the dissolution of the East German state. It is also true that within the Soviet bloc the GDR represents a significant economic potential and can use this as a means of political leverage, as earlier demonstrated in the case of Czechoslovakia.

What Mr. Hangen does not take into sufficient account, however, is the fact that the GDR necessarily remains excluded from the mainstream of present East European development towards greater national consciousness, because with the best of will East Germany can be neither "nation" nor "fatherland." Its only raison d'être has been the existence of a Soviet-dominated bloc directed against the German Federal Republic, against Western Europe, and against the West in general. But as actual development in the East moves in a different direction, the GDR-without any action. on the part of the West-finds itself falling into an isolation which would continue even if it were to be accorded increased entry into the international community, whether with or without recognition by the German Federal Republic. In such an eventuality, the GDR would still be only the second and lesser German state, without a convertible currency, with second-rate economic performance, and with a permanent need to restrict foreign travel by its citizens, many of whom would otherwise leave.

Antagonism toward the general direction of East European development produces in the East German leadership an irritability which manifests it self in arrogant attempts to influence the policy of the other East European states, in turn provoking matching responses by the latter. Indeed, the day is not far off when the Soviet Union will no longer be able to use the German question as a means of unifying the bloc, and the contribution of the GDR itself to this development is not inconsiderable. Furthermore, there appears to be no compelling reason for always looking at Western policies towards the bloc in terms of whether or not they promote German reunification.

THE MORE THE INDIVIDUAL East European states commit themselves to their own independent lines of action, the more the politico-military as well as economic organizations of the whole bloc tend to lose their cohesiveness. It would be unrealistic to view this East European trend simply as a by-product of the Sino-Soviet conflict, although it cannot be disputed that the conflict did prove highly beneficial to Rumania, for example, in the pursuit of the latter's policy of emancipation from Moscow. The development of East Europe is tak

ing its own independent course, and accordingly the time has come on the side of the West when the policy of "building bridges" to the East can progress from the realm of idealism to that of Realpolitik.

In his book Alternative to Partition,1 Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski takes a rather critical view of nationalist currents in Eastern Europe, seeing in them the danger of a new "Balkanization" of the area. His essential argument is that the United States, as a world power, must strive above all for a dialogue with the Soviet Union and therefore can care little for the anti-Soviet oriented nationalisms of Eastern Europe. This thesis seems to reflect the attitude of the present American administration, which would like to recommend "regionalism" and "regional cooperation" as a general remedy for many world problems. One can only point out, however, that any policy must take things as they are, and that so long as the USSR, by reason of its whole character, position and strength, remains the antipole to the Western world, everything that weakens the Soviet Union is, fundamentally speaking, to the West's advantage.

It is perhaps by no means unfortunate that the United States, burdened as it is with the Vietnam conflict, presently feels itself constricted in Eastern Europe. The latter is first and foremost a European problem. Pierre Hassner makes this point very convincingly in his contribution to Eastern Europe in Transition.15 To be sure, certain of the more powerful European states will also be forced to the recognition that they cannot seek a dialogue with the Soviet Union as "world powers" and simultaneously pursue an East European policy that is intrinsically anti-Soviet. At the same time, any effort to draw the Soviet Union into a European system in which the United States would not be equally represented would be not only dangerous but also senseless. A European policy for Eastern Europe can have tangible success only if it seeks to counterbalance a lessening of American influence in Western Europe with a like reduction of Soviet "bridge-building" policy based on reciprocity can influence in Eastern Europe. Such a European perhaps count on only partial success, but it conforms to the realities-and politics is after all the "art of the possible."

14 Published under the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1965. See review by Max Beloff in Problems of Communism, No. 4, 1965, pp. 46-50. 15 Pp. 325-54.

Reviewed by Peter Wiles

SOME ENDS OF COMMUNISM are in contradiction to its chosen means, and some are not. The word "chosen" here implies that they are, in a sense, ends. Intolerance, centralization, command rather than consent, power monopoly, secrecy in government, are chosen means. Socialism-or something near enough to it-might be attained without them, so they are not neutral, but in fact ends in themselves. One simply cannot say that such means must necessarily be employed to achieve the particular form of socialism chosen, for there is no scriptural warrant for so rigid and distasteful a form: it did not have to be chosen. The two books before us admirably illustrate this distinction.

In the labor market the democratic and proproletarian ends of communism stand in stark contrast to those means which many Communists in fact regard as ends, for example, little free choice between jobs or between techniques, and above all no collective bargaining. And this remains true even if, as does this reviewer, one disapproves of collective bargaining and free trade unions in the first place. If my lack of sympathy with them appears Communist, it is in fact individualist, and the overlap of prejudices is coincidental.

In the treatment of women, on the contrary, there are no such difficulties. The equality of women is eminently compatible with the suppression

of free individual choice-indeed it can be enhanced

thereby, since many women do not desire “equality." Again the equality of women positively demands the suppression of collective bargaining since such procedures are, in fact, in the hands of men. All radical social changes, indeed, are more likely to be achieved by those who do not fear force. Here, then, is an ultimate end that does not stand in contradiction to the means-that-are-in-fact-ends.

WE HAVE LONG AWAITED an up-to-date "Solomon Schwarz": a blow-by-blow account of what has happened in the Soviet labor market since 1941, when effectually Schwarz leaves off.1 Miss Brown's is not quite the book needed, though it is sufficiently nearly so to be required reading, at least in parts, for everyone in the field. The author is too deficient in Marxism, in statistics and in economic theory-indeed, too much the old-fashioned type of labor economist-to have done a perfect job; but she has certainly done a very adequate job.

With more Marxism, she would have asked why the phrase "labor market" is never used (p. 11). The answer, of course, is that it is absent from Marx's view of socialism, for it implies an unplanned economy in the hands of non-laborers. Hence

1 Labor in the Soviet Union, New York, F. A. Praeger, 1952.

wage differentials are often not used, but, say, Komsomol pressures substituted, which in the long run do not work; a rate of turnover no higher than in the West is regarded as appalling (p. 34), and great efforts are made to reduce it; it was possible for Stalin to take the entirely retrograde step of abolishing labor exchanges. The damnosa hereditas of Marxism has made it very difficult to change these things.

We all know that the Soviet working week is no longer than the American (p. 304). But with real income at about one-third the US level (p. 307), are we not owed an explanation? We would choose to work longer hours to increase our incomes-are Russians so very different? The answer, not given here, appears to be that they are not-but Marxists

are.

Greater attention to ideology would also have thrown more light on the role of factory committees, whose genuinely increasing and wholly beneficent role is well described in chapter VI. Why did they come to the fore precisely in 1958? The answer is, of course, the immense attraction of Titoism at that moment, and the need to counter the workers' councils with a more manageable substitute. But Marx, Tito and their"-isms" do not figure in the index.

A labor economist must of course be a good practical statistician to compare real incomes between times, places and persons. The passage on these comparisons (pp. 305-8) is so perfunctory as to leave the reader puzzled: should there not be more than four pages on such things, with appropriate statistical tables? I simply do not believe Professor Brown is as bad a statistician as her omissions imply.

The pure, and even the not so pure, theorist will miss a number of applications of valid theory. What, for instance, is the underlying institutional model of the Soviet nationalized sector? What is the effect of low direct and high indirect taxes on initiative, not to mention the diversion of effort into the black market by the mere height of taxation? Is there any cost-push inflation? Or, better, why was there so much and is there now so little? To paraphrase George Orwell, inside every average fat book there is a good thin book trying to get out. The thin book in this case is on trade union structure alone. Take the phrase "defense of workers' interests" and its prominence in successive trade union statutes and laws. The story of its absence (after 1928) and reappearance (after 1957) constitutes a thrilling Kremlinological whodunit (p. 65). And did you, gentle Sovietologist,

know that workmen's compensation was sometimes chargeable to enterprises (p. 165)? The whole of chapter VI on local unions is, to repeat, a vital contribution to recent Soviet history. We should note in particular the man-in-the-street's increased confidence in his local union (pp. 169-171).

MR. DODGE, ON THE OTHER HAND, has set himself a dry and modest goal, and drily and modestly he has achieved it: a statistical picture of the economic position of women. His task was facilitated by the wealth of Soviet data, which often give the proportion of men to women in this or that group even when the absolute total is concealed. The Bolsheviks have almost achieved their aims in this field, and are proud of them. Even though the economic equality of women falls off at the highest Soviet levels, it is far more nearly achieved in the USSR than in the West. There are, for instance, no professions closed to women— except the military and the priesthood. However, as we we move away from sheer statistics, it is possible to fault Mr. Dodge. For example, he professes (p. 106) not to understand why the separation of the sexes in the high schools, begun in 1942, was abandoned in 1954. Surely, sexual segregation was all a part of Stalin's patrioticmilitaristic-traditional-pronating-Russifying phase. The author also detects an anti-feminine bias in Khrushchev's reform of higher education (pp. 3, 115-7) on the grounds that the preference given to those with two years' work experience militated against young married women, and the preference for war veterans excluded them. Yet Khrushchev himself was consciously in favor of women (p. 214). The anti-female bias of Khrushchev's educational reform was surely an accident. The author further speculates that the Soviet authorities have covertly recognized the lower profitability of funds invested in the higher education of women. But since Mr. Dodge's book went to press, Khrushchev's reforms have been rescinded.

Of course, statistics of participation in the labor force and in higher education do not tell us what it is really like to be a Soviet woman. For that we must turn to refugee and literary evidence, not exploited by Mr. Dodge. Nevertheless he is not simply a counter of heads, and he does give us a few case-histories. More important, he is a versatile and imaginative exploiter of the hard data, from which he builds up a case for those Soviet women who, despite their professional qualifications, fail to reach the top or to be professionally

creative (ch. 12). In view of the uniquely favorable opportunities for such performance in the USSR, women's continued failure is very striking, indeed, and needs further study. Mr. Dodge's explanations for this failure perhaps are rightly universal and have nothing to do with the peculiarities of Soviet society-loss of time through childbirth, loss of energy through housework, loss of promotion through being tied to a husband's place of residence, etc. There is also the regional problem of Islam. If there is a genetic factor, Soviet data on student examination performance conceal it as successfully as similar Western data.

Is communism in some way responsible for this? Does it in some subtle and doubtless unconscious way keep women down? It is certainly very striking that women have risen to high political office less often in the Soviet Union than in the Western democracies, although they bulk large as judges, doctors, managers, etc. Thus there has been only one Presidium/Politburo member since 1917: Yekaterina Furtseva. This makes her 2% of all Politburo members since 1917. It may be that the Politburo, being freer to disregard the Communist sanctities, allows more anti-feminism to itself than to the state machines or the lower party organs. Indeed much the same applies to the Central

Committee; the percentage of women on it varies between two and four (p. 214).2

Different in subject-matter and style, these two books nevertheless teach one lesson in common. Leaving aside economic performance, Soviet society is an improvement on our own in many respects. If Soviet trade unions cannot bargain, neither can they obstruct. If the Western right to strike produces balanced management and government, the strike itself is social poison. If some official Soviet proposals for the fruitful employment of leisure time are deplorable-how can the country that invented the druzhinniki ("people's guards") criticize the Red Guards?—others are easily superior to the offerings of Madison Avenue (Brown, pp. 134, 172). And of course, in the domain of economic equality for women, the USSR is very far ahead of us indeed, even allowing for overwork and a great deal of defeminization distasteful even to career women. It may be that competitive coexistence will become more sociological than economic.

Corresponding Western figures (my calculations): United Kingdom Cabinet, 1928-66-four percent; House of Commonstwo to four percent.

Reviewed by Richard T. Davies

NEITHER OF THE BOOKS under review is a definitive political study of Khrushchev, nor were they apparently intended for readers who specialize in the study of Soviet affairs. Such readers already have at their disposal three works which plot in detail the political life of the ex-First Sec

retary: Lazar Pistrak's The Grand Tactician: Khrushchev's Rise to Power (New York, 1961); Robert Conquest's Power and Policy in the USSR: The Study of Soviet Dynastics (New York, 1961); and Michel Tatu's Le Pouvoir en URSS: de Khrouchtchev à la direction collective (Paris,

1967; to be published in English later this year). Those who have read these studies will find little in Mr. Crankshaw's and Mr. Page's books to deepen their knowledge.

Drawing upon his long experience as an observer of Soviet developments and upon some of the sources necessary to an understanding of the Khrushchev era (in particular, he pays a welldeserved tribute to the above-mentioned work of Lazar Pistrak), Mr. Crankshaw has striven to provide a study of Khrushchev in the setting of his times and presumably one which would inform those who want to go beyond the newspaper headlines, if not those already closely involved with Soviet affairs. How well has he succeeded?

As a generalized summation of Khrushchev's career, Mr. Crankshaw's book has merit. He sees many of the reasons for the First Secretary's fall and for his failures along the way to it. He sees why the people of the Soviet Union not only were not his enthusiastic supporters, but were quite indifferent to his fate just as, in a more general sense, they are indifferent to the behind-the-scenes maneuvers which constitute the essence of politics in the USSR. He sees the irony in the history of a man who was able to fight his way to the top and then was unable either to consolidate his position or to use the enormous power he held to accomplish decisive changes in the state.

Some of the merit of Mr. Crankshaw's view of Khrushchev appears in his summary of the reasons for the First Secretary's removal from office:

He went not because he was reactionary and not because he was liberal, but because he was erratic, unpredictable, unmanageable, now increasingly dictatorial; because, after a solid decade of incessant uproar about agriculture, food production was once more static and showed no signs of rising; because, after all his economic plunging, industrial growth was slowing down most dangerously, consumer goods were still in short supply, and the quality of what was being turned out was often atrocious; because the country was confused and bewildered, not stimulated any more, by his restless dynamism; because in pushing the very necessary quarrel with China to extreme lengths, and concentrating now not on ideological differences, not any longer on China's reckless belligerence, but on the great-power aspects of the dispute, he was shattering to small pieces what was left of Communist unity; because in pursuing his understanding with America, he was giving too many hostages

to fortune; because, in the end, he was showing signs of megalomania-as, for example, his essay in personal and private diplomacy through his son-in-law Adzhubei, aimed at coming to an understanding with West Germany (p. 272).

All true enough, no doubt, but one seeks in vain for an answer to the question, "Why did he go in

October 1964?" For most of the accusations advanced against Khrushchev in Mr. Crankshaw's summing-up were just as damning a year earlier.

The author's description of the climacterics of Khrushchev's career also lacks precision. The 22nd Party Congress figures only fleetingly in his account, and then only in its relation to the SinoSoviet dispute. The Cuban missile crisis is seen as little more than a passing episode, following which the sole aim of Khrushchev's foreign policy is said to have been to achieve a détente with the United States. Even Mr. Crankshaw's description of the struggle against the "anti-party group" leaves the reader wondering how Khrushchev really pulled it off.

...

THE MAIN TROUBLE with the book, perhaps, is that Mr. Crankshaw fails to provide a convincing explanation of the nature of Soviet leadership politics. He asserts that Khrushchev "was never to be the supreme autocrat, as Stalin was the supreme autocrat, though at times he came very near it. . . . the men who had raised him up could, and one day might, pull him down. In the end they did just this." He adds: "It is important to be clear on this immediately . . . it is the key to our understanding of Khrushchev's own rule, and it is the key to our understanding of the country over which he ruled . . . and of the men who ruled with him, the survivors of whom destroyed him when he tried too hard to make himself an autocrat, and who continue to rule without him" (pp. 202-3).

...

This points toward the truth. But Mr. Crankshaw does not show us in detail, as the story of Khrushchev's career unfolds, how the processes he refers to operated in fact. Thus, he describes many of Khrushchev's acts as motivated by the desire to accomplish certain general goals, without however giving sufficient weight to those factors in the Soviet political environment which enjoined Khrushchev constantly to embark upon risky endeavors, which just as consistently failed.

The absence of real analysis leads Mr. Crankshaw to mistakes in emphasis. Thus, he holds that "from 1960 until the end, the course of Khrushchev's career was dominated by the Chinese quarrel," and he finds it “quite impossible to understand Khrushchev's foreign policy, and a good deal of his domestic policy too, except in the light of his life-and-death struggle with China" (pp. 276 and 277). To be sure, in writing of Khrushchev's foreign policy, something has to be said about the dispute with China. But, leaving aside Mr. Crank