ABSTRACT
In the course of a visit to the Soviet Union in mid-1989,1 again recalled what my father had so often said to me when I was a small child. In 1921 the late Herbert Hoover had sent my father to the recently-born Soviet Union, when it was gripped by famine — largely induced by Lenin’s policies — and by civil war, and when Lenin had already instituted his Red Terror. My father always spoke of his admiration for the Russian people and of their stoical endurance of the privations brought about mainly by their defective system. A marvellous people with a miserable system: that was how he summed it up, and that is how one must still sum it up today.
