With a Fine Eye

...Beginning, appropriately enough, with the backward and oppressive Tsarist Russian society, the author graphically describes the costs involved in casting out the old regime and establishing the new: By 1921, 16 million persons had died during World War I and the Civil War-two million of them on the battle field-and an additional two million had emigrated...

...His dislike of abstractions -and that is what it seems to boil down to-leads him to slight ideology, avoid psychological considerations, and shy away from fitting his empirical data into a metaphysical or theoretical framework...

...The dust jacket identifies him (her?-only the initials are given) as a former lecturer in Russian history...

...Despite an initial numerical superiority in men, tanks, aircraft and other equipment, deficient Soviet leadership brought the country close to the brink of defeat and had to be salvaged by enormous sacrifices of manpower...

...He notes that 10-15 million peasants died during the 1932-34 famine and its attending epidemics resulting from the collectivization of agriculture, and another 10-15 million were sent to Stalin's labor camps in the purges of Party, Army and population which accompanied this ruthless experiment in forced modernization...

...Is backwardness still plaguing the country...

...I believe it is the one major shortcoming in his book...

...What will be the consequences to the Soviet Union and the rest of the world...

...The purpose is almost perfectly fulfilled by this slim volume, written in great style and with fair wit by a British scholar...

...Beyond intimating that things are looking up, Westwood refuses to consider questions of this kind, which may be counted as a weakness or a strength, according to one's taste...

...By 1928, Stalin was ready to implement the economic system designed to pull Russia out of its backward condition...

...A mystery remains...

...So is his chapter dealing with the last years of Stalin, which witnessed the unmerciful reactivation of the Stalinist model of industrialization-no less successful than the first time, for now the USSR emerged as the second largest industrial power- and the spreading of the cold war, spurred by, among other things, Soviet anxiety over the lack of the atomic bomb...

...And where does the Soviet Union stand now...

...Again, Westwood's exposition of the complex maneuver-ings of the War is a small marvel of concision and clarity...

...Add to this Westwood's very considerable gift of exposition and his very extensive knowledge of the subject, and one could hardly ask for a more sensible introduction to a thorny and complicated subject...

...But these are the only points where I would quarrel with the author's handling of what is, after all, an enormously dense story...

...In his introduction, Westwood writes: "The deeper one studies Russia, the stronger grows the realization that the Communists have been struggling not so much with the Whites, or the capitalists, or the kulaks, or the Nazis, but rather with 10 centuries of Russian history which preceded them...

...Once he comes to the subject of Khrushchev's rise, however, he introduces a more individual note...

...Up to this point, Westwood's story is, as it must be, well-rounded and even eclectic...

...The price, however, was appalling...

...A more intangible, but no less heavy cost was that the victorious Bolsheviks-a tightly structured party of select, professional revolutionaries absolutely obedient to their leaders-installed their winning revolutionary strategy as the permanent rule of the organized minority over the huge unorganized majority...

...Westwood also assigns perhaps too much of the responsibility for the split in the Communist bloc to the ramifications of the de-Stalinization policy...

...As the author sees it, Khrushchev meant to return the Party to a position of predominance that it had not occupied since the 1920s, even though this involved not only a battle against the rising opposition of the technocrats behind Malenkov, but also the battle against the lasting, demoralizing effects of Stalin's "crimes against the Party" (detailed in Khrushchev's Speech of 1956...

...The British edition of this book, published somewhat earlier this year, credits J. N. West-wood with only one other book- on the subject of Soviet railways...

...To judge by the initial effort, the books are intended as compact, yet fairly comprehensive introductory texts for the general reader...

...What are the probable trends of Soviet development...

...It is this consciousness of Russian backwardness-enduring through most of the Soviet rule-and of the cost paid in overcoming it which provides the red thread running through West-wood's closely woven tale...

...Cutting through the enormous mass of scholarly materials at his disposal, J. N. Westwood has constructed a well-balanced, fair and highly readable account of Soviet history from Lenin's rise to power in 1917 to Khrushchev's fall in 1964...

...Westwood skillfully and objectively describes the achievements of this system, at once complex and crude, but he is not blind to the toll it took: "By 1941, the situation of the Soviet worker resembled Marx's description of the 19th century proletariat...

...All this strikes me as a very British, not to say old-fashioned failing...

...Fortunately, these shortcomings are overbalanced by the sturdy British virtues of an elegant, if somewhat cupped style, a factual approach, fairness, an absence of moralizing, and common-sense judgment in choosing between the essential and the trivial...

...Perhaps no one learned the lesson of minority rule better than Stalin, who used the period of domestic relaxation between 1921-27 to take over the Party from within (a process he did not complete till the 1930s) even while the Party was consolidating its control over the vast Russian country...

...Whoever J. N. Westwood is, I hope more will be heard from him...

...This emphasis plays down, if only by comparison, those impulses for de-Stalinization generated by the growing inefficiency of Stalin's economic model (no longer suited to the complexities of a mature economy), and by the burdens of an overcentralized administrative apparatus...

...Squeezing every bit of agricultural surplus from the collectivized peasantry, distributing the food in near-subsistence portions to the greatest possible number of industrial workers, and placing the largest number of these workers in heavy industry, the Stalinist model of industrialization did indeed provide the highest rates of industrial growth among the developed nations...

...In discussing the motivation for the de-Stalinization policy, Westwood places unusual emphasis on Khrushchev's intention to rehabilitate the Party from its low estate under Stalin when its membership was ruthlessly purged and its central organs were habitually bypassed by the dictator's personal Secretariat under Poskreby-shev...

...If so, where is it concentrated and how is it likely to be overcome...

...Who is J. N. Westwood...

...In one way, World War II was for Russia both a symptom of its lingering backwardness and a push into backwardness...

...Reviewed by THEODORE FRANKEL Contributor, "Book Week," "Commentary," "Yale Review" This is the first volume in a projected "Twentieth-Century Nation Series" dealing roughly with the last 50 years in the histories of modern nations...

...Indeed, I have omitted mention of a great many topics Westwood covers, including religion, art, minorities, intellectual life, social policy, etc.-all treated judiciously and with a fine eye for their development over half a century...