INTRODUCTION

Our relations with the Soviet Union are of the greatest importance to American foreign policy today, and no fundamental part of that policy can be successfully maintained without the support of the American people. Therefore, the more Americans can learn about the Russian people the sounder our national policy will be.

To understand modern Russia, it is necessary to know something about the long history of the Russian people: today's Russian leaders are a product of that history, of the Russian experience and Russian tradition. Marxist ideology has been superimposed on that tradition.

While 1 was in the Soviet Union during World War II, the writer Aleksei Tolstoy, a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy, told me that to understand Stalin's Kremlin we must understand the Kremlin of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. To understand those, we need to go back even further. This book brings nine centuries of Russian history vividly to life—from the Ninth Century Varangian Ru-rik, a half-legendary figure, to Peter the Great, a wholly real and wholly astonishing one.

Both as a private citizen and as an official of the government of the United States, I have had many opportunities over the past forty years to visit the Soviet Union on numerous occasions, to talk with successive Soviet leaders, and to observe

The changes that have occurred in Russian life.

Today, the Soviet leaders are pragmatically adopting Western methods to solve the increasingly complex problems of production and distribution, as Peter the Great, in his own way, did before them. In addition, Stalin's concept of Communism as a monolithic structure has been shattered. Each of the Eastern European states is attempting to develop its own national policies, with greater independence from Moscow. Most dramatic is the conflict between Moscow and Peking—a conflict that is itself, in great part, a product of history and geography.

Perhaps the most intriguing change in the Soviet Union is the growth of a greater independence of thought. The illiteracy that existed when the Bolsheviks seized power has been almost entirely eliminated. Though the government still holds a tight rein on all forms of communication, more education has brought a demand for a freer access to knowledge and for greater freedom of expression.

In my opinion, this demand will be increasingly irresistible and will bring about many fundamental changes in the nature of Russian life.

Our own attitude toward Russia will affect the nature of those changes. Mr. Wallace's book should exert a most useful influence in this direction.

W. AVERELL HARRIMAN