For many years, the nations of the Balkan Peninsula were treated as a Balkan block and, because of the ways these states secured their political independence, they shared years of stormy political life. The term “Balkans” was then, with considerable contempt, applied to Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania and Romania. Yet after World War I, when the Adriatic littoral was added to Serbia and Montenegro to form Yugoslavia and Romania recovered Transylvania and Bessarabia, the name came to have little meaning. Now with Turkey playing a positive role, efforts have been made to use the name Southeastern Europe, but with little success. “Danubian Europe” is worse, for the Danube crosses both Austria and Hungary, and avoids Greece and Albania. At the present time, the term “Eastern Europe” is probably the least objectionable but it is ridiculous to apply this term to Czechoslovakia and Hungary which are almost in the heart of Europe. Still, this is the term, added to Slavic or Slavonic, used as a general title by both the British _Slavonic and East European Review_ and _The American Slavic and East European Review_. But the culture area also includes all of the former Russian possessions in Asia, for the Urals owe their position as the boundary of Europe more to the fact that they run roughly north and south at the eastern end of the Caspian Sea, and so are useful to cartographers, than to any historical importance. The term “Mid-Europe” has been introduced lately to cover the history of that strip of countries which won their independence after World War I and lost it after World War II. It is an attempt to unify the non-unifiable, except in terms of their present fate, for during much of the last thousand years the fate of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary has been intertwined, but Poland has been involved with Lithuania, Byelorussia (White Ruthenia), and Ukraine, while the main relations of Latvia and Estonia have been with the Scandinavian and other Baltic peoples. For purposes of detailed study then, a division can be made between the eastern Baltic shore in the north, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the center, and the states of the Balkan Peninsula, including Turkey, in the south. What then can we do with Ukraine and Byelorussia, two of the three East Slavic states? For both countries connections with Moscow have been of a special character with a long record of turbulence, opposition and attempts at independence. They have lived their own lives with intermittent contact with the West; in fact, it was through them that most of the purely Western influences drifted into Moscow and the land of the Great Russians, which in ancient times was more closely connected through the Volga River with the Caucasian group of peoples and the Golden Horde.