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THE

RUSSIAN |
REVIEW!

An American Quarterly
Devoted to Russia
Past and Present

January

1955

Vol. 14, No. 1 Price $1.25

Contributors to This Issue

WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN, Foreign Correspondent in
Soviet Russia for the Christian Science Monitor, is the author of
well known works on the Soviet Union and international affairs.

ALVIN Z. RUBINSTEIN received his Ph.D. in Political Science
from the University of Pennsylvania, and is the author of
articles on Soviet policy in the United Nations; at present he
is serving as an officer in the U.S. Navy.

ALBERT PARRY is Professor of Russian Civilization and Lan-
guage at Colgate University and author of Whistler's Father,
1939, Russian Cavalcade, 1944, and numerous articles in the
field of Russian-American relations.

SYDNEY D. BAILEY, formerly Secretary of the Hansard Society
(London, England), as well as Editor of Parliamentary Affairs
and National News-Letter, is at present a representative of the
American Friends Service Committee at the United Nations in

New York.

IRINA SABUROVA is a journalist and writer, who lived in Latvia
after the Bolshevik Revolution and witnessed the Suviet and
Nazi occupations in World War II.

A. LEBED is a refugee Soviet scholar, at present connected with the
Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of the
U.S.S.R. in Munich, Germany.

B. YAKOVLEV is a refugee Soviet scholar, at present Director of
the Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of the
U.S.S.R. in Ivlunich, Germany.

HELEN A. SHENITZ, a student of Russian folklore, is Librarian
at the Historical Library and Museum, Juneau, Alaska.

THE
RUSSIAN REVIEW

An American Quarterly Devoted to Russia
Past and Present

Vol. 14 JANUARY 1955
kok

Three Designs for Checkmating Communism, William Henry
Chamberlin

The U.S.S.R. and the I.L.0., Alvin Z. Rubinstein... 2.2.2...
More on General Turchin, d/bert Parry

Stalin’s Falsification of History: the Case of the Brest-Litovsk

Treaty, Sydney D. Bailey

The Soviet Occupation of the Baltic States, Jrina Saburova....

BOOK REVIEWS

Russia: A History and an Interpretation, y Michael T. Florin-
sky, V. A. Riasanovsky

The Mongols and Russia, dy George Vernadsky, Marc Szeftel. .

Soviet Law and Soviet Society, 4y George C. Guins; Law and
Social Change in the U.S.S.R., dy John N. Hazard, N. 8.
Timasheff

Continued on Page II

From Lenin to Malenkov (A History of World Communism),
by Hugh Seton-Watson, Stuart R. Tompkins

The Threat of Soviet Imperialism, ed. by C. Grove Haines,
Bertram D. Wolfe

The Origins of Soviet-American Diplomacy, 4y Robert P.
Browder, Dexter Perkins

Management of the Industrial Firm in the U.S.S.R., dy David
Granick, M. V. Condoide

Russian Writers: Their Lives and Literature, dy Janko Lavrin,
Mare Slonim

THE RUSSIAN REVIEW

Dimitri von Mohrenschildt
Editor

William Henry Chamberlin Warren B. Walsh
Michael Karpovich Alexis Wiren

The purpose of The Russian Review is to interpret the real aims and
aspirations of the Russian people, as dininaphiahed from and opposed
to Soviet Communism, and to advance general knowledge of Russian
culture, history and civilization. The Review invites contributions
by authors of divergent views, but the opinions expressed in any

individual article of this journal are not necessarily those of the
editors.

Copyright 1955 by the Russian Review, Inc., 235 Baker Library, Hanover, N. H. Published
quarterly in January, April, July, and October. Entered as second class matter at the post
office in Hanover, N. H., under the Act of March 3, 1897 with an additional entry at the
post office in Brattleboro, Vt. Subscription rates: $5.00 a year in the United States; Canada
$5.50; foreign $6.00; single issues through Vol. 12, $1.00; subsequent single issues $1.25.
Cumulative Index to Vols. I-X (Nov. 1941, Oct. 1951), $.75 per copy. The contents of this
publication cannot be reprinted without permission of the editors. Unsolicited manuscripts
will not be returned unless accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes.

Three Designs for Checkmating

Communism

By WILit1amM Henry CHAMBERLIN

HE United States and other free nations at the present time face
eet might well be called an agonizing dilemma. Every civi-
lized and rational human being is shocked at the thought of an
atomic war, with its uncertain consequences, political, economic
and social as well as military, and its appallingly certain toll of
destruction.

Yet the philosophy and the governing methods of Communist
totalitarianism, which has now acquired a grip on one-third of the
manpower and one-fifth of the natural resources of the world, are
not compatible with genuine peace. Such aspects of Soviet policy
as the creation of an enormous international fifth column, in the
shape of Communist parties throughout the world, the persistent
efforts to promote espionage and subversion all around the world,
from Sweden to Australia, the swift military build-up of every new
conquered area as a base for further aggression are without precedent
in the history of peaceful relations between states.

This is a generation that can and should still remember the disas-
trous end of the policy of trying to appease another type of aggressive
dictatorship in the thirties. Sometimes the line between discredited
appeasement and the seductive Soviet slogan of “‘co-existence” be-
comes so dim as to be almost obliterated. The distinguished British
expert on Russia and other Slav countries, Dr. Hugh Seton-Watson,
put this point very clearly and forcefully in The Manchester Guard-
ian:

“The trouble about ‘peaceful co-existence’ is that it means differ-
ent things on different sides of the Iron Curtain. Unfortunately
Western public opinion does not yet understand that when the
Stalinists say, ‘peaceful co-existence’ they mean war without shoot-
ing, in preparation for war with shooting and with hydrogen bombs.
When the Western public hears the phrase, it understands peace,
and even the prospect of friendship. There is an alarming parallel
between the mood of Britain to-day and at the time of Munich.
Whatever they may now think they thought in 1938 the men of

4 The Russian Review

Munich really believed that they could trust Hitler. To-day similar
illusions are growing up about Malenkov and Mao.”

With atomic war and a long series of one-sided concessions, re-
treats and surrenders that would not, in the long run, avert war,
but only produce it under very unfavorable circumstances, ruled
out as desirable alternatives it is natural that attention should be
focussed on the possibility of subverting Communist régimes with-
out large-scale war. There would seem to be three main possibilities
in this field.

(1) There can be an attempt to stimulate discontent, short of
actual armed revolt, and passive resistance in the countries of East-
ern and Central Europe which were brought under Soviet control
during and after the war: Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslova-
kia, Bulgaria, Albania. There is general agreement among political
exiles and American experts in the field that incitations to armed
revolt, even if successful, could only lead to a useless and disastrous
slaughter of the more courageous and active anti-Communists under
present circumstances.

An advocate of active political warfare, aimed at the liberation
of the Soviet satellite countries, as opposed to the policy of merely
checking the further spread of Soviet imperialist Communism by so-
called “containment” is Mr. James Burnham, author of the hard-
hitting little book, Containment or Liberation? (John Day). Burn-
ham’s thesis, summed up in his own words, is as follows:

“If the Communists succeed in consolidating what they have
already conquered, then their complete world victory is certain. .. .
The simple terrible fact is that if things go on as they now are, if
for the time being they merely stabilize, then we have already lost.
That is why the policy of containment, even if one hundred percent
successful, is a formula for Soviet victory.”

Mr. John Foster Dulles, in War or Peace (Macmillan), a book
written before he became Secretary of State, suggests that con-
solidation of the present Soviet empire would carry a grave risk of
war:

“The great danger of war would come if and when Soviet leaders
successfully combined Eastern Europe and Asia into a vast political,
industrial and military unity and completed the ‘encirclement’
phase of their strategy. They would then be so strong that they
might well plan to finish their conquest by war.”

Mr. Burnham’s concrete recommendations included withdrawal of
diplomatic recognition from the Moscow-sponsored governments,

Three Designs for Checkmating Communism 5

admission to NATO of representatives of the Polish and other
governments-in-exile, recruiting of military forces among refugees
from the Iron Curtain countries, intensive cultivation of educational
projects among these refugees.

An organization, the Free Europe Committee, has been in exist-
ence for several years and is trying in various ways to support the
spirit of resistance among the peoples in the countries which were
annexed to the Soviet Union, in fact if not in name, after the end of
the war. It has encouraged and helped to sustain national councils,
composed of leading political exiles from various East European
countries.

The Free Europe Committee has subsidized the research efforts of
many émigré scholars. Its most spectacular effort in psychological
warfare is located in Munich, where more than a thousand people are
employed in the imposing headquarters of Radio Free Europe. I
visited this headquarters last August and was able to attend several
meetings at which the strategy of broadcasts to such countries as
Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary was worked out.

The offices in charge of these broadcasts are manned by nationals
of the various countries, many of them publicists, professors, and
formerly active political figures. Official broadcasts of the state
radio organizations of these countries are monitored; newspapers
are read; newly arrived refugees are interviewed and are often given
the opportunity to deliver broadcast messages to their countrymen.

Messages beamed from Radio Free Europe emphasize the kind
of news that would not be considered fit to print in Communist
newspapers: escapes of refugees, exposures of Soviet spies, con-
structive achievements in the free world. Head of the Polish desk
is Jan Nowak, an energetic young man with a glamorous record of
adventure in the Polish underground during the war.

Recognizing that “‘you cannot liberate a people by radio” Nowak
expressed the conviction that the broadcasts of Free Europe were
slowing down the process of Sovietization and attracted a wide
audience. When Poles escape to the West by various means, by
stowing away in Polish merchant ships, flying jet planes out of the
country, making the dangerous voyage across the Baltic in small
ships, they usually get in touch immediately with Radio Free
Europe. A surprising number of letters of commendation and com-
ment, sent to “cover” addresses in Europe which are frequently
changed, reach the Free Europe Committee.

Czechoslovakia, directly across the frontier from Bavaria, has

6 The Russian Review

been blanketed with anti-Communist leaflets contained in balloons.
Forty-two million small pieces of literature have been scattered over
Czechoslovakia to date. There is no appeal to active violence,
but the Czechs and Slovaks are exhorted to resist the speed-up
demands of their Communist rulers. Most of the messages are
based on ten demands, related to the most pressing immediate
grievances of the people and end with the slogan: “Today conces-
sions, tomorrow freedom.”

Angry attacks by government organs testify to the effectiveness
of the Free Europe Committee propaganda offensive. But Nowak’s
statement, “You cannot liberate a people by radio,” remains true.
Desirable and effective as this propaganda effort to pierce the Iron
Curtain is, only a very optimistic observer could expect that govern-
ments with unlimited military and police power can be overthrown
by such means.

(2) There can be an effort to drive a wedge between the peoples of
the Soviet Union and their Communist rulers. This is the main ob-
jective of the Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, an organi-
zation of Americans of anti-Communist views, most of them with
some firsthand knowledge of Soviet conditions. New chairman of
this organization, which has been headed in succession by Eugene
Lyons, author and journalist, and Admirals Alan Kirk and Leslie
Stevens, respectively former Ambassador and naval Attaché in
Moscow, is Mr. Howland Sargeant, who has been for some years
identified with the Public Affairs division of the State Department.

A spirited plea for regarding the peoples of the Soviet Union as
allies, not enemies, in the struggle against Communist totalitarian-
ism was voiced by Mr. Lyons in his recently published book, Our
Secret Allies: The Peoples of Russia (Duell, Sloan and Pearce-
Little Brown). Mr. Lyons marshals a good deal of evidence to show
that Communism was never freely and voluntarily accepted in
Russia, that it was imposed after prolonged and bloody civil war
and has always rested on a foundation of intensive espionage and
terror.

Mr. Lyons also brings out such points as the cordial welcome
which the German army received in many occupied regions of
Russia, until the systematic brutality of Nazi administrators dis-
illusioned the Russians and Ukrainians of the idea that liberation
might be obtained with the aid of Hitler, and the extreme unwilling-
ness of large numbers of Soviet war prisoners and wartime laborers
in Germany and Austria to return home after the end of the war.

Three Designs for Checkmating Communism 7

Recently there has been a gradual but perceptible change in the
policy of the Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism. In the
first years of its existence (the Committee was organized early in
1951) the emphasis was on trying to promote a united organization
of Russian and non-Russian émigré groups (Communists, Fascists,
and extreme reactionaries excluded) which could carry on radio
broadcasting and other anti-Communist activity in the name of a
united politically conscious emigration.

This attempt was frustrated by the atmosphere of suspicious
hostility which prevails among the Russian and non-Russian political
groups and also by personal feuds among leaders of the groups. A
“Co-ordinating Centre” which was announced in 1953 quickly
split into two rival “centres.” The present trend is to emphasize
functional activity, to support special practical projects and not to
worry unduly about forming shadowy coalitions of small exile
groups which are, in the main, cut off from real contacts in the
Soviet Union.

“Radio Liberation,” with headquarters in Munich, now employs a
staff of some two hundred people and broadcasts by short wave in
Russian, in Ukrainian, and in some of the languages of the Caucasus
and Central Asia. An Institute for the Study of the History and
Culture of the Soviet Union, also located in Munich, has expanded
to a point where it has become an important centre of Soviet studies.
Most of the scholars connected with this Institute, which issues
magazines and special publications and holds periodical conferences,
have lived under the Soviet régime and possess the advantage of
being able to check their studies of Soviet publications against a
background of personal knowledge.

As an example of the special projects which the Committee hopes
to support more and more in the future one may cite the visit to
Mecca and other Mohammedan centres of two fugitive Soviet
Moslems who were able to expose and denounce propaganda, cir-
culated by a few selected Soviet Moslem pilgrims that Moham-
medanism is fully tolerated in the Soviet Union.

There can be little doubt as to the desirability of reaching the
peoples of the Soviet Union with messages from the West. What is
doubtful is the possibility of making these messages very effective.
“Radio Liberation” has to overcome a highly developed jamming
campaign of stations in the satellite countries and in the Soviet
Union itself. And there is some factual support for a view suggested
by George Fischer, in his Soviet Opposition to Stalin (Harvard Uni-

8 The Russian Review

versity Press) that opposition and discontent in the Soviet Union are
passive, rather than active, and are likely to find expression only
after the régime of dictatorship has been subjected to some powerful
shock.

There remains a third method of undermining the huge Com-
munist empire, which may be practically more effective than radio
appeals or leaflets, although its potential value in the anti-Com-
munist struggle is not universally recognized. This is the rearming
of the German Federal Republic, within the framework of a Western
alliance.

This has been a cardinal aim of United States policy for more than
four years. The United States strongly favored and supported the
EDC, or European Defense Community, a project which, although
originally a French suggestion, was neglected by various French
Cabinets and finally defeated by the French parliament on Au-
gust 30, 1954. A looser form of West European association, with a
German military contribution, backed by a British promise to keep
British military units on the continent so long as they may be
needed, in the judgment of the co-signatories of the enlarged Brussels
Treaty (France, the German Federal Republic, Italy, and the Bene-
lux countries) was agreed on at London early in October.

The familiar arguments in favor of German rearming are that
without German participation there can be no effective defense of
Western Europe and that, as Germany cannot be kept disarmed
indefinitely, it is wise to restore sovereignty and the right to par-
ticipate in Western defense to Germany while it is under the leader-
ship of pro-Western, moderate Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The
unpleasant probable alternatives to such a step are a German re-
lapse into sullen neutralism or an attempt by Germany, following
the discrediting of Adenauer’s foreign policy, to seek understanding
with Moscow.

Both the above-mentioned arguments are sound. But there is
another possible consequence of German rearmament which is of
interest from the standpoint of weakening the Soviet empire. There
can be little doubt that the Soviet Zone of Germany is the weakest
link in this empire. Since the end of the war almost two million
inhabitants of the Soviet Zone (about 10% of the population) have
fled to West Germany. During a visit to Berlin last summer I found
fugitives arriving in West Berlin at the rate of 300 a day. Movement
in the opposite direction, from West to East, is negligible, almost
non-existent.

Three Designs for Checkmating Communism 9

In June, 1953, there was a surprisingly widespread spontaneous
outbreak against the Soviet puppet régime in the Soviet Zone. The
German Communist military and police forces proved completely
unreliable and ineffective. Order could only be restored by the use of
Soviet troops with tanks and other heavy weapons.

So long as there is no German armed strength on the other side of
the zonal border discontent and resistance in the Soviet Zone may
remain passive. But the magnetic effect of the appearance of well-
equipped German divisions, flying: the old flags, playing the old
military marches, across this border may be very considerable. The
Soviet occupation authorities may have occasion to remember
Talleyrand’s axiom that one can do anything with bayonets,—
except sit on them.

Perhaps the degree of Soviet reaction to each of these three
methods is significant. The activities of the Soviet exile groups and
of the Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism have been almost
completely ignored in the Soviet press and in Soviet public state-
ments. The resources expended in jamming the broadcasts of Sta-
tion Liberation are, of course, a tribute. Kidnapping and murder
attempts against some members of the NTS, or Solidarists, indicate
that this group is at least a minor thorn in the side of the Soviet
occupation régime in Germany. A Ukrainian émigré who went
back to the Soviet Union, apparently of his own volition, ‘has been
encouraged to denounce the activity of anti-Soviet Ukrainian or-
ganizations abroad. But on the whole, reaction to direct propaganda
attacks in Russian has been meagre.

There have been many more public attacks by the satellite régimes
on the Radio Free Europe broadcasts. The Czechoslovak govern-
ment has sent diplomatic notes to the United States Government,
demanding cessation of the broadcasts from Munich. The Polish
official radio goes in heavily for attacks on the Polish broadcasts. A
book has even been published in Poland, a novel with a propaganda
purpose, designed to paint these Polish broadcasts in the darkest
colors.

But the Soviet government has concentrated primary attention
on trying to prevent the rearming of the German Federal Republic
in alliance with the West. No device has been overlooked, mobiliza-
tion of the fifth column Communist parties (it was actually the
hundred Communist votes that defeated the EDC in the French
parliament), official and semi-official threats and blandishments.

This feverish activity, deployed against the rearmament of Ger-

10 The Russian Review

many in the Western camp, can hardly be inspired by military fears.
No German army that is feasible within any near future could very
much affect the purely military balance of power. So it seems a
reasonable assumption that what Moscow most fears is that the
appearance of a German army as part of a Western coalition will
have an inflammable effect on the mood in the Soviet Zone. And
any new serious disturbance in the Soviet Zone is very likely to
produce repercussions throughout the other satellite states.

The US.S.R. and the LL.O-

By Atvin Z. RuBINSTEIN

Bip decision of the Soviet Union, in June, 1954, to participate
in the activities of the International Labor Organization has
implications far transcending the scope of this specialized agency of
the United Nations. Constituting an abrupt reversal of a policy of
fifteen years duration, the Soviet move is significant in two ways.
First, it throws light on the motivations behind Soviet foreign
policy; second, it affords insights into the current direction and
emphasis of that policy. Calculated for immediate as well as long-
term advantages, the maneuver represents the latest in a series of
Soviet diplomatic decisions aimed at exploiting the growing evidence
of disunity among the leading powers of the NATO coalition, and
between them and the under-developed areas of South Asia. Not
only does Soviet membership in the International Labor Organiza-
tion presage a further extension of the East-West struggle, but it
renders less likely the prospect of any lasting settlement in these
crucial areas. Rather, the conflict of power and ‘ideology has been
joined on a new front.

Upon preliminary examination no completely satisfactory ex-
planation for the sudden about-face of the Soviet government is
readily apparent. Indeed, there is an obvious inconsistency between
this policy and the previous postwar Soviet attitude toward the
International Labor Organization, an attitude characterized by re-
peated vilification and denunciation. However, there is a definite
rationale behind the seemingly confusing nature of Soviet policy
which emerges quite clearly from a study of present Soviet behavior
in the United Nations. This rationale has a twofold purpose.

First, Soviet membership is designed to disrupt the effectiveness
of the International Labor Organization. As such it marks the
critical crossroads in the development of the organization. Hence-
forth, the prevailing atmosphere will more closely reflect the antag-
onisms of the East-West conflict; existing differences within the
I.L.O. will be increasingly invested with an ideological rigidity
hitherto unknown. The future of the I.L.O. and its prospects for

*The opinions expressed in the article are my own and are not to be construed as
official or reflecting the views of the Navy Department or the Naval Service at large.

12 The Russian Review

continued and useful endeavors are in jeopardy. I.L.O. efforts to
undertake modest programs of achievement may flounder in the
currents of grandiose but ill-conceived projects. For if past Soviet
behavior is to serve as a criterion, the suggestions offered will fall
victim to the reality of Communist antipathy despite a strong flavor
of Marxist idealism. The postwar period of relatively friendly
discussion and criticism is over for the I.L.O.

There were manifestations of a typically Soviet nature at the
I.L.O. conference held in Geneva in June-July, 1954. Here, for the
first time, accusations based on ideological dogma dominated the
proceedings. In addition to the noticeable tendency toward bloc
voting according to Great Power allegiance, the tenor of the dis-
cussions changed perceptibly. The ideology of moderation and
negotiation appeared, if not abandoned, to have been ignored. A
heightened frequency of political polemics over-shadowed con-
sideration of vital economic problems and the East-West si io
permeated much that was said and done.

In the past the Soviet record on economic and social matters in n the
United Nations has been woefully inadequate. The limited Soviet
participation in supposedly non-political discussions has sought to
impede the pace of U.N. progress. Soviet failure in this area can
largely be explained by the absence-of the veto in U.N. bodies con-
cerned with economic and social problems. The primary aim of
Soviet policy in these agencies has centered on the desire to extend
Soviet influence or, similarly, to thwart the influence of others.
Soviet behavior at the recent I.L.O. conference was in this tradition.

Second, the Soviet decision to join the I.L.O. signifies an inten-
sified effort to promote the alienation between the under-developed
countries and the industrial nations of the West. This is especially
true with respect to the uncommitted countries of South Asia. Now
independent or engaged in a transitory process with independence
as an objective, they are in the process of establishing new relation-
ships with the rest of the world. Circumstances of geography and
economics have accelerated this development and propelled them
into the forefront of the Great Power struggle. Within the develop-
ing pattern of international political alignments, the aspirations and
actions of these under-developed countries assume a special cogency.
It is in this context that the motivations behind the Soviet decision
to become a member of the International Labor Organization will
be found.

The changed Soviet attitude constitutes the latest in a series of

The U.S.S.R. and the I.L.0. 13

developments designed to facilitate the spread of Communist in-
fluence in South Asia. Increased signs of Soviet interest started to
crystallize soon after the outbreak of the Korean war, although it
had always been a factor in long-term Soviet strategy. Signifying a
shift in tactics, they testify to the importance of South Asia in
Soviet strategy. Prior to the Korean aggression, the Soviet Union
had been preoccupied with internal difficulties and the consolidation
of its hegemony in Eastern Europe. However, at present, the virtual
acceptance by the West of the Stettin-Trieste line as the status quo
in Europe enables the Soviets to engage in a wider area of political
excursions. Previously, the Soviets were content to support the
principle of aid to under-developed areas. Within the U.N. this
seemed to align the U.S.S.R. with Asian aspirations. In practice,
however, the Soviets contributed not “‘a red ruble.” Perhaps more
than in any other areas of U.N. activity Soviet policy toward the
under-developed areas was distinguished by an obvious discrepancy
between what it said and what it did. Soviet policy made no effort to
support in practice that which it favored in principle. Throughout
the Stalinist postwar era the U.S.S.R. persisted in a policy of non-
participation and opposition to the work of those specialized agencies
of the United Nations primarily engaged in furthering the economic
development of under-developed areas.

Thus the Soviet Union did not join the International Monetary
Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development,
U.N.E.S.C.O., or the I.L.0. Nor did it participate in the U.N.
technical assistance programs established in 1950. The real reasons
for this policy were never revealed and the explanations given were
garbed in a mantle of self-righteousness hardly pertinent. It is not
certain whether the lack of participation reflected a basic mistrust
of the United Nations, a measured move to hinder its successful
operation, or an inherent antipathy predicated on an inability to
control the organizational apparatus of the respective agencies.
Possibly it was a combination of all three. If action may be re-
garded as reflecting desire, then any genuine Soviet concern over the
future of the under-developed areas remained a fiction of Soviet
speeches.

At no time during the postwar period has the U.S.S.R. cooperated
with U.N. efforts to promote economic growth and stability in the
non-Communist countries of South Asia. On the contrary, it has
often opposed concrete programs to aid these areas. Though pro-
fessing concern for the working classes of Asia the U.S.S.R. did not,

14 The Russian Review

with one exception, attend any of the U.N. sponsored conferences
occupied with such problems. The important conferences held under
the aegis of the I.L.O. in New Delhi in the fall of 1947, in Ceylon
in January, 1950, and in Tokyo in September, 1953 were ignored.
These dealt with urgent problems common to the free countries of
South Asia. Numerous non-political missions conducted investiga-
tions of Asian agricultural and industrial needs, submitted recom-
mendations, and provided limited amounts of technical assistance.
The Soviets continued to be conspicuous by their absence and
apparent lack of interest.

The U.S.S.R. did attend the meetings of the United Nations
Economic Commission for Africa and the Far East, but its record in
the commission and its subsidiary bodies was no less negative. How-
ever, of late the Soviets have shown a more pronounced interest in
the activities of the U.N. agencies dealing with the problems of
under-developed areas. The decision to join the International Labor
Organization, and a few months before that U.N.E.S.C.O., char-
acterizes this new political approach. Soviet strategy now appears
primarily concerned with intensifying the estrangement of the
newly emergent countries of South Asia from the West. It has long
been an accepted tenet of Soviet thought that such a course was a
pre-condition for an eventual Communist victory in Europe. This
strategy of alienation demands time and a concerted effort on a wide
front. Joining the I.L.O. is the latest aspect of this pattern of overall
Soviet policy.

Admittance of the Soviet Union to full membership in the Inter-
national Labor Organization climaxed a sharp internal struggle,
which ultimately may curtail the effectiveness of the organization
as a constructive agency of economic development and technical
assistance. Denied membership at the November, 1953 conference
because of its reservations to certain clauses of the I.L.O. charter,
the Soviet Union removed its stipulations at the June, 1954 session
and agreed unconditionally to accept all the charter’s provisions.

Opposition to full Soviet membership was led by the United States,
which based its position on the need to maintain the tripartite
structure of the I.L.O. The machinery of the International Labor
Organization remains unique among the specialized agencies of the
United Nations. Predicated on a threefold division of power, labor,
government, and management are regarded as distinct interest
groups and each is accorded an equal voice. The level of accomplish-

The U.S.S.R. and the I.L.0. 15

ment depends upon the continued cooperation and willingness of
these diverse elements to compromise.

Organically, there are three main bodies. First, the General
Conference, which convenes annually and acts upon submitted
recommendations, labor codes, and budgetary issues; second, a
Governing Body or “Executive Council” of forty members, which
meets quarterly, conducts the actual groundwork for the Confer-
ence, and supervises the activities of the Secretariat; finally, there
is a permanent Secretariat headed by a Director General, who is
elected by the Conference. The present Director General. is an
American, David Morse.

The distinctive feature of the I.L.O. is its system of representa-
tion. Each nation is permitted four delegates to the General Con-
ference. Two represent government, one, management, the other,
labor. As a matter of practice most governments appoint delegates
acceptable to both management and labor organizations. This
tripartite system of representation extends to the Executive Council.
There, twenty seats are apportioned among the various governments
with labor and management groups each receiving ten seats. Since
each member votes as an individual representing an independent
interest group rather than a national unit, a delegation may be
split three ways.

Strongly supported by the loocion of the International Confedera-
tion of Free Trade Unions, the American delegation opposed full
Soviet membership. They argued that Soviet labor and manage-
ment delegates were not independent agents representing definite
interest groups. Rather they were, in fact, but additional representa-
tives of the Soviet government. However, the Credentials Com-
mittee demurred from this interpretation and voted to accept
Soviet labor and management delegations without any regard to
their possible subservience to the state. This consideration was
held to be irrelevant since the I.L.O. charter does not contain any
stipulation that management interests must represent private
ownership or a similarly independent interest group. Thus was the
complex and broader problem of nationalization of industry raised.
Western labor and management groups, a decided minority, argued
that this constituted a deliberate denial of the philosophy inherent
in the founding of the I.L.O.

In the final vote before the Conference the balance of power was
wielded by members of the delegations from the under-developed

16 The Russian Review

countries. They refused to oppose the seating of the Soviet delega-
tions on the ground that countries with nationalized industries were
still entitled to send separate labor and management delegations to
the I.L.O. It is important to note that the American effort to keep
the Soviets out collapsed because of the inability to convince the
under-developed countries of the salient differences between the
practice of Soviet totalitarianism and the theory of a democratic
system relying heavily upon the nationalization of industry to
achieve its ends. This failure to divorce the practice of one country
from a theory which holds a great attraction for the under-developed
countries must become a cardinal concern of American diplomacy.
To criticize or condemn indiscriminately the principle of nationaliza-
tion and not to appreciate adequately the potency of its appeal
would be a crippling handicap in the quest for the friendship of non-
Communist Asia. In many respects the key to the antagonism and
misunderstanding between the United States and these countries
awaits the outcome of the dialogue over the problem and future of
nationalization.

The success of the Soviets at the June, 1954 Conference of the
I.L.O. in no way erases their lamentable record of opposition to all
I.L.0. activities during the 1946-1953 period. Although not a
member, the U.S.S.R. regularly denounced the organization in the
various organs of the United Nations. Not too surprisingly, Soviet
criticisms did not focus on specific phases of I.L.O. activity but on
imagined and exaggerated shortcomings of the organization. The
Soviets held the I.L.O. to be an instrument of capitalist exploitation
and maintained that it operated to the detriment of the working
class. They also insisted that the failure to advance the interests of
labor stemmed from the archaic tripartite structure and recom-
mended that labor be accorded a larger representation. Their view
of the I.L.O. was dogmatic, ideologically discolored, and bore little
resemblance to the actual functioning of the organization. This
aspect of Soviet policy was related to its overall opposition to all
U.N. efforts seeking to alleviate the incidence of unemployment.
The Soviets belittled the importance of the I.L.O. reports, holding
them to be insignificant and biased. They made no offer of any
alternative approach.

The Soviet-conjured image of a ruthless coalition of government
and management arrayed against labor proved a figment of Marx-
ist metaphysics. In the complex organizational system of the I.L.O.,
government did not always side with management. On the contrary,

The U.S.S.R. and the I.L.O. 17

Labor governments, as in Britain and Scandinavia, tended to side
with the interests of labor. The voting alignments were complicated
and did not, in reality, approximate the class stereotypes pictured
by the Soviets.

During the sessions of the Economic and Social Council the
Soviet delegation persistently demanded a series of far-reaching
I.L.O. reforms. At one particular meeting the Danish representative
inquired whether the Soviet Union would join the I.L.O. if the
Soviet proposals were adopted. No reply was ever given. Signif-
icantly, the subsequent Soviet decision to participate in the I.L.O.
was in no way contingent upon any of these changes being effected
in the charter. More weighty policy considerations were controlling.

Within the scope of I.L.O. operations, which covers a diversity of
activities, the technical assistance programs are becoming increas-
ingly important. In cooperation with the other specialized agencies
and the Technical Assistance Administration of the United Nations,
the I.L.O. has been allocating a progressively greater share of its
budget to aiding under-developed areas. It seeks to raise standards
of industrial and agricultural productivity, combat unemployment,
promote land reform in collaboration with the efforts of the Food
and Agriculture Organization, and improve labor conditions. To
prevent the realization of these efforts is the concern of Soviet
policy.

Through the intimate contact with labor groups from the under-
developed.countries afforded by its I.L.O. membership, the Soviet
government works to weaken the already unsteady prestige of the
West and, correspondingly, to establish itself as the champion of
Asian ideals. In this respect it should be realized that Soviet im-
perialism is not as evident in South Asia as it is in Europe. Con-
sequently, the Asian countries, understandably but irrationally
influenced by their past, are apt to be more sensitive to imagined
attempts by the West to regain its former position than to concrete
instances of Soviet expansionism.

Of immediate import to the Soviets is the report on forced labor
due to be presented to the General Assembly this fall. Prepared by
the I.L.O., it contains many passages critical of Soviet labor prac-
tices. Judging by past behavior, the Soviets will try to mitigate
their impact and shift attention to the sections unfavorable to the
West. It is unfortunate, but nonetheless true, that these latter
portions will probably be more carefully scrutinized by the Asian
delegations than those relating to the U.S.S.R.

18 The Russian Review

Herein lies the challenge. The economic achievements of the
Soviet experiment have made an indelible impression upon important
segments of Asia’s intellectual élite, and the influence of Marxian
stereotypes, even among those apathetic to its philosophy, must not
be underestimated. Soviet membership should not be viewed with
despair or pessimism by the West. Rather, the West must make
every effort, notwithstanding Soviet intransigence, and in a fashion
acceptable to the under-developed countries, to expand the technical
assistance programs of the International Labor Organization. Only
by deeds can the West convince the growing nationalism of Asia of
its friendship.

More on General Turchin 23

“T cannot change what I have done,
And won’t be made a fool,”

Was all the answer he could get,
The owner of the mule.

Chorus—Go back, go back, go back, old scamp, etc.

And thus from place to place we go,
The song is e’er the same;

Tis not as once it used to be,
For Morgan’s lost his name.

He went up North, and there he stays,
With stricken face, the fool;

In Cincinnati now he cries,
“My kingdom for a mule.”

Chorus—Go back, go back, etc.

Stalin's Falstfication of History:
the Case of the Brest-Litovsk ‘Treaty

By Sypney D. BalILey

ie 1938 there was published in Moscow an official history of the
Russian Communist Party. It was immediately translated into
many languages and issued in large editions at subsidized prices.

The distinctive thing about this book is that it attempts to make
history—not the history of the future but the history of the past—by
the simple device of rewriting it. Its purpose is to demonstrate that
Lenin’s chief lieutenant at the time of the October Revolution was
Stalin, though in fact Stalin was a relatively unimportant and little
known figure at the time. Lenin’s best known disciples in 1917—
men like Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and Radek—
were eliminated in the various purges after Lenin’s death. This
rewriting of history seeks to reduce the réle of all Lenin’s friends
except one, to portray them as stupid, weak, vacillating, men of no
substance, opportunists, foreign spies. The book is full of such
phrases as: “political double-dealers,” ‘“‘counter-revolutionary con-
spiracy,” “dregs of humanity”—used not of Lenin’s enemies but
of his closest friends. Stalin is shown in a very different light. “Of
great importance was Comrade Stalin’s report.” “Comrade Stalin’s
speech made a profound impression.” “Comrade Stalin’s article
was of the utmost political moment.”

It was not until January, 1946, that it was revealed that the
author of this book was Stalin himself.

Stalin’s attempt to falsify the recent history of Russia can be
illustrated in many ways, but the case of the Brest-Litovsk treaty
negotiations is as good an example as any. The diplomacy was
“open” and the proceedings were fully reported day by day in the
press of the world; most of those who took part published memoirs
soon afterwards; the attitude of the differing groups within the
Bolshevik Party can be discovered from the published minutes of
committees and the reports of speeches. From these contemporary
sources it is not difficult to reconstruct the course of events, to dis-
cover who advocated a particular course of action at any particular

Stalin’s Falsification of History 25

moment. The impression received from a study of contemporary
sources is quite unlike Stalin’s version published 20 years after.!

There were, broadly speaking, three points of view within the
Bolshevik Party in 1918. Lenin, ever a realist, wanted to stop the
war as soon as possible on the best terms they could get. He no
longer believed, as he had done a few months before, that the Rus-
sian Revolution would inevitably collapse unless it were supported
by revolutions in Germany and elsewhere. He now realized that the
Bolshevik régime would have to be planned on the assumption that
it would exist in a hostile world for some time to come. He had
promised the people peace, and in the last resort this could only be
secured on the enemy’s terms. “If I accept peace when the army is
in flight,” he told the seventh Bolshevik Congress in March, 1918,
“. . . I accept it in order to prevent things getting worse .. . I
say again that I am ready to sign, and that I consider it my duty
to sign a treaty twenty times, a hundred times more humiliating,
in order to gain at least a few days . .. As every sensible man
will understand, by signing this peace treaty, we do not put a stop
to our workers’ revolution.”? “The question is the fate of the revolu-
tion .. . At the moment our revolution is the most important
thing in the world.”* Lenin was supported in his view by Sverdlov,
Zinoviev, Stalin, Sokolnikov, and Smilga.

The leading spokesman of the opposite view was N. I. Bukharin,
“the most valuable and biggest theoretician of the Party” as Lenin
described him in his “Political Testament.”* Bukharin wanted to
resume hostilities and wage what he called “‘a revolutionary war.”
He believed that the Central Powers were on the point of collapse
and that the proletariat in those countries would never fight to
suppress the Russian Revolution. To sign a humiliating treaty
would, he felt, demoralize the revolutionary will of the Russian
people and impede the spread of revolution to other countries. He
wanted to arm the masses and let them fight a guerilla war. He was
supported by Dzerzhinsky, Joffe, Uritsky, Alexandra Kollontai,
Bubnov, Ryazanov, Krestinsky, and Lomov.

But it was Trotsky’s agile mind which hit on a third course.

1The actual course of negotiations, which started on December 3, 1917, is de-
scribed in J. W. Wheeler-Bennett’s book Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace, 1938
[Ed.].

*Lenin, Selected Works, 1946 ed., vol. vii, pp. 301-303.

*Trotsky, Lenin, 1925, pp. 134, 130; My Life, 1930, p. 327.

‘Trotsky, The Suppressed Testament of Lenin, 1946, p. 7.

26 The Russian Review

Trotsky rarely saw things in terms of black and white; his was a sub-
tle character—though Stalin called him a waverer. Trotsky outlined
his plan in a letter to Lenin. “It is impossible to sign their peace . . .
My plan is this: We announce the termination of the war and de-
mobilization without signing any peace. We declare we cannot
participate in the brigands’ peace . . . The Germans will be unable
to attack us after we declare the war ended.” Trotsky’s idea was
to delay the final capitulation as long as possible in order to arouse
the workers of Germany and Austria-Hungary to as great a revolu-
tionary activity as possible.

Trotsky elaborated his plan at a meeting of Bolshevik leaders on
January 21. Bukharin and Radek put the case for a revolutionary
war. Lenin urged acceptance of the German terms. An informal
vote showed 32 for Bukharin, 16 for Trotsky, and 15 for Lenin.

At the Bolshevik Central Committee the next day a decision had
to be taken. Bukharin’s plan for a revolutionary war was voted
down by 11 votes to 2 (Bukharin and Dzerzhinsky), with one ab-
stention. Lenin proposed that the negotiations be dragged out as
long as possible and this plan was adopted by 12 votes to 1. Then
Trotsky put his formula: “We terminate the war, we do not conclude
peace, we demobilize the army.”’ This was carried by g votes to 7.

Trotsky now returned to Brest in order—as Lenin put it—to hold
out until the Germans presented an ultimatum; he was accompanied
this time by a delegation of pro-Bolshevik Ukrainians. This led, as
Trotsky intended, to a lengthy but fruitless debate between the
two Ukrainian delegations, which only came to an end on Feb-
ruary 9, when the Central Powers signed a separate peace treaty
with the anti-Bolshevik delegation from the Ukrainian Rada. “I
wonder if the Rada is still sitting at Kieff?” wrote Czernin in his
diary.’ As a matter of fact it was not.

On February 10 Trotsky produced his trump card. “We declare
to all peoples and governments that we are dropping out of the war.
We are issuing orders for full demobilization of all our troops that
face the armies of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bul-
garia. We wait and trust that all nations will soon follow in our
steps.”® “The whole congress sat speechless when Trotsky had

‘Magnes, Russia and Germany at Brest-Litovsk, 1919, pp. 122-123; Wheeler-Ben-
nett, Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace, 1938, pp. 185-186.

‘Lenin, vol. vii, p. 308.

7Czernin, In the World War, 1919, p. 329.

*Proceedings of the Brest-Litousk Conference, 1918 (hereafter cited as Proceed-

Stalin’s Falsification of History 27

finished his declaration,” wrote Hoffmann. “We were all dumb-
founded.’*® Kiihlmann’s legal adviser, Kriige, after some hasty re-
search, announced that the only precedent for this had taken place
over one thousand years earlier between the Greeks and the Scyth-
ians.!°

Trotsky and his colleagues returned to Petrograd and reported to
the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets. Sverdlov moved
a resolution, which was adopted unanimously, approving the action
of the Russian delegation.

The Central Powers were in a most difficult situation. Hoffmann
wanted to resume hostilities, but Kiihlmann and Czernin were
afraid this would have an unfortunate effect on world opinion. But
Hoffmann had the support of German G.H.Q., and on February 16
the Germans announced that the armistice would end two days later
and hostilities would be resumed.

The next day the Bolshevik Central Committee met to consider
the ultimatum. Lenin proposed that the terms be accepted and
was supported by Stalin, Sverdlov, Sokolnikov, and Smilga. Trotsky
proposed that negotiations be delayed until a German advance had
actually begun and its influence on the workers’ movement was
revealed; he was supported by Bukharin (who still hankered after a
revolutionary war), Joffe, Uritsky, Krestinsky, and Lomov. Thus
the forces were ranged—s votes for acceptance of the terms, six for
delay. Then Lenin put the crucial and practical question: if the
German advance becomes a fact and yet no revolutionary upsurge
occurs in Germany and Austria, should a peace treaty be concluded?
Lenin’s motion received 7 votes, including Trotsky’s; Joffe cast the
single vote against; Bukharin, Krestinsky, Lomov, and one other
abstained.

The next day the Germans resumed hostilities, and the Bolshevik
Central Committee met and remained in session virtually through-
out the day. Lenin again urged immediate acceptance of the German
terms, but his motion was lost by one vote. As the day went on
reports of the rapid German advance reached Petrograd, and in the
evening a second vote on Lenin’s motion was taken. This time
ings . . . ), pp. 169-173; W. Astrov and others, 4n I/lustrated History of the Russian
Revolution, 1928, vol. ii, pp.§16-517; Bunyan and Fisher, The Bolshevik Revolution,
1934, p- 510; Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, 1951, vol. i, pp. 43-45.

*Hoffmann, War Diaries and Other Papers, 1929, vol. ii, pp. 21 8-219.
Price, My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution, 1921, p. 239.

28 The Russian Review

Trotsky supported Lenin because he believed that further resistance
was useless. The motion to accept the German terms was thus car-
ried by 7 votes to 6: in addition to Lenin and Trotsky, Sverdlov,
Sokolnikov, Zinoviev, Stalin and Smilga voted for the motion;
Bukharin, Joffe, Uritsky, Krestinsky, Dzerzhinsky, and Lomov
voted against.

Lenin and Trotsky communicated the decision to the Central
Powers: “The Soviet of People’s Commissars finds itself ferced to
sign the treaty and to accept the conditions of the Four-Power
Delegation at Brest-Litovsk.”!! General Hoffmann replied that a
wireless message could not be regarded as an official document be-
cause the original signatures were absent. Accordingly, the Russian
communication with the actual signatures of Lenin and Trotsky
was sent by special messenger to Dvinsk.

While a reply was awaited, Trotsky communicated with the
representatives of Great Britain, France, and the United States to
find out whether they could expect help if they had to continue the
war. Trotsky told Bruce Lockhart, the British representative, that
if the Allies would send a promise of support he would sway the
decision of the Russian government in favor of war. Lenin told
Lockhart: “I am quite prepared to risk a co-operation with the
Allies, which should be temporarily. advantageous to both of us. In
the event of German aggression, I am even willing to accept military
support.”!? Lockhart passed all this on to the Foreign Office but
apparently received no reply.

The Bolshevik “Lefts,” however, opposed accepting Allied help.
The question was considered at the Central Committee on Feb-
ruary 22. Lenin could not be present, but he sent a note favoring
acceptance of “the assistance of the brigands of French imperialism
against the German brigands.’’'* A motion to this effect was ap-
proved by 6 votes to 5, Bukharin still maintaining his opposition.

At this point Trotsky offered his resignation as Commissar of
Foreign Affairs. He no longer felt able to accept full responsibility
for the conduct of Russia’s foreign affairs. “It seems to me it would
be politically wise if I resigned,” he told Lenin. “My resignation
would imply, for the Germans, a radical change of policy and would

“Proceedings . . . , pp. 174-175; Magnes, p. 150; Bunyan and Fisher, p. 513;
Degras, vol. i, p. 46.

128R, H. B. Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, 1932, pp. 229, 231-232, 239.

Trotsky, My Life, p. 333-

Stalin’s Falsification of History 29

strengthen their confidence in our willingness to sign the peace
treaty this time.” His resignation was accepted and on March 13
he became Commissar of War and Chairman of the Supreme War
Council.

On February 21, Kihlmann despatched a reply to the message of
acceptance from Lenin and Trotsky. This reply contained terms
even more onerous than those proposed on January 18. Acceptance
within 48 hours was insisted on. Russia was to be stripped of about
300,000 square miles of territory, inhabited by more than 50 million
people. She was to lose one-third of her railway mileage, three-
quarters of her iron production facilities, and ninety percent of her
coal production.

Again the Bolshevik Central Committee met. Lenin insisted that
the new terms be accepted at once. Stalin seems at this point to
have favored a further period of delay, but Lenin was adamant and
threatened to resign. Bukharin still wanted a revolutionary war,
but Trotsky pointed out that this was mere theorizing: it was im-
possible for a divided party to wage a revolutionary war. When a
vote was taken, Lenin was supported by Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Stalin,
Sokolnikov, Smilga, and Elena Stasova; Trotsky, Joffe, Krestinsky,
and Dzerzhinky abstained; the irreconcilable “Lefts” (Bukharin,
Uritsky, Bubnov, and Lomov) voted against Lenin’s motion. Seven
of the fifteen present thus favored acceptance; it was not an absolute
majority, but the abstentions enabled the motion to go through.
Bukharin, Lomov, Bubnov, Pyatakov, and Smirnov resigned from
the Central Committee and from their government posts.

On February 24, Lenin and Trotsky telegraphed acceptance of
the new terms. It was with the utmost difficulty that the Bol-
sheviks found anyone willing to go to Brest to sign the treaty. The
Russian delegation which finally went consisted of Sokolnikov,
Joffe, G. V. Chicherin (Trotsky’s successor as Commissar of Foreign
Affairs), Karakhan, G. I. Petrovsky (Commissar of the Interior),
and a number of military and naval specialists. The Central Powers
proposed that negotiations for the fulfilment of the new terms should
begin. Sokolnikov said there was nothing to negotiate about. They
had come to sign a dictated peace, not to negotiate. The Russian
delegates, wrote Ludendorff, displayed dignity in misfortune.'® The
treaty was signed on March 3.

MIDid., p. 333; Lenin, p. 138.

18] udendorff, My War Memoirs, 1919, vol. ii, pp. 561-562.

30 The Russian Review

Now let us see how Stalin describes these events in his History:

In order to finally consolidate the Soviet power, the war had
to be ended. The Party therefore launched the fight for peace
from the moment of the victory of the October Revolution.

The Soviet Government called upon “all the belligerent peo-
ples and their governments to start immediate negotiations for a
just, democratic peace.” But the “‘allies’—Great Britain and
France—refused to accept the proposal of the Soviet Govern-
ment. In view of this refusal, the Soviet Government, in com-
pliance with the will of the Soviets, decided to start negotiations
with Germany and Austria.

The negotiations began on December 3 in Brest-Litovsk.
On December 5 an armistice was signed.

The negotiations took place at a time when the country was
in a state of economic disruption, when war-weariness was
universal, when our troops were abandoning the trenches and
the front was collapsing. It became clear in the course of the
negotiations that the German imperialists were out to seize
huge portions of the territory of the former tsarist empire, and
to turn Poland, the Ukraine, and the Baltic countries into
dependencies of Germany.

To continue the war under such conditions would have
meant staking the very existence of the new-born Soviet Re-
public. The working class and the peasantry were confronted
with the necessity of accepting onerous terms of peace, of re-
treating before the most dangerous marauder of the time—
German imperialism—in order to secure a respite in which to
strengthen the Soviet power and to create a new army, the
Red Army, which would be able to defend the country from
enemy attack.

All the counter-revolutionaries, from the Mensheviks and
Socialist-Revolutionaries to the most arrant White-guards,
conducted a frenzied campaign against the conclusion of
peace. Their policy was clear: they wanted to wreck the peace
negotiations, provoke a German offensive, and thus imperil
the still weak Soviet power and endanger the gains of the work-
ers and peasants.

Their allies in this sinister scheme were Trotsky and his ac-
complice Bukharin, the latter, together with Radek and Pyata-
kov, heading a group which was hostile to the Party but cam-

Stalin’s Falsification of History 31

ouflaged itself under the name of “Left Communists.” Trotsky
and the group of “Left Communists” began a fierce struggle
within the Party against Lenin, demanding the continuation
of the war. These people were clearly playing into the hands
of the German imperialists and the counter-revolutionaries
within the country, for they were working to expose the young
Soviet Republic, which had not yet any army, to the blows of
German imperialism.

This was really a policy of provocateurs, skilfully masked
by Left phraseology.

On February 10, 1918, the peace negotiations in Brest-
Litovsk were broken off. Although Lenin and Stalin, in the
name of the Central Committee of the Party, had insisted that
peace be signed, Trotsky, who was chairman of the Soviet
delegation at Brest-Litovsk, treacherously violated the direct
instructions of the Bolshevik Party. He announced that the
Soviet Republic refused to conclude peace on the terms pro-
posed by Germany. At the same time he informed the Germans
that the Soviet Republic would not fight and would continue
to demobilize the army. —

This was monstrous. The German imperialists could have
desired nothing more from this traitor to the interests of the
Soviet country.

The German government broke the armistice and assumed
the offensive. . .

On February 18, 1918, the Central Committee of the Party
had approved Lenin’s proposal to send a telegram to the Ger-
man government offering to conclude an immediate peace.
But in order to secure more advantageous terms, the Germans
continued to advance, and only on February 22 did the Ger-
man government express its willingness to sign peace. The
terms were now far more onerous than those originally pro-
posed.

Lenin, Stalin and Sverdlov had to wage a stubborn fight on
the Central Committee against Trotsky, Bukharin, and the
other Trotskyites before they secured a decision in favor of the
conclusion of peace. Bukharin and Trotsky, Lenin declared,
“actually helped the German imperialists and hindered the
growth and development of the revolution in Germany.” . . .

On February 23, the Central Committee decided to accept

32 The Russian Review

the terms of the German Command and to sign the peace
treaty. The treachery of Trotsky and Bukharin cost the Soviet
Republic dearly... .

Meanwhile, the “Left Communists” continued their struggle
against Lenin, sinking deeper and deeper into the slough of
treachery.

The Moscow Regional Bureau of the Party, of which the
“Left Communists” (Bukharin, Ossinsky, Yakovleva, Stukov,
and Mantsev) had temporarily seized control, passed a resolu-
tion of no-confidence in the Central Committee, a resolution
designed to split the Party. .. .

At that time the real cause of this anti-Party behavior of
Trotsky and the “Left Communists” was not yet clear to the
Party. But the recent trial of the Anti-Soviet “Bloc of Rights
and Trotskyites” (beginning of 1938) has now revealed that
Bukharin and the group of “Left Communists” headed by
him, together with Trotsky and the “Left” Socialist-Revolu-
tionaries, were at that time secretly conspiring against the
Soviet Government. Now it is known that Bukharin, Trotsky
and their fellow-conspirators had determined to wreck the
Peace of Brest-Litovsk, arrest V. I. Lenin, J. V. Stalin, and
Y. M. Sverdlov, assassinate them, and form a new government
consisting of Bukharinites, Trotskyites, and “Left” Socialist-
Revolutionaries.

While hatching this clandestine counter-revolutionary plot,
the group of “Left Communists,” with the support of Trotsky,
openly attacked the Bolshevik Party, trying to split it and to
disintegrate its ranks. But at this grave juncture the Party
rallied around Lenin, Stalin, and Sverdlov and supported the
Central Committee on the question of peace as on all other
questions.

The “Left Communist” group was isolated and defeated. . . .

It will be noted that this version of Stalin’s perverts the facts in
several important particulars. It is impossible here to consider all
the discrepancies and verbal tricks used by Stalin but some of the
more outstanding are worthy of comment.

In the first place, Stalin does not regard the disagreements within
the Bolshevik high command as genuine differences of view be-
tween honorable men; Trotsky and Bukharin had committed the
unforgivable sin of having been “against Lenin,” against the in-

Stalin’s Falsification of History 33

fallible high-priest of Bolshevism and architect of the Soviet state.
Such conduct could only have been inspired by disreputable motives,
and it was Stalin’s view that their purpose was to “‘provoke a Ger-
man offensive and thus imperil the still weak Soviet power.” His
reasoning seems to have been something like this: Russia and Ger-
many were at war: Lenin favored one course, Trotsky another:
Lenin was opposed to German imperialism, therefore Trotsky was
acting in the interests of German imperialism. But the evident
absurdity of this line of reasoning is clear when we remember that
it was mot Trotsky or Bukharin, dut Lenin, who favored uncondi-
tional acceptance of Germany’s cruel terms.

Stalin, as we have seen, invariably ascribes the most despicable
motives to Lenin’s opponents. They were guilty of ‘ ‘treachery,” of

“secretly conspiring against the Soviet Government,” of hatching a

“clandestine counter-revolutionary plot.” Lenin had certainly held
that both the Bukharin position and the Trotsky position were mis-
taken, but he never for one moment doubted their sincerity or their
devotion to Bolshevik principles or the Bolshevik government.
Stalin, on the other hand, describes them as being “hostile to the
Party . .. clearly playing into the hands of German imperial-
ists . . . really a policy of provocateurs, skilfully masked by Left
phraseology.”

Another device of Stalin’s is to lump all Lenin’s opponents into
one category and label the whole lot of them as counter-revolu-
tionaries and traitors. Bukharin and his “revolutionary war”
group, Trotsky and his “no peace, no war” group, the Mensheviks,
the left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries, and even what he calls the
“arrant White-guards’”—all these people are put in one category
and written off as enemies. There is no attempt to distinguish their
different viewpoints. It is like saying “Sir Winston Churchill and
Harry Pollitt are both opposed to the British Labor Party: therefore,
Churchill is Pollitt’s accomplice.” Indeed, Stalin does describe
Bukharin as Trotsky’s accomplice, though it is beyond question that
Trotsky and Bukharin took quite distinct and independent positions;
when in the end Trotsky decided to abandon his own position for
the sake of agreement, it was to suprort Lenin, not Bukharin.
Stalin even manages in one sentence to refer to ““Bukharin and the
group of ‘Left Communists’ . . . together with Trotsky and the
‘Left’ Socialist-Revolutionaries.” To confuse Trotsky and Bukharin
is bad enough, but to bring in the Socialist Revolutionaries—a party

34 The Russian Review

that both Trotsky and Bukharin despised and opposed—is ten-
dentious in the extreme.

Stalin states that Trotsky “‘treacherously violated the direct
instructions of the Bolshevik Party.” This is quite untrue. Trotsky
did, of course, oppose Lenin on the issue within the inner councils
of the Bolshevik Party for a time; it may even be that he was in-
fluenced in his decision to resign as Commissar of Foreign Affairs
by a wish not to be saddled with responsibility for actually signing
the Brest treaty. But he always carried out his instructions loyally
and faithfully; this is confirmed by the independent accounts of the
negotiations by the German and Austrian participants.

Another trick of Stalin’s is to report an actual incident quite cor-
rectly but in such a way as to leave a false impression. Stalin’s
statement that the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party sent
instructions to Trotsky that the Treaty must be signed is quite
true, but it does not prove that Trotsky was planning to defy his
colleagues in the government.

Finally, Stalin alleges that Bukharin, Trotsky, and others de-
cided to arrest Lenin, Stalin, and Sverdlov, “‘assassinate them, and
form a new government.” Stalin does not say why this plan never
materialized, but the fact is that Stalin was of only minor signif-
icance in the Bolshevik hierarchy in 1918. Even if Bukharin and
Trotsky had wanted to eliminate Lenin and Sverdlov, it is hardly
conceivable that it would have occurred to them im 7978 that Stalin
was worth eliminating. But the truth about the alleged plot to
assassinate Lenin was very different from Stalin’s version. Lenin’s
opponents were in a difficult situation in 1918. They had a majority
in certain sections of the Party—Stalin admits this. Yet Lenin’s
prestige in the Party was so great that it was difficult for the govern-
ment to put through a plan which Lenin was known to oppose. One
of Lenin’s opponents on the Brest issue—not Trotsky or Bukharin—
apparently suggested, not very seriously, that they arrest Lenin,
pass a resolution attacking his position, then release him next day
and let things take their course. Radek had even boasted in public:
“Tf there were five hundred courageous men in Petrograd, we would
put you [Lenin] in prison.” Lenin had replied: “It is much more
likely that I will send you than you me.” Lenin little realized that
Radek was to disappear in the Stalinist purge twenty years later.
Certainly, the notion of arresting Lenin was fantastic and nothing
ever came of it. In any case, there was never any talk of killing

Stalin’s Falsification of History 35

Lenin, and it is unlikely that anybody ever thought of arresting
Stalin.

One of the interesting things about the Stalinist revision of history
is that a leading réle in the process was played by Stalin’s fellow-
Georgian, Beria. Shortly before Stalin’s History appeared, Beria
had delivered a long address—it took two days—entitled “On the
History of the Bolshevik Organization in Transcaucasia.” This was
designed to show that Stalin had always been a good Bolshevik and
had played the leading réle in building up the party in Transcau-
casia. The leading Georgian historians were fiercely attacked and
told to “revise” their works, which had not given sufficient credit to
Stalin. The lecture was later translated into many languages and
was regarded by orthodox Stalinists as basic source material on
Stalin’s early life.

Now that Stalin’s friend Beria has been unmasked as a foreign
spy, will it be necessary to rewrite history once again?

The Soviet Occupation of the
Baltic States

By Irina SABUROVA

— fate of the Baltic States—Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania—
both before and during World War II is of special interest to
Russian readers as well as to foreign students of contemporary
Russian history.

The Baltic states, which became independent after the February
revolution, were formed out of the former Baltic provinces of the
Russian Empire. For as long as two centuries they had been a part
of the Empire; as a result they contained, next to the indigenous
Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, and so-called “Baltic Germans,”
a numerous native-born Russian population. Moreover, in some
cases the establishment of the new states was accompanied by the
inclusion of purely Russian territories. Estonia, for 1 instance, incor-
porated Pechera, Isborsk, Ivangorod, settled mainly by “Sets,” an
ancient Slavic tribe. The monasteries of Pechera, the fortresses of
Ivangorod and Isborsk are monuments, respectively, of the early
feudal period of Russia and of the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Latvia
absorbed part of the provinces of Pskov and Vitebsk. Thus it hap-
pened that a native Russian population, not newcomers (émigrés),
found itself outside the borders of the Soviet Union. The Baltic
Russians represented a peculiar historical and political phenomenon,
inasmuch as they belonged neither to the Soviet population nor to
the “old emigration,” since up to the end of World War II they
never migrated anywhere. Politically and economically, they
formed an integral part of the new free democratic states, while
preserving their full cultural autonomy.

Until 1934 the Latvian Diet contained representatives of several
Russian parties. In addition to Latvian and German, Russian was
one of the three official languages whose knowledge was required of
all civil servants dealing with the public, and even street names were
given in the three languages. The Greek Orthodox Church was
independent of the Moscow Patriarch, and Orthodox churches and
monasteries carried on their activities without interference. The
system of compulsory universal education provided free six-grade

The Soviet Occupation of the Baltic States 37

elementary schools for Russian children; the larger towns, moreover,
had state-supported Russian high schools in addition to the many
private institutions. Since 1922-23 Riga, the Latvian capital, had
the only permanent Russian theatre outside the Soviet Union, with
daily performances throughout the season. This theatre developed a
whole new generation of Russian actors, while at the same time
offering opportunities to famous veterans of the Russian stage.
It taught the young people of the country, by no means Russians
alone, to appreciate the classic masterpieces of Russian dramatic
literature as well as modern foreign and Soviet plays. A Russian
daily newspaper, the Segodnia (Today), with the widest circulation
of any Russian newspaper outside the Soviet Union, was brought
out in Riga both in a morning and an evening edition. Perezvony
an art review, was published there for several years, and so were
many other Russian periodicals. There were several Russian pub-
lishing houses, and Russian artists, musicians, and singers main-
tained well-attended studios. Finally—and this is a unique phe-
nomenon outside the U.S.S.R.—Latvia included purely Russian
agricultural areas. After the land reform of 1922, these areas were
divided into individual farms settled and worked by Russian farm-
ers, neither under the conditions of tsarist Russia (since here the
former landlords were allowed to keep only the core of their estates
with a small allotment of land), nor under those of the Soviet collec-
tive farms; here the farmers enjoyed full ownership of their home-
steads and could pass them on to their children. They also had their
full share, to the same extent as Latvian farmers, in government
aid to agriculture, such as dairy subsidies, state-organized marketing
of flax, promotion of horsebreeding, etc. Thus, in comparison on
the one hand with the “rootless” Soviet citizens deprived of any
kind of freedom in their homeland, and on the other hand with the
“rootless” émigrés living in small isolated colonies among alien
nations all over the world, the Baltic Russians represented a “third
force” with special characteristics, and their life and evolution offer
considerable interest not only historically, but as a portent of the
future.

After 1934, with the coming to power of the Premier, Dr. Ulmanis,
the Diet was abolished and Latvian was declared the only official
language. In all other spheres—church, economic, and cultural
life—nothing was changed for the Russians. During the war, which
began with the first Soviet occupation of the Baltic states, the
Russian population of Latvia, both natives and émigrés, shared the

38 The Russian Review

fate of all other citizens of the country and actually suffered even
more than the Latvians.

Almost simultaneously with the occupation of Poland, in the fall
of 1939, the Soviet Union pressed the demand for the occupation of
military and naval bases in the Baltic states. The latter were pre-
sented with a kind of ultimatum and could do nothing but submit.
Latvia was the leader among them, both as to size of territory and
number of seaports. Riga, the capital, a member of the Hanseatic
League in the Middle Ages, was a major commercial port at the
mouth of the Dvina (which at this point is almost a mile wide) and
accessible to ocean-going vessels. Libau had been an important
open-sea naval port in tsarist Russia; Vindau, in Latvian Kuldiga,
was of secondary importance. The population of Latvia numbered
about 1,900,000 and included, as has been indicated above, Latvians,
Germans, and Russians, both native-born and émigrés.

Despite the fact that Latvia maintained a peacetime army far
exceeding her normal capacity, her armed forces barely added up to
300,000 men. The armies of Estonia and Lithuania were still smaller.
The Baltic states possessed neither motorized divisions nor naval
and air forces of any importance. The Latvian Navy, commanded
by Count Keyserling and later by Captain Spade, former officers of
the Russian Imperial Navy, consisted of the warship “Virsaitis”
(formerly a Coast Guard ship) and two or three submarines. The
number of light aircraft was negligible, and there were no bombers
at all. Plainly, with these forces Latvia was powerless to defend
herself against her giant neighbor.

In the fall of 1936, the three Baltic states entered negotiations
with a view to forming a defensive alliance. The alliance was ac-
tually concluded, but its combined fighting capacity still remained
too insignificant for effective resistance to such an enemy as the
Soviet Union. The military potential of this alliance is best illus-
trated by a story widely circulated at that time. The Latvian
commander-in-chief, General Balodis, wired the Estonian com-
mander-in-chief, General Leidoner, saying, ““Send me your heavy
artillery immediately.”” The reply was, “Both cannon?”

Early in June 1940, the Baltic Foreign Ministers held urgent con-
sultations among themselves and made several flights to Moscow
to confer with the Kremlin. The press reported these flights and
conferences in vague and restrained terms. The population was
unworried, being engrossed in preparations for the annual choral
festival to be held in Dunaburg. This festival, in which giant

The Soviet Occupation of the Baltic States 39

choruses attired in national costumes participated, was scheduled
for Saturday, June 15. The absence on this occasion of the Presi-
dent, Dr. Ulmanis, who usually opened such celebrations, was ex-
plained by an indisposition. The Sunday papers of June 16 were
filled with descriptions of the festival and pictures of the partici-
pants. Few people probably paid any attention to a short small-
print item in the Russian paper Segodnia, which read approximately
as follows: ““This morning at the village of Maslenki on the Soviet-
Latvian border a skirmish occurred, and shots were fired. Several
Latvian frontier guards have been taken prisoner, as well as a young
village shepherd. The incident is being investigated.”

Yet even prior to the appearance of the Sunday papers, Igals,
former Latvian consul in Paris, on duty that night at the Foreign
Ministry, had been alerted by a strange wire from the Latvian
envoy in London, who wanted to know whether it was true that
Soviet troops had crossed the border, and why the Latvian lat no
longer was quoted on the Stock Exchange. The Foreign Minister,
roused from sleep, irritably grumbled: “Wire in reply, “This is old
Wives’ gossip.” ”

Nevertheless, the commanding officer of the frontier brigade,
General Bolstein, early that morning left for the frontier in his car.
He found that the brigade had been smashed by the onslaught of
Soviet troops. That same day General Bolstein shot himself.

On Monday morning, June 17, Riga was buzzing with sinister
rumors, and in the afternoon Soviet tanks rolled into the city. Ex-
cept for a few clashes with the police (actually street fights between
the police and Latvian Communists who had suddenly emerged
from the underground) the Russians met with no resistance in the
Latvian capital. The President, standing upright in his car, slowly
drove through the streets, telling the populace to keep calm. The
next day the President and the commander-in-chief of the army,
General Balodis, were under house arrest, and a few days later both
were taken to the Soviet Union, and nothing has been heard from
them since.

During the first days of the occupation, several thousand people
were arrested in Riga and throughout the country—members of the
government, army officers, heads of government departments, in-
dustrialists, clergy of all denominations, publishers and editors,
civil servants, and civic leaders, both Latvian and Russian. Milrud
and Khariton, editors of Segodnia, were arrested and later deported
to the Narym region with thousands of others. A third editor,

40 The Russian Review

Levin, was temporarily left in his job in order to instruct the new
editor-in-chief, the Communist Rappaport, just released from prison,
but soon, he too, was to share the general fate. For a short time the
paper was brought out under various names, but it was finally estab-
lished as the Proletarskaya Pravda (Proletarian Truth). More than
half of the contributors to the former Segodnia were either arrested
or fired. A former contributor, Kira Verkhovenskaya, now revealed
as an agent of the N.K.V.D., the Soviet secret police, played a con-
spicuous part in the arrests. She had been in charge of the local
news section of the paper, and in the capacity of a reporter she knew
everyone of 1 importance in the Russian circles. Soon promoted to a
more responsible post in the N.K.V.D., she did not remain long on
the staff of the Proletarskaya Pravda.

After the first wave of arrests had swept away all prominent lead-
ers, arrests of plain people went on uninterruptedly throughout the
thirteen months of the Soviet occupation. Night after night, the
“Black Raven” would stop in front of this or that house, and the
N.K.V.D. men would carry off their victim after a thorough search
of the premises. If they met with no resistance, they would behave
with reasonable courtesy. But sometimes they were fired upon, or
else the prospective victim would commit suicide by shooting him-
self or jumping out of the window; in such cases all other members
of the family would be taken away.

In Riga the arrested persons would be taken to the building of the
former Ministry of the Interior, now headquarters of the N.K.V.D.
Here they were submitted, according to some reports, to a prelimi-
nary procedure: they were kept standing motionless on their feet
in a room packed with people for up to 48 hours before being called
up for questioning. The Central prison was filled to overflowing. It
took months of effort for relatives to be allowed to visit the prisoners,
and when at last permission was given, it happened more often than
not that the prisoner had been removed to some unknown destina-
tion. In a suburb of Riga a house called the “White Villa” was
occupied by a special department of the N.K.V.D. in charge of
tortures and executions; residents of the neighborhood often heard
shots in the night behind the strictly guarded high fence of the Villa;
and many corpses mutilated by torture were later found in the
adjoining woods. The cellars of the N.K.V.D. headquarters in
Riga also contained torture chambers. After the departure of the
N.K.V.D., tiny “coffins” were discovered there, one-man cells so

The Soviet Occupation of the Baltic States 41

small that their inmates had no room except in a bent position. A
system of pipes kept the temperature of these cells unbearably hot.
There was also one room with soundproof walls, a drain for blood,
and special torture equipment.

The whole life of the country underwent a radical change. This
was especially marked in the towns, for in the countryside the
organization of collective farms moved at a very slow pace, ob-
structed by the passive but stubborn resistance of the rural popula-
tion. The system of individual farmsteads had taken root. Old-
type villages were left only in the Russian area of Latvia, and even
here they usually consisted of a series of individual farms located
around a center—the former village. The size of the farms varied
between 30 and 240 acres.

Thanks to the state-organized export of dairy products, flax, and
fruit, as well as to the confectionary industry, for whose needs
several sugar refineries had been set up, the farmers in Latvia were
prosperous, and in peace-time the market was glutted with cheap
food of every kind. In Latgalia, the Russian part of Latvia, many
farmers interested in horsebreeding used to keep one or two racing
horses, half-breeds of the famous Orlov stock, which were used only
for light work on the farm but would win prizes in the winter “Lat-
galia races” in Dunaburg. On the race course of Riga, the races
were also managed by Russian horsebreeders, the brothers Mos-
kalenko. In the rural areas there used to be a shortage of farm
labor, and every summer would see an influx of migrant workers
from Poland and Lithuania. With the arrival of Soviet troops prices
increased 100 per cent. The lat was made equal to the Soviet ruble
and for some time both currencies were in circulation, but within a
few months first Latvian silver coins and then Latvian banknotes
disappeared.

At the same time wages and salaries remained unchanged, despite
the decrease in the purchasing power of money and the increase in
taxation. Shop owners were compelled to keep their shops open
but were treated only as managers and had to deliver the proceeds
to government agencies. The shops, once richly stocked, quickly
emptied of merchandise. The Soviet military and their families,
helped by an invading army of Soviet office workers, within a few
weeks bought up all stocks of watches, radio sets, shoes, dress
fabrics, etc. Prices of all these wares soared. Formerly a man’s
suit of medium quality had cost 50-60 lats, and an expensive one,

42 The Russian Review

custom-made by a first-rate tailor, 300-350 lats. Now the cheapest
suit cost 800-1000 lats, and six months later few people could afford
to buy a handkerchief.

The only trade that flourished under the Soviet occupation was
the liquor trade. The price of vodka remained low. Formerly vodka
had been sold only in specially licensed stores which closed Saturdays
at noon. Evenings and on Sundays and holidays, to be sure, one
could buy vodka at any restaurant, but this was expensive. Now,
vodka was being sold at all food stores, and the stores were kept
open at night in rotation. Since in the Soviet Union the price of
vodka was much higher, this leniency probably had a special purpose.
At any rate, hard drinking increased.

Russian libraries and bookstores were closed down. Russian
books were confiscated wherever they were found, and the bulk of
the scrap-heap was then shipped by the N.K.V.D. to a paper factory
to be reprocessed into pulp. Riga possessed several large Russian
libraries in addition to the school libraries and to the municipal
library, with its huge and extremely valuable newspaper archives.
The Ivanov library, the oldest Russian book collection, possessed
all Russian pre-war classics, both originals and translations, and
many bookstores had lending libraries containing both Russian
classics and émigré Russian literature. Books that in some way had
escaped destruction were eagerly bought up by the Soviet occupiers.

After the Segodnia, the weekly magazine Diya Vas (For You),
which for eight years had provided entertaining reading to wide
circles of the Russian public, was suppressed. Political parties no
longer existed among the Russian population of Latvia. Except for
charitable organizations, only a few societies, mainly of a profes-
sional kind, such as the athletic league “Sokol,” the associations of
physicians, engineers, seamen, etc., were !eft. “All these, of course,
were dissolved, and their leaders and prominent members arrested.
The well-known journalist, Piotr Pilsky, avoided arrest only because
he suffered a paralytic stroke when the N.K.V.D. men came to
fetch him. He died a few months later at his home. One of the first
victims was P. S. Yakobi, a Russian lawyer and member of the
Latvian Senate. He and his family were extremely popular and
beloved by all Russian Riga; one of his sons was an artist, another a
journalist, and a daughter was a prima ballerina of the Latvian
National Opera. Yakobi was arrested together with one of his
daughters. But a list of all those who perished would take up too
much space. With the exception of the Theatre of Russian Drama,

The Soviet Occupation of the Baltic States 43

whose personnel remained almost intact (only one-third-rate actress
was charged with espionage and shot), Russian Riga was wiped out.

All private institutions were, of course, suppressed. Government
agencies were being reorganized. Many Latvian Communists, who
years before had gone to the Soviet Union, now reappeared in their
homeland. Admission of the public to the government offices was
under strict control, working hours were increased from six to eight,
and office workers a few minutes late were sternly reprimanded and
warned of dismissal—yet their performance deteriorated from day
to day.

With respect to meetings and demonstrations, labor displayed an
inarticulate, passive resistance. Resolutions, of course, would be
adopted “unanimously,” but discontent was growing. It should be
remembered that the standard of living, as well as the educational
level of the Latvian population, had always been high. Even under
the tsarist régime the Baltic provinces had enjoyed special privi-
leges, serfdom disappeared here long before it was abolished in the
rest of Russia, Latvian peasants were used to being hereditary
tenants and not serfs of their landlords, compulsory universal educa-
tion was introduced earlier than seeadbiane:i in Russia, and there was
no illiteracy in the Latvian republic.

Under the Soviet occupation, from a salary of 300 lats about 80
would be withheld for various dues, loans, and contributions, and
the simple and convenient sick funds were replaced by polyclinics
where doctors often were compelled to treat sixty patients or more
in the course of one day. Sanatoria were available only to Com-
munists and “activists,” foreign patented medicines disappeared,
and doctors were forbidden to prescribe expensive treatments.

In July preparations were started for the election of a new govern-
ment that was to express “the will of the people’—the people’s
most ardent desire being, of course, the incorporation of the Latvian
republic into “the family of Soviet peoples.” At first the voters
were given a choice between the Communist party and a “non-
partisan bloc,” but a week before the election the bloc was liqui-
dated. At the voting places ballot boxes were set up among blatant
decorations, and booths were provided for voters who might wish
“to write in any corrections” on the ballots. Security agents were on
duty at every polling place, and the passport of every voter was
stamped to certify that he had fulfilled his civic duty. For several
days before the election, police stations had been swamped by people
claiming to have lost their passports. Since the issuance of a new

44 The Russian Review

passport would have taken three weeks, and a simple certificate of
the loss did not entitle the loser to vote, this device was used by
many to avoid voting altogether. However, the Soviet authorities
soon caught on and introduced heavy fines for the passport losers,
who in addition were registered as unworthy of citizenship.

“The vote for the inclusion of the Latvian republic into the
Soviet Union was 113%!—-joyfully announced one paper, fumbling
its arithmetic in its zeal. The rejoicing, however, was confined to
the press. The 18th of November, on the other hand, the anniver-
sary of Latvian independence, was marked by a truly national
demonstration. Early in the morning the pedestal of the Liberation
monument in Riga was covered with flower wreaths in the national
colors, secretly deposited there during the night, and in the evening,
after working hours, unusual crowds filled the streets. Men and
women attired in national costumes slowly and silently moved
through the streets, expressing their grief over the ruin of their
country with this solemn march. The police, of course, understood
what it was about, but did not interfere.

At Christmas time the people fared worse. All factory and office
workers were notified that they were expected to come to work on
December 25 and 26. Yet a few days before the holiday the workers
of several big plants declared their determination not to work on the
holidays. “They can’t arrest us all!’ they told themselves. The
authorities showed themselves ready for a compromise. Since
Christmas in the Latvian language is Ziemas Swetki, which means
literally ‘Winter Yuletide,” on Christmas Eve the “winter yule”
days were officially declared non-working days. This, however,
proved a Pyrrhic victory. New Year’s day was followed by a wave
of arrests among the factory workers.

In January a second repatriation of Germans was announced. All
those who for some reason had not been included in the first repa-
triating operation in 1939 were allowed to leave now, but under
drastically changed conditions. In 1939 a declaration of the desire to
leave had been all that was needed, the German repatriation com-
mission did not look closely to see whether the applicant desirous of
escaping the Bolshevik threat bore a German, a Latvian, or a Rus-
sian name, nor did the Latvian government take any interest in
those who were leaving. As a result, a considerable number of Rus-
sians and Latvians, who all too well remembered Bolshevik rule,
departed together with the Germans. Now, after six months of
Soviet occupation, the German commission was literally besieged

The Soviet Occupation of the Baltic States 45

by people eager to escape from the Soviet paradise. This time, how-
ever, the German officials shared a room with a Soviet commission
which insisted that every applicant submit documents to prove his
German descent. Quite often an applicant would be arrested and
taken away, with the German Consulate powerless to help. It was
then that the Russian writer Galich perished (the former Russian
general Galich-Goncharenko). His daughter was married to a
German and had left with the first party of repatriates in 1939. For
some reason he stayed behind. Now some N.K.V.D. men called on
him and proposed that he collaborate with them. Given a short
time in which to make up his mind, he used this respite to rush to the
German Consulate, but the Consul could do nothing for him. When
the N.K.V.D. men came back for an answer, he took poison.

Correspondence with residents of foreign countries, reading of
foreign papers and periodicals, listening to the radio—all this, of
course, was strictly forbidden. The latter prohibition was difficult
to enforce; most people owned excellent radio sets which were not
yet confiscated as automobiles, boats, and other private means of
transportation had been.

During this occupation the Soviet conquerors kept rigidly aloof
from the local population. The soldiers were lodged in barracks and
were seldom seen on the streets, and then only in groups. Officers
and office workers with their families occupied the many apart-
ments abandoned by the repatriates. Soviet people were never
seen on the streets in the company of local residents. As a rule, both
Latvians and local Russians avoided contacts with the occupiers.
Their attitude was one of secret hostility. The occupiers on their
part kept to themselves and behaved with great restraint.

In the spring of 1941 a general registration of the population was
ordered; new passports were to be issued. The passports had been
printed in the Soviet Union, and many of them bore stamps of the
Oriental republics—Kasakhstan, Tadjikistan, and others. This was
a new cause for alarm among the population.

The soldiers of the former Latvian army and those who were doing
their military service at the time of the Soviet invasion were not
demobilized, but regiments were broken up into small units, which
were incorporated into the Soviet army, chiefly the troops stationed
in Lithuania.

The iron grip of Communist rule became ever tighter. Night
after night people were arrested in their homes. No one returned
from prison. Parties of prisoners, one after another, were deported

46 The Russian Review

to the north. When Easter came, people no longer dared to cele-
brate it openly. Services, to be sure, were still held in the churches,
often attended by Soviet people trying to keep out of sight in far
corners, but the ringing of church bells was forbidden.

“We are still handhng you with kid gloves, comrades!’ remarked a
N.K.V.D. man, and this was true. To avoid open rebellion, the
Soviet authorities acted with great caution for a time. Only after a
year of occupation, when most prominent leaders had been liqui-
dated, did they strike. In the night of June 14 a gigantic raid was
carried out in all the Baltic states. All local N.K.V.D. organizations
and their auxiliaries were engaged in the operation. According to a
statement made a few years ago in Germany by a former N.K.V.D.
man involved in the raid, the secret police had been given a definite
assignment—to round up no less than one and a half million pris-
oners. The operation took place simultaneously in all towns and
villages. Whole families were snatched from their homes and loaded
on deportation trains prepared in advance. Ever since, the 14th of
June has been a day of mourning for Latvian émigrés. The number
of arrests in Latvia alone exceeded 100,000 (the total number of
those who perished reached 600,000). In Estonia and Lithuania
there were as many.

Strictly guarded freight trains, packed with people, slowly moved
eastward. All the attempts of local inhabitants to get through to the
trains waiting their turn on the sidetracks, in order to pass at least a
jug of water to the unfortunate people, were of no avail. The suffer-
ings of the deportees were intensified by the unusual heat. Inhabi-
tants of the frontier villages saw hundreds of corpses thrown out of
the cars all along the route of the trains.

According to reports of former Soviet prisoners who are now
émigrés, it appears certain that the overwhelming majority of those
hundreds of thousands of Balts deported to the slave labor camps of
northern Russia, perished within a short time. Some died on the
journey, others in the camps, and still others made up the “death
parties.” Immediately after their arrival (as could be inferred from
their still decent clothes) they were sent by the hundreds to the
taiga, where they were shot, and then buried in mass graves dug
for them by other prisoners. The ground was then leveled by heavy
trucks.

On June 22, a week after the raid, war with Germany was de-
clared. To the Baltic population this meant a hope of salvation, and
no wonder. Soldiers as well as men in civilian life fled to the woods

The Soviet Occupation of the Baltic States 47

to await the arrival of the Germans. The German armies advanced
impetuously. Five days later the Soviet authorities were in a state
of panic. Railway stations, trains, and all the highways were filled
with retreating troops, fleeing Soviet officials, Latvian Communists,
and also Jews dreading Hitler’s Nuremberg laws. Everywhere the
fugitives were waylaid by an embittered population. There was no
actual fighting around Riga. German airplanes, above the city
and the seashore, confined themselves to reconnaissance. The
Soviet authorities had ordered the inhabitants to paste paper over
the windows, the air alarm was sounded almost continuously. The
Germans, however, spared the city. At the very last, on June 29
and 30, artillery fire destroyed half of the Old Town located on the
shore of the Dvina. Some of the ancient buildings crumbled, others
burned down. Two precious monuments of medieval architecture
perished in the fire—the so-called ‘House of the Blackheads” and a
Petrine church with a three-storied open-work oaken belltower,
considered the tallest wooden building in Europe and the symbol
of Riga.

The retreating Soviet troops blew up the big railway bridge across
the Dvina. On June 30, German troops entered the still smoking
city and were enthusiastically greeted by the population. There
was a rush to the prisons, but it was too late. Part of the prisoners
had been transferred from Riga to Dunaburg and many had died
on the way; others had been executed by N.K.V.D. agents. Dead
bodies were stacked high in the prison yards. The central N.K.V.D.
building was filled with corpses; torture chambers were discovered in
its cellars. Hardly a family was left in Latvia that had not lost one
or more of its members. A solemn service was held in the Greek
Orthodox cathedral by the surviving clergy in commemoration of the
victims. Salvation had come too late for many, and there was no
Joy.

The thirteen months of Soviet occupation were more than enough
to cure everyone not only of any trace of “‘neutral” or “loyal atti-
tude” towards Communism, but also of the illusion cherished by
some, notably by Russians, who thought that Soviet Russia should
not be judged by the N.K.V.D. and the torture chambers, that it
would be possible to live and work under Soviet rule if one just
kept quietly to oneself. Neither the ghetto immediately set up by
the Germans, nor the Nazi treatment of the population met with
approval, but the Balts had no choice. It was not for the first time
in its history that the Baltic area had become a bridgehead. After

48 The Russian Review

having experienced a period of Soviet occupation, the inhabitants
were ready to make common cause with any foe of Bolshevism. This
explains the origin of the so-called Baltic Legion, formed of volun-
teers, both Latvian and Russian, which fought in the ranks of the
famous Nineteenth Division in 1944-1945, even later—defending
literally every inch of ground with the courage of despair, so as to
allow more people to escape west before the Soviet reoccupation.
Mitau, a small town about 25 miles from Riga, changed hands eight
times until nothing was left of it, but this made it possible to hold
Riga for several months. Riga finally was taken on October 13,
1944. But Libau, the last piece of Baltic ground, held out until
June 8, 1945, that is, one month after the armistice. And all the
while vessels of any kind that could float on the water, were leaving
the port, crammed with wounded and refugees.

As might have been expected, the reprisals against the population,
of which some information has reached the West despite the Iron
Curtain, were ruthlessly cruel. In Lithuania, for instance, in 1952
the regular secret police was supplemented by some 30,000 so-called
“exterminators,” a term that speaks for itself. It would be no mis-
take to state that no less than a third of the population has been
deported to the extreme north. The story of the guerillas’ opera-
tions in the woods has been told by Gunno Heino, an Estonian
seaman, who in 1952 crossed over to Sweden’s shore in a rowboat,
after having spent all the years since 1945 in the woods, until he
became convinced of the hopelessness of the struggle and decided
to escape. The resistance of the partisans was broken when the
authorities let it be known that for every Communist killed by
them ten hostages from the local population would be shot; later
this number was increased to a hundred, and finally to a thousand.
These were by no means empty threats, and all partisan activities
came to an end.

Today the chief target of persecution is, of course, the Church,
especially in Lithuania where the majority of the population are
Catholics. The observance of religious holidays is forbidden. In
Riga the Novo-Gertrudinskaya Church has been transformed into a
Komsomol club, at Dunaburg a church has been turned into a silo,
the Nikolaevsky cathedral at Tallin has become a fish-canning fac-
tory, the cathedrals and monasteries of Vilno are closed, and the
Church of Christ’s Resurrection is a Komsomol dormitory with a
cinema. On Christmas Eve in 1952 Radio Riga announced: ‘God
has never existed. . . . God is an invention of the capitalists. . . .”

The Soviet Occupation of the Baltic States 49

The obituary list of clergy of all denominations includes over a
thousand names, among them nine bishops.

Economic conditions, according to data in Soviet newspapers,
continue to be deplorable, despite all the measures of the Soviet
authorities. Collectivization has been completed, but agricultural
production is only a fraction of what it used to be. The Five-Year
Plans, whether in agriculture or in light industry, remain unfulfilled.
Yet in the past Riga was a center of light industry, famous for its
candy, knitwear, canned food, textiles, radio sets, etc. The Com-
munist press blames lingering “bourgeois individualism” for the
situation, but this does not improve things. However, the im-
portance of the Baltic area to the Soviet Union is chiefly strategic.
Military bases have been erected all along the coast. Libau is enor-
mously important as a rebuilt. military port. The town is sur-
rounded by a triple belt of forbidden zones, and part of the inhabi-
tants have been removed. Military bases, secret forts, and airports
are scattered over the whole Baltic area. The genocide of the Baltic
population has been nearly completed.

The Angarstroy
By A. LEBED AND B. YAKOVLEV

| 2 pesusemeayrog construction, a part of the government’s policy
ever since the beginning of Soviet rule, has lately shown a re-
markable growth. The new canals and hydroelectric stations in the
Ukraine as well as the complex system of hydrotechnical installations
on the Volga and in Siberia are significant instances of this expan-
sion.

A highly original and interesting project in this field is the so-
called ‘““Angarstroy”—a vast multiple-purpose hydrotechnical de-
velopment destined to generate huge quantities of electric power as
well as to solve various problems of water transportation. It is
geographically linked with immensely rich coal and ore deposits.

We propose here to give an outline of this vital ganglion in the
nervous system of the Soviet state.

For a better understanding of the ieaibonion of this project, it is
necessary to dwell briefly on the characteristic features of Lake
Baikal—the center, as it were, around which the gigantic enterprise
has been planned and is now being built.

Lake Baikal is located in Central Asia, some 44 miles from the
town of Irkutsk. It is 395 miles long, with a maximum width of
49.3 miles, and occupies an area of 13 thousand square miles—equal
to that of Belgium or the Netherlands. The depth of Lake Baikal
reaches 5,712 feet; owing to this depth, the volume of water in the
lake adds up to 30,084 billion cubic yards.'! The average level of its
surface is 1,502 feet above, and that of the bottom 4,265 feet below
sea level.

Lake Baikal is surrounded by high mountain ranges. To the
south rise the Eastern Sayansk mountains, with the glacier-covered
peak Munku-Sardyk (11,453 feet); to the east are the Ulan-Burgas,
the Ikatsky and Bergusinsky ranges, with peaks up to 9,186 feet;
along the western shore stretches the Baikalsky chain with peaks
up to 8,858 feet; on the north loom the spurs of the north-Baikal
highlands. This mountainous border either towers steeply above

*This is an excerpt, translated into English, from the authors’ forthcoming book
on the réle of hydrotechnical projects in the waterway system of the U.S.S.R. [Ed.].
1M. M. Kozhov, Lake Baikal and Its Life, Moscow, 1953, pp. 3-4.

5°

The Angarstroy 1

the shores or else recedes to a distance of 6.2-12.4 miles from the
lake.

More than 300 tributaries rising in the mountains, many of them
big and deep, flow into Lake Baikal. In the course of a year 72 bil-
lion cubic yards of water are discharged into the lake, while only
one river, the Angara, issues from it to carry away most of these
waters. The river Angara is about 3,281 feet wide when it leaves
Lake Baikal and carries off 2,281 cubic yards of water every second.
It has numerous tributaries. Forcing its way through rapids im-
passable to ships, the Angara, at the end of a course of 1,157 miles,
empties into the river Yenisei. At this point the level of the Angara
is 1,181 feet below that of Lake Baikal. Thus there is a drop of
nearly .66 feet in the river’s level for every .62 miles of its length.
The velocity of its flow is very great, and the river represents a
mighty potential of energy, whose utilization can produce over
60 billion kilowatt-hours? of electric power annually. The availabil-
ity to the power plants now under construction of a permanent
water store with a non-sinking level in Lake Baikal makes it possible
to maintain a uniform pressure of the upper waters throughout the
whole year. It has been computed that if the discharge of water
into Lake Baikal were theoretically stopped, it would take about
400 years to empty the lake through the river Angara; this conveys
an idea of the magnitude of the store of water it contains.

In addition to cheap electric power from Lake Baikal, the terri-
tory adjacent to it and to the river Angara is prodigiously rich in
valuable minerals. The area has attracted the attention of numerous
explorers. According to V. A. Obruchev, Soviet academician and
expert on Siberia, during the period 1918-1940 alone there were pub-
lished no less than 830 scientific books, treatises, and reports devoted
to the geological investigation of Lake Baikal and the adjoining
region.®

Most notable among the natural resources of the territory are
coal, mineral oil, gold, iron, manganese, copper, silver, lead, mica,
pyrite, gypsum, molybdenum, and wolfram.

Coalfields, known as the Cheremkhovsky deposit, stretch for
hundreds of miles along the Angara. The coal forms a seam 19.7 feet
thick and is tapped by the open-pit method.‘ The mining operations

2§mall Soviet Encyclopedia, 1937, Vol. 1, p. 358.

8V. A. Obruchev, History of the Geological Exploration of Siberia, Leningrad, 5 v.
1931-46.

‘Radio Moscow, August 18, 1953.

2 The Russian Review

are well organized, with an extensive use of earth-moving machinery,
excavators, and bulldozers.

Close to the rivers Angara and Ilim, some 310 miles from Lake
Baikal, lies the Angaro-Ilimsky iron-ore zone, which contains eleven
separate ore deposits. The ore (magnetite) occurs in steeply de-
scending veins. At the Rudnogorsky deposit the vein has a length

of 2.5 miles, a thickness up to 115 feet, and contains up to 66% iron.
The contents of this vein alone, according to estimates made in
1932, would provide 250 million tons.’ Even these few data suffice
to illustrate the great natural wealth of the Baikal region. It goes
without saying that the Soviet government is eager to exploit these
rich resources.

Ever since 1931, additional explorations and surveys have been in
progress and plans have been in the making. The outcome is the
hydrotechnical project now under construction on the river Angara—
the so-called Angarstroy. Since the end of World War II, and in
particular of late, the Soviet government has shown an exceptional
interest in this undertaking. The Nineteenth Congress of the Com-
munist Party resolved: “To start work on the investigation of the
power resources of the river Angara, in order to develop various
branches of industry—aluminum, chemical, metallurgical, and
others—on the basis of cheap electric power and local sources of raw
materials.”

It may seem puzzling that the Congress should resolve “‘to start
work on the investigation” at a time when the actual construction
on the site was already under way. However, the explanation of this
discrepancy between the resolution and the facts, as well as of the
heightened official interest in the Baikal region, is simple: as early
as 1924 the occurrence of uranium and thorium-bearing ores in
pegmatite veins in the Sludianka area had been reported by the
geologists V. G. Khlopin and G. Cherniak, who had explored the
territory.© Uranium-bearing ores were also found near the upper
part of Lake Baikal. Also, in the Baikal region, some 124 miles from
the Sludianka, there occur, according to Obruchev, deposits of
graphite, a material indispensable in the construction of atomic
furnaces.

Let us now turn to the hydrotechnical project, in part completed,
on the river Angara and its tributaries. The plans for the An-
garstroy drawn up in 1936 called for the erection on the river Angara

*Small Soviet Encyclopedia, 1937, Vol. 1, p. 358.
*V. A. Obruchev, History of the Geological Exploration of Siberia.

The Angarstroy

OWENISEISK

ANGARSTROY

RAILROADS IN OPERATION
PROJECTED RAILROADS

HYDROELECTRIC STATIONS
DISCONTINUED HYDROELECTRIC STATIONS
PROJECTED POWER OF THE HYDROELECTRIC " ,

STATIONS |!!!
B BROWN GOAL n't
niin CG COAL
YUtltlt. | VRON ORE
yates =M COPPER

“¢ U URANIUM

, G GRAPHITE
O on

alone (not counting the tributaries) of six huge hydrotechnical
structures, providing special arrangements for navigation and
including a series of power plants with a total generating capacity
of 9 million kilowatts and an annual output of 61.3 billion kilowatt-
hours.’ The tributaries included, a total of 13 hydroelectric stations
were envisaged, with an estimated capacity of 12 million kilowatts.
The first to be built was a power station on the Angara at the point
where it issues from Lake Baikal. The work was started, but the
war put a stop to it, and the operations were resumed only in 1948.8
Instead of the two upper hydroelectric stations originally planned,
the Baikalsky and the Barkhatovsky, the post-war program provides
for only one, which is now under construction near the town Barkha-
tovo. The site of the construction is called “the fall’—here the
difference between the highest and the lowest point of the river’s
level reaches 98 feet. Exact data regarding the scope of the build-
ing operations are not available, but some idea of the dimensions
*Small Soviet Encyclopedia, 1937, Vol. 1, p. 359.

*Radio Moscow, January 29, 1954.
*Ogoniok, December, 1953, pp. 3-4-

54 The Russian Review

of the project may be gained from the fact that the work has been
going on for four years, with excavators, scrapers, bulldozers, trac-
tors, and other mechanical equipment used on a large scale.

Our assumption that the Angarstroy is a development of the first
magnitude is corroborated by the following facts and figures. The
dam across the channel of the Angara will raise the water level in the
river and will create a continuous reservoir, the “Sea of Angara,”
which will merge with Lake Baikal and raise the latter’s level by
4.9 feet.” The rise of the water will also affect the level of the river
Kitai. The relocation of industrial plants and collective farms from
the prospective reservoir area has already begun. The early com-
pletion of the Angarstroy is apparently considered a matter of
prime urgency; it is known that manpower and heavy equipment
have been transferred to its site from the main Turkmen canal.
Within the building zone, the town of Angarsk has arisen and al-
ready has new houses with 84 thousand square yards of floor space,
not counting temporary huts."!

Once completed, the project will solve many problems of water
transportation. The construction of a series of hydroelectric sta-
tions on the river Angara will result in linking Lake Baikal with the
Arctic Ocean through the river Yenisei, thus connecting it with the
Northern maritime route. And within the total Soviet system of
canals, mapped out or under construction, Lake Baikal will have a
deep-water connection (deep enough to raise sea-going vessels) with
the Sea of Aral, the Caspian Sea, and all the seas surrounding the
European part of the U.S.S.R. Plans are also afoot to link Lake
Baikal with the Pacific Ocean through the river Amur, whose navi-
gable depth would be increased by means of various engineering
measures.

It should be clear from the above that the Baikal region is on the
way to becoming a major industrial center. Foreigners are strictly
forbidden to enter the area and it may safely be assumed that not
all Soviet citizens are allowed access to it.

Small Soviet Encyclopedia, 1937, Vol. 1, p. 358.
1tRadio Moscow, January 29, 1954.

The Vestiges of Old Russia
in Alaska’

By HE ten A. SHENITZz

eee on Russian customs and language, as they are prac-
ticed in Alaska today, cannot be done at a desk in a library, as
there is almost no recently published material on this subject. As a
matter of fact, I do not believe that there has been any research
done in this field since the purchase of Alaska in 1867.

The information upon which this paper is based comes chiefly
from two sources: Mrs. Laura Jones’ book, Heart in the Snow, pub-
lished in 1952, and my own observations. In Mrs. Jones’ book, be-
cause of the fact that she is a careful observer, we find a good report
on customs and life in the Aleut-Eskimo village, Pilot Point, in
Bristol Bay, where she was a teacher. Little did she know, when she
was writing her book, how valuable her observations would become
to those who have a Russian linguistic and historical background.
Her book, which provides delightful reading, is the first recently
published account of some of the old Russian customs and folklore
still in force in Alaska.

It was in October, 1867 that Old Glory was raised in Sitka and the
Russian flag came down. Shortly after, the majority of Russians
went back to Russia. Today, 87 years later, we still find tangible
and intangible marks left by the Russians on the Alaska soil.

The first and most obvious Russian marks are, of course, Russian
churches with their eastern domes. Some of these churches are
falling apart; some are closed on account of lack of priests willing
to come to this “snow and icebound” country. To the majority of
people in the continental United States, Alaska is still the land of
dog sleds and polar bear. But a few Russian churches are func-
tioning. Although those priests who have been sent from the States
do not know the native tongues, and although the English of these
priests is more than limited, and in spite of the fact that the Church
services are conducted in Church-Slavonic, a language understood
by no one but the priests themselves, the congregations are devoted

*A paper read at the Fourth Alaskan Science Conference, Juneau, Alaska, Octo-
ber 1, 1953 [Ed.].

56 The Russian Review

to their little churches and are proud of them. This devotion is one
of those intangible marks about which I am going to speak later on.

Other tangible marks of the Russian heritage are: old Russian
peasants’ customs, Russian folklore, and the Russian language.

In Heart in the Snow, Mrs. Jones, speaking of the way the women
in Pilot Point carry water from the lakes to their homes, describes
“‘a wooden yoke across the shoulders with a bucket on each side.”
This method of carrying water has been used for centuries in central
and northern Russia.

“Sara, the Aleut woman,” Mrs. Jones writes, “played her ac-
cordion, chanting an ancient Aleut song, for no group was long
together without music.” Not knowing the words of the song, I am
not prepared to state that it was a Russian song, but the fact that
it was a chant is rather significant. In Russia, in the old days, a
chant was the customary form of singing, based, of course, on Church
singing, which in the early period of the development of Church
music was chant only. Accordions were originally introduced to
Russians by craftsmen who came to Russia from Italy. Russians
were pleased with accordions and eventually they became Russian
folk instruments. It is impossible to visualize a Russian village
without a few accordion players. Usually the best player was the
most popular man and the conqueror of hearts. Even in the Soviet
Union people still sing songs about the irresistible charm of men who
excel in playing accordions.

Describing the bear hunting technique observed in Pilot Point,
Mrs. Jones says: ““Willie’s was the most unique and the safest
method of bear hunting. When he located a vent, which is always
present over the location of a bear den, Willie would make a large,
firm snowball and roll it over the vent. Sooner or later the bear
would stick his head out for air. The moment he did, Willie would
shoot him.” This method, though unique at present, used to be a
standard method of Russian peasants to hunt bear, though in early
times, when firearms were not plentiful among the peasants, spears
were used instead of guns. I would not be at all surprised to learn
that Siberian peasants still use the same method.

““Beewock,” a drink made in Pilot Point, is described as produced
by “throwing together anything handy and allowing it to ferment,
though not for long, as the brewers hadn’t the patience to wait.”
The meaningless name “Beewock” is a corrupted Russian word,
bivac, bivouac in English. Drinks that were made with little time
to spare for fermenting, while a group was on a bivouac, was called

The Vestiges of Old Russia in Alaska 57

in the old days divuachnoe pit’e, which means a bivouac drink, hence
the Aleutian “‘Beewock.”

Tying a piece of red yarn to prevent the spreading of swelling on
legs or arms, as was practiced by Sara of Pilot Point, is a common
Russian peasants’ remedy.

An Eskimo ball game called Miatchee is played at Pilot Point.
““Miatchee” is a Russian word, miachik, meaning handball. Hand-
ball was and still is one of the favorite games in Russia.

In pre-Communist Russia, the celebration of Christmas continued
for twelve days, three days of Church holidays, December 25-27,
and nine days of merriment, December 28-January 5. These dates,
of course, are those of the Julian calendar. In Laura Jones’ book
we find that the Aleuts in Pilot Point celebrate Christmas exactly
the same number of days and in the same way, even to the point of
carrying the six-pointed Russian Christmas star, going from house
to house, and singing the Russian Christmas songs, as it has been
done for centuries in Russia.

Masquerading is one of the favorite Russian forms of Christmas
frolic. The Aleuts masquerade at Christmas time. Mrs. Jones tells
us about a masked figure called “muskrat.” It only sounds like
“muskrat” to an ear not attuned to Russian sounds. “Muskrat”
is not a muskrat but a mask, in English, maska, in Russian. In
Russia it is customary to address a masked person as maska.

Going into an unlighted bathhouse, or into an unlighted church
at midnight, during one of these nine days of merrymaking, is an
old Russian superstitious custom. One does it in order either to
learn one’s future, or to get in touch with “little people,” who must
be appeased from time to time. A bathhouse is the usual place for
meeting those little spirits, although in the same bathhouse, if one
places a mirror so that it faces the door, one has a chance to see
one’s future spouse. Mrs. Jones has observed the same superstition
in Pilot Point, where she herself was selected to go into an unlighted
church at midnight.

The Russian language can be easily traced in Alaska. Russian
geographic names, in correct or corrupted form, can be seen on
every map of Alaska. In the Aleutian Islands, such words as sugar,
tea, bread, matches, flour, milk, teapot, overcoat, kerchief, button,
steamship, hammer, store clerk, and names of certain edible wild
plants such as parsley, cow parsnip, ptarmigan grass, etc., are used
not in the Aleut or English language, but in Russian, though mostly
in a corrupted form. In Pilot Point the Russian form of greeting on

The Russian Review

holidays, s prazdnikom, has been corrupted into dblaznikom; and the
Russian word for Christmas, Rozhdestvo, has become Arosistwock.
In the same village there is an Eskimo girl whose name is Izba,
which means a peasant’s house in Russian.

I was told by quite a few people, old residents of Kodiak, that
before World War II one who knew the Russian language could get
along in Kodiak without knowing any other language.

The intangible vestiges are demonstrated by natives of the East-
ern Orthodox faith in their devotion to their Church and in their
proud persistence in calling themselves Russian. The Russian
Church in Alaska has little to offer to her disciples. It is a poor
Church, and it is greatly neglected by the Church authorities in the
States. The spiritual needs of congregations are not taken care of,
and a good, active Russian priest in Alaska is rather the exception
than the rule. Yet, these people, actually forgotten by their Church,
support it to the best of their ability. They are united in their love
for the ritualistic services of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Al-
' though they have every opportunity to join other denominations,
which would offer them a great deal more than the Russian Church
would ever care to, they still remain within the fold.

What impressed me most when I came to Alaska was the fact
that a family which can claim a Russian ancestor, even three or four
generations back, invariably calls itself Russian. I have met fam-
ilies in which there is much more Norwegian or Swedish blood than
Russian, but they consider themselves Russian. I have been invited
to their homes. They still display the famous Russian hospitality,
and they serve dishes which, though modified, are Russian dishes.
On occasion they: make an attempt to speak a language that they
believe is Russian, but which really is a language of their own.

The interesting part of these phenomena is that the self-styled
Russians have no interest in old Russia, and the Soviet Union,
according to most of them, is not Russia. They are perfectly loyal
Americans. On one occasion I knew that the family I was visiting
was American born for generations back. Pretending that I did not
know it, I asked them when they had come to the United States.
They were almost indignant in their reply. No, they were not for-
eign born; they were American born. Yet they are Russian. It all
goes back to the time of Russian America, as Alaska was called
when she belonged to Russia.

During the early period of Russian domination, natives of Alaska

The Vestiges of Old Russia in Alaska 59

had neither social nor legal status in their relations with Russians.
As time went on, marriages between Russian men and native women
became more frequent. The offspring of these marriages were
officially known as Creoles, and their legal and social status became
somewhat higher. Creole offspring were accepted by the Russians
as Russian, and as such they became people of distinction among the
natives. Eighty-seven years later it is still a mark of distinction in
Alaska to be a Russian.

Book Reviews

Fiorinsky, Micuaet T. Russia: A
History and an Interpretation.
New York, Macmillan, 1953. 2
vols., 628 pp. and 1511 pp. $15.00.

The two volumes of Russian his-
tory by Professor M. T. Florinsky
represent a solid work, designed not
as a concise textbook but as a rather
comprehensive course of study. As
indicated by its title, the purpose of
the book is to present not only a
pragmatic history of Russia but also
an interpretation of it. The work
covers a long period and contains a
wealth of material. It explores the
internal policies of the Russian state
as well as its foreign relations, its
social-economic conditions as well as
its cultural development—although

not every A is treated with

equal thoroughness. In this respect
the second volume seems better or-
ganized than the first. The reader of
M. T. Florinsky’s two volumes will
find in them a vast fund of knowl-
edge, sound opinions, and interest-
ing appraisals. In his interpreta-
tion of Russian history the author
does not always follow the path
beaten by the great masters of Rus-
sian historiography—Kliuchevsky,
Solovyov, Platonov, and others—
but frequently shows considerable
independence in his views and
evaluations. Thus, for instance, he
attempts a new interpretation of
the activities of Peter III and, to
some extent, those of Paul I. In
several other instances the author
displays an independent mind. This
is one of the positive and indeed
commendable features of Florin-
sky’s work, which make it a val-
uable addition to the literature

in this field. The book, neverthe-
less, has its shortcomings.

It shows, for instance, a striking
lack of balance in the distribution
of the material. Only 300 pages are
devoted to the history of Kievan
and Muscovite Russia, a period of
about eight centuries. The eight-
eenth century is treated in some-
what greater detail in 320 pages.
The entire second volume is devoted
to the history of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. The
cursory treatment of the Kievan
and the Muscovite periods cannot
be explained by a dearth of material.
During the last decades a number of
historians both inside and outside
the Soviet Union have been devot-
ing much attention to the study of
Kievan Rus and Muscovy, and
abundant material has been col-
lected (see, for example, the works
of Rostovtsev, Vernadsky, Struve,
Grekov, Rybakov, Navrodin, the
symposium History of Culture of
Ancient Russia, 1951, and others).

As regards M. Florinsky’s method
of exposition, it would seem to this
reviewer that he lays too much
stress upon the activities of individ-
uals—emperors, ministers, tsarist
favorites—and accords too little
attention, while not neglecting them
entirely, to the social factors of the
historical process. As to his inter-
pretation of events—emphasized in
the title of the book—it quite often
fails to carry conviction. This is
especially true of the first volume.
In some cases the author’s argu-
ments are insufficiently developed;
in other instances his conclusions
appear doubtful. Let us cite a few
examples.

Book Reviews 61

In dealing with the origins of
Russia, the author, after a brief
reference to the Bertinian annals,
attributes the creation of the Rus-
sian state to the Scandinavian
Norsemen (pp. 9-15). He fails to
mention the different views held by
historians of the ‘anti-Norman”
school. M. Florinsky further asserts
that “Rus,” the original name of the
country, was derived from the name
of the Norman bands that were
operating along the Russian water-
ways (p. 9). The author does not
tell us how these Norman bands had
come by that name. Yet the prob-
lem of the origin of the name “Rus”
is still a highly controversial issue in
historical science. All the attempts
of Schloezer, Tunman, Kunik,
Thomsen, and Shakhmatoyv, to solve
the riddle have been unsuccessful.
A. A. Shakhmatov spent years try-
ing in vain to find a Scandinavian
root-word for the name “Rus.”
Shortly before his death in 1920, in
summing up his labors, he wrote:
“The origin of the name ‘Rus,’ de-
spite the persistent efforts of many
scholars, remains obscure... .”
His advice was to go on looking for a
root-word in the Scandinavian lan-
guages (‘‘Early Fortunes of the Rus-
sian Tribe,’ 1919, 52 pp.). After
Shakhmatov’s death some historians
of the Norman school have followed
his advice (for instance, Brim:
drotsmen, 1923); others have given
up hope of finding a Scandinavian
root and have turned elsewhere
trying to discover some place-name
from which “Rus” may have been
derived (Belyaev, Frisia, 1927; Ver-
nadsky, Rustringen, 1943); to still
others the Scandinavian origin o
“Rus” is just a matter of faith. This
being the situation, it is natural that
the reader should be curious to know
the reasons upon which M. Florin-

sky bases his assertion. But he fails
to disclose them.

As to the problem of feudalism in
ancient Russia, the author cites two
views of it current in historiography:
the one admitting, the other deny-
ing the existence of feudalism in
medieval Russia (p. 108). His expo-
sition suggests that he ranges him-
self with the second group. We are
well informed of the reasons that im-
pelled Kliuchevsky, Miliukov, and
Struve, to deny, wholly or partly,
the existence of a feudal system in
Russia; Florinsky, however, fails to
make it clear what features of the
historical development of medieval
Russia prevent him from admitting
a Russian feudalism. It is not
enough to express contempt for
“the pedantic minds that firmly
believe in the universality of his-
torical and sociological schemes”
(p. 108)—one has to prove one’s
right to despise them. Professor
Florinsky confines himself to re-
peated allegations of profound dif-
ferences and lets it go at that. He
fails to contribute any material to
the solution of the problem.

In dealing with the trial of Pa-
triarch Nikon, the author points out
that his judges, the eastern pa-
triarchs, had renounced “the proud
Byzantine tradition of the primacy
of the ecclesiastical power over the
secular” and had obsequiously rec-
ognized the obligation of the Pa-
triarch “to obey the tsar in all
political questions” (P. 292). The
author is mistaken. It was by no
means a “proud Byzantine tradi-
tion” to put the Church above the
state but a Roman-Catholic one.
After all, in 1077, Emperor Henry
IV went to Canossa, barefoot and
clad in sack-cloth, to do penance
imposed by the Pope, not by the
Patriarch of Constantinople. Byzan-

62 The Russian Review

tium, in theory, recognized a certain
equilibrium between the ecclesiasti-
cal and the secular power, each
master within its own sphere (“‘ren-
der unto Caesar the things that are
Caesar’s, and unto God the things
that are God’s’’). In practice, how-
ever, as early as the ninth century,
the primacy of the emperor was
acknowledged in all matters of ad-
ministration, including Church ad-
ministration (yet excluding matters
of faith), a situation which, in its
extreme form, gave rise to serious
objections. It was for this that
Nikon was brought to trial—for
having followed the Catholic exam-

le in putting the authority of the
Deseanek above that of the Tsar.
What the judges did was to apply
to him the Byzantine tradition <a
the Patriarch was to subordinate
himself to the Tsar in_ political
matters.

Professor Florinsky has a par-
ticular dislike for Peter I. As a mat-
ter of fact, neither Kliuchevsky nor
Miliukov liked Peter, yet they did
not dispute his achievements. Pro-
fessor Florinsky goes much farther
and reaches the conclusion that
“the flimsy and fanciful temple of
Petrine greatness crumbles into
dust” (p. 431). But 25 pages farther
ahead we read that the Northern
War won for Russia the position of a
great European power (p. 457).
This alone would entitle Peter to
recognition by posterity. Nor should
one forget that Peter provided Rus-
sia with an army and a navy. They
were inferior, say Peter’s detractors.
Against this there is the indubitable
fact that Russia owed to them the
victories of Poltava and Hangé.
Peter also created a merchant ma-
rine, established industries, founded
schools, etc., and much of what he
called into being did survive. There

is no need to regard Peter as a demi-
god, a genius, a man of destiny; yet
he does not deserve to be held up to
scorn. He is entitled to a fair, objec-
tive treatment—which the author
denies him. He condemns Peter for
a great many things and goes so far
as to blame him, “at least partly,”
for actions of his remote succes-
sors—the conduct, for instance, of
Peter III during the Seven-Years’
War (p. 480), or the interference of
Catherine II (and Frederick of
Prussia) into Polish affairs (p. 517)
which led to the partition of Poland.
He forgets that Peter I himself had
been definitely against such a parti-
tion. Fifty years after Peter, Cathe-
rine II and Frederick ought to be
allowed to answer for their actions
themselves.

The author devotes little atten-
tion to the cultural life of ancient
Russia, in particular to the develop-
ment of art. While such experts as
Kondakov, Ainalov, and Grabar
have much to tell us about various
schools of painting, sculpture, and
decorative art during that period,
Professor Florinsky finds there little
more than a wasteland. Notwith-
standing the author’s unqualified
denial (P. 150), sculpture did exist in
ancient Russia—witness the remark-
able miniature sculpture of the
school of Ambrosy in the fifteenth
century, the decorative carving of
the elder Arseny and his “‘school,”
and others.

Vol. I contains not a few factual
errors and inaccuracies. On page 5,
for instance, the author states that
the Avars “emerged from Asia in
the second half of the ninth cen-
tury.” This is incorrect. Avars had
been known in Europe as early as
the sixth century. They had con-
quered some of the Slavic tribes and

had reached the Danube by 562;

Book Reviews 63

here they established a state, fought
against Byzantium in the sixth and
seventh centuries, etc. On the same

age we find the assertion that the

hazar empire was destroyed by the
Pechenegs in the tenth century; on
page 8 we read that the power of the
Khazars was brought to an end by a
Pecheneg onslaught in the first half
of the ninth century, and on page 17
the author makes the same thing
happen in the middle of the ninth
century. According to Evers, Frahn,
and Harkavy, the Khazar empire
perished in the eleventh century,
after 1016, when the Khazar ruler,
the Kagan Tsula, was defeated in
battle by Greek and Russian troops
led by Mstislav Tmutarakansky. Tt
is quite possible that the Pechenegs
completed the destruction of the
Khazars, but in the eleventh, not
the ninth century.

On pages 6-7, the author states:
“The Eastern Slavs reached the
Dnieper, probably in the seventh
century ... They failed, however,
to establish themselves on the shores
either of the Black Sea or the Sea of
Azov.” Jordanes, however, who
wrote in the sixth century, re-
corded that the Antes were dwelling
along an inlet of the Black Sea be-
tween the Dniester and the Dnieper
(De Origine Actibusque Getarum,
XXIII). And the Russian Chroni-
cle mentions the fact that Ulichi
and Tivertsy were settled along the
Dniester down to the seashore, and
not as transients. They built towns
“and their towns exist to this day”
(Povest Vremennykh let, ed. 1950,
p. 14).

The footnote on page 9 states:
“The last reference to the Varang-
ians appears in the Chronicle un-
der the year 1043.” This is not
correct. In the Chronicle of Nov-
gorod, Varangians are mentioned

under the years 1188, 1201, and
elsewhere. Other transcripts of the
Chronicle contain references to the
Varangians under the years 1240
and 1380. On page 14 we find:
“... the year 854, the first year
mentioned in the Chronicle. . . .”
The first year mentioned there is
852. On page 22 we read that the
sons of Vladimir made use in their
internal struggles of the Poles and
the Polovtsy (Cumans). Actually,
they made use of the Pechenegs; the
Polovtsy made their appearance in
the Black Sea steppes at a later
time, in the second half of the
eleventh century (see the Lavrenty
Chronicle under 1061). On page 65
the author calls Mamay a khan; yet
he was a murza, a general. On
page 68 it is stated that Vasily II
organized “the kingdom of Kasi-
mov’ on the lower Volga. Kasimov
was located on the middle Oka, not
the lower Volga. On page 113 it is
said that the merchants of Novgorod
seldom went abroad, but used to at-
tend fairs at the nearest Baltic
ports—Dorpat, Riga, Reval. This
is inaccurate. Novgorod belonged
to the Hanseatic League and carried
on a lively trade with Wisby. The
Novgorod men maintained there a
community house, a warehouse, and
a church (see document published
by Karamzin, History, iit, note
243). Its last sentences indicate
that eastern wares were brought to
Wisby by Russian merchants. Trade
with Denmark is mentioned in the
same work, Vol. II, note 256; see
also the Novgorod Chronicle under
1130 and 1142. The old Scandina-
vian language adopted such Russian
words as forg, kleti (warehouse),
besman (an instrument for weighing
merchandise), /ad’ya, pechat, etc.
The name of the ancient capital of
Finland—Turku—is derived from

64 . The Russian Review

the Russian torg (Syromyatnikov).
All this proves that Russian mer-
chants did travel to Denmark and
Scandinavia to trade with the West.

On page 114 the author writes
that the Novgorod Veche had no
control over the appointment of the
posadnik (burgomaster). This was
true up to the year 1136; after the
events of that year the Veche did
appoint the posadnik. On page 200
we read that the correspondence
between Kurbsky and Ivan the
Terrible consisted of four letters;
actually there are six of them (four
written by Kurbsky and two by the
Tsar). On page 245 we are told that
after his election to the tsardom,
Mikhail Romanov ‘“‘was discovered”
with his mother in a monastery at
Kaluga; as a matter of fact, he was
found at his own house on the
grounds of the Ipatievsky monastery
at Kostroma. The Romanov family
owned an ancestral estate in the
district of Kostroma as well as the
“Romanov House” within the com-
pound of the Ipatievsky monastery.
On page 408 we read that “seven-
teen fellows from Germany” were
made members of the first body of
the Academy of Sciences. To be
exact, only nine of the seventeen
foreigners were Germans: three were
Swiss, one was French, and the
nationality of four is unknown. On
page 425 the author states: “The
Bashkirs, a people of Mongol de-
scent... .” The Bashkirs belong
to the Ural-Altaic ethnic group, but
to its Turko-Tatar, not its Mon-
golian branch.

To be sure, an extensive work like
the book under review cannot en-
tirely avoid factual inaccuracies.
Nevertheless, the first volume would
gain much from a careful revision.

The second volume of M. T.
Florinsky’s history is elaborated

more thoroughly and in greater de-
tail. Here again, one cannot always
agree with the author, but, as a
rule, in this part of his work he
develops his arguments carefully,
without the vagueness and sketchi-
ness that sometimes mars his first
volume.

Let us record a few objections.
The author, in our opinion, exag-
gerates the importance and political
influence of N. P. Ignatiev (“the
formidable Ignatiev,” pp. 990 and
1007) and the whole Panslavic
trend. Neither the Chancellor
Gorchakov nor the War Minister
D. Miliutin nor Tsar Alexander II
shared this view. Panslavism had
no influence on Russian foreign pol-
icy. It was made much of by the
governments of England, Germany,
and Austria, mainly to justify some
foreign policies of their own. Little
fuss, on the other hand, was made
over Pangermanism. The practical
results are known. Russian Pan-
slavism proved too weak to achieve
anything, while Pangermanism ulti-
mately gave rise to Hitler.

Let us further point out what
seems to us an omission of some
importance. The author, true to his
method of stressing the activities of
prominent personalities as the mo-
tive force of the historical process,
draws detailed character pictures of
Tsar Nicholas II, the Tsarina,
Stolypin, Goremykin, and some
others. It should be obvious, how-
ever, that their actions and the
events during their rule, including
the war with Germany, taken alone,
do not account for the collapse of
the monarchy and the subsequent
events. The social causes of these
phenomena lie deeper. M. T. Florin-
sky is right when he writes: “The
process of social disintegration that

Book Reviews 65

set in must be viewed against the
background of discord, bitterness,
and lack of national unity that had
accumulated for generations” (p.
1375, our italics). The author ie.
do well to expound this statement
in greater detail and to devote a
special chapter to an analysis, at
least in general outline, of the social
factors that caused the fall of the
monarchy.

Factual inaccuracies are not many
in Vol. II. Let us note a few. The
Kirghiz are not a Mongol tribe, as
stated on page 743, but a Turko-
Tatar one; the name of count Milor-
adovich, mentioned on page 747,
was Mikhail and not Nikolai; the
Bespopovtsy (the Priestless) are in-
correctly defined as a sect refusing
to pray for the Tsar and to recog-
nize the hierarchy of the Church
and the sacrament of marriage
(p. 798). They are a branch of the
Old-Believers which includes sev-
eral subdivisions or sects, all of
them denying the hierarchy but
only a few opposing the sacrament
of marriage and refusing to pray
for the Tsar. On page 895 we read
that peasants were subject to cor-
poral punishment until 1904, while
other social classes had been exempt
from it since 1863. Actually, the
nobility had been granted exemp-
tion from corporal punishment by
the “Charter to the Nobility” of
1785.

In conclusion, this reviewer is of
the opinion that the merits of the
work by far outweigh its shortcom-
ings. We hope that a second edition
will provide the author with the
opportunity to take into considera-
tion some of the points we have
made above.

V. A. RIASANOVSKY
San Francisco, California

VeRNADSKY, Georce. The Mongols
and Russia (A History of Russia,
by George Vernadsky and Mi-
chael Karpovich, vol. III). New
Haven, Yale University Press,
1953. 462 pp. § maps. $7.50.
One hails every new volume of

this voluminous project which, when

completed, will become the most
important presentation of the his-
tory of Russia ever written in a non-

Russian language. Also, under

present circumstances, when _his-

torians within the U.S.S.R. are re-
stricted in their scholarly conclu-
sions by an overall doctrine publicly
enforced, this history of Russia
promises to become a most authori-
tative survey, objectively offered by
the two outstanding non-Marxian
historians under the conditions of
an absolute scholarly freedom. Not

since the beginning of the 1930’s,

when P. Milyukov, C. Seignobos,

and L. Eisenmann published their

Histoire de Russie in 3 volumes

(Paris, 1932-1933), has an attempt

of such crucial value been under-

taken by the students of Russia out-
side the U.S.S.R.

Still, Professor Vernadsky’s The
Mongols and Russia has been, for
this reviewer, a major disappoint-
ment. Instead of the history of
Russia during a most important
period (from the thirteenth to the
sixteenth century) a history of the
Mongol world is offered to us, pri-
marily, with the underlying under-
standing that the Mongol rule repre-
sented the key factor of Russian
historical development during these
centuries. A key factor of such
overwhelming importance, in Pro-
fessor Vernadsky’s eyes, that fewer
than S50 pages (in a book of 390 pages
of text) have been devoted by him
to Russian economic, institutional,

66 The Russian Review

social, and intellectual history (pp.
338-385, of chapter 5: “The Mongol
Impact on Russia”. The rest is
either exclusively Mongol history
(the first 213 pages) or represents a
minute description of the military
and diplomatic relations between
the Mongols and not only Russia
(Muscovy and Lithuania) but the
whole of Eastern Europe and the
Near East. An important sub-
chapter deals with the Mongol ad-
ministration in Russia (pp. 214-232).

The result of Professor Vernad-
sky’s plan is an optical deformation,
similar to the one which would arise
if a historian of Greece should
describe Greek history between 1453
and 1832 as mainly an upshot of he
Ottoman conquest (other analogies
would also be in order, but this one
seems to be the most appropriate).
Professor Vernadsky hamscif ad-
mits this deficiency of his plan,
when in his foreword he says: “The
disadvantage of my plan, of which I
am well aware, is that no room has
been left, within the framework of
this volume, for a balanced picture
of Russian social, economic, and
cultural life under the Mongols.”
However, not only does he under-
rate this deficiency, when, in con-
tinuing, he says: “This is especially
true of West Russia and Novgorod”
(it is true, almost to the same de-
gree, of North Eastern Russia!), but
he certainly does not give full jus-
tice to the complexity of Russian
medieval development, when he
hopes “‘to make up for the deficiency
in the next volume of this series, by
means of retrospect.” This reviewer
even submits that a retrospect might
take the development out of its
chronological context, and thus
produce a new, dangerous, optical
deformation. What would be neces-
sary is a new study of the problems

treated by Professor Vernadsky in
chapter § of this book from factors
other than the Mongol impact,
and especially from the point of
view of domestic factors. There is a
place for such a book, and there is a
necessity for it; without it, this
history of Russia will be incom-
plete. It is entirely legitimate to
deal in a special volume with the
Mongol factor in Russian history,
but it should not be at the cost of
other essential developments. I
must express my regret that the
author did not plan for this period,
instead of one book, two books, the
second of which would be devoted
to Russian history per se in its
economic, social, institutional, and
cultural aspects during its ““Medie-
val period.’

It is hardly possible, within the
narrow limits of thie review, to dis-
cuss, one by one, all the essential
points of this remarkably informa-
tive volume. This reviewer, more-
over, lacks special knowledge to
deal with the chapters of the book
where Mongol history is specifically
treated (and they represent the
larger part of the book). The num-
ber of problems raised by the chap-
ters dealing with Russia is so great
and of such complexity, that it
would be presumptuous to at-
tempt to give them even a most
casual consideration; besides, a cas-
ual treatment would only be mis-
leading. Knowing this difficulty,
this reviewer will refer those of the
readers of The Mongols and Russia
who might be interested in a point
of view on the Mongol impact differ-
ent from that of Professor Vernad-
sky, to the excellent analysis of this
problem in V. I. Riasanovsky’s
Obzor russkoi kultury, part 1, chap-
ter IV, pp. 381-411 (Eugene, Oregon,
1947). As to a more thorough pic-

Book Reviews 67

ture of Russian internal develop-
ment during this period, where a//
factors have been taken into con-
sideration, there is so far no better
book available than Alexander Eck’s
Le Moyen dge russe (Paris, 1933) as
an overall summary. V. I. Riasanov-
sky’s appraisal is particulary valid
in view of his knowledge not only of
Russian history, but also of Mongol
institutions. ;

As in all his works, Professor
Vernadsky has added to this vol-
ume detailed and valuable bibliog-
raphies, genealogical tables, and
indices. These, together with nu-
merous footnotes, offer to a student
of Mongol or Russian history, splen-
did leads toward independent study.
This critical and _ bibliographical
apparatus also testifies to the enor-
mous work performed by the author
of this volume. In spite of this re-
viewer's disagreement with the au-
thor’s conception of this period of
Russian history, he is aware of the
importance of Professor Vernadsky’s
remarkable contribution, which will
undoubtedly be of great usefulness
to future students of Russian and
Mongol history.

Marc SzEFTreL
Cornell University

Guins, Georce C. Soviet Law and
Soviet Society. The Hague, Mar-
tinus Nijhoff, 1954. 457 pp. 27.50
gu.

Hazarp, Joun N. Law and Social
Change in the U.S.S.R. Toronto,
Carswell Co., 1953. 310 pp. $4.50.

Two important books on Soviet
law have recently appeared: one by
Professor G. C. Guins, a distin-
guished Russian scholar who studied
with Leo Petrazhitsky in St. Peters-
burg and is now teaching at the

University of California in Berkeley,
and another by Professor John N.
Hazard, who gained complete com-
mand of the Russian language, stud-
ied for a year at the Moscow School
of Law, and is now teaching at
Columbia University. Both authors
attempt to cover the whole range of
legal phenomena in the Soviet
Union, and both strive to correlate
Soviet law with some aspects of
Soviet society, as is evidenced by
the very titles of the books. One
might expect, therefore, that there
would be a striking similarity be-
tween th «two works; but there is
none. It is, in fact, a fascinating
experience to read one book after
the other and to see how different
the interpretation of the same
material can be.

For Guins, Soviet law appears
primarily as a system of coercive
norms derived from principles dia-
metrically opposed to those of the
law of the modern democratic state.
Soviet ethics is based on the denial
of “eternal and basic ethical princi-
ples’”” and may be conceived as
revolutionary utilitarianism: good is
what helps promote the Communist
revolution. The Soviet conception
of law identifies it with coercion
exerted by the dominant class
against its foes. With this back-
ground, the individual phases of
Soviet law—civil law, labor law,
criminal law, constitutional law,
and so on—are passed in review and
contrasted with the institutions of a
democratic society. Special em-
phasis is laid on the abuse of the
term “democracy” by the Soviets,
on the cruelty of Soviet penal law,
and on the iron discipline imposed
by Soviet law on the workers.

For Hazard, Soviet law is pri-
marily a system which may be
logically derived from the Marxian

68 The Russian Review

premise that he who has economic
wer has also political power. The
ee of the new society, he holds,
has been laid by nationalization of
production resources and centraliza-
tion of control over their use. Rules
had to be established to make the
new economic system work and to
“reserve political leadership for a
selected few.” Contrary to most
recent investigators (for instance,
W. W. Rostow and Barrington
Moore), the author does not em-
phasize that this “reservation of
power” has become the leading
principle of the whole system.

Hazard shows that a peculiar
status had to be given to authors
and inventors; that a certain amount
of social security had to be granted
to the people; that tort liability,
preserved in Soviet law, is there to
assure better efficiency on the part
of the managers. Family law under-
went two revolutions, one dissolving
and another restoring it, both serv-
ing the general purposes of the
régime. A new conception of inter-
national law had to be created,
again to help the “selected few”
preserve the fruits of the “October
victory.” The individual topics are
presented in an interesting, but
always pragmatic way, without any
reference to moral judgments, some-
times covering repugnant aspects of
Soviet law by euphemisms. Thus,
according to the author, the Russian

easants have been “encouraged”’ to
join collective farms while it 1s com-
mon knowledge that they were com-
pelled to do so and that resistance,
actual or imaginary, has cost the
Russian people approximately five
million lives.

Neither of the authors has ac-
tually succeeded in showing Soviet
law as a factor or product of Soviet
society. Guins has good chapters on

social stratification and on the

eculiarities of social life; but, from
his presentation, one sees that it is
not so much the law which has been
responsible for these transforma-
tions as it is the collective hand of
“the selected few.”” As to Hazard’s
presentation, the enactment of dras-
tically new laws and their later
modification coincides with social
change; in other words, Soviet law
has been a form of social change.
This, to a certain extent, is true of
every society whose laws are en-
forced.

There is a good reason why the
two attempts have partially failed.
Law may be an important and semi-
autonomous component of the total
social system; then the activities of
the courts, of the lawyers, and even
jurists (teachers of law) may play
the réle of a factor of social change.
But, in the U.S.S.R., nothing like
that exists: the courts, the lawyers,
and the jurists are mere servants o
“the selected few,” and the latter
arbitrarily make and unmake the
law, which is merely a technical
instrument in their hands. (This
point has been emphasized by
Stalin himself in his “work” on
linguistics.) In consequence, one
cannot separate the law and the
institutions regulated by it from
the rest of the society which has
been “dissolved in the state.”

This failure with respect to the
secondary objective is not of great
importance. The main objective,
the presentation of the legal status
of the Soviets, has been achieved by
both authors. Guins’ book is im-
portant as a solid refutation of the
view that Soviet law is just another
manner of solving problems arising
before men, especially lawyers, in
every society (such was the implicit
contention of many of Hazard’s

Book Reviews

earlier writings) or that it is a chal-
lenge, perhaps a model, for American
legislators (such has been the main
thesis of the earlier writings of H.
Berman). Hazard’s book is valuable
in that it contains a number of
sketches of little known aspects of
Soviet law (such as “the authors’
certificates” which replace, de facto,
the patents) and includes short ac-
counts of some hundred cases from
Soviet practice, which display (per-
haps contrary to the author’s inten-
tion) the helplessness of Soviet
courts and other agencies in dealing
with legal problems of even mod-
erate difficulty.
N.S. TIMASHEFF

Fordham University

Seton-Watson, Hucu. From Lenin
to Malenkov’ (A_ History of
World Communism). New York,
Praeger, 1953. 377 pp. $6.00.

Professor Hugh Seton-Watson’s
book is an effort to embrace the his-
tory of World Communism for the
past thirty-seven years in one vol-
ume, and deserves, therefore, serious
attention. It is an impressive piece
of work, and one is little less than
astonished at the author’s ability to
thread his way through the maze
of Communist diplomacy and in-
trigue in all sectors of Communist
activity. It undoubtedly will pro-
vide a useful guide for students of
Communism throughout the world,
being adequately documented and
accompanied by a bibliography that
seems to embrace the fundamental
works.

It might seem ungenerous to
question the soundness of some of
his conclusions. At the same time
this reviewer feels it incumbent on
himself to scrutinize rather carefully

his treatment of some subjects. His
judgments on the purges of 1937,
which appear to be drawn from
Deutscher’s Stalin, strike one as
a very inadequate explanation of
them. Enough is known of the
treatment of accused persons by
the M.V.D. in the Soviet Union
and the brain washing in Soviet
China to know that alleged confes-
sions that are utterly false can be
wrung from the most innocent per-
sons and have little to do with
reality.

His treatment of Chinese Com-
munism seems to leave something
to be desired. After tracing the
political evolution of China from
1917 to 1927, he, curiously, omits
the hostilities that opened between
China and the Soviet Union in that
year and proceeds to the opening of
Japanese hostilities against China
in the thirties. On one point his
statements are open to very serious
question, those concerning the kid-
naping of Chiang Kai-shek by
Chang Hsueh-Liang at Sian in
1936. In recounting this incident,
he purports to give the results of the
agreement reached at this time.
This runs counter to accounts gen-
erally received that almost nothing
is known of the results of this
meeting.

A further statement which ap-
pears misleading is found on page
sixty-seven, where it is implied that
the treaty of Rumania with Ger-
many in 1918 provided for the
annexation of Bessarabia by the
former.

One serious omission is the au-
thor’s failure to point out certain
basic trends that would render elab-
orate explanation of incidents un-
necessary. On page 172, he re-
marks on “the extensive capacity
for pursuing a thought to its logi-

70 The Russian Review

cal conclusion, . . . which has long
been a characteristic of the Russian
mind”; this is a statement that, if
given greater prominence, would
render exhaustive generalizations
on Russian politics unnecessary.

Another criticism has to do with
the Soviet collective farms. There
appears to be some confusion be-
tween the sovkhoz which is anal-
ogous to the factory, where the
workers are paid a daily wage and
the kolkhoz, which is a cooperative
undertaking managed independently
by the peasants, who are required
to turn over to the government the
largest share of their products in
taxes of various forms. But it is to
be noted that the peasants, not the
state, take all the risks, and any
remuneration they receive comes
only after the government has
taken its fixed share. If this is
socializing of agriculture, it is a form
of socialization quite distinct from
the socialization of industry.

In the last chapter the author
advances certain recommendations
with regard to the attitude we
should maintain towards Commu-
nism. He does so as a reasonable
person attempting to give counsel
to reasonable people, and his advice
will appeal to all of moderate views.
At the same time, there is an im-
plied assumption (which may or
may not be true) that in the last
analysis victory will go to the side
that is moderate and that is able to
rally the moral forces of the world
in its defense. One passage is par-
ticularly striking and, we think,
worth quoting: “There are two
divisions in the world today. One is
between the Communists and the
rest. The other is between those
who regard slavery, torture, and
massacre as permissible methods of
political struggle and those who do

not. The first division is the more
ublicised, the second the more
undamental.”” One may question
his claim that the two divisions are
distinct. Actually, to this reviewer,
it would seem that there could,
perhaps, be no better summary of
the issue that today divides the
Communist from the non-Com-
munist world.

Sruart R. Tompkins
University of Oklahoma

Haines, C. Grove (Editor). The
Threat of Soviet Imperialism. Bal-
timore, The Johns Hopkins Press,
1954. 402 pp. $5.00.

Since 1939, the Soviet Union has
annexed 684,300 square kilometers
of territory with almost 25,000,000
population and has acquired control
of satellites, by force, purge, pene-
tration, and puppet governments,
embracing roughly twelve and a half
million square kilometers and 600,-
000,000 people. During the same
period che Free World has with-
drawn from or given freedom to
India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Ceylon,
the Philippines, Burma, and Israel,
an area of over six and one half
million kilometers with a popula-
tion of over a half billion. Yet the
Soviet Union’s spokesmen call their
process of economic penetration,
political domination and conquest
‘liberation’; and call the process of
increasing liberation of former colo-
nies “imperialism.” “When I use a
word, it means just what I choose
it to mean,” said Humpty-Dumpty.
And many of the Alices among
Asian intellectuals wandering in
the bewildering wonderland of prop-
aganda echo Humpty-Dumpty’s
seo semantics.

n the Summer of 1953 the School

Book Reviews 71

of Advanced International Studies
of Johns Hopkins called a confer-
ence of scholars and specialists in
business and government to discuss
the problems raised by Soviet Im-
rialism and the cultural lag among
intellectuals of several continents
which prompts them to accept some
aspects of Soviet semantics. A list
of the participants in the resultant
symposium is sufficient to indicate
the scope and seriousness of the dis-
cussion: George F. Kennan, George
A. Morgan, Mose L. Harvey, Willis
C. Armstrong, Frederick Barghoorn,
Cyril Black, Jules Menken (Eng-
land), Robert N. Carew Hunt (Eng-
land), A. Rossi (France), Admiral
Stevens, John Campbell, Harry
Schwartz, Conway Zirkle, D. Ver-
non McKay, Hobart A. Spalding,
T. Cuyler Young, Merrill R. Good-
all, Gerald F. Winfield, U. Alexis
Johnson, Paul H. Nitze. And those
who led the discussions and par-
ticipated in the discussion from the
floor were many of them specialists
of similar stature.
The resulting work is informa-
tive, comprehensive, somber, and
serious. It covers Soviet military,
scientific and economic strength and
weakness, internal morale, ideo-
. logical pretensions, diplomatic and
propaganda techniques, methods of
subversion, penetration and con-
uest, the impact and successes and
fates of Soviet penetration and
ropaganda in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America. Some of the papers
make informed guesses on what goes
on inside the Kremlin since Stalin’s
death. Others warn of the fatuous
wishful thinking that would make
Mao into another Tito. Many con-
tain constructive suggestions on
what the United States should be
doing to check the spread of Soviet
Imperialism and the accompanying

semantic poison. Whether the par-
ticipants agreed or disagreed with
each other, all the papers serve to
stimulate clear thinking end _ in-
formed policy. All in all, a highly
useful, and—unlike so many such
collected papers—a highly readable
symposium.

BertraM D. Wo.Lre
Russian Institute,
Columbia University

Browper, Rospert P. The Origins
of Soviet-American Diplomacy.
Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1953. 256 pp. $5.00.

Professor Browder’s book, while
entitled The Origins of Soviet-Amer-
ican Diplomacy, deals cursorily with
the years between 1917 and 1929
and intensively with the years from
1932 to 1938. It is in essence a study
of the elements which entered into
the eventual recognition of the
Bolshevik régime after years of
diplomatic boycott and of the man-
ner in which this recognition worked
out in practice. On this phase of our
relations with the Kremlin it is
suggestive and authoritative, and is
based upon Russian as well as Amer-
ican sources.

The foreign policy of the United
States is nell 4x affected by what
is often called public opinion, but
which might often be more accu-
rately described as public sentiment.
The accent is often on certain emo-
tional prepossessions rather than on
a cold-blooded and rational assess-
ment of this or that particular prob-
lem. It is an interesting question
whether Soviet diplomacy, always
granting its initial presuppositions,
is not on the whole more intellectual
and wisely calculating than that
of our own country.

72 The Russian Review

The question of Russian recogni-
tion was usually seen by American
public men in rather extreme terms.
On the one hand, there was the
natural detestation of a régime
which had shown a cavalier attitude
towards private property, which
made little effort to restrain radical
propaganda, and which was dicta-
torial in its internal order. On the
other hand, on the part of the ad-
vocates of recognition, there was
usually a very romantic view of
what recognition would do to stimu-
late trade, and a very naive view of
the standards of good faith in inter-
national intercourse that prevailed
in the Kremlin. Rarely, in the de-
bate over recognition, was the sim-
ple fact recognized that there is a
strong basis in the American prec-
edents for the recognition of any
de facto régime, however odious its
principles. Against an argument of
this kind, however, there might al-
ways be pitted the contention that
Russia had shown contempt for her
international obligations, and that
in such circumstances its govern-
ment, no matter how firmly estab-
lished, ought not to be acknowledged
out of hand.

In Moscow the question of recog-
nition assumed very little impor-
tance for many years. Trade in the
’20’s flourished without it, and there
was no other important interest to
be satisfied by the establishment of
formal relations. With the advent of
the Japanese militarists to power,
however, Moscow warmed towards
the idea of closer relations with the
United States, in the hope that an
understanding between Washington
and the Kremlin might restrain the
“‘war-mongers’’ of Tokyo. In basing
its action on this assumption, Lit-
vinov and his colleagues showed
very little understanding of the

strength of isolationist sentiment in
the United States and of the tradi-
tional policy of no entangling alli-
ances.

Recognition came easier in 1933,
says Professor Browder, partly be-
cause of the * ‘surface aura of re-
x se sl that now characterized

e Soviet régime, partly because of
a genuine willingness in Moscow to
work with other countries, partly
because of the idea that greater
trade would open up at a time when
it was badly needed, and partly be-
cause of the temperamental opti-
mism of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
There is another factor that might,
I think, be mentioned. The break-
down of our economy had induced a
somewhat greater tolerance towards
the Communist experiment. The
degree to which this tolerance, and
even active approval, penetrated
American society in the "30’s has
never yet been authoritatively stud-
ied. But it surely was a factor in
giving to the Roosevelt administra-
tion more freedom of action than it
would otherwise have enjoyed.

The negotiations themselves were
successful only by glossing over un-
pleasant facts on both sides. Lit-
vinov agreed tocommitments which,
honestly construed, would have
curtailed the activity of the Third
International. Roosevelt, on his

art, seems to have held out the
bait of a loan in exchange for the
recognition of the debts and gave
this assurance well knowing that
the Johnson Act, forbidding loans
to defaulted debtors, might pass
and tie his hands.

The result of the recognition of
1933 was disillusionment on both
sides. As the Russians became more
self-sufficient, the hopes of far-
reaching trade advantages for the
United States grew dimmer and

Book Reviews 73

dimmer. By 1935 the Third Inter-
national was acting up again, and
developing new tension between
Moscow and Washington. The
Russian hope of closer political
association with the American gov-
ernment in the Orient had been
virtually extinguished. The attempt
to settle the debt question had
failed. Relations grew worse rather
than better. And the disillusion-
ment of William C. Bullitt, our
ambassador in Moscow, was vir-
tually complete.

None the less Professor Browder
believes that recognition was wise.
No vital American interest was en-
dangered, and it is “extremely ques-
tionable whether normal intercourse
with Russia increased the strength
of Communism in America.” The

sitive advantage lay in the possi-
bility of learning more about the
Soviet Union at first hand, and of
gaining practical experience in deal-
ing with the Kremlin. And this,
indeed, seems to the reviewer to be
the very heart of the matter. Recog-
nition is not a matter of moral
judgment; it is a matter of inter-
national convenience. Where, as in
the case of China, a government has
defied international authority,
there may be a case for not ad-
mitting it to the very international
body it has defied. But regular
relations with such a government
is a very different matter. And
there is a strong case for it.

Professor Browder’s book ought
to be useful in bringing into clear
perspective a question which has too
often been discussed in so emotional
a way as to hamper sound judgment
as to the wise course of action.

DexTER PERKINS
Cornell University

Granick, Davip. Management of
the Industrial Firm in the U.S.S.R.
New York, Columbia University
Press, 1954. 346 pp. $5.00.

To students of the Soviet Eco-
nomic System, the tribulations of
Soviet managers of industrial
firms have been fairly well known
since numerous references as to
their plight and problems have
frequently been and are contin-
uously discussed in the Soviet press,
and several articles in American
periodicals have been devoted to
them. Dr. Granick, in his study
Management of the Industrial Firm
in the U.S.S.R., has systematically
and painstakingly surveyed this
field and came out with an inter-
esting analysis of the problems con-
fronting Soviet management of in-
dustrial enterprises. Though the
author emphasizes the limitations
of his study, that is, the fact that it
applies to heavy industry only and
that it covers the period 1931-1941,
there is enough evidence to suggest,
on the basis of present-day Soviet
writings, that the problems which
plagued Soviet management in the
past are still prevalent in the pres-
ent, and, generally, appear through-
out the whole Soviet industrial
system. Moreover, it would not be
far-fetched to assume that the
plight of Soviet managers in the
consumers’ goods industry is in
some respects even worse because
management in this industry is
generally blamed for all the short-
comings of this much neglected seg-
ment of the Soviet industrial system.

The study consists of 14 chapters,
including conclusions, 4 appendices,
and an extensive bibliography. After
an introduction, chapters 2 and 3
provide a background to the réle of
management according to Soviet

concepts and describe the environ-
ment in which management has
been operating. Chapters 4 and 5
deal with national plans and the
réle and contributions of the firm
personnel to these plans. The next
topics discussed are the criteria ac-
cording to which plant management
has been evaluated, followed by a
description of controls over manage-
ment and the incentives offered
them for proper behavior. The
next two chapters are devoted to the
réle of the Communist Party and of
workers’ participation in manage-
ment of industrial firms, and in
supervision of their managers’ be-
havior. A chapter with conclusions
ends this study.

Whether the Soviet industry is
less bureaucratic than some of the
giant firms in capitalist society may
be true as Dr. Granick asserts.
There can be little doubt, however,
that Soviet society has developed a
most complex and cumbersome ad-
ministration to operate its industrial
system, which the Russians them-
selves call “bureaucracy.” Year
after year this Soviet “bureaucracy”
has been blamed for the hardships of
Soviet life. Nevertheless this system
of administration continues to ex-

and regardless of measures taken.

t is possible that such expansion is
inherent in a system in which the
state attempts to operate the econ-
omy and regulate economic activity,
or one might say, the whole society.
This expansion of controls is partly
based on the general distrust of the
individual—no matter how long he
has been a member of the Party,
regardless of how high his position
is and no matter what services he
has rendered to the state. The sys-
tem is flooded with a hodgepodge of
loose regulations and directives, is
inefficient and is immersed in red

The Russian Review

tape. As a result Soviet authorities
are forced to tolerate a great number
of evasions of the law and of ad-
ministrative regulations on the part
of the management, of various kinds
of shady dealings into which man-
agement is forced in order to produce
according to plan, and of other
managerial activities inconsistent
with Soviet dogma. Under these
conditions, it appears remarkable
that the ponderous economic ad-
ministration developed by the So-
viets is able, in spite of continuous
interferences by the authorities, to
operate the way that it does the
gigantic economic machine devel-
oped by the state.

It is rather unfortunate that
the author mars the end of his
study with the following conclusion:
“Throughout this study, we have
seen the great powers granted to
directors and the considerable au-
tonomy left to them. From the
point of view of practical independ-
ence in making concrete decisions,
the Soviet director may be conceived
of as an entrepreneur. But the di-
rector’s entrepreneurial activity is
restricted to one field—that of
developing better methods for carry-
ing out the existing Party line. The
successful director must look at his
work with the eyes of the Polit-
bureau, so far as possible interpret-
ing his problems in the same way
that Stalin would. The guide to his
entrepreneurial activity must still
be, in Commissar Ordzhonikidze’s
words, ‘Party activity and belief—
above all and before all!” The
Soviet director of a firm is essentially
an agent of the government and as
such he has limited rights and pow-
ers for making certain economic and
political decisions on the spot with-
out waiting for his superiors to ap-
prove them. But it would seem to

Book Reviews 75

be rather misleading to apply the
term “entrepreneur” to a Soviet
plant director since this term,
as referred to Western economic
thought, denotes essentially a busi-
ness man of imagination and initia-
tive.
M. V. ConpoIDE

The Ohio State University

Lavrin, JANKO. Russian Writers:
Their Lives and Literature. New
York, Van Nostrand Co., 1954.
363 pp. $6.00.

The English professor Janko Lav-
rin, author os many and varied
volumes on Russian literature, had
assembled some of his University
lectures, articles, and chapters from
a previous work entitled From Push-
kin to Mayakovsky (1948) in a new
book which makes an excellent
introduction for college students and
general readers who begin their
exploration of Russian poets and
novelists. Russian Writers does not
present a systematic survey or a
strictly chronological sequence but
offers a series of brief and sugges-
tive portraits of individual authors,
meet of the nineteenth century.
Some of the essays are more on the
expository side, such as that on
Goncharov; some are devoted to a
specific aspect of a writer’s activity,
such as the chapter on Chekhov
which analyzes only his plays but
does not deal with him as a story
teller. Periods preceding the nine-
teenth century are merely sketched
in chapters on “The Lay of Igor’s
Campaign,” on Avvakum and on
Fonvizin, while the post-revolu-
tionary era is described in chapters
on Essenin and Mayakovsky. As a
matter of fact the concluding essay
of the volume—“A Pattern of the

Soviet Novel’’—is the least satisfac-
tory: while in his nineteenth century
portraits Mr. Lavrin gives sharp
and at times brilliant characteriza-
tions (those of Gogol, Tiutchev,
Lermontov, and Leskov are particu-
larly successful), his survey of Soviet
letters never goes beyond cut and
dried informative notices and re-
sembles articles one usually finds in
reference annuals. He avoids ex-
pressing definite opinions about the
value of various Soviet novels and
his ‘“‘assessment” is therefore re-
duced to a lifeless enumeration.
Is it because Mr. Lavrin, like so
many historians of literature, is
afraid to pronounce a critical judg-
ment on his contemporaries and
feels more at ease with the dead
than with the living?

Whatever the reason, Mr. Lavrin
is certainly much more at home in
the last century. Most English sur-
veys of Russian literature of the
past either are filled with clichés
taken from pre-revolutionary sec-
ond-rate text-books, or abound in
highly subjective and irresponsible
evaluations which are rather amus-
ing when they come from the pen of
such a brilliant and witty person as
D. Sviatopolk-Mirsky, but sound
hollow or pretentious when at-
tempted by ae gifted and less in-
telligent writers. Mr. Lavrin for-
tunately escaped these pitfalls, and
his analytical insight—rooted in
solid scholarship and sustained by
the good use of recently published
literary materials—is well ee mer
honest and often refreshing. I
found particularly rewarding his
treatment of Russian Romanti-
cism, his profound study of Gogol’s
warped genius, his description of
Lermontov’s contradictions or his
vivid outline of Tiutchev’s try.
This does not mean that I subscribe

76 The Russian Review

to all of Mr. Lavrin’s opinions, but
in most cases they are well argu-
mented and candidly presented.
As one instance when I certainly
part company with the author of
Russian Writers, 1 should quote his

aise of The Life of Klim Samghin
ios Gorky which he defines as “a
masterpiece of critical realism.” I
believe that this endless chronicle,
even though it contains a number of
excellent descriptive passages, is no
masterpiece at all; it is formless, dull
and flat and does not occupy a prom-
inent place in the history of modern
Russian fiction.

I have but two reservations to
make about this highly readable and
highly commendable work: one con-
cerns its method and the other the
place allotted to Tolstoy and Dos-
toevsky. It seems rather para-
doxical that in a book on Russian
great literary figures by a scholar
who wrote separate works on Dos-
toevsky and Tolstoy, those two
most important Russian classics
are not even given a chapter each
but are only dealt with in a com-
parative essay which is not doing
justice to either of them. These 24
pages seem too parsimonious indeed
in a volume of 360 pages. No wonder
that Mr. Lavrin’s strongly critical—I
am tempted to say, outright nega-
tive—attitude toward Tolstoy is not
sufficiently explained and is not

backed by convincing reasoning. I
wonder why Mr. Lavrin reduced his
interpretation of Tolstoy and Dos-
toevsky to such capsulized form.

Mr. Lavrin knows perfectly well
that any organic picture of Russian
literature requires some notions of
its general asic background,
and he tries to squeeze them in by
summarizing a few data at the end
of one portrait and at the beginning
of another. These few sentences
have to serve as “conjunctive tis-
sues” between the chapters and are
supposed to make the reader aware
of the historical sequence and the
social and political environment.
Such a method, however, proves
totally inefficient, and one wonders
whether a simple succession of in-
dividual portraits, even in the
manner used by such impressionistic
critics as Yuli Aikhenwald, would
not be preferable to a frustrating
mixture of critical analysis with
fragments of historical descriptions.
The use of this hybrid form is
probably responsible for the fact
that some very significant phenom-
ena of Russian literature, such as
the Pushkin’s “pleiade’” or the
Symbolist movement at the turn of
the century, have not found an
adequate place in Mr. Lavrin’s
otherwise valuable work.

Marc SLoniIm

‘Sarah Lawrence College

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WORLD POLITICS

A Quarterly Journal of International Relations
Under the Editorial Sponsorship of the

CENTER OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Table of Contents, Vol. VII, No. 2, January, 1955

Contents

Indian Foreign Policy: An Interpretation of Attitudes ................ TAYA ZINKIN
American Policy-making and the North Korean Aggression ....ALEXANDER L. GEORGE
Gis Eee UNIS CMON oa Sie oo. in Whee ee Mba E eee eRe tS ......ASHER LEE
Conditions and Prospects for Economic Growth

iy Ccummebneee Smee CP Or EAE) oc sinks nnadcc ves cd.ccecas ALEXANDER ECKSTEIN

Review Articles

Foreign Policy: The Conservative School .................. HANS J. MORGENTHAU
Psychology and Politics: The Freudian Connection ................05- PHILIP RIEFF
RD DANE ARG OL GROOMED one 0k 0 sa istbicle’s vcwddnlcewews Bert F. HoseE.itTz
The Administration of Foreign Affairs in the United States ...... James L, McCamy
The Statistical Analysis of Anglo-American Economic

Subscriptions $5.00 a year (two years, $8.50), single copies $1.50
Address: WORLD POLITICS
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, Box 231, Princeton, N. J.

Statement Required by the Act of August 24, 1912, as
Amended by the Acts of March 3, 1933, and July 2, 1946
(Title 39, United States Code, Section 233) Showing the

Ownership, Management, and Circulation

Of THe Russian Review published quarterly at Hanover, N. H., additional entry Brattle-
boro, Vt., for October 1, 1954.

1. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business man-
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also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding 1
percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and
addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unin-
corporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be
given.)

The Russian Review, Inc., 235 Baker Library, Hanover, N. H. Voluntary, non-stock
corporation.

8. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1
percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: (If there are
none, so state.) None.

4. Paragraphs 2 and 8 include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears
upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the
person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting; also the statements in the two
paragraphs show the affiant’s full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions
under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the
company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide

owner. '
DIMITRI VON ns - ~

ditor
Sworn to and subscribed before me this 21st day of September, 1954.

INEZ M. KELLAM, Notary Public.
(My commission expires April 17, 1958)

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Full text of "The Russian Review 1955-01: Vol 14 Iss 1"

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