ABSTRACT
The important similarity of the two countries – Russia and United States consist in the essentially democratic structure of their basic sociocultural institutions. The superficiality of foreign reporters and "experts" on Russia is responsible, moreover, for an excessive exaggeration of the autocracy of the Czarist regime itself. The autocratic Czarist regime has acted as a screen which has hidden from foreigners the truly democratic constitution of the basic social institutions of Russia — in pre-Tatar and post-Tatar times, and especially in the second part of the nineteenth century. Before the Revolution the women of Russia were emancipated as fully as those of any other land, including America, and probably more in most European countries. At Russia's prerevolutionary provincial, local, and municipal self-government, are once again impressed with the essentially democratic character of its institutions. As a whole, the Russian political system from the ninth to the twentieth century was virtually as democratic as the governmental regime of most European nations.
