The Recent Publication of Journey for Our Time; the Journals of the Marquis de Custine, has served the purpose of reawakening interest in the conflict between East and West which existed a century ago. In some respects, a comparison with the present “cold war” is in place. Thus Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, in the introduction, points to certain similarities in the status of the Tsarist Empire around 1839, as reported by de Custine, and the Russia of our times.
Separately considered, the journals of the Marquis de Custine perhaps give an impression of uniqueness which is not warranted. The French nobleman was not the first in his own generation to point to a supposed Russian threat. Nor was he an isolated prophet in a wilderness, calling for some sort of European unity or alliance against the Muscovite menace, personified in the glacial figure of the Russian autocrat, Nicholas I.