Russia REVISITED

...He has taken a few steps backward from his February, 1956, Twentieth Party Congress secret speech condemning Stalin...

...Both have promised to do better next time...

...Sputniks do not feed the soul...

...The revolt of the Malenkov-managers represented, among other things, an attempt of the industrial leaders to win relief from Party interference and domination, to make the Soviet economy less a political economy in which material results would not always be sacrificed to Party and power ends...

...Khrushchev is concentrating on the nation's food...

...Something is slowly brewing, slowly fermenting in the Soviet Union...

...Malenkov is now directing an electric-power station near the Chinese border, but the conflict between the needs of the individual and Soviet international aims remains...

...I found, during my recent stay in Moscow, that a number of persons had either lost, or never achieved, the power of thought...

...Youth turns to jazz, sex, American films, Western dances and dress...

...Malenkov urged more emphasis on consumer commodities, and as prime minister between 1953 and 1955, he cut the military budget...

...The Kremlin is seeking to win plaudits at home by victories abroad...

...After Stalin's death he finished a novel...

...The Soviet citizen has no vote (elections are always unanimous and hence unreal) and no freedom of expression...

...If foreign aid is not too popular in the United States where it does not reduce the number of shoes, suits, homes, and cars available to the consumer, how much more so in Russia where it does...

...Russia has been a difficult country to run, and the relaxation of the Stalinist terror enhances the difficulty...

...Yet surcease from arbitrary arrests and from the numerous executions of authors, journalists, and editors of the Thirties has injected a little courage into the literary world...

...The Party has won in all instances, yet it seems still to be on the defensive...

...They did not want war...

...The Soviet regime has been long on promises, short on delivery...

...Decades of shortages, privations, sufferings, blood purges, political confusion arising out of drastic Kremlin zigzags, and the political impotence synonymous with totalitarianism have thrown the individual back upon himself and his family...

...The purges of Malenkov, Molotov, Shepilov, Kagano-vich, and Zhukov are further retrogressive, disillusioning, confusing steps...

...The Muscovites whom I visited in their homes, most of them old, intimate friends who spoke frankly and freely, showed negligible interest in and not much acquaintance with the domestic or foreign politics of their government...

...Soviet society is no more thoughtless than classless...

...Cultural life too is full of the potential of change...

...But the Soviet citizen is astonishingly individualistic and his values are chiefly materialistic...

...We have nothing to match this," a Soviet composer confessed to me...

...The result is a mounting desire for improved living conditions...

...The Kremlin may seek to keep these matters secret, but so many persons are involved that the aid operations must become widely known...

...their seniors resort to drink, cards, and Russia's classic literature...

...In the midst of industrial bustle there is a vast intellectual emptiness, my Moscow friends told me...

...The Kremlin, accordingly, must do more for the welfare of the population...

...They could not do much about them, so why bother...

...Their high cost also cuts food for the stomach...

...The Italian Communist Party prohibited the publisher from printing the book, but the publisher quit the Party on account of Hungary and now Pasternak's novel has appeared in Italy where it is being acclaimed a masterpiece...

...Short of capital herself, in fact forced by capital shortages to curtail the current five-year-plan, Russia can ill afford, and her citizens will hardly appreciate, the export of capital and materials in large quantities...

...Meanwhile, our government and institutions like universities, foundations, city governments, industrial companies, large farm cooperatives, research projects, and newspapers should undertake personnel exchanges with the Soviet Union (and Russia's satellites) in an attempt to achieve total civilian communication...

...the Party is the only political organization, and the essence of Khrushchev's internal strategy is to maintain the supremacy of the Party in economic matters as well as military...

...The Kremlin need not reckon with public opinion...

...They were thrilled...

...Unsure whether it would be published in the Soviet Union, he dared give it to an Italian Communist publisher who visited Moscow...

...The Khrushchev antagonism to Zhukov was based on Party hostility to even partially independent operations by another power group...

...especially since, for the population as a whole, it is synonymous with repression, compulsion, and world goals while the industrialists and the military are more closely identified with material and national interests...

...The emphasis on armaments and machine tools makes for consumer shortages and for inferior quality in wearing apparel, apartments, and other popular necessities...

...Here foreign policy interferes...

...But it would be a mistake to denigrate the Soviet political mind...

...In 1957, Khrushchev took the trouble to go to several writers' meetings and, in his usual bulldozer fashion, to attack Miss Aliger, a poet, and Vladimir Dudintsev, author of Not By Bread Alone, for, as he put it, not serving the purposes of the Communist party...

...A Soviet youth newspaper which asked in a questionnaire who were the new generation's heroes got answers with names from the works of Ler-montov, Pushkin, and the great Russian novelists of the Nineteenth Century, but none from the political or cultural worlds of the post-1917 era...

...Instead, he translated Shakespeare, Goethe, and the Caucasus poet Rustaveli...

...This makes a lot of difference...

...Zhukov, having saved Khrushchev's political position in June, 1957, and helped decisively in ousting Malen-kov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Shepi-lov, loomed too large, appeared too influential for Khrushchev's taste, and since they had been eliminated, Khrushchev no longer needed the Marshal...

...The Soviet public obviously does not quite know which way Khrushchev is heading or how permanent is his tenure (though from the outside he looks secure, as Zhukov did until last October...

...Fischer returned to Moscow for a month a year or so ago...

...This consideration might justify a more flexible American foreign policy...

...He could not make his meter toe the Party line...

...More than ever since 1917, the Soviet government depends on the good will and support of the people...

...In perhaps a far-fetched way, this represents a germ of democracy, for the expenda-bility of dictators could further freedom from dictatorship...

...Poland, flee the collective farms at the first opportunity...

...Now the editor is his own censor...

...He is striving mightily against the resistance of the peasantry who, we know from authenticated facts out of Yugoslavia, Hungary, and LOUIS FISCHER, one of the nation's best informed journalists on Soviet Russia, lived in the Soviet Union for more than a decade as an American correspondent...

...The central political issue in the Soviet Union today is the high cost of foreign policy, which includes armaments and military and economic aid to China, the East European satellites, and the neutrals and uncommitted nations of Asia and other continents...

...Existence centers on material goods, schooling, and careers for self and close relatives...

...I met one friend who had recently returned from 18 years in Arctic exile at Vorkuta, and in Warsaw, in 1957, I spent ten hours, in four sessions, talking with a man who spent 22 continuous years in Soviet prisons and camps...

...The editor of a Soviet literary monthly said to me in Moscow in 1956 that the built-in censor (in fact, a secret police official) has disappeared from magazine editorial offices...

...Entitled Dr...

...The Soviet theater, once the best in the world, is stagnant, the ballet's choreography is fifty years old, and writers still wear mental shackles...

...they want a second room in their apartment, a better dress, more vegetables, richer variety in food, less queuing...

...It is most difficult to run a country, even a dictatorship, when the nation is discontented...

...During 1957, the Soviet police did make political arrests, but they were few and involved no highly-placed persons...

...For the recession of terror makes work discipline dependent on consumer goods available to the customer...

...Boris Pasternak, whom 1 knew in Moscow in the Thirties, is Russia's greatest poet, but none of his verse has been published for more than two decades...

...The Great Russians, about half the population of the Soviet Union, are probably Russian patriots and proud of the strength acquired by their country under Bolshevism...

...Behind this personal equation, however, is the struggle of the armed forces—loyal to state and Party and led almost entirely by Party men—to liberate itself from irksome political interference...

...The highly-educated people as well as workers and peasants can and do assess the Soviet system in accordance with what it has given and cost them individually...

...How long can he withhold the quenching drink of freedom...

...In effect it exerts pressure on the butter-tomorrow regime to become a pay-as-you-go system...

...All this is supremely political...

...IRussia REVISITED by Louis Fischer ARussian-speaking American scientist, just back from his second visit to the Soviet Union in three months, quotes a Soviet colleague as saying, "If we can get along without Malenkov and Molotov, we could do without Khrushchev too...

...Those who believe in democracy have nothing to fear from association with dictatorships...

...Zhivago, and full of brave denunciations not only of Soviet practices but of the revolution and Marxism, it will soon be available to the English-reading public in Britain and the United States...

...One never knows what will emerge from secret, serious, patient, ambassadorial, then foreign-minister, then summit negotiations...

...Public life is a nuisance and horror—a thing to avoid...

...The Soviet literary thaw in 1955 and 1956 was followed by a 1957 freeze...

...The steppes of Russia have sprouted factories and farms but intellectually the country is a desert...

...But the population has no organization...

...Yet the Soviet man's mind is athirst...

...that, moreover, millions were being released from the concentration camps...

...Formally and officially there is none...

...Thus the urge to collect on state promissory notes accepted reluctantly by the populace these forty years has grown into a major factor in foreign as well as domestic politics...

...But when everybody works for the state—and everybody does in the Soviet Union—the interests, moods, and sentiments of the people are a factor in production and administration...

...He is the author of many books, including "The Soviets in World Affairs," "Machines and Men in Russia," "Soviet Journey," and "Why Recognize Russia...

...He also paid less attention than Khrushchev to the aggrandizement of Soviet power abroad...

...In weighing the advisability of giving space to a politically non-conformist piece of writing, he might reason, "The censor would not have passed this...

...the peasants do not like them and do not give them their full devotion or working energy...

...The Soviet domestic situation appears extremely fluid, and crystal-ball predictions are, now as ever, dangerous...

...Significantly, the Soviet press and radio ignored the Soviet delegate's offer, widely-publicized throughout the rest of the world, at the December Afro-Asian "Peoples Solidarity Conference" at Cairo, to grant unstinted economic and technical assistance "as brother helps brother" to underdeveloped countries...

...Khrushchev has a much lighter touch than Stalin...

...In 1956, my Moscow friends told me—and it was corroborated by many others—that for a year there had been no political arrests...

...Khrushchev's near-fall in December, 1956, was largely the result of the loss of prestige he suffered from the Polish and Hungarian revolutions two months earlier...

...Another Muscovite expressed a similar view to the American visitor...

...The Soviet citizens I saw in 1956 were better clothed and fed and, except for members of the upper class, more poorly housed than in 1938...

...The national minorities, especially Georgians, Jews, and Ukrainians, and those ethnic groups in Asia which are being Russified may not be distinguished by their zeal for the Moscow leaders...

...I could get a Party reprimand for using it, or I may be dismissed from my job, but I won't be arrested...

...Khrushchev's statements are ample proof that Russia has not yet solved the problem of food...

...What Stalin did with NKVD revolvers and long-term promissory notes Khrushchev must accomplish by raising income and living standards plus a few short-term credits...

...The dead hand that has rested and continues to rest on Soviet literature and art creates a cultural vacuum and boredom...

...A number of them attended the concerts of the Boston Symphony which performed in Leningrad and Moscow when I was there...