Anatomy of the horse BOOKS

TIBOR SZAMUELY

Nearly thirty-five years ago, in one of the best

books ever written about the USSR, Winter in Moscow, Malcolm Muggeridge painted a bril-

liant portrait of an 'old Moscow hand,' an American journalist whom he called 'Jefferson.' Jefferson possessed no political, moral or ideo- logical convictions, but he was deeply im pressed by the Bolshevik leaders' ruthlessness and unflinching determination, and fully con- vinced that with these qualities they would achieve all their aims and modernise Russia into a kind of replica of the us. Accordingly, he devoted himself to the task of 'selling' Russia to the American public: glossing over or even denying the harsh facts, glorifying and magnify- ing the achievements, whether real or imaginary.

But 'Jefferson' was not a fictitious character: he was Walter Duranty, one of the most famous of Moscow correspondents, who repre-

sented the New York Times there for the better part of twenty years. Duranty himself made no bones about his attitude to the USSR. In a book published after his return home he wrote:

backed Stalin the way you back a horse, until you think of it as "your" horse . . . That's how I felt about- Russia, that's how I feel about Stalin. I don't care a whoop about socialism, or totalitarianism, or any of their "isms."' Such, on the whole, has been the policy of the New York Times itself towards the Soviet regime throughout most of its existence. The paper doesn't believe in 'isms': in socialism, communism, egalitarianism and all that crap, and neither do its correspondents—which is why none of them ever became disillusioned, as happened to all the genuine idealists like Louis Fischer and Eugene Lyons and Malcolm Mug- geridge himself. What the Times-men saw was a huge country, a semi-continent, a 'new' nation (Americans often forget that Russia is one of the oldest nation-states in the world), rapidly modernising itself, taming the wilderness, con- quering nature, roughing it. In short, something very like the us, and inevitably getting more and more like it all the time.

This was, by and large, the concept behind the Moscow reporting .of Duranty's most dis- tinguished successor, Mr Harrison Salisbury, today the paper's assistant managing editor. Like `Jefferson'-Duranty, he, too, 'backed' Stalin and Russia the way one backs a horse. His dis- patches during Stalin's lifetime and after faith- fully reflected this posture. The murderous old tyrant was, according to Salisbury, 'not the kind of executive you cannot speak up to . . His manner with inferiors is fatherly and benevo- lent.' No wonder then that `to the ordinary Russian the phrases bestowed upon Premier Stalin—genius, architect, great leader, great teacher—have had genuine meaning.' Like 'Jef- ferson'-Duranty, Mr Salisbury cast a charitable eye on the grisly activities of the secret police at the peak of the postwar mass terror: 'Most

people think of the NKVD as a sinister secret police which carts off Russians in the dead of

night and sends them packing to Siberia. Well,

there is something in that impression, of course. The NKVD does things like that, occasionally.' Not that Mr Salisbury was forced to write like that by Soviet censorship. This was what

he really believed. In his private diaries (pub- lished in 1961) he commented on one of the biggest Stalinist slave-labour projects: 'The Volga-Don Canal doesn't sound like a forced labour job, although some such labour may have been used.' Other references in the diary to forced labour at the height of the system, when it numbered from fifteen to eighteen million slaves, are 'nowhere did I see forced labour' and `slave labour exists in this country, true. But that is not the point.' Of course not.

All this, to be sure, was a long time ago. Anatomy of the Soviet Union (Nelson 70s), a collective work compiled by the staff of the New York Times and edited by Mr Salisbury, ap- pears thirteen years after the latter's departure from his Moscow post. During these years a great deal has become known to the world about The ussR. Though not, judging by the evidence of this book, to the New York Times: the basic attitude is still the same as in the glorious Duranty-Salisbury era. True, Mr Salisbury has been popping over to the USSR quite frequently since he left his post, emerging each time with some fresh little nugget of prevarication. Thus, only a year ago he bounded out of Russia with the breathless news (automatically reprinted and accepted, thanks to the Times prestige, throughout the world) that the persecution of Solzhenitsyn had stopped, that all his manu- scripts had been returned to him, that his Cancer Ward was shortly to be published, that censor- ship would be abolished after the fiftieth anni- versary of the revolution, at which time Sin- yaysky and Daniel would also be released. Not a single word of this was true, yet Mr Salisbury has the impudence to repeat it all in his book.

Anatomy of the Soviet Union is a veritable mine of misinformation. This is achieved not merely by the actual contents, but in equal measure by what is left out, namely almost every important aspect of the country's life. One could hardly imagine that a book calling itself the 'anatomy' of a country (and acclaimed, in- cidentally, by the Times Literary Supplement as `by far the best general survey of the Soviet Union to have appeared in recent years') would have no chapters dealing with that country's government or politics or social structure. Yet this is the case. Moreover, the editor has left out all those crucial areas where a positive picture might be rather difficult to present : the legal system, the secret police, agriculture, the nation- alities problem, etc. One of the central facts about the ussa—its multinational character— is hardly mentioned even in passing. Practically the only reference to this is the following pass- age: The Soviet Union is divided into fifteen so-called union republics, each of which has its own government, capital, and legislature, much like an American state or a Canadian province.' Twelve years ago the author would have men- tioned sixteen—since then, alas, the Karelo- Finn 'republic' (with its own government etc, much like an American state or Canadian pro- vince) has been dissolved by a simple Kremlin decree. Could it happen to Wisconsin or Win- nipeg, I wonder?

The book's twenty-one essays are devoted almost exclusively to those fields in which the regime's record can be shown as creditable: health, education, science, space research, music, ballet and so on. This method was essential be- cause the book, quite frankly, is written to the traditional Times thesis : the increasing simi- larity between the us and USSR. It is studded with phrases like 'I left convinced that, after fifty years of striving towards Communism, the Soviet Union was never more like its American rival than it is today.' The authors write their essays mainly on the basis of interviews with important Soviet officials, whose every word they accept at face value. Thus 'sex education in the schools begins at fourteen or fifteen, according to Mrs Skornyakova' (head of a de- partment in the Ministry of Health). Now, if the author of this article on health had taken the trouble to study the Soviet press, he would have discovered that there is no sex education in Soviet schools at all.

This, in fact, is the cardinal indictment: any book based on published Soviet sources alone —newspapers, statistics, etc—would have been more truthful than the Salisbury 'Anatomy.' The most utterly ridiculous of all the contribu- tions is the article on housing. The author is enchanted by everything she sees and hears— it is all so marvellous, so thrilling, so greatly superior in so many respects to the West. Hous- ing, she burbles, is going up 'on a scale that is leaving other countries far behind.' In the us, by comparison, 'construction is still in the handicraft stage' (contempt for the United States is de rigueur in the New York Times).

Almost every single figure in her article is wildly incorrect. Had she glanced into the official Soviet Statistical Yearbook she might have dis- covered that (a) the amount of housing space constructed in urban areas in 1961-65 was not 393 million square metres, as she affirms, but 291.5 million; (b) that the us, with a rather smaller population, has been building many more housing units annually than the USSR, and that four fifths of these consist of four or more rooms—a luxury unheard-of in Russia; (c) that even poor old Britain is building proportion- ately as many housing units as the USSR-with the average floor area of each about three times the Russian figure; and (d) that only in 1965 did the Russians regain the wretched pre- revolutionary urban average of 6.6 square metres of living space per person—well below the official sanitary minimum, a mere fraction of western housing standards, and light-years re- moved from the fantasies conjured up in her essay.

The book does not consist solely of blatantly slanted material. There are also a few dull, stodgy, but fairly competent—typical Times stuff—technical surveys of Russia's natural re- sources, military capabilities and economic machinery. And, surprisingly, one really excel- lent essay, by Fred M. Hechinger, on 'Educa- tion; Triumphs and Doubts.'

But the whole inimitable tone of the compila- tion is set by Mr Salisbury himself, who not only edits it but also writes four of the essays.

It is fitting that this should be so, for he is almost the only man in the world with the

acumen to discern that the political influence of the neo-Stalinists `now seems somewhat on the wane,' and that `the tide is running' in the liberals' direction. His profound knowledge of Russian literature—the subject of one of his articles—is revealed by his remark about the `friendship' between Pushkin and Lermontov (Mishkin, as every Russian schoolboy knows, was not even aware of Lermontov's existence). But one must hand it to Mr Salisbury : in a bare

two pages he carries out the neatest job of character-assassination of the late Boris Pas- ternak that I have yet seen anywhere.

He is equally good on foreign policy. The Russian people's traumatic memories of the-war `limit the government's ability to manoeuvre on the international front.' As has, of course, so recently been demonstrated. Mr Salisbury accepts without question the views of Yuri

Zhukov, the leading Soviet propagandist, `that the Soviet Union had learned its lesson in its

attempt to impose its will on the Eastern Euro- pean countries, and now was prepared to per- mit them to evolve their policies more and more on their own.'

I am not trying to be sarcastic at Mr Salis- bury's expense—that would be impossible. For he (though not all his authors) quite openly re-

gards the USSR as a much happier land than his own, as a country where—unlike the us--the

young generation has no real cause for rebel- lion. With obvious bewilderment he asks Andrei Voznesensky, the nonconformist poet, `what Soviet youth had to rebel about—they had no Vietnam war to protest against, and there was no vital race issue to direct their energies into?' Such is the level of intelligence and the breadth of understanding of a man who for twenty years has been regarded at large as a foremost authority on Soviet affairs.