Ends of the Earth
Russia Explored. By John Brown. (Hodder and Stoughton, 16s.) An unusually and refreshingly objective and good-humoured second look at the Soviet Union (Central Asian republics included) by a writer who first went out there in the 1930s —travelling with Sidney Webb, whose naive acceptance of Soviet statistics shocked the young man from Ruskin even then. Now he has been moving around Mr. Khrushchev's country, not- ing the new dominance of women; the gradual dis- appearance, as more consumer goods come into the shops, of typical `Russian' products; the late- Victorian standards of personal behaviour; and much else, from the dreariness of Soviet news- Papers and bookshops to the uninhibited enjoy- ment of non-stop private parties: `Elsa Maxwell would like the Russians.'
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