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In this article Joaquín Fermandois argues that the papers presented in this edition of Estudios Públicos —the lecture and interview offered by Ambassador Edward M. Korry, the work of the historians Olga Uliánova and Eugenia Fediakova, together with ancillary documents— have to be understood in the context of the ideological tensions of the 20th century, to which Chile was both witness and party. This country has been extraordinarily sensitive to world political developments, and its political life has reflected the evolution of world events. According to Fermandois, this explains how in the polarization of the 1960s and early 70s, both the North Americans and the Soviets redoubled their efforts to promote policies in Chile in line with the way they saw their own interests. But the Chilean players were not mere pawns: they were convinced that their own interests were at stake in such terms as "socialism", "liberty", "free world", "anti-imperialism". Ambassador Korry was witness to this interrelationship, starting with the Kennedy Administration’s courting of the possibility of a "reformist" government in the 1960s, and passing through the vague and sterile financing of an anti-communist campaign in 1970, to his own recommendation to support forces opposing the Unidad Popular government. On the other side, the Soviets were financing the Communist Party and viewed Unidad Popular with great sympathy. In turn, they offered tempting loans to the Chilean army with the idea of "peruvianizing it" in the medium term, but they were not willing to help the "Chilean experience" with a subsidy like that provided to Cuba. Despite this, their Latin American admirers saw Moscow as the governing paradigm of Chilean politics.