Malevsky-Malevitch P. (ed.) Russia/USSR. A Complete Handbook

New York: William Farquhar Fayson, 1933. — 712 p.There is a steadily growing interest among all intelligent people in that part of the world which was the Russian Empire and which now appears as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In no part of this planet have the changes during the last three decades been greater, the development of human history and institutions more involved, and the results so far-reaching on the thoughts and actions of modern times. There is a great wealth of material available for tracing out the general course of events in the Soviet Union. The Press is full of information about it, and every organ for the dissemination of knowledge is almost choked with the reports, official and unofficial, which are at hand. At the same time actual statements of accomplishments and failures, of realities and expectations are profusely diluted with propaganda of various kinds and of a conflicting nature. Russia has always been wrapped in a veil of mystery. The stories which were told before the Revolution gave to the uninitiated reader a picture which he could not analyse or understand, and the almost fantastic course of the Revolution only served to confuse still further the public mind. Moreover, there have been no large scale attempts to carry out an objective survey of the last phase of the Empire together with the progress of the Soviet State since the Revolution. The situation is further complicated by the conflicting reports on the Soviet programmes, estimates and statements of detailed results which arc exploited according to the sympathies and desires of the readers and their secondary sources of information. With the present Government establishing an entirely new system, based on untested and generally little known principles, the situation is really more than chaotic. There seems, then, a very real place for this work which aims to sketch conditions as they existed in various fields of thought and of activity during the early part of the twentieth century in the Russian Empire, and then to show how conditions changed into those of the present day. The serious scholar, and even the average reader, will secure an appreciation of the tendencies of life in the Empire and the Soviet Union that will help him to understand much of the present and of the possibilities of the future.