and spiritually by primitive working conditions and a constant speedup; a peasantry herded into collective farms and state farms, harassed at every turn by Government restrictions and demands; a synthetic culture managed by Party officials, frankly directed to the service of State power, now engaged in xenophobic crusades against "cosmopolitanism," now fearfully following official orders to enjoy a "thaw."
This is the heritage of Lenin-Stalin from which the present Soviet leaders, picking and choosing as best they can, hope to fashion a more secure rule. It remains to be seen whether other powerful forces in modern Soviet society will ultimately accept either that rule or that heritage.—Anatole Shub
Managing Editor, The New Leader
THE ANNOTATOR
Boris I. Nicolaevsky is one of the free world's most authoritative students of Soviet affairs. Active since his youth in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, he served in Moscow's Marx-Engels Institute after the democratic revolution of March 1917, but left Russia after the Civil War had insured the triumph of Communist dictatorship. Since that time, in Berlin, Paris and New York, he has devoted himself principally to amassing a unique archive of materials on Communism and the Russian Revolutionary movement. His personal knowledge of many of the early Soviet leaders enabled him to publish, two decades ago, the famous Letter of an Old Bolshevik; the basic accuracy of this sensational document, which explained the intra-party struggle leading to the Great Purges, has now been officially confirmed by Khrushchev. Mr. Nicolaevsky is author of Aseff: The Spy and co-author of Karl Marx: Man and Fighter and Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, and has contributed to numerous scholarly journals here and abroad. Mr. Nicolaevsky's notes have been translated from the Russian by Louis Jay Herman.
