COMMUNIST faith is materialism; ^ Communist history is a chonicle of materialist promises deferred. The first TIME story on Russia in Volume I, Number 1, March 3, 1923, reported a famine in the Soviet Union and U.S. help in feeding the hungry. The first TIME cover story about a Russian, on July 14, 1924, dealt with Aleksei Rykov, President of the Soviet People's Commissars, who had just issued one of those typical, promissory reports filled with soaring but questionable statistics. This week's cover article on Leonid Brezhnev, President of the Soviet Union, is TIME'S 70th on a Russian subject. It was written by Michael Demarest, edited by Edward Hughes, and reported from many quarters, but principally by our Moscow bureau chief, Israel Shenker. Despite great changes in Russia, the story has remained essentially the same: present economic crisis surrounded by hopeful incantations about the future.

Our 70 cover stories, appearing over a period of 40 years, sum up much of Soviet Russia's history. During the war years it was the Russian generals and marshals who often appeared on TIME'S cover, many of their names--Budenny, Rokossovsky, Timoshenko, Voronov--now half-forgotten echoes of an era when the U.S. desperately tried to believe in the good faith of its Russian allies. There also were the artists, from Prokofiev and Shostakovich to Evgeny Evtushenko, always on the brink of political disgrace.

Above all, our Russia covers constitute a gallery of dead men. Trotsky, who appeared three times, was killed in 1940 by the agents of Joseph Stalin, who in turn appeared eight times before he died in 1953. The ninth cover story offered this epitaph: "He might have boasted in the words of the Roman song honoring Emperor Aurelian:

A thousand, thousand, thousand men

I alone, a single man, have killed."

Many other Russian cover subjects were liquidated, physically or politically--Beria, Bulganin, Malenkov, Molotov--after the emergence of Nikita Khrushchev. He made his first appearance on TIME'S cover a few months after Stalin's death, as head of the Economic Reform Program, again--and still--struggling with the perennially sagging Soviet economy. Soviet Russia is always ready to create heroes, as in the case of the cosmonauts, and always ready to forget them--if not physically remove them from their tombs. One of TIME'S Russia covers presented famed Shock Worker Alexis Stakhanov (Dec. 16, 1935) who was then being celebrated as a Hero of Labor. "Pass the champagne," the story quoted him, "for our last drink." He has long since disappeared from the Soviet scene, and the word Stakhanovism is no longer used to connote extra effort, but the hortatory spirit is still there, along with the cheap champagne that fails to make up for so much else that is lacking in Russian life.

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