Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin didn't quite know what to expect when he stepped onto American soil for the very first time. He'd been stationed in England before so was familiar with democracy, but he also knew that there were differences between the two countries. The U.K. was much more socialist than the United States was, with higher taxes but services such as health care and a college education offered for free, unlike in the United States. Illya shuddered to think of innocent people dying of treatable medical conditions simply because they couldn't afford to pay for doctors or medicine. That was a situation that would never happen in his own country or in England but could well happen in the U.S.
Still, Illya strongly approved of the social programs being implemented by the current president, Lyndon Johnson, as well as the civil rights championed by the recently slain president, John F. Kennedy.
Both the U.S. and the U.K. had a two-party political system, unlike the U.S.S.R. Illya found that he agreed much more with the values and beliefs of the Labor party rather than the Conservative party in the U.K. He wondered whether his new partner, Napoleon Solo, was a Democrat or a Republican. He very much hoped that Napoleon was a Democrat; however, he knew that, whatever the case was, if they were going to work together closely, he and his partner were going to have to be able to trust one another.
Another thing he was certain of was that life in the United States would be very different from the life he'd lived so far. He couldn't wait to find out what new challenges he was about to face.