ABSTRACT
For the mass of people those much-advertised blessings of capitalism and the free market must still seem chimerical, while their negative features are all too apparent. For a nationalist, even if democratically inclined, Russia's dependence on loans and subsidies from the West cannot but lead to bitter reflections. One would like to think that the winds of change that have swept through Russian society since Gorbachev's time have made impossible the return in totalitarianism. The bulk of the people while not convinced of the benefits of democracy would not acquiesce in a return to a one-party regime and loss of their recently acquired freedoms. It is clear first of all that America's predominant foreign concern must be to help Russia's continuing progress toward an orderly democracy, and its most important precondition, a stable economy. The issue of economic help for what was then the USSR first arose in the West with Gorbachev's perestroika.
