[T]he persistent and growing achievements of the Enlightenment and its belief in the perfectibility of human life shape the last portion of the book. The problem is that Gombrich doesn't always see its vulnerabilities or the dangers that threatened it. For example, he expresses a sympathy for socialist ideals that may have prevented him from fully acknowledging that the failures of the Bolshevik Revolution had some source other than the fact that "the outside world intervened." Gombrich knows that history keeps repeating itself, but in this respect he is almost a progressive. So, he confesses in his added chapter, in 1936 it seemed "unthinkable" to him that after the Enlightenment an era of intolerance and torture could arise again - unthinkable enough, perhaps, that he could not fully take into account what must have been right before his eyes.

This faith, though, ultimately provided the confidence to make this book work as it does; it really does provide a sense of home. That this was an illusion may have been one reason that this book never appeared in English. Gombrich may have had an inkling of this. In his writings about art, he argued that we make sense of images because of our presuppositions. Art, though, can demonstrate how those presuppositions are mistaken; it teaches new ways of seeing. Could there have been an element of that here - a sense that despite all he did see, he didn't see well enough because of his presuppositions? This resurrected history deserves reading for all its delights, but its optimistic illusions may help explain why histories for children are now so hard to write.
    -ESSAY: A History for Kids That Isn't Child's Play (EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, 10/03/05, NY Times)

All stories begin with "Once upon a time". And that's just what this story is all about: what happened, once upon a time.

But just once there was a glimmer of hope. In Russia a revolution had broken out in 1917.