Professor Liebich notes in his article that several western scholars consider Boris Nicolaevsky's of an Old Bolshevik to be an important historical source and others do not. Now, with publication of the memoirs of Bukharin's widow, Anna Mikhailovna Larina (Bukharina), the question arises anew with fresh force. Larina maintains that Bukharin, when he was sent abroad by Stalin in March and April of 1936 to negotiate with mensheviks Nicolaevsky and Dan for purchase of Marx documents owned by exiled German Social Democrats, did not hold the kinds of conversations with Nicolaevsky which the latter much later identified as his major source in writing the Letter, and she accuses Nicolaevsky and Dan of writing and publishing that article for the purpose of destroying Bukharin. Professor Liebich has, I believe, effectively rebutted Larina's main arguments. He points out, for example, that Larina was not with Bukharin during half or more of his two-month stay abroad and hence could not have known about meetings with Nicolaevsky, Dan and others at that time in which political events in Moscow were discussed, unless Bukharin informed her about them. Further, that Bukharin had good reason to keep his then 22-year-old pregnant wife fromn knowing how deeply worried he was about the situation at home, hence good reason not to inform her of matters he was discussing with Nicolaevsky. Bukharin had either to inform his wife fully on backstage high politics in Moscow at that time, or not to burden her with such knowledge on the chance that matters would take the favorable turn for which he hoped in March-April 1936 and not the grim outcome that he feared. Understandably, he chose not to burden her. If, in spite of all this, Professor Liebich's article leaves in the reader's mind the sense of a continuing mystery concerning the Letter, this is because, concentrating as he did on Larina's memoir, he was not able to provide a full-scale critical assessment of the Letter as an historical source. And this brings us to a sad fact: our profession has been remiss in its failure to produce that assessment. Various scholars, myself included, have not only accepted the Letter as an important documnent but have cited it in writings on Soviet history. But none of us has taken the trouble to produce the critique of the source that is needed, and this leaves the question somewhat in limbo. One might suppose that Nicolaevsky himself had provided the missing assessment, or the material for one, by answering the questions that Janet Zagoria and Seweryn Bialer put to him in the interview which opens Nicolaevsky's 1965 book of articles, Power and the Soviet Elite (one of the articles being of an Old Bolshevik). But informative as his replies were, they did not mneet in full the need for Slavzc Reviezw 51, no. 4 (WTiiiter 1992)