ABSTRACT
The USSR has been in existence for over twenty-five years, but for by far the greater part of these it has not seemed quite real to the people of this country. One of the economists went so far as to deny that a country which proposed to ignore capitalist economics could survive at all; ergo, it has presumably ceased to exist. This state of mind, this stubborn refusal to regard the USSR as anything but a monster, persisted throughout the years: it was responsible for the denigration of Soviet science and Soviet industry made in many quarters. For the needs of war seem to have aroused in the Soviet citizen a consciousness of the past of his country as strong as any Anglo-Saxon has of his, and Stalin to be appealing, no less than Churchill after Dunkirk, to an ancient common heritage of his people, as well as to their pride in their present.
