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Even before the end of the first world war, during the inter-war years and right up to the outbreak of the second world war, a vein of political thought ran through Europe, which condemned national sovereignties and set up against them the idea of a European federation.In reality, the federalist trend of thought in the inter-war years remained marginal to the main political currents, and partook more of the nature of prophecy than of politics. In the 1920s and 1930s politics in Europe were both tense and varied, culminating in the emergence of many political-ideological tyrannies. But in spite of the violent divergences over political problems in those years, politics itself, of the right and of the left, of moderates and radicals, of conservatives and revolutionaries, was based on the profound experience which the peoples had lived through during the first world war, namely of the solidity of the nation state. This experience led to the conviction that only on this rock could anything be built.

The golden era of the study of folklore in the Soviet Union was the first decade after the Revolution, when the party and government, occupied with more urgent tasks, let the literary scholars and folklorists do their work relatively undisturbed. In 1925 the so-called "magna charta libertatis" for Soviet writers was issued by the Central Committee of the party, which permitted "free competition of various groups and currents." As a result, the 1920s turned out to be rich and fruitful in literary scholarship, including folkloristics. In the study of folklore, different trends could freely coexist and thrive side by side. The most important of them were the historical school, Formalism, and the so-called Finnish school. The historical school continued the traditions of its leader Vsevolod Miller, whose first concern had been to find reflections of concrete historical reality in Russian byliny (epic songs). Thus the tendencies of the historical school are found in the commentaries to some bylina collections in 1918 and 1919, and also appeared strongly in the works of the brothers Boris and Iurii Sokolov, both of them disciples of Miller.