Russia in Broad Strokes

...In fact, Shub's book supports this view...

...second, in concluding that the prospect is a growth of revolutionary attitudes confronting the present regime...

...Elsewhere, it is the significance of his data that bothers me...

...At the same time, the Soviet leadership seems unable (and, Shub adds, increasingly unwilling) to launch major economic or administrative reforms...

...For instance, that in the last two or three years Soviet bureaucratic rigidity and intolerance have gone from bad to worse...

...While I have no figures to dispute it, I question Shub's assertion that Soviet "subversion," propaganda, and "direct support" of "most" foreign Communist parties costs the USSR as much as all its economic and military assistance (including Vietnam, India and the Arab states...

...With this estimate I would of course fully concur...

...fortunately, this is not so (though it may come true anytime, of course...

...He is struck by what I think are thoroughly inapt analogies with the Tsarist past...

...In addition, he shows that Khrushchev's timid successors have failed to get their country moving again, failed to break its bureaucratic and ideological inertia and multi-faceted resistance to meaningful change...

...He reports (correctly) that nearly half the Soviet population is "still on the farms...

...Any reviewer who (like myself) has not been back to the Soviet Union in the last two or three years may seem brazen to differ with the views of an author who has, and I confess a certain hesitancy because of the second-handedness of my perspective...

...It remains a mystery how such an explosion could take place if Stalinist controls were again effectively imposed—and he argues, in effect, that they could not...

...Given the values of the men in the Kremlin, it is, alas, plausible that they will not permit demonstrations in Red Square to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and that they will hound writers for sending abroad works they cannot publish at home...

...There is no question about the honesty of Shub's account of the new clamp-down on noncom-formists...

...I doubt, too, whether the rift between the cpsu and the Italian, Yugoslav and Rumanian parties was in large measure provoked by Moscow's "harsh stance on the German question...

...And he sheds interesting light on the growing role of the military and of the kgb...

...De-Stalinization has been reversed...

...As Shub indicates in a very interesting chapter, the power of the present leaders is quite circumscribed...

...It is also because the articles that make up this book (as the jacket reminds us) have been applauded as "the best reporting . . . from the Soviet Union in many years...

...More recently, he had done some superb reporting from Germany and Eastern Europe...

...Soviet citizens have learned what, at any given time, they can afford to say and what they cannot—and they will wait for another turn of the "line" if overt evidence of solidarity among them becomes too risky...

...Whether they followed the particular lines of cleavage Shub describes and are as serious as he suggests in his provocative analysis, only the future will tell...

...Shub himself recognizes much of this...

...He further characterizes current Soviet domestic policy as being in part a "reversion to Stalinism," but nowhere indicates what he considers the essence of Stalinism to be...

...It is certainly true that we have typically underestimated tensions and fissures within the Soviet elite, and that on the Czechoslovak issue there were differences within the leadership...

...His key point is that Soviet policy converts in-system liberals to revolutionaries...

...And I find it difficult to take as a serious indictment his (correct) insistence that in Russia diaper service is still a Utopian dream...

...The creative intelligentsia is again intimidated...

...and implausible that the Ussuri incident in March 1969 should have represented "Chinese fulfillment of obligations to the hard-pressed Rumanians...

...Moreover, it makes little sense to review books of this kind unless one assumes that an observer in this country can arrive at responsible judgments...

...This series of reports goes beyond such a general tableau, however: first, in extending the picture of gloom and doom to all areas of Soviet life, portraying it as an unrelieved catalogue of crimes and catastrophes, failures and frustrations...

...More generally, I would subscribe to his observation that "we are frequently driven to conclude, 'It cannot go on this way'—but it can and often does...

...He reports that Aleksandr Tvard-ovsky was rumored to have been ousted from the editorship of Novyi Mir...

...While there may well be some diffuse anxiety, especially among the intelligentsia, the present policy seems quite selective and predictable...

...This brings us to Shub's general interpretation of Soviet policy...

...Shub speaks of the Soviet scene as "pre-revolutionary," in the sense that the "likeliest result" of what he labels re-Stalinization will be a "violent explosion...

...But this does not make for revolution...

...indeed what Shub has to say deserves to be taken seriousiy...

...Much of what Shub reports confirms, in broad strokes, what others have found...

...Shub insists (correctly) that the growth rate of the Soviet economy has been no greater than it was in the last two decades of Tsarism...

...This book, the product of his Russian experience, is essentially a series of 10 newspaper articles written upon his return to the U.S...

...If so, the present scene scarcely meets these criteria...

...To my mind, two essential ingredients are one-man dictatorship and political error...

...I am in no position to check whether it is true that a majority of Soviet city dwellers still have no running water, as he claims...

...He argues that economic improvement in the last 20 years has been "minimal"—something most observers would dispute (however inadequate the benefits in relation to the consumers' rising expectations...

...It also seems premature, to say the least, to conclude that the Kremlin rejects all efforts at rapprochement with Bonn...

...He asserts that by a "conservative" estimate 60 per cent of all Soviet industry works directly for the military—a rather incredible figure...

...As for terror, no matter how scandalous and depressing the recent instances of intimidation and repression, they lack the Stalinist arbitrariness and unpredictability in choice of victims, and the severe and massive character of the victimization...

...But I am not really sure what Shub means to imply concerning the prospects of these potential rebels (about whom he has interesting things to relate...

...The dominant mood of treading water and losing ground could not provide a greater contrast with the Khrushchev era...

...The Soviet urbanization and shift in labor force happened faster than that of the West: The real problem is the costs and benefits of the process...

...Then, after serving two years as the Washington Post correspondent in Moscow, he was expelled from the Soviet Union last spring, just as his tour of duty was about to end...

...The problem with the first point —the undifferentiated indictment?is both its verisimilitude and its interpretation...

...By its nature it is a slim volume, and those who have come to admire Tony Shub's work are bound to hope that he will still offer us something more substantial...

...Indeed, to speak of Soviet dissenters as "revolutionary heroes" seems to dangerously validate the worst fears of the most illiberal elements in Moscow and provide them with a justification for stepping up the suppression of dissent...

...But why is this so damning...

...It is precisely because a return to Stalinist terror is unthinkable that the Soviet dissidents are prepared to speak out...

...The "pre-revolutionary" phase might then, by his own estimate, last for generations—which amounts to saying that things are bound to change, sooner or later, in ways we cannot now foresee...

...If I have dwelt at length on some areas of disagreement, it is because I come away uncertain about just what is The New Russian Tragedy...

...If his intention is to argue that Soviet society has reached a point at which it is impossible to exact the kind of blind compliance that Stalin could, he is entirely right...

...But even those who have been there recently often present conflicting assessments...

...The Soviet intelligentsia, "inured to fatalism," for the most part have given (at best) "private and passive" opposition to events like the Czech invasion...

...quite wrong to argue that there is "no sign" that arms control talks "might be substantially productive...

...He is at his best in showing that "the political leaders' dilemmas are multiple and tortuous...

...Perhaps because of the brevity of his account, he fails to say just where and how this manifests itself —not as a war of words, not as a determination to hold on to the "sphere," not as an effort to maximize Soviet power and influence, but as aggression...

...Reviewed by ALEXANDER DALLIN Professor of International Relations, Columbia University Anatole Shub is well known to veteran readers of The New Leader as a former staff member and, in 1953-58, its managing editor...

...moreover, the "economic mess is the fertile soil nurturing the seeds of revolution...

...Similarly, the invasion of Czechoslovakia showed an unwillingness to tolerate dissent and diversity...

...All this leads him to speculate, with the inevitable paucity of hard information, about an intense struggle for power in Moscow since the Czech crisis...

...Yet given his cumulative experience, exceptional skill and unusual background, The New Russian Tragedy demands closer attention than one might accord a journalistic neophyte or grasshopper...

...One gathers that such incidents (which have indeed multiplied, as Solzhenitsyn's recent ouster from the Writers' Union once again demonstrates) understandably informed much of Shub's general perception of the Soviet scene...

...But this is typical of the growth curves of all industrialization: at the outset, a sharp take-off showing high percentage growth and later, larger absolute but slower rates of growth...

...He argues that Soviet foreign policy is still "fundamentally aggressive...

...He sensitively describes, for example, the search of the room of a dissident historian and his Tatar wife, a gifted portrait painter...