The musical tale is viewed as a metaphorical representation of Russian ethnopsychology, its conflicts, and their proposed Soviet resolution. Stein delineates essentials of the impact of history on the personality structure of the Russian people and the way they are represented by Prokofiev in his symphonic fairy tale. The Wolf, symbol of archaic orality, represents both the hordes of destructive enemies who invaded and devastated the land throughout its early history and the identification with those enemies embedded in the Russian psyche. The cautious and forbidding grandfather, paralyzed by his suspiciousness, is the "old" Czarist Russian image, while Peter is the new Soviet man. Peter tames rather than kills the wolf and takes him to Petrograd, the westernmost great city that looks toward the future aspirations of European civilization rather than the past of the Asian Steppe. An interesting analogy is drawn between the wolf of Prokofiev's creation and the wolf in Freud's Wolf Man's history.