Coexistence of Opposites

...Writing in 1916 in the New Statesman, the reviewer, Gerald Gould, noted: "My Russian friends are without exception perfectly sane...

...But he wisely refrains from tallying up the balance sheet...

...Russians tend, as a case in point, to be quite tolerant of accents and imperfect grammar, possibly because of their long exposure to a variety of non-Russian nationalities within the country...

...A chapter on "Group Consciousness" discusses the country's sense of togetherness, patriotism, relations between social classes, and the cohesiveness of family ties...

...yet all the Russians I read about in books are mad as hatters...

...His approach here is wholly undogmatic...

...Reviewed by Theodore Shabad Member, foreign news staff, former Moscow correspondent, New York "Times" Characterizing anything as elusive as a nation's collective mentality is a risky undertaking, so I approached this book skeptically...

...The author, an Oxford University lecturer in Russian, who is probably best known in the U.S...

...Seeking to strike back, one of them blurted out, "And how do you treat blacks in your country...

...Finally, coming as close as he does anywhere to political matters, the author deals with "Regimentation and Resistance" from the Tartar-Mongol domination to the present regime...

...The Soviet astronauts feel fine...

...My experience here seems to corroborate Hingley's theories...

...The volume's reliance on literary evidence and the impressions of outsiders raises the question of whether Russians actually possess the adduced peculiarities, some highly bizarre and incongruous...

...When foreign correspondents are taken on visits to outlying parts of the country, for instance, at the end of the trip they are invariably asked for their impression by the local officials who have shown them around...

...If the Russian mind has a basic trait, according to Hingley, it is the coexistence of opposites, thesis and antithesis, or as he puts it at the very beginning, life-enhancement and life-denial...

...Drawing on examples culled from Russian literary classics, the testimony of travelers, going back to Baron Sigismund von Herberstein, a 16th-century ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire, and.his own experience, he comes up with a long list of contradictory qualities that Russians exhibit: broad-narrow, reckless-cautious, tolerant-censorious, freedom-loving-slavish, and so on...

...Then there is the Soviet journalistic practice that I like to call the double-or triple-echo...

...Hingley anticipates the objection, and with typical self-deprecation quotes an English reviewer for whom I have considerable sympathy...

...Our hosts were clearly annoyed at this mention of what they considered a vestige of the past...

...It reverted to Lugansk in 1958, when Voroshilov fell into mild political disgrace after siding with the anti-Khrushchev faction...

...He recalls the well-known sequence St...

...My own favorite, though, is the town of Lugansk-Voroshilovgrad in the Ukraine...

...Petersburg-Petrograd (1914-1924)-Leningrad, and the vast array of places commemorating Stalin whose names were changed during Nikita Khrushchev's 1961 de-Stalinization drive...

...He suggests that the active-inactive tempo still plaguing Soviet agriculture stems from the rhythm of rural life, where hectic fieldwork during the short summer growing season is followed by enforced idleness during the long winter...

...change in the advances in health and education, the bureaucratization of society and a safer yet duller life...

...Hingley, as he often does, seeks an explanation in the past...

...Russians appear incapable of steady, disciplined, evenly-deployed labor, and alternate instead between periods of near idleness and frenzied spurts of energy...

...But reading it proved a stimulating experience, for Ronald Hingley says much about the Russian psyche that rings true and evokes sharp memories in one who has spent a total of seven years in the USSR with the Moscow bureau of the New York Times...

...Petersburg on a swamp or the construction of the world's largest dams and railroads...

...as a translator and biographer of Chekhov, has also written impressively on the history and other aspects of Russian and Soviet society...

...The content may be completely non-comittal and go little beyond the obvious: "Brezhnev avowed the Soviet Union's peace-loving aims...

...Upon his death in 1970 his name was restored, and Hingley aptly quips that it still graces the industrial city "at the time of going to press...

...With equal common sense, after having meticulously dissected the Russian psyche, Hingley ends his provocative book with this comforting comment: "How fortunate it is that, whatever sweeping statements may be made about a generalized 'Russian mind,' there are still so many individual Russians with minds of their own...

...One would particularly have liked to see Hingley's assessment, based on his wide reading, of how Russians regard the Jews...

...I commented about having seen an old man riding a donkey amid huge trucks while on the way to one of the world's highest hydroelectric dams at Nurek...

...on the other hand, there is evidence of condescension and prejudice (ostensibly officially condemned) toward some of these groups...

...Getting down to specifics, Hingley groups these distinctive characteristics under three broad headings...

...Although he tends to make sweeping generalizations that are perhaps inevitable in this sort of undertaking, he promptly cites the available data on the other side, softening—and sometimes negating—his initial proposition...

...What is wanted is not a candid appraisal but an uplifting testimonial...

...Nevertheless, the echo obviously does something for the Russian collective ego?someone out there is paying attention...

...In a final chapter, "Continuity and Change," he lists evidence on both sides of the ledger: continuity in authoritarian government, the absence of a legal political opposition, and conscription of labor for prestige projects (whether the building of St...

...I remember one such session in Central Asia...

...As might be expected, Hingley has difficulty disentangling the Russian from the Soviet mentality...

...Another familiar trait, cited by Hingley, involves work habits...

...Curiously, Hingley does not mention a similar feature of Soviet production that has a serious adverse impact on the economy...

...This can assume various forms...

...A chapter titled "Communications Systems" ranges from how the Russians address one another, through their extroversion and candor, to their obsessive secrecy that even casual observers have noticed...

...Although the author goes to considerable lengths to depict the Russian attitude toward foreigners, he does not touch on feelings about other ethnic groups in the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union...

...I am referring to the so-called shturmovshchina ?storming time"—a period at the end of the month or year when a lackadaisical work pace suddenly picks up in an all-out effort to reach the target...

...Take the Russians' baffling compulsion of looking to foreigners for approval...

...But Hingley does take up the bewildering pattern of Soviet geographical appelations, brought about by redesignating cities according to the political fortunes of their eponyms...

...It is not, of course, simply a matter of sanity, and many of the thought and behavior patterns described in The Russian Mind are undisputably accurate...

...It consists of picking up foreign reaction to major Soviet events, say, a Brezhnev speech or a space shot, and playing it back to Russian readers in Pravda or Izvestia...

...In 1935 it was named for Kliment Y. Voroshilov, a Soviet leader whose early years were spent there...