Russia's Inner Self

...Hopefully, too, the thousands of hurried tourists who go a long way "just to see what it's like" will first invest time and money in Hindus' work...

...better than most, they know it will continue for many decades...

...For House Without A Roof is a true book—true in its factual details and in its sweep of judgment...

...Peasants, newly calm after the nightmare, on the move into the bright cities after abject centuries on barren land, unproductive because their individual initiatives have been allowed to atrophy but grateful because their dignity has been restored...

...He is left dangling quite surely between the Soviet Union that is ugly tyranny and the Russia that is efficient, dynamic and progressive...

...But those Americans who have lived in Russia share an experience, vivid and empathie, and they share the guilt of not having hitherto conveyed to their countrymen a sense of the complexity and profundity of Russia...

...son, eager for a less austere life, without memory of revolution or civil war, without a heritage of heroism but also without the nightmare of barbarism, jealous of his privacy against the collective, hungry for experience and thought, impotent...

...Hopefully, it is not too late to begin to understand...

...Above all, he is left with the notion that Russia is human...

...He can call on memories of his first 14 years spent in Russian villages and towns, as well as impressions gained in travel throughout the Soviet Union over the last four decades...

...Here and there, the imagery becomes repetitious and occasionally the narrative spins on and on in well-organized but undirected fashion—in Russian fashion...

...Hindus does not introduce us to the Soviet politicians, who, he notes, are "men of action, armed with a vocabulary of optimism and a spirit of militancy, their minds, like those of soldiers set on battle and victory whether in industry, agriculture, education, sports, or diplomacy...

...Workers, their indignation mounting, not against Kremlin ideology or policy but against bureaucratic and managerial failure...

...And on the peasants Hindus is superb...

...The peasant is the hero here, because all Russians are or recently have been peasant...

...true as a diary of all foreign travelers through the Soviet Union...

...The careful reader derives the only kind of perspective that can bring any serenity in the long, long battle with the Russians...

...Hindus misses little that the foreigner can perceive anywhere on the Russian landscape or, indeed, in the official, statistic-laden interviews...

...Intellectuals: father, without integrity or rectitude (outside science and technology), disillusioned with official ideology but beaten, cynical and incapable of remorse...

...Moonstruck girl, chauvinist youth, devout Baptist...

...In fact, this tendency toward encyclopedic treatment of the books Russians read or of the gold they mine in Siberia is his book's major flaw...

...But the whole is remarkable, perceptive and, most important, in perspective...

...And the very few Americans who have had an opportunity to live among the Russians and who pretend in some small measure to know them cannot argue against the frustration or soothe the anger...

...From Khrushchev down they care little or nothing for the vagaries of human nature or for the demands of the citizen's inner self, so long as he doesn't slip dangerously out of control, which in my judgment cannot happen...

...Women, bearing most of the land's hardship with dedication and coming out nonetheless as more humane, more liberal and decent than the men...

...They cannot confidently vouch for the sanity of the Kremlin rulers or predict certain peace, and, if the blow should come, they will know no more than anyone else exactly what hit us...

...true in its portraiture of Russian peasant and academician...

...Reviewed by MAX FRAN?EL Reporter, New York "Times" The frustration, anger and even hysteria and idiocy that the mere mention of the Soviet Union still produces in many quarters of the United States are unhappy monuments to a truly colossal lack of understanding...

...Maurice Hindus is the great expiator of this clan of Americans...

...It is also true in the largest sense possible: the impression it leaves (with inadequate summation) of a nation in ordered restlessness, of channeled energies but unguided souls, of secure totalitarianism and insecure welfarism, of a house without a roof...

...It has the perspective of time within the Russian village, of space between Moscow and Siberia, of history between the worlds of East and West...

...Hopefully, the few thousands who aim our cold-war guns, tend our ideological missiles and blindly (without knowing the flesh that surrounds the Bolshevik skeleton) decide tactics in the grand diplomatic chess game, will study this book and carry with them at work the questions it poses...

...Rather, we are introduced to the "demanding inner self" of the nation, which persists "like an underground stream...

...Jews, forced into an identity that they may not express and prevented, paradoxically, from shedding that identity...

...Their knowledge makes them more contented and, I believe, more effective combatants in the cold war...