In politics as in nature, oppositcs clash but are also attracted. At any event they cannot escape one another; and no two contrasting nations have ever been more fatefully linked than the United States and Russia.

Over a century ago Alexis de Tocqucville, as AMERICAN HERITAGE noted in an early issue (June, 1955), propounded what seemed at the time a most unlikely prophecy. “There are at the present time,” he wrote, “two great nations in the world which seem to tend toward the same end … I allude to the Russians and the Americans. … Their starting point is dilferent, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of hall the globe.” America then was still a raw republic sprawling westward across a continent of which it was not yet full master. Russia was a backward, semi-Oriental autocracy—a glitter of lights at St. Petersburg ebbing out into shapeless plains ol serfdom, medievalism, and mud. Hctwcen the two rose the self-assured, stately capitals ol Europe: the arbiters of Western man. Yet today, as Tocqueville predicted, the ultimate arbiters are at the outer extremes, whence they rival, suspect, and misunderstand each other. Still, for all their dissimilarities, they are related by unique experiences of overwhelming change and growth.

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