REPORT TO THE PEOPLE
WOLFE, BERTRAM D.
Report to the People MY THREE YEARS IN MOSCOW. By Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith. J. B. Livpincott Company. 346 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by BERTRAM 0. WOLFE IT HAS OFTEN BEEN SAID that "it is...
...They do not prevent this from being the best single handbook to guide the average American today to understand the problems of Russo-American relations...
...More importantly, I felt that Dr...
...3.50...
...Take, for example, the device of holding huge protest demonstrations at meetings of crackpot anti-Semites, meetings that would otherwise have gone unnoticed and largely unattended...
...More recently, there was the strange case of Ambassador Davies, whose Mission to Moscow seemed to reverse the adage into "It is the duty of a diplomat to lie to his country...
...He also exposes the dangerously superficial linking of prejudice with economics—the hypothesis that prejudice is a device purely of the capitalists in the class struggle...
...In combating prejudice," he says, "to win an argument is a penny's gain...
...As such it is easily the best onevolume book so far written for the orientation of the public-spirited manof-good-will who would like to understand the issues of the cold war and the nature of the Soviet State...
...Morris Freedman, whe has contributed io Commentary, teaches English at C. C. ft...
...He implements these words with specific suggestions on how to win allies...
...the illusion that Communism makes no moral appeal, and the illusion that the total state spreads primarily because of its moral appeal...
...It seems to me that loose charges of prejudice are not,only as sinful as prejudice Itself but equally harmful to a civilized society...
...Fineberg's anecdotal style, so obviously an amalgam of the digest magazines' simplicity and the insipid if widely popular tone of the "How to Succeed" books, and the awkward word he coined to describe all victims of prejudice: "Victimian...
...It has also become a potent bogey-man...
...to win an ally is to acquire a fortune...
...2. In his zeal to avoid the illusion that the Soviet state is undermined by deep and general opposition it seems to me that General Smith falls into the opposite error of underestimating the opposition that has led to over a million non-returners and some ten to fifteen million or more men and women living in concentration camps...
...Other chapters analyze the police state, forced labor and concentration camps, staged elections, the manipulation of religion in the interests of autocracy and imperialist expansion, the speedup in farm and factory, the fate of scientist and artist in a state which has set as its motto: All for the State, all through the State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State...
...Doubleday...
...He shatters the "hush-hush" charge Communists and others have made against a slower, more sensible handling of prejudice when he recounts with approval the public, organized, and mass demonstrations of dignified action taken against specific instances of discrimination — as when Negroes crowded a restaurant, holding up business, until they were served, or when a group of white college students promised one barber all their patronage if he would also take Negro customers...
...These groups have made such extravagant claims for their methods and accomplishments that many innocent bystanders have been convinced by them...
...But in all his three years in Moscow he was able to meet the Soviet Dictator face to face only four times, including the purely formal first meeting for the presentation of credentials...
...I should particularly have liked to see a discussion in the book of a current phenomenon in the field of prejudice, a kind of commercial exploitation of the subject...
...Fineberg shows how impossible it is to handle such a discussion "as though it were an intellectual pursuit of facts...
...Is at the Hoover Library as.a Senior Fellow In Slavic Studies, working on a sequel to be entitled The Uses ot Power...
...The three years Were crucial years of fateful and deepening crisis, embracing the tail end of the conflict over Iran, the recurrent crises over Turkey and Greece, the Berlin blockade and airlift, the outbreak of the Tito-Stalin controversy...
...Suppose at a party you hear an anti-Negro slur...
...Fineberg's book performs is its demolition of a whole battery of concepts that have been widely established in the fight against prejudice by left-wing and aggressively nationalistic groups...
...From the day he got his unexpected assignment to the day when he read the last page of proofs of this book, he continued— and doubtless is still continuing—his effort to undestand the Russian people, the regime, the men in the Kremlin, and the Vorhd or self-imposed and self-anointed leader of the Russinn total state...
...The result is that he often mixes both, and the implausible, unconvincing material adultcrates the serious matter...
...The most important point Dr...
...But in our age of anxiety, an age which professes to believe in the democratic determination of foreign policy, something new must be demanded of a diplomat: namely, to report truthfully on our purposes to the people as well as the rulers of the land to which he is accredited, and to report faithfully to his own countrymen on the insights he has gained and the problems he has faced...
...To the question "Can we legislate morality...
...On the possibly trivial level, I found objectionable Dr...
...Your untutored instinct might be to take up the remark and try to disprove its basis...
...But both these reservations are minor and matters of emphasis...
...The two chapters on Stalin and the Men in the Kremlin tell more about the Politburo and its functioning than the whole of Walter Duranty's book on that subject—without any of the Duranty fictions and apologetics...
...What was wrong with just "Victim...
...BEFORE HE LEFT Washington for Moscow, General Smith was briefed thoroughly on Russia's growing truculence and aggressiveness...
...It is a sober, informed and informing account, free from hysteria and free from wishful thinking and self-induced illusions...
...PrejftdKje_hajLiei»iii*rin ajejisET-a--^tnvTrnodity, as witness Hollywood...
...Fineberg overwhelmingly proves how mere "militancy" often boomerangs to spread prejudice...
...Feinberg brings to it his work as a rabbi and as an official of the American Jewish Committee...
...some perpetuate stereotyping . . . but some actually create a warm feeling toward the group...
...The American people can feel that for these, three years, at least, they were well represented in Moscow...
...Myriad illusions concerning the regime are quietly and unobtrusively disposed of: the illusion that all we need to do is disarm and the danger of war will vanish...
...337 pp...
...But he found himself surrounded by a deliberately raised high wall of suspicion and Isolation, herded into the "ghetto" into which all foreigners are driven as soon as they get to Moscow...
...FTINEBERG SIMPLY and, I think, adequately explains many questions that must have occurred to many persons...
...It was hoped that this loyal cooperation in war would facilitate cooperation in time of peace...
...He tried plain speaking with Stalin and believed he was getting plain answers...
...Feinberg makes is that the most obvious way of reacting to instances of prejudice is not always, in fact is rarely, the best way...
...Consider the inflated importance the specious charge of antiSemitism against Dulles took on...
...His first shock came when he brought some gifts from General Eisenhower for Marshall Sokolovsky's wife in Miscow, and the Russian general was afraid to give him his home address so that he might deliver the gifts courteously in person...
...Fineberg also places too much emphasis on a reliance on "techniques" in combating prejudice, as though all one had to do to be effective is to take an Intensive training course in the use of the proper weapons...
...As I read I found only two minor details to object to: 1. General Smith's frequent quotation from the writings of an earlier American Ambassador, McNeill (1853) and from the Frenchman, Custine (1839), both taken from the period of Tsar Nicholas I, surrtamed "The Cudgel," stress the continuity and striking resemblances in Muscovite life then and now, but do something less than justice to the period of democratic aspirations and "loosening of the bonds" that came in between— the period that began before the Emancipation of the serfs'(1861) and came to an end only with the Bolshevik seizure of power...
...With this repulse, suffered in Berlin before he even got to Russia, began the practical education of this soldier turned diplomat...
...when the subject of an FEPC comes up, he answers that traffic laws do diminish dangerous driving...
...Fineberg did not keep a clean distinction between conclusions based on controlled research and those based on his personal experience...
...On the other hand, he shows the danger of backfiring in such an approach to prejudice as group libel legislation...
...Ne professional diplomat but a soldier, General Smith was chosen because our generals had gotten closer to cooperation with high Russian officials during the war than our professional diplomats have been able to get at any time...
...My Three Years in Moscow is his report to the American people, on what he tried to accomplish, and above all, on what he learned in the process...
...One of the most valuable services Dr...
...Bertram D. Welfe, whose most recent book Is Three Who Mode a Revolution...
...Reviewed by MORRIS FREEDMAN SUBTITLED "What Yon Can Do About Prejudice," this is intended as a handbook based on a mixture of research findings and personal experience...
...General Smith takes his own values for granted rather than parading them, but from the account of his fight to break the Russian-imposed caste system as far as it applied to the number of hierachical eggs allotted to each embassy staff member's breakfast, to the touching story about the Soviet janitor who goes "from apartment door to door rapping at midnight, shouting as he knocks: "Don't be frightened, Comrades, it's only a fire"—every detail bespeaks a humane, thoughtful and democratic individual...
...Reviewed by BERTRAM 0. WOLFE IT HAS OFTEN BEEN SAID that "it is the duty of a diplomat to lie for his country...
...Unscrupulous persons have begun using the brush of prejudice with a dangerous abandon...
...By S Andhil Fineberg...
...Guide for the Anti-Anti PUNISHMENT WITHOUT CRIME...
...Consider "militancy," a key word of this school...
...the illusion which the President has twice fostered that "Good old Joe is only a prisoner of the Politburo...
...Fineberg shows how rabble rousefs thrive on such opposition...
...DR...
...He nourished the hope that obvious goodwill, and frank plainspeaking to the autocratic ruler of "all the Russias," might yet save the peace and relieve the mounting tension...
...THE SPECIALIST may learn little that is new, yet even the specialist will find the organization of materials, the balance and perspective illuminating and helpful...
...But General Smith soon found that even his opposite numbers on the Russian General Staff were no longer permitted to meet with him freely...
...What about jokes in dialect...
...A model of this new democratic diplomacy is Ambassador Smith's My Three Years in Moscow...
Vol. 33 • March 1950 • No. 11
