THROUGH NUSSIA'S BACK DOOR, by Richard E. Lauterbach; Harper & Brothers, Publishers. pp. 239. $2.75.

More concerned with the thoughts and reactions of Russians, than in their physical setting, "Through Russia's Back Door" is a running account of conversations and incidents from Shanghai to Berlin, as a reporter saw them. Lauterbach was tied down to a coach of the Trans-Siberian Railway through most of the trip, and the book necessarily suffers from the limitations of such a vantage point. This narrow scope of observation does not, however invalidate his report; it merely robs it of the greater sampling possible if be had been allowed free rein to talk and travel as he pleased.

He did see and hear enough to convince him that the Russians want no war, and that they would be in no physical shape to endure another major struggle. They emerge from the book as a people exhausted by their great exertions, sincerely desirous for a rest to recuperate their powers, and at the same time profoundly suspicious of events outside their border. Readers will also be impressed by the account of a police state in full swing with an ubiquitous corps of agents, and a bureaucracy as red-taped as could be discovered anywhere. The war-weariness, pervasive as he found it, has not prevented an increasing return to "normalcy" with prices beginning to come down and new products appearing. Lauterbach's Soviet will not willingly slip back into the wartime mold, but he feels that it can be inched back and that the process has already started.

Lauterbach does not regard an American-Russian conflict as inevitable, but from the almost desperate urgency of his words when he sums up the situation, he evidently feels that the time is later than we in this country believe. Responsibility for allowing the situation to deteriorate to the extent that it has, in the author's opinion, is as much America's as the Soviet's, with the balance tipped in favor of Russia, since we always had the advantage of the atom bomb. The press, too, comes in for its share of criticism--he accuses a portion of it of deliberately distorting the facts. "Through Russia's Back Door" will not make easy reading for those content to blame Ivan for all our present woes.