TWO ON RUSSIA

...One hopes he will now give us the benefit of another more deliberative study of Russia, for the best parts of the book are the interpretations...

...The question of Khrushchev's whereabouts implies not only he was implicated with Stalin, but that he and others did nothing to end the party's travail...

...he is now on the Times' Washington staff...

...That key is Russian national interest...

...Readers of Schuman's book will know where Khrushchev was...

...In Communist Russia, as in Nazi Germany, fear of the Vozhd or Fuehrer was less impelling than the desire to share in his spoils...

...One, that they were "afraid to rule without him" for Stalin was "skillful, shrewd, quick on the trigger, and successful...

...But even Schuman's valuable longer-range effort, covering the period from Lenin and Trotsky to the 20th Congress, is not immune to the impact of the latest headlines...

...Fischer's meetings with new and old friends make interesting reading, but much of the material is pure journalese...

...With the muffled sound of the blood baths in the background, the mid-Thirties were the years in which Khrushchev blossomed as Party leader in Moscow...

...In 1934, he appeared in the center ring of the Party when he was named not only to the Central Committee but an alternate member of the Politburo...

...JACK RAYMOND was until recently correspondent for the New York Times In Moscow...

...Reason enough to fear Stalin...

...Schuman has an irritating, although not always challengeable, tendency to equate in principle Soviet "realism" and United States "idealism" in the struggle...

...Before the year ended, the Leningrad Party leader Kirov was assassinated, letting loose the murders, arrests, and suicides that made room for the Khrushchevs...

...That is where Khrushchev was— working his way to the summit, dodging the bodies that fell like boulders from the hands of the mad giant who sat at the peak...

...It cannot be in accordance with the interest or the safety of Russia that Germany should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun the Balkan states and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of southeastern Europe...

...Yet it must be clear that the Russian leaders, given their basic interests, and unprepared for sudden changes, had few realistic alternatives...

...Fischer offers three guesses for their failure...

...Then with Russia astride Eastern Europe, the Cold War began between East and West...

...They might also try using the key to explain why the Russians suppressed the Hungarian revolution so violently...

...MAX SEHAM has been engaged In the private practice of medicine for 40 years and has served as clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota...

...The Russian regime, ruler of dissatisfied millions, was less prepared to accept hostility on its border than the United States found it possible to tolerate a Communist penetration in Guatamala...

...The methods used to dispossess the governments concerned were different in degree, but the question of defense was the same...

...But Churchill did not leave it as hopelessly as that...

...The weakness of the Nagy regime —contrasted with the strength of the Gomulka regime which was not swept away by the obvious anti-Communist and anti-Russian feelings of the people—presaged not merely an independent Hungary, but a hostile one...

...These days, when it is useful to remind Russia of America's wartime aid, Schuman makes an interesting point...

...In 1938, as the number of Party leaders shot and imprisoned moved beyond a thousand and the number in slave labor beyond many millions, Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Ukraine...

...Two, that the death of Stalin "might have split the leadership" and the "fetish of unity restrained the assassin's arm...

...The First Secretary asked the identity of his questioner, and when it was not forthcoming, sneered, "Now you know where I was...

...While often critical of the West, while often leaning over backwards to avoid the extremes of anti-Communist propaganda, Schuman's well written history also is illuminating...

...THE REVIEWERS FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, is co-editor of "William Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism...

...But his is no mere record of events...

...But the story of Russia that he tells does not neglect to make clear that since Stalin was, indeed, the one-man ruler of Russia for twenty years, it must follow that he, perhaps he alone, was also responsible for the tremendous and necessary—albeit costly—industrialization of the country and the unbelievable victory against the Nazis...

...It is that the vast aid for her defense did not come to Russia until after that nation alone had stemmed the tide...

...WILLIAM B. HESSELTINE is a professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin...

...Louis Fischer retells with deserved emotion the story of the Hungarian revolution last fall, "the most radiant tragedy of our time...

...At the 20th Communist Party Congress, at which Khrushchev denounced the terrorism of Stalin, and cited some of the details, he was confronted with the anonymous demand, "Where were you all this time...

...It has sometimes happened," Bul-ganin afterwards told Khrushchev— as Louis Fischer records in his Russia Revisited—"that a man goes to Stalin on his invitation as a friend and when he sits with Stalin he does not know where he will be sent next, home or to jail...

...The latter returned to Russia last summer for the first time following his sixteen year stint in Moscow, 1922-1938, as a correspondent...

...Schuman finds this guess "not implausible...

...On the eve of Kirov's burial in the Kremlin wall, 31 high party persons in Leningrad and 32 in Moscow were shot, after which there was a continuing wave of arrests and executions...

...Perhaps there is a key," he went on...

...Reviewed by Jack Raymond FI HIS highly readable and scholarly one volume history of Russia since 1917, Professor Schuman recalls in a footnote the now famous story that spread in Moscow last year...

...He shared with Kaga-novich the credit for building the subway...

...It is a story with a point of view...

...E. NELSON HAYES is an editor for a Boston publisher...

...For example, it has become commonplace to quote Churchill that Russia is a "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma...

...And three, that "Stalin's co-workers saw him pushing a gigantic ball up a steep slope to the castle of their desires...

...That would be contrary to the historic life interests of Russia . . ." Those who mark Russian intransi-gience on the unification of Germany might well ponder these words...

...During 1955 a major reshuffle of the top party personnel in public posts . . . evoked voluminous speculation abroad, ranging from the view that a Khrushchev-Bulganin-Zhukov faction had engineered the 'downfall' of a Malenkov faction . . . None of these 'explanations' squared with the facts...

...American and other Western aid, it developed, had another effect...

...In 1939, he became a full member of the Politburo, having proved himself in the bloody collectivization campaign...

...Of course, the fact that such a coalition did, ultimately, send Malenkov to Siberia, in addition to disposing of Molotov and Kaganovich, does not disprove Schuman's version of the original Malenkov resignation as premier—that it was part of a Rus-sion reaction to the rearmament of Germany...

...By the politics of paradox so characteristic of the Twentieth Century, it [aid] became a major factor in the counterattack and in the later subjugation of all Eastern and much of Central Europe by Soviet armies— which was no part of the purposes of the Atlantic Powers," Schuman writes...

...Schuman's book is a bigger project than Fischer's...

...Finally, perhaps, in 1953, they did in the apparently mad tyrant...

...But why did they not assassinate him...