The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 55, July 1951 - April, 1952 Page: 156

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

colonial life of executive domination has been restated first as
caudillism and now as personalism. The president still controls
the government. It can be safely assumed that it is not concen-
tration of authority that Hondurans have opposed in their search
for governmental forms but rather a reconciliation of authority
with responsibility.
RAY L. KELLEY
Sterling College
The Election of the Russian Constituent Assembly of zgy7. By
Oliver Henry Radkey. Cambridge (Harvard University
Press), 1950. Harvard Historical Monograph Number XXI.
Pp. 89. $2.50.
In these days of intense partisanship on all questions relating
to Russia, it is indeed a refreshing experience to read a book on
this subject written from a thoroughly objective point of view.
Here is no condemnation of one party or another because the
author does not accept its program. Instead, Dr. Oliver H. Rad-
key, associate professor of history at the University of Texas,
relates the facts as he finds them, reaches such conclusions as
appear to be warranted, and states frankly "I don't know" where
the information is not available.
Since this is the only study in English on the Russian election
of 1917 and since it is unlikely that there will ever be another
(the materials are now either unavailable or inaccessible), it is
fortunate that the work was undertaken by a scholar so compe-
tent and meticulous as Professor Radkey. In gathering data, Pro-
fessor Radkey visited six libraries, located as far apart as the
American West Coast and Moscow itself. Basing his study exclu-
sively on source materials in Russian, he left no stone unturned
in his search for data. He succeeded in discovering electoral
returns hitherto unknown even to Russian scholarship.
This analysis of "the only truly democratic election in Russian
history" reveals several significant conclusions: that four-fifths of
the 42,000,000 voters favored some form of socialism, but only
one-fourth of the total were willing to accept the Bolshevist brand
of socialism; that the influence of the church and the monarchy
had been reduced to a negligible quantity; and that a strong

156