  This article was published in 2001 in Festschrift "At the Frontier of
Particle Physics; Handbook of QCD", Ed. M. Shifman, (World Scientific,
Singapore, 2001), Vol. 1, page 126. Asymptotic freedom as the basic property of
QCD was discovered by Gross, Wilczek, and Politzer in 1973. Personal
recollections of David Gross which are being published in this Volume vividly
describe the historical background and the chain of events which led to this
fundamental breakthrough. Unfortunately, I failed to obtain Politzer's side of
the story. Some details can be found in an interview which Prof. Politzer gave
to R. Crease and C. Mann on February 21, 1985 \cite{DP}. Below I acquaint the
reader with the pre-1973 appearances of asymptotic freedom which,
unfortunately, went unnoticed
