The first draft of this book, spanning some twenty-five years of my life altogether separate from later goals and circumstances, was written when the events described in it were still fresh in memory. Much of it is based on my letters to my mother. For various reasons the manuscript was allowed to rest for more than thirty years. During this time it remained constantly in the back of my mind, ripening, as it were, toward the form it could finally take when I had gained in experience and in vision.

It is not only an account of the life in which I grew up and of which I was a part as a young girl, but an effort to present a historical episode as it is now perceived from a greater distance in time and possibly in a truer perspective.

I wanted too to extract from the impact of politics a more faithful image of a complex, highly emotional, intuitive, and gifted people who inhabit a vast part of the earth. And in so doing, I have endeavored to isolate from the distortions created by political trends and events the essence of the Russian character as it appeared to me in its many phases, altogether devoid of the bias contrived by the preconceived notions of archenemy and communist. Only thus, it is my strong conviction, shall we know and understand each other.

With the exception of the historical figures, some of the Russians in this book appear under fictitious names, either because their real names have slipped my mind or because they are better left unknown.