1 Of my first chapter, entitled “The Heritage”, Dr. Szeftel writes: “There is no doubt —the word heritage proves it—that in Mr. Wolfe's case the aim … was a biographical aim … to show how strongly conditioned by the Russian past were his three protagonists, and especially Lenin.” It was for this that he undertook what “is in itself an act of boldness” even for a historian.

Now it is true that one of my aims, and a not unimportant one, is to analyze the Russian component in Lenin's make up, his organization methods and theories, and his revolutionary theory and temperament. But the “heritage” I had in mind to analyze in my first chapter is even “bolder.” It is the heritage referred to in the last word of the above project outline, and my first chapter is not merely the first chapter of the first volume but of the whole projected study of the Russian Revolution.

2 I do not wish to alarm the owner who paid .$6.00 for the first edition. Most of these S75 changes are quite minor: typographical errors, inconsistencies in transliteration, small slips in secondary matters. Only in the closing chapters on the impending war and Lenin's attitude towards war, the national question, the relation of democracy to socialism, have I introduced changes of estimate and larger perspective, but these of course deal with matters that get their first systematic treatment in my second volume.

3 I should add that I also try to be a good writer, and believe that good history is a branch of literature.