Dreadful Dynamo
WORDS cannot describe, nor lambs forgive, nor worms forget, the tedium of this awful book. Reading it is like riding a bicycle through sand- dunes. Spurred on by a glum sense of duty, this reviewer pedalled on till page 117, at which point he fell off exhausted. What spurred Mr. Zilliacus on his dreary marathon through Moscow to Bel- grade, Prague and Warsaw remains a mysterY. Love or money? The search for truth? For all he found of the last commodity (and for all I know of the other two) he might just as well have re- mained in London, W9, burrowing and sucking his way, like Pope's blind, industrious bug, through the files of Pravda, Borba and Kom- munist. He sees about as much of life as do these indigestible journals, and that is about as little as anything could see.
Mr. Zilliacus—so his blurb-writer claims—was able, in Moscow, 'to hear the views of people it5 all walks of life.' In all walks of lifelessness might be the cliche Piste. To accompany Mr. Zilliacus to Moscow is to accompany a progres- sive Odysseus. to a progressive Hades, inhabited only by squeaking phantoms who drink not life- giving blood but, 'at tables strewn with boxes of cigarettes and Plates of fruit and biscuits,' in- numerable cups of tea with lemon. Over this joyless stimulant Mr. Zilliacus met not people but his vralkingfellow-abstractions; not people, but 'leading personalities,' various grouPs of -scientists, trade unionists, journalists, econo- mists, etc.'; the President of Moscow University, a savant who appears to have had nothing better to do than follow 'for years' Mr. Zilliacus 's speeches and writings; five pompous asses who edit Kommunist; and other asses and leading impersonalities too numerous to recall. With these spectres Mr. Zilliacus, so it seenis, ceaselessly exchanged the slogans and idle theories (or rather idle collections of intefrelated slogans) which form the substance of his existence as of theirs: 'peace zone,' personality cult,' pressure of the masses,' peaceful co-existence,' 'Socialism in one country.' No word or breath of reality inter- rupts for a moment the even droning and drum- ming of jargon. It is like listening to the dull roar of some dynamo, loveless, hateless, irrelevant to humanity (a false and misleading impression, cer- tainly: but this is at root a false and misleading book). In the files and documents of the German civil service the mass-murder of the Jewish people was often referred to as 'resettlement.' Mr. Zilliacus is the sort of person who, with his prejudices suitably adjusted, could have discussed the theory and problems of 'resettlement' for weeks on end with 'leading personalities' of the Third Reich' without forming the very slightest notion of what
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