Many news stories have appeared in recent months about the rising expectations of the various ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union. Then, too, the Soviet Union is confronted by the threat of Moslem fundamentalism among the myriad followers of Mohammed within its borders. All of these pressures pose a threat to the state which came into being seven decades ago. Yet, according to Soviet historian Hugh Ragsdale, the greatest danger to Soviet power comes not from the non-Russian blocs of the U.S.S.R. but from the Russians themselves.

A frequent visitor to the Soviet Union, most recently last year, Mr. Ragsdale feels "the official ideology in the Soviet Union is utterly moribund and soporific, but there is a charged emotional component of intellectual life among the intelligenty that is utterly absent from intellectual life in the West....its most conspicuous manifestation is the romantic conservativism of the Russian nationalists, and I find them to be as fascinating as they are dangerous." A native North Carolinian, Mr. Ragsdale received his A.B. Degree from the University of North Carolina and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia. He is a member of the history faculty at the University of Alabama, where he has taught since 1964, and a former president of the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies.

H. G. Wells has been called the Shakespeare of science fiction and even today he remains, in W. Warren Wagar's phrase, the "patron saint" of science fiction.