20 Days in Khrushchev's Russia
TREADGOLD, DONALD W.
20 Days in Khrushchev's Russia Russia Revisited. By Louis Fischer. Doubleday. 288 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by Donald W Treadgold Russian History Department, University of Washington; author, "Lenin...
...He found many people like one woman he met who "was not a partisan of the Soviet system, she was a patriot, and she wanted to praise and be proud of her country, especially in converse with a foreigner...
...Out of his rich background of experience with Russia (he lived there fifteen years prior to 1938) and other nations and peoples of East and West, he was superbly qualified to extract the meaning and implications of everything he saw and heard...
...But are not Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung responsible for much of that behavior, and in what sense "must" they behave as they do...
...after his departure he briefly visited Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia...
...Fischer's special contribution is to drive home his points by means of striking and poignant vignettes of his own experience...
...It can therefore give them more liberty...
...Both specialist and general reader will find much of interest in Russia Revisited, which provides perhaps the most penetrating and rounded glimpse so far into the life and recent experience of the ordinary man in the USSR and the European satellites...
...Fischer does hope that in the satellites "the heat of popular displeasure" may precipitate a "recession of Russian imperialism" there...
...However, his book is no ordinary traveler's diary...
...although he is not sanguine about their obtaining it soon...
...Yes,' he sighed, 'it is a problem...
...With dramatic effectiveness and clarity, Fischer treats Tito-Khrushchev relations, the situation in Czechoslovakia, the bloodless revolt in Poland, and the bloody revolution in Hungary...
...Fischer points this out ably...
...They dislike Communism but fear chaos...
...The man behaved in an incredible manner...
...factory workers would demand the right to strike and participation in management...
...He says less about the reaction of the still warm-blooded and inquiring youth...
...But he knows how many Soviet citizens yearn for freedom...
...A writer and a professor with whom Fischer talked suffered under the regime's intellectual oppression, yet feared the (quite hypothetical) possibility of freedom...
...Under such conditions, "de-Stalini-zation" brings a measure of relief to many Soviet citizens who after all their suffering have little mental and moral stamina left for thinking ahead...
...Excuse me,' I said, "we are both grownups...
...The overcrowded state of Moscow housing is illustrated by the taxi driver who told Fischer that he lived with his wife and two children in one room of 140 square feet...
...The Communists, in that respect like the ancient Romans, do not confuse lenient treatment of slaves with manumission...
...It is surprising that Fischer does not point this out, for in his zeal to deny that any real "Communism" exists in Russia he strongly emphasizes the nationalist factors in the whole picture...
...Would you mind telling me how you manage with your family life in such circumstances?' He shook his head sadly...
...Both contended," Fischer reports, "that if the peasants won freedom they would disband the collectives, and the city would lack food...
...In fact, he goes so far as to say that "Russia and China" are "behaving, as they must, like nations...
...Perhaps we should organize a committee in New York or London to get you a Soviet passport,' I suggested facetiously...
...He suggests that the reason Czechoslovakia has so far been able to forego de-Stalinization is that it is so rich, and that may well (in part) be the case...
...The countries where revolt occurred were Poland and Hungary, neither the richest nor the poorest, neither the most nor least Westernized, but the two traditionally most anti-Russian countries of Eastern Europe...
...Coming from you, after eighteen years' confinement, the question is funny,' I replied...
...For example, it is well known that new Soviet buildings look old and old look new...
...yet if he began to think, he might not be able to go on living...
...Upon the Kremlin's comprehension of how the minds of people like the released slave-camp inmate and the two privileged intellectuals work, the Soviet system is partly based...
...Fischer conveys this by telling first of his visit to friends who lived in a pre-Revolutionary apartment house which seemed unchanged in the 29 years since his first visit...
...However, his overall evaluation of the post-Stalin events is sound: "The Kremlin is not liberating its servants...
...Actually, in dealing with Soviet citizens, Fischer distinguishes carefully between nationalism and Communism...
...Part I is entitled "Return to Russia: a Personal Account...
...He seems to have encountered few (although other tourists have found them) who were willing to risk damning the system openly to outsiders...
...He found a Communist friend who had just been released from an Arctic concentration camp: " 'Why don't you give a passport to Paul Robeson?' he demanded...
...The writer and the professor saw their country's future in black-and-white terms of Communism or chaos...
...Out of his love for human beings he hopes, like the Hungarian poet Petofi whose poem of 1849 he quotes, for the time "When men tear off their yoke of captivity "And raise their heads to the feast of Liberty "And purple banners in the breeze unfurled "Proclaim these holy words to all the world, "Freedom...
...The book is divided into two parts, the second slightly longer than the first...
...then of his finding the flat into which he and his family had moved just after its completion in 1936, and discovering that the partitions had had to be ripped out because the building was unsafe...
...However, he warns the West against succumbing to proposals to neutralize and withdraw troops from Central Europe in a misguided effort to buy apparent freedom for Eastern Europe at the expense of the safety of the Western countries...
...The bed must not creak and we must not talk or make any noise.' " The author uses the same device in dealing with attitudes toward the regime...
...author, "Lenin and his Rivals" Louis Fischer's "revisit" to Russia lasted a scant 20 days, despite a promise from Anastas Mikoyan that he would be permitted to stay longer...
...Part II, entitled "Trouble in the Satellites," draws on some secondhand material, but the reporting remains on a very high level...
...God forbid,' he exclaimed...
...He will soon convince himself that he was never in a camp,' a Young Communist whispered in my ear...
...All of that time was spent in Moscow...
...However, his understanding of the obstacles prevents him from expecting the "feast" to be laid for the peoples of the Soviet orbit easily or instantly...
...Keep quiet, you fool,' his wife shouted...
...but so have (as he points out later) desperately poor Bulgaria and Albania...
...It assembles material on a number of topics about which much is widely known, such as architecture and housing, consumer prices and worker income, popular reaction to official propaganda, and "delinquency" among Soviet youth...
Vol. 40 • October 1957 • No. 41
