Editor's Introduction

Abstract

In the thirty years' history of this journal, it is unlikely that any issue's contents could have been described in dramatic terms. The journal reflected the landscape of the country's politics. Only scholars could truly enjoy the labor of searching for nuggets of insight in the subterranean depths of Soviet quasi-official prose. But in this issue the great antitheses of human behavior spill from the pages: courage and cowardice, heroism and egotism, humaneness and brutality, vision and blindness.