The USSR in One Volume
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
The USSR in One Volume A History of Soviet Russia. By Georg von Ranch. Reviewed by William Henry Chamberlin Praeger. 493 pp. $6.75. There has long been a need for a reliable one-volume history...
...There has long been a need for a reliable one-volume history of the Soviet Union, if only for teaching purposes and as an alternative to Frederick L. Schuman's opinionated and biased Soviet Politics...
...The author maintains an attitude of scholarly objectivity, and sticks closely to the role of chronicler rather than interpreter or judge...
...Beginning with a brief sketch of the populist and Marxist origins of the Russian revolutionary movement and of the 1905 "dress rehearsal" for 1917, Professor von Rauch tells in greater detail the main facts of the March and November Revolutions and of the prolonged Civil War, from which the Soviet regime emerged politically victorious but faced with a major economic crisis...
...Contrary to the author's statement that "after Kolchak's, Deni-kin's armies were the most important,'' the record of the Civil War shows that Denikin, with his Cossacks and his hard core of veteran officers, offered a more serious military challenge to the Soviet regime than Kol-chak...
...Some of the best narrative deals with the tremendous clash of the two totalitarian giants, German Nazism and Soviet Communism...
...He was politically and militarily ousted before Denikin's northern sweep began...
...The author carries the story through the New Economic Policy, the retreating maneuver by which Lenin alleviated the economic crisis without giving up the dictatorship...
...650,000 Soviet citizens were registered auxiliary soldiers in the German armies...
...Then come, with well-proportioned distribution of space, the struggle for the Leninist succession, the gradual emergence of Stalin as the all-powerful dictator, the drive for industrialization and collectivization, the great purge of the Communist party in the Thirties, Stalin's temporarily successful effort to steer Hitler's expansionist drive away from Russia and against the West, the German-Soviet war, and the events of the last twelve years...
...Militarily, Professor von Rauch believes that Hitler's decision to grasp simultaneously for Stalingrad and the Caucasian oil fields in 1942 was disastrous to German hopes of victory...
...This need is pretty satisfactorily filled by this translation of a work by a German scholar, Georg von Rauch, who is equally at home with Tsarist and Soviet historical material...
...The dispassionate narrative style tends to exclude much depth and originality in interpretation...
...Trotsky acknowledged this in a speech at the time...
...Concentrated German strength might have taken one of these objectives...
...The history is fortified by an extensive bibliography and a brief chronological summary of the principal events in Soviet history...
...The one-volume size is convenient for the general reader, but the compression in space means that many events are inevitably treated briefly and somewhat superficially...
...According to Professor von Rauch...
...Besides being a painstaking historian, the author proves himself a shrewd and accurate judge of current Soviet political realities...
...these included over 100,000 natives of Turkestan, over 100.000 natives of the Caucasus, 70.000 Cossacks, and 35,000 Tatars...
...He is not fooled by Khrushchev's speech, with its highly selective and qualified exposition of Stalin's crimes, into thinking that any renlh fundamental ideological shift was intended...
...the former Ataman of the Don Cossacks, was not in command of their forces during Denikin's campaign...
...The account of the overthrow of Tsarism in March (New Style) 1917 is inaccurate in some dates and assigns to the Duma a bigger role than it actually played...
...He accurately diagnoses the basic dilemma facing Stalin's heirs: "Attempts to meet, in part, the needs of their subjects lead to demands for genuine freedom with which Communism is incompatible...
...There are a few slips in this generally solid and accurate work...
...Even so, the Soviet Union, far from being free of any fifth column, as former Ambassador Joseph E. Davies naively supposed, furnished more military recruits for the Nazis than all the other invaded countries put together...
...As a result, the record of four decades of Soviet Communism emerges with little distortion...
...the reader is not likely to regard the Soviet system as much stronger or weaker than it is...
...However, this is a book in which the reader can find a reasoned, documented description and explanation of almost every important development during four decades of Soviet rule...
...By 1944...
...to reach for both, filling weak spots in the line with militarily inferior Nazi satellite units, was to invite the crushing Soviet counter-offensive which ultimately occurred...
...Krasnov...
...This is a valuable achievement and fills a notable gap...
...The merits of the work have their corresponding defects...
...attempts to suppress the desire for freedom lead, in the long run, to a malignity which can only undermine government...
...Even more important, perhaps, was the loss of excellent political opportunities to exploit Russian disaffection with Stalin's brutal tyranny because the Nazi-installed regime in the occupied areas was equally brutal, with the additional stigma of being alien...
Vol. 40 • April 1957 • No. 16
