In politics as in nature, opposites clash but are also attracted. At any event they cannot escape one another; and no two contrasting nations have ever been more fatefully linked than the United States and Russia.

Over a century ago Alexis de Tocqucville, as AMERICAN HERITAGE noted in an early issue (June, 1955), propounded what seemed at the time a most unlikely prophecy. “There are at the present time,” he wrote, “two great nations in the world which seem to tend toward the same end … I allude to the Russians and the Americans. … Their starting point is dilferent, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of hall the globe.” America then was still a raw republic sprawling westward across a continent of which it was not yet full master. Russia was a backward, semi-Oriental autocracy—a glitter of lights at St. Petersburg ebbing out into shapeless plains ol serfdom, medievalism, and mud. Hctwcen the two rose the self-assured, stately capitals ol Europe: the arbiters of Western man. Yet today, as Tocqueville predicted, the ultimate arbiters are at the outer extremes, whence they rival, suspect, and misunderstand each other. Still, for all their dissimilarities, they are related by unique experiences of overwhelming change and growth.

It is the history of this fateful American-Russian relationship, now cordial, now angry, upon which the editors of this magazine aim to cast such light of historical understanding as they can. Several articles dealing with significant episodes have already appeared—lor example, the story of John Quincy Adams’ ministry to St. Petersburg, by William Harlan Hale (February, 1958), and that of the ill-fated North Russia expedition of 1918-19, by E. M. Halliday (December, 1958). Now we begin a new series, taking up subjects both remembered and forgotten. How many now recall, lor instance, the Czarist settlements in California that might have brought a long sweep of our West Coast under Russian domination; or the once-famed “friendship” visit of the Czar’s fleet to Union ports during a crisis of the Civil War; or American relief to Russia during nineteenth-century famines?

Over the past century and a half, the Americans who have penetrated the secretive fastness of Russia, whether self-appointed or official envoys of the Republic, have been an extraordinary lot. Our series will examine, from the beginning until modern times, this strange galaxy of philosophers and fools, drunkards, soldiers, politicians, adventurers, and even statesmen into whose hands the conduct of American-Russian relations has fallen. Of these, few were more singular than John Reed; and an article commencing overleaf recounts the adventures of that young idealist from Oregon who plunged into the “Ten Days That Shook the World” and became, in effect, a Western missionary to and of the Bolshevik revolt.

If one chooses, one can regard Reed’s story as simply another case history of a type familiar to subsequent years, the American ideological defector. But it