Editor's Note (Editorial‪)‬

IN THE LATE 1960s, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE COLD WAR, I WAS fortunate to join a small group of about a dozen high school students from The Bay Area, New York and Chicago on a summer tour of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe which, to most Americans at the time, lay behind a dark, impervious and forbidding "Iron Curtain." My mother was terrified. I was exhilarated. It was a remarkable experience during a remarkable period in history. In those days very few westerners traveled to what Ronald Reagan would later dub the "Evil Empire" to meet--even talk to--people who lived there, to see the expanse of the Russian steppe, marvel at the architecture of the Kremlin, to view the collections in the Hermitage, to look across the wide Volga River toward the even greater unknown that was Central Asia. We toured most of Eastern Europe as well during the latter, turbulent days of the Prague Spring (including a couple of days milling about with the defiant crowds in Wenceslas Square) before returning to the U.S. just hours before it all came to a sad, disconsolate end. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]