SOVIET SLAVE MINING

...By Herbert E. Bolton...

...A crowning irony of the Soviet system appears in the slogans adorning the arch-ways to these camps...

...PROFESSOR BOLTON has wisely chosen to tell the story of the Spanish conquest of our Southwest in terms of a man's life...

...First, the famed Cibola turns out to be a poor Indian nation...

...as a political document it reveals the morals of that tiny oligarchy in the Kremlin which sways the destinies of almost half the globe today and conspires to extend its rule throughout the earth tomorrow...

...The great expedition into northern Mexico, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma was essentially the human drama of the man Coronado and the lesser dramas of the other men who accompanied him...

...EVERYWHERE AND ALWAYS WE ARE INSPIRED BY OUR GREAT LEADER, COMRADE STALIN...

...Professor Bolton and some companions painstakingly followed the course of the Coronado expedition...

...They generally receive favored treatment and are regarded as capable of reforming...

...THE WAY TO FREEDOM IS THROUGH HONEST WORK...

...Until his arrest at nineteen he had lived under Soviet institutions, had been educated in Soviet school*, and had regarded himself a loyal son of the Soviet state...

...These three upper strata constitute the privileged classes...

...They explored regions that even today present a real challenge to the ingenuities of modern exploration...

...During this period he was subjected to incredible privations, indignities, and tortures, physical and mental...

...The late A. W. Bunkley was a professor of government at Princeton University...

...LONG LIVE THE SECOND FIVE YEAR PLAN...

...But this opportunity has not been fully exploited...

...Framed by a rebuffed female agent of the NKVD, he was arrested and held in the Sails of the City of Lenin for six months...

...Whittlesey House and The University of New Mexico Press...

...The simple fact that the expedition of Coronado and of the other great conquistadores must be • told in terms of personalities, rather than in terms of material "causes" or abstract ideologies, will go far in teaching the North American that even today we must, in thinking of the Latin American world, adapt our terms and our thinking process to their more personalistic-humanisticvalues, rather than trying to force their reality into our intellectual mold...

...6.00...

...On about the same social level are those convicted of plundering or destroying "socialist property," even when the value of the article involved does not exceed ten rubles...

...He set out in a spirit of optimism, fully expecting to take a place next to Cortes and Pizarro in the history of the American conquest...

...The fate of a woman therefore, particularly if young or comely, is beyond tears...

...He was a victim o£ the government-inspired terror which swept the Soviet Union from border to border following the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the anointed of Stalin, in December, 1934...

...This particular endeavor successfully combines the merits of serious scholarship and popular interest...

...Next come "thieves of every description,from burglars to pickpockets," followed by murderers and gunmen...

...But here also there are gradations...

...Indeed he was distined to suffer long and terribly before his basic loyalties were shaken...

...Thence he went by boat to Magadan and by read and trail to the gold fields ot Kolyma where in winter the temperature drops to fifty degrees below zero Farenheit...

...George S. Counts, of Teach erf College, is the author of many books, the latest of which Is The Cewstr* of the Blind...

...And the stories of these adventures were not stories that could be dulled by the academic accounts of economic historians nor whose glamour could be dimmed by the methods of historical positivism...

...Reviewed by ALLISON WILLIAMS BUNKLEY IN HIS ACCOUNT of the explorations of Coronado throughout what is now the southwestern section of the United States, Professor Bolton has made a valuable contribution to Hispanic American studies in this country...

...Cononado was a young man of thirty when he was entrusted by Viceroy Mendoza with the task of seeking out the fabulous El Dorado and the Seven Cities of unheard riches of which Cabeza de Vaca and his companions had heard during their long trek from Florida...

...Denied all the rights essential to a free society, he was eventually convicted without a trial, as the term is understood in a civilized state, by the Military Tribunal of the Leningrad Districts...

...They injected new life into their narrative by reliving much of the"tiistorical experience, and in the archives of the New and Old Worlds Professor Bolton dug up the new evidence that makes this the definitive history of Coronado and his explorations...

...From this basic principle the structure of that strange convict society, in which Petrov lived for six years, is largely derived...

...Every man in the administration, from the highest official to the chef in the kitchen has an inalienable right to violate the woman of his choice, if she is not the mistress of some man of greater power...

...Here arc a few samples noted by Petrov: WELCOME TO OUR PLACE...

...It must suffice to mention several features of the Soviet labor camps and penal system that particularly impressed the reviewer...

...They were stories of men's lives—the lives of men whose faith and will overcame the material, geopolitical, and intellectual forces that play such dominant parts in the histories of other epochs...

...Separated by an impassable gulf from this relatively small company of the "socially elect" are the political prisoners of all shades, the "irreconcilable enemies of the Soviet regime...

...She is utterly without defense or recourse...

...and second, the dull archival studies and monographs...

...At the top are swindlers, speculators, forgers, rapists, and others convicted of criminal broaches of trust...

...Such people are to be found occasionally in the forced labor camp--, and probably nowhere else...

...This Spanish conquest of America has long offered an opportunity for the historian to combine his painstaking research and accuracy with a dramatic interest that would capture the imagination .of more than . the scholarly readers...

...Amid the sobbing and screamnig of women and children, who had come to the station to bid a last farewell to their loved ones, he boarded the prison train which was to take him to Vladivostok...

...As a human document the book tells a story of personal tragedy directly involving millions of men and women...

...The overwhelming majority, nourishing the hope of ultimate liberation from the camp, guard their conversation with extreme care and "laud to the skies" the Soviet order, the Party, and the Great Stalin...

...Boasting that he doesn't "have to be afraid of anything," he curses Stahn and the regime and defiantly proclaims himself a "Social Democrat," a "Menshevik...

...He was, as the saying goes in Russia, a true "child of October...

...But the story of Coronado is more than the recounting of these disappointments, for it is also the story of the courage of one more of the many small expeditions that drove against untold odds of nature and savage peoples to widen the empire of the Emperor Charles V and the scope of the Catholic Church...

...After forty-seven days of traveling in a closed and crammed freight car, in stifling air and filth, without once washing his face, after fortyseven days of lying on a bed of planks, of eating food "unfit for dogs," he arrived at the great far-eastern port...

...Coronado would not give up until all possibilities had been explored and until he himself had suffered a serious accident...

...other nations of Europe were hardly aware of the existence of another world, small groups of Spanish soldiers and priests covered the American continent from the southern Uliited States to Patagonia...

...Immediately below the "ordinary" criminals are so-called "agitators against the Soviet regime"—persons convicted of incautious political .conversation, of telling anti-Soviet anecdotes, of concealing their social origins, or of failing to get along with local representatives of government or party...

...The book remains a model of what can be done with a fascinating period of history, of how it can be made interesting to the public...

...It would appear that the labor camp is the only place in the Union where complete freedom of expression may be observed...

...This does not mean of course that such exercise of freedom is general among the prisoners...

...Under the Soviet dictatorship the worst of all crimes is actual or even suspected political dissent or opposition...

...But even this class has its pariahs whom all shun as they would shun the plague—persons convicted of "treason," of "preparing an insurrection," and of "having ties with foreign countries...

...Yet there is an occasional prisoner like Prostoserdov who has spent ten years in the camps and who has just been given an additional ten to serve...

...The works have for the most part fallen into two categories: first, the historical novel, without serious effort at accuracy or reliability...

...While they have their separate camps, their guards are men...

...Petrov was struck down at the very beginning of a promising professional career while a student at the Leningrad Engineering Institute...

...The Seven Cities were only the pueblos whose ruins are still to be found in the Southwest...

...History Can Be Thrilling CORONADO, KNIGHT OF PUEBLOS AND PLAINS...

...They conquered empires and won untold riches...

...Apparently freedom of expression emerges in the Soviet Union only among those who have abandoned all hope...

...The rest of the story recounts his successive disappointments...

...Finally, at the very bottom of the social scale are prisoners convicted of "espionage," "terrorism," "wrecking activities," "diversionary acts," "failure to give information," "concealment of a pre-revolutionary past," and "membership in a counterrevolutionary group...

...His sentence was six years at penal servitude...

...491 pp...

...LABOR IN THE SOVIET UNION IS A MATTER OF GLORY, HONOR, COURAGE AN HEROISM...

...Vladimir Petrov was two years of age at the time of the Russian Revolution . He consequently knew nothing at first hand of the old order...

...Quivira, with its promise of treasure, was nothing more than the villages of the Wichitas on the Great Plains...

...From them, moreover, the prison authorities recruit persons for posts of confidence in the administration of the camps...

...In a period when tly...

...The era of the Spanish cotiqutstadores in America is packed with excitement and adventure...

...Women seem to occupy a special social category...

...THE STORY of Petrov's life in the gold mines, of the hardships and privations of the prisoners, of the brutality and arrogance of guards and officials, of the corrupting influence of unlimited power, of the degradation of human beings in the name of Communism—this ghastly story of the twentieth century cannot be told here...

...And now the reader is treated to a most surprising tact...