Traveller Analyzes Soviets as People, Not Economic Cogs

SINCE the death of Stalin, American readers have each year been subjected to the same stock exposes of the spuriousness of Soviet production figures, the tyranny over free expression, the prohibitions against tourist photography, etc., all written by eager reporters just back from their first encounter with Russian travel and anxious to show that they too can write a New York Times Magazine article. Yet, from time to time, an excellent travel account by an expert in Soviet affairs is published: Maurice Hindus' new book is just such an exception.

"Essentially," Hindus writes, "this is a book not about doctrine, politics, economics, but about people." And it focuses on the thought and attitudes of typical Russians.

Few people are better qualified than Hindus for such a work; born a Russian, he is fluent in the language, and an unaggressive manner of interviewing-rare among journalists-puts him fully at ease with the people, While the great Insider, John Gunther, complains in a fit of frustration that "most [Russian] citizens, in talk with an outsider, always say that everything is perfect," Hindus blithely explodes the "myth" of Soviet taciturnity with a plethora of frank interviews.

HE does not, of course, totally avoid subjects of common knowledge: a study of Russia could, after all, hardly be complete without its survey on the subject of surpassing American milk and butter production. Yet since agriculture is Mr. Hindus' forte, his remarks on farming often prove quite interesting. He notes, for example, that the Soviet milkmaid has "by the grace of Khrushchev, ...been lifted to the status of a new heroine on Soviet farms." For spending her entire day at pitching hay to at most twenty-five cows, milking them, and cleaning their stalls-what to an American farmer are mere morning and evening chores-the milkmaid receives, before bonuses, over twice the wages of the average male field worker.

Unfortunately, the author's remarks on agricultural inefficiency are not matched with an equally good chapter on industry but then this is outside of his field. On the other hand, he delves into several matters totally ignored by the writers. One such subject is the Baptist Church, now claiming some three million worshippers (the Orthodox Patriarchate estimates its own (membership) at between twenty-five and thirty million). According to Hindus, the Baptist faith has divested its followers of all the brutality indigenous to the old Russian peasantry and made of them the most temperate among men. Hindus explains this phenomenon in purely religious terms; the peasant in purely religious terms: the peasant is just overwhelmed by the beautiful simplicity of the Baptist belief. But such an explanation is obviously inadequate. Surely a deeper study into the reasons for the conversion of the traditionally Orthodox peasants to a faith as unhierarchical as Baptism might offer some rather significant insights into the mind of the contemporary Soviet peasant and his reaction to the Soviet regime.

FOR his chapters of the intellectuals, Hindus adapts Turgenev's classification of the nineteenth century intellectuals into fathers and sons, Today's fathers' are those who personally experienced the Revolution and their writings, perhaps because of the experimental nature of the Soviet state, were largely theoretical. Most writers have been brow-beaten into accepting the official Party line but from time to time a lone figure such as Pavlov or Pasternak rebels.

The 'sons,' however, as Turgenev's 'sons,' interest themselves very little in ideology. But the reasons for this disinterest change considerably between the 1860s and the 1960s. The young intellectuals of Turgenev's time were materialists in an obscurantist and harshly unjust world because theoretical abstractions did not produce bread for the hungry peasants. But the current generation of intellectuals, brought up during the Stalinist era, and having both bread and ideology, fights for neither.

"I have never," Hindus writes, "encountered any young Soviet citizens, workers or intellectuals, who question collective ownership of the 'means of production.' They accept the Soviet economy without reservations, and I am certain they would battle against any movement to overthrow it. They know nothing else, and to them the term 'capitalism' spells depravity and damnation." They fight only to buy more books, to write about day to day problems rather than about the romance of building Socialism, and to wear lipstick and play jazz.

The Russian, Hindus concludes, live in a society built upon a strong ideological foundation. Economical and institutional walls do tumble here and there, and others are torn down and rebuilt. Having no rigid structure, their society is-as yet- a house without a roof.