November 7, 1967

A conference on the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, hosted by the college in conjunction with the State University of New York at New Paltz, began at New Paltz with a lecture by New Paltz Professor Harry Schwartz. A member of the editorial board of The New York Times and the newspaper’s specialist on Soviet affairs, Professor Schwartz spoke on “Fifty Years of the Bolshevik Revolution.” Events at Vassar at the weekend included panels on Soviet economy, foreign policy, intellectual life and literature.

Professor Herbert Levine, a specialist in Soviet economic planning at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Harry Braverman, editor of the Socialist Monthly Review, and Professor Lynn Turgeon, a scholar of Soviet industry and labor at Hofstra University spoke on “The Russian Revolution: 50 Years of Economic Change. “Fifty Years of Soviet Foreign Policy” were examined in a lecture by Professor Alexander Dallin, the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Relations at Columbia University.

Focusing on “The Cultural Impact of the Revolution,” Russian émigré historian Marc Raeff from Columbia spoke on “The Revolutiion and the Russian Intelligentsia,” Professor George Gibian, chair of the department of Russian at Cornell University, examined “A Half Century of Soviet Literature: Issues, Achievements, Problems” and John Githens from Vassar’s Russian department described “Metaphoric Avatars of October in Mandelstam and Mayakovsky.”

Sponsored by the economics, history, political science and Russian departments and supported by the Matthew Vassar Lecture Fund and the Crego Endowment, the conference concluded with a concert by the Yale Russian Chorus, a group of some 40 undergraduates, graduate students and faculty members which toured in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. “The conference,” explained one of the event’s planners, Vassar political scientist Suzanne Lotarski, “is not a celebration of the anniversary of the revolution but an educational opportunity to evaluate a timely and much discussed event.”

The Miscellany News

The Crego Endowment, established in 1956 by Jean Crego ’32 in honor of her father, sponsored annual lectures in the general field of economics under the auspices of the economics department.