This book took a long time to write, and the final product turned out rather differently from what I had originally planned. The Russian Revolution was one of the great social revolutions in history: People suffered dreadful hardships and saw around themselves a remarkable transformation of their world. My first intention was to study the changing perceptions of ordinary people in extraordinary times. I wanted to know how well people understood what was happening to them, what in fact they thought of their leaders, the political institutions, and of new ideas that must have appeared strange to them.

As I read more and more of the available source material, it became clear to me that I would never be able to reconstruct the world view of the average citizen. Workers and peasants left no memoirs; the thoughts and feelings of the ordinary people appeared in the sources only in a distorted fashion. Under the circumstances, my study gradually turned into an examination of the ways with which the new political elite attempted to bring its message to the common people; I was, in fact, writing a book on propaganda. I did not then, and do not now, believe that the Bolsheviks at the time of their Revolution or in the 1920s were cynical. They had a burning desire to convince their fellow citizens that the new order would bring a better world of social justice. They were certainly manipulative, and that was an attitude born out of their ideology and practical experiences. They came to their task of ruling an almost ungovernable country, however, with no clear ideas about propaganda.