UNRAVELING 'THE RUSSIAN ENIGMA'
Hanighen, Frank C.
Unraveling 'The Russian Enigma' THE RUSSIAN ENIGMA, An Interpretation, by William Henry Chamberlin. Scribners. $2.75. Reviewed by Frank C. Hanighen AMONG THE CORPS of American "foreign...
...In those days, it was virtually seditious to suggest the latter possibility...
...A "leftist" reader, disillusioned of the course of the revolution, will gain a calming understanding of why Stalinism prevails and why the Oumanskys aren't necessarily devils freshly created by the new gang in the Kremlin...
...Most of the journalists, under the tremendous pressure of events, had lost their heads and were fighting a cause, with marked absence of the cool, analytical spirit they should have displayed...
...Chamberlin didn't become one of the log-rolling crew which has given more heat than light to American readers...
...Hence, in this volume, he is able to set the current picture against a brilliant presentation of Russian history from the time of the boyars...
...Finally, for those who complacently assume that Stalin, after the defeat of Germany, will readily join the military crushing of Japan, Chamberlin offers a disturbing view: "If Japan refrains from attacking and Stalin retains his freedom of action in the Far East, it is doubtful whether he will attack Japan the day or the month, or perhaps even the year after Nazi Germany cracks up...
...Chamberlin wouldn't join the lodge...
...When Japan begins to totter under the blows of the Anglo-American-Chinese coalition, Stalin may be expected to intervene and help deliver the final blows...
...Reviewed by Frank C. Hanighen AMONG THE CORPS of American "foreign correspondents," there are Walter Newcombes (the unforgettable dim-wit character in Marquand's So Little Time)—and William Henry Chamberlin...
...At least, I often feel that way...
...His advent in this body brought, at least for me, a welcome and sanifying influence...
...No writer tackling this vast and unpredictable subject could do more...
...I think his reputation among intelligent readers has gained thereby...
...I met Chamberlin first in the Spring of 1939 in Paris, where he had just been transferred from Japan, and I sponsored his membership in the Anglo-American Press Club...
...I don't know how he acquired this, but I have a feeling that he possessed a wide historical training before he ever entered a city room or a newspaper bureau in foreign parts...
...He will.probably prefer to sit back and recuperate, make the dispositions which he desires in Europe, and watch the United States and Great Britain carry the brunt of the war in the Orient...
...If the reader is a conservative and derives his knowledge of Russia from the corporation lawyer who married General Foods, he will receive a healthy revelation that Stalin isn't a nice, kindly old chap, devoted to the Bill of Rights and the ideas of the League of Women Voters...
...Chamberlin knows enough about the Russian enigma to know that it is an enigma (the title isn't something chosen by sales-hungry publishers...
...He didn't, like Walter Newcombe, come solely equipped with the background of a small-town reporter, nor did he pick up his knowledge of world history from a perusal of Pertinax...
...I recall how devastatingly he warned the boys not to expect an Anglo-French-Soviet pact and to be prepared for something like the Soviet-German deal which was to come...
...Chamberlin sketches ably and penetratingly the trends and highlights the more dominant ones...
...Nor will he, if he's thoughtful, become exasperated by the sort of on-the-one-hand-and-then-on the-other gabble of some commentators...
...Chamberlin also has doubts that the old Communist International will survive in the form and with the force of the past 20 years...
...The reader won't receive any simplified predictions a la Gabriel Heatter...
...The hopefully inclined may derive some nutriment from the suggestion of a "strong possibility that the Russian people after the war will not be so submissive to the arbitrary rule of the political police, will not allow themselves to be forced back into that mold of rigid one-party dictatorship which the war itself has broken to some extent...
...You receive for the first time from accounts of Russia a real sense of why Stalin and his country are "Eastern...
...He quite evidently sifted the flow of daily facts and weighed the residue in the balance against the verdict of centuries...
...Against this, he projects the greater possibility of an increase in Russian nationalism...
...Another thing that places Chamberlin head and shoulders over most of his craft is his integration of journalism with a profound sense and knowledge of history...
Vol. 7 • November 1943 • No. 46
