The hundred-headed hydra of nationalism may destroy the achievements of the October Revolution," This prediction by a Russian professor was privately circulated after he had visited Central Asia, the Baltic Republics, the Caucasus, and the Ukraine. Indeed, the pent-up resentment against Russian domination is apparent to anyone who has traveled within these regions (outside the collective Intourist propaganda jaunts). The current reinforcement of repression against "bourgeois nationalism" and against religious beliefs suggests that highly placed people in Moscow share the professor's anxieties.

History is not a morality play, but the word "retribution" springs to mind. For the Communist regime could never have been established on the ruins of the Tsarist empire had not its founding fathers—Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin—perpetrated what must surely rank as history's biggest hoax ever: inducing the non-Russian subject peoples to identify the Red Revolution with their own struggle for liberation from Moscow's rule.