G. I. LITVINOVA, N. V. POPOVA. Historical Experience of Solving the Women's Question in the U.S.S.R.

The experience gained by the world's first socialist state graphically shows that the solution of the women's question is an indefeasible law of the socialist revolution and of the building of socialist society. The authors examine the three main social functions performed by the woman in the Soviet state: as a citizen she takes part in the country's political and social life; as a labourer she directly participates in the creation of the material and spiritual values indispensable for society; as a mother she brings forth and rears a new generation. In this connection the article describes the methods and forms of ensuring the equality of women in the U.S.S.R. in the sphere of political, production and family life, and draws attention to a number of problems which still remain unsolved and which require further elaboration by scientists.

A. A. CHERNOBAYEV. Committees of the Poor Peasants as Reflected in Contemporary Bourgeois Historiography

The article makes a critical analysis of contemporary bourgeois historiography devoted to the development of the socialist revolution in the Russian countryside during the first year of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The author draws on extensive factual data and archive materials to demonstrate the utter insolvency of the fabrications spread by bourgeois historians, whose basic aim is to misrepresent the reasons which necessitated the establishment of the Committees of the Poor Peasants, as well as to depict the actual significance of the latter and the nature of their activity in a distorted light.

Y. M. TARASOV. Colonization of the South Urals by the Russian Peasants in the Period of Feudalism and Its Consequences

Drawing on a wealth of factual material furnished by the central and local archives, the author traces the history of colonizing the South Urals by the Russian peasants in the 17th-19th centuries, disclosing its causes, geographical and social sources, progress, principal stages and significance in stimulating the development of the productive forces, and showing the influence it exerted on the indigenous population of this territory. Comprising as they did the overwhelming majority of the settlers in the colonization of the South Urals, the peasants set up major seats of agriculture there and developed handicrafts and other trades. They also provided the bulk of the work force for state-operated and privately-owned factories and mills built in the South Urals in the 18th-19th centuries.

S. A. MKHITARYAN. The Formation of the Soviets in Vietnam in 1930 - 1931

The author makes a comprehensive study of the period marked by the upsurge of the revolutionary movement in Vietnam (the early 1930's), in the course of which popular rule in the form of the Soviets was established in two provinces of Central Vietnam (Nghe-An and Ha-Tinh), which remained in power for over nine months and carried out a number of important revolutionary-democratic reforms. The article points out that one of the

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major achievements of the Soviets was the alliance of the working class and the peasantry formed under the leadership of the Communist Party. The developments in Nghe-An and Ha-Tinh provinces during that period can be regarded as the first experiment of applying in practice the theory of Marxism-Leninism in the specific conditions of Vietnam, with due account to the experience accumulated by the Russian and world-wide revolutionary movement. The experience gained by the Vietnamese working class and peasantry in 1930 - 1931 largely contributed to the victory of the August 1945 Revolution and the proclamation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

S. L. TIKHVINSKY. Great-Han Hegemonism and Publications on Historical Themes Put Out in the People's Republic of China

The article analyzes a number of publications on historical themes which appeared in the P.R.C. in the 1960's-1970's. Impregnated with the spirit of Great-Han chauvinism, they are called upon to justify the hegemonistic claims of China's Maoist leaders to the territories of their neighbours and to China's dominant role in the world. Among the numerous means they employ in their ideological struggle against the Soviet Union, the socialist world system and Marxist-Leninist science, the Maoists are actively trying to use history, having borrowed from the ruling classes of old China the experience of influencing the population by deliberately falsifying the historical records. The author makes a point of stressing that the struggle against all manifestations of Great-Han nationalism and hegemonism in the realm of historical science in the P.R.C. is at the same time a struggle to revert China to the path of building socialism.

K. V. KHVOSTOVA. Methodological Problems of Applying Mathematical Methods in Historical Research

The significance of applying mathematical methods in history consists, from the viewpoint of Marxist historians, in detailizing and concretizing historical hypotheses. The employment of these methods heightens the authentic value of the given sources and extends the possibility of verifying the conclusions formulated by historians. The keen interest shown by bourgeois scientists in the mathematical processing of historical information is explained by the essential requirement of bourgeois historiography to manifest a theoretical, problems approach to the study of history. But the attempts of bourgeois historians to employ theories and mathematical models applied in economic science and sociology are insufficiently effective. Research in the historical past calls for the evolvement of special mathematical models. For example, research in the medieval period, owing to the specific character of its phenomena, as well as to the incompleteness of individual sources of mass information, calls, as a rule, for micromodelling intended for the study of micro-structures and small social groups.

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