Mr. Salisbury, the retired chief foreign correspondent for the New York Times, had been a student of Russia all his adult life. In this conversation rich in detail, he sets out his view that Soviet imperialism is mainly an extension of Russian imperialism "all the way back to the Ivans," and only secondarily an expression of ideology: "Lenin himself was really a great improviser, who used a lot of Marxist language to do what he thought he had to do to maintain his power and get his country moving again. [Marxism-Leninism] is a ragbag. I think one of the great delusions of our generation is to assume that there is such a thing as Marxism-Leninism just because they label it that. I just don't think it exists."