The prime requirement in all these subjects is scientific accuracy, something which is far too often honored in the breach. There has been in the past too great a tendency to accept some superficial treatment composed of half truths. We must remember that ignorance, and conscious ignorance at that, is often better than incorrect knowledge. The problem lies not so much in what a person does not know as in what he knows wrong. At the present time, there scarcely can be given a course in modern history which overlooks and omits the questions that have been forced upon the attention of the world by Russian Communism. There is, therefore, little or no reason why the main facts of the present situation should not be correctly given with proper weight laid on the Soviet structure and methods. This involves a clear recognition that there are important differences not only between the old capitalistic and the new communistic Russia, but also that there is an ostensible stress which the Soviet Union lays upon the differences between the populations inhabiting her republics, subject as they all are to the same Russianization. There can be no excuse for the oft repeated view that all the people of the Soviet Union are Russians in the old sense of the word. There is no reason for the arbitrary omission of the nationality problem on the ground that it has no validity in fact or experience just because it was denied by the Tsars a century ago. There have been too many instances of even responsible publications omitting from accurate surveys references to such problems, at the will of certain anti-Communist nationalist Russian groups. Although there is available today adequate and easily accessible literature, far too little of it has penetrated the scholarly world which is still burdened with the traditions of the past. The same can be said of literature. For many years masterpieces of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Gorky have been included in courses on modern European literature. Still, far too often, they have been presented in a vacuum, without any attempt to equate them with Russian life and thought. This is perhaps less common today, but immediately after World War I, it is not extreme to say, there was a Western science of Russian literature almost as far from reality as that first French translation of _Anna Karenina_ which, in the interest of clarity, calmly omitted the entire Levin-Kitty story.