[A] From "Songs of Russia," rendered into English by Alice Stone Blackwell
To the Readers
The name "Open Road" had to be abandoned, owing to the existence of a magazine by that name.
Observations and Comments
The importance of written history for the people can easily be compared with the importance of a diary for the individual. It furnishes data for recollections, points of comparison between the Past and Present. But as most diaries and auto-biographies show a lack of straight-forward, big, simple, sincere self-analyses, so does history seldom prove a representation of facts, of the truth, of reality.
The way history is written will depend altogether on whatever purpose the writers have in view, and what they hope to achieve thereby. It will altogether depend upon the sincerity or lack thereof, upon the broad or narrow horizon of the historian. That which passes as history in our schools, or governmentally fabricated books on history, is a forgery, a misrepresentation of events. Like the old drama centering upon the impossible figure of the hero, with a gesticulating crowd in the background. Quacks of history speak only of "great men" like Bonapartes, Bismarcks, Deweys, or Rough Riders as leaders of the people, while the latter serve as a setting, a chorus, howling the praise of the heroes, and also furnishing their blood money for the whims and extravagances of their masters. Such history only tends to produce conceit, national impudence, superciliousness and patriotic stupidity, all of which is in full bloom in our great Republic.
Our aim is to teach a different conception of historical events. To define them as an ever-recurring struggle for Freedom against every form of Might. A struggle resultant from an innate yearning for self-expression, and the recognition of one's own possibilities and their attitude toward other human beings. History to us means a compilation of experiences, out of which the individual, as well as the race, will gain the right understanding how to shape and organize a mode of life best suited to bring out the finest and strongest qualities of the human race.