Excerpt from Russia Without Illusions It so happened that like Pat Sloan I went to Russia in September, 1931 - not like him to teach, but to pursue an inquiry in my own professional field. I had been there in the summer of 1924 to find out whether the defenders of capitalistic society were right in saying that the N E P (New Economic Policy) meant the inevitable return to capitalism. I went again, to stay until the spring of 1932, to find out what makes the economic machine run and the cultural life develop when profit is ruled out. This task required that we live with the people in order to understand their attitudes. For a shorter period Mrs. Ward and I duplicated many of Mr. Sloan's experiences. We lived with a Soviet family of the former middle class, in a factory dwelling house, on a collective farm, in a sanitarium, and in a rest home with people of all sorts and conditions from all over the Soviet Union.

We know that sometimes the barn is the best place to sleep. We sat in the various kinds of group meetings through which Soviet citizens participate in and develop the people's control of all their common affairs - with industrial workers, peasants, students, intellectuals. Everywhere we asked and were asked the question that Mr. Sloan discusses. Some of the places and some of the people he mentions we got to know even more intimately. Through close friends I knew well the working of the Technicum where he taught. In widely different parts of the Soviet Union, including those where smaller nationalities live, we became acquainted with the workings of the labor unions, in one of which Mr. Sloan served.

We naturally had our fair share of the discomforts and unpleasantnesses of that period. We saw, as those educators in Moscow who counseled us where to go said they wanted us to see, "the worst as well as the best" of Soviet life. And we also saw a fair sample of what lies in between. To read Mr. Sloan's descriptions and judgments is to vividly live over again the experiences of that period. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.

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