RUSSIA TODAY
Fischer, George
Russia Today MY THREE YEARS IN MOSCOW, by Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith. J. P. Lippincott. 346 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by George Fischer THROUGH most of World War II the Army officer who wrote My...
...From 1946 to 1949 he was U. S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R...
...My Three Years in Moscow is a notable deviation from the average foreign book on Soviet Communism...
...is like today...
...To challenge the view that Russians are basically slavish need of course not imply that pre-Soviet Russia was a full-fledged democracy, or that its standard of living approached that of the West...
...Of the turbulent evidence that the Russian people have known of and striven for liberty, only little need be cited: the epic peasant rebellions of Razin and Pugachev, the Decembrist coup of the aristocrats-officers, the world-renowned odes to freedom from the pens of Turgenev and Herzen, of Tolstoy and Ktor kin...
...The latter is true although in specific terms Gen...
...Beedle" Smith's account of his three years in the Soviet capital...
...Smith holds that both long-range Communist aspirations and postwar Soviet aggrandizement make war an ever-present possibility...
...add little to previously known facts—aside from an up-to-date picture of what the author terms the "ghetto existence" of foreigners in Moscow...
...But nevertheless the theme is one which recurs in Gen...
...Dwight Eisenhower's chief of staff in Europe...
...Today too few recall—or kno —that the democratic Provisional Government regime of 1917 Wer separated from absolute Tsarism if decades of increasing, though fm from ideal, political and economic progress...
...The outstanding feature of the book is how sober and unaffectedly informative it is...
...For Gen...
...As such, the book has little that is specifically "diplomatic history," aside from chapters on the Moscow Conference of 1947 and the Berlin blockade...
...In My Three Years in Moscow this potentially racist view of the Russians is reflected in far less excessive form than, for instance, in Geoffrey Gorer's "scholarly" The People of Great Russia...
...Smith possesses two foremost prerequisites: first-hand experience and a mature, politically astute mind...
...The drawn-out Soviet purges certainly speak of widespread disaffection—as the well-j nigh unfathomable Soviet forced labor system does even more tragically...
...My Three Years in Moscow is a thoughtful, unpretentious, and competent survey of Soviet life today...
...Smith's published findings on the U.S.S.R...
...This book—serialized in the New York Times and the Saturday Evening Post—is Lt...
...An unabatiag' series of local uprisings—of which the Kronstadt sailor revolt of 1921 is among the few known abroad—* was dramatically highlighted in the early 1930's by the protracted, stubborn peasant resistance to state-im, posed "collectivization...
...Smith's otherwise solid work...
...Rather, it consists of discussions of key topics like "Stalin," "Industry and Agriculture," "Culture and the Purge," and "War or Peace...
...But that the forgotten, or never learned, historical truth lies somewhere in between these two extremes—that is attested by the whole record of Russia's past and present...
...Of particular interest, of course, are this ex-Ambassador's views on diplomatic prospects...
...This view is that the people of Russia are and will be wholly submissive to (or happy under) Soviet rule because of their national make-up, especially since their pre-Soviet political and economic existence was essentially that of slaves...
...It is therefore the more regrettable that here and there it should lend support to those who unwisely contend that Russia is inherently authoritarian, and that the free world need not hope or strive for support from the Russian people...
...But his conclusion is that "distance, necessity, firmness, and the united strength of the West, now being organized under the Atlantic Pact, may enable us to continue for a protracted period that precarious but relatively peaceful co-existence which we have managed to lead with the Russians up to this time...
...The Soviet period provides abunlj dant evidence, too...
...Intermingling personal observations and opinions with Soviet data and U. S. Government reports, My Three Years in Moscow is a layman's survey of what the U.S.S.R...
...In current American opinions on Soviet behavior, one theme is becoming increasingly fashionable...
...Reviewed by George Fischer THROUGH most of World War II the Army officer who wrote My Three Years in Moscow served as Gen...
...It sounds impressively plausible, and appears to corroborate a wide range of opinions on Russia—even of those as far apart as ardent Soviet sympathizers and "preventive war" advocates...
Vol. 14 • March 1950 • No. 3
