shaw's characterization of it as "life-and-death" (no one can yet know whether it will be so for the Soviet Union), it is difficult to see how the conflict with China can be related in any specific way to such undertakings as the Berlin wall and the emplacement of missiles in Cuba. If we were to accept Mr. Crankshaw's emphasis on this point, we should wonder why even more desperate foreign policy ventures are not being undertaken today, when the polemics with the Chinese have risen to new heights.

Mr. Crankshaw sees in Khrushchev's maneuvers of the summer of 1964 his intention of "moving to an accommodation with West Germany. He was getting ready to sell Comrade Ulbricht down the river" (p. 286). Perhaps, but no evidence is offered. Something was in Khrushchev's mind on this score; that is clear. But can we simply assume, without further ado, that he intended to sell East Germany out?

In his final assessment, Mr. Crankshaw considers that Khrushchev "brought the Soviet Union through the great change; he had acted decisively and boldly when others had been afraid to act; he had secured the peace and laid the foundations for prosperity" (p. 287). Now change there had indeed been since Stalin died, but Mr. Crankshaw himself shows that the system, as Khrushchev left it, was fundamentally little altered-Mr. Crankshaw calls it "Stalinism without tears." As for securing the peace, that achievement is better ascribed, for the period of the early 1960's, to President Kennedy. And the current Soviet leadership's continued preoccupation with the basic problems of the economy casts a strange light upon the author's claims that it found the foundations of prosperity already laid.

MR. MARTIN PAGE'S The Day Khrushchev Fell was written, according to a statement on the dust jacket, in collaboration with Mr. David Burg, a Soviet-born writer now living in England. Notwithstanding its anecdotal breeziness and calculated appeal to the general reading public, it does a better job than Mr. Crankshaw's book of answering the specific questions to which Khrushchev's fall gave rise. Thus, Messrs. Page and Burg correctly see the immediate precipitant of the Presidium's decision to remove Khrushchev in the First Secretary's insistence upon ramming through yet another "reform," specifically, another scheme of agricultural reorganization, to be considered at the Central Committee plenum scheduled for November 1964.

Mr. Page was the Moscow correspondent of the London Daily Express during the period leading up to Khrushchev's fall and beyond it. Employing a minimum of formal documentation, he relies mainly on his own first-hand observations and the reports of other journalists (in particular, he gives general credit to the Moscow reports of The New York Times and Le Monde) to sketch the events of the first half of October, 1964. His account is accurate. The book is fleshed out with a good description of the life of foreign correspondents in the Soviet capital and with accounts of the reaction in the West and in Eastern Europe to Khrushchev's fall, of the character of the new regime, and of life in the USSR.

Mr. Page does not pretend to provide a study in depth. He does tell what happened and leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions. As an approach to producing an account for the general reader, Mr. Page's seems preferable to that of Mr. Crankshaw.

Soviet Politics

LEONARD B. SCHAPIRO: The Government and Politics of the Soviet Union (2nd edition). London, Hutchinson University Library, 1967.

THIS EMINENTLY authoritative textbook appears to be more suitable for harried young instructors caught unprepared before a lecture than it is for any but the least ambitious college courses in Soviet area studies. In our age of rapid reading and minimal retention, a text which a student can devour in half an hour has obvious disadvantages. In addition to being short, Leonard Schapiro's book invites the kind of reflection which might be found in the Great Books Clubs but hardly in the classroom, with its current trend away from old-fashioned learning and toward free-wheeling and frequently ill-informed discussion.

It is a pity that The Government and Politics of the Soviet Union will not be widely read in the one place where it would be most useful, i.e. the Soviet Union. We seldom realize how exceedingly narrow and subjective is the Soviet citizen's perception of his political reality, and how unhelpful are indigenous Soviet writings in providing him with a fair and meaningful view of his own world. The Soviet Government, ever anxious to retain a maximum of freedom in the implementation of its policies, is loath to explain to the public the interrelations of its various "measures" or their underlying significance. Nor is the citizen enlightened by the Soviet equivalents of western political scientists, whose discussions of political developments in the USSR amount to little more than em

bellishments of the current party “line.” In spite of his tendency to blur the picture by excessive use of qualifiers, Professor Schapiro's introductory historical chapters are quite lively. He seems to dislike Lenin more than his successors; he somehow succeeds in making even the cataclysmic seizure of power by the Bolsheviks anticlimactic. His evaluation of Stalin's era is rather circumspect. While deploring high human costs and the violence of the economic policies of the early 1930's, he stresses Stalin's "solid gains," the main one appearing to be his successful leadership in the conduct of the war against Germany. Prof. Schapiro also assumes that the Soviet system "could really only work effectively where one man was in undisputed command." As for the postStalin period, he believes that Khrushchev's great innovations have survived his personal demise. He is not sure whether the Soviet Union "still remains in essentials the totalitarian police state which Stalin built on Lenin's foundations," but is cautiously optimistic that "it may prove very difficult to reverse the process to which Khrushchev gave such a powerful initial impetus," and which "may have started the Soviet Union along a path of evolution of which the end cannot be foreseen."

The remaining two-thirds of the book correspond more closely to its title, representing a very competent, dispassionate, and up to date analysis of the components of the Soviet government, their interrelations and functions. Put in clear, unambiguous prose, these chapters readily fill factual gaps in our knowledge of the subject-gaps which, unfortunately, all but the best of us rarely seem to be able to fill.

Vladimir Petrov

Soviet History

JOHN M. THOMPSON: Russia, Bolshe vism, and the Versailles Peace. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1966.

THIS VOLUME is a detailed, painstaking account of how the peacemakers tried to deal with the problem of Russia during the brief period from the armistice in November 1918 until January 1920. Mr. Thompson based his study on a prodigious amount of research: in addition to reading a large body of published material, he consulted over twenty archival collections and interviewed several participants in the proceedings in France. His work is no doubt the final word on the subject.

The problem of Russia was extraordinarily complex, and Mr. Thompson has succeeded in lucidly presenting all the intricacies. Although the peacemakers were agreed on the wickedness of bolshevism, they differed on the way to cope with the revolutionary regime. There were those, particularly the French leaders and Winston Churchill, who advocated a tough policy in order to crush communism. They were opposed to inviting the new rulers to send representatives to the peace conference and favored massive military intervention to overthrow Lenin's government. Lloyd George and President Wilson, however, pointed to the unwillingness of the people in the Allied countries to fight another war and stressed the enormous expense of new military ventures. Moreover, they feared that intervention might play into the hands of the Communists by making it possible for them to exploit patriotic resentment against foreign interference. In Lloyd George's and Wilson's view, trade with

Russia and a program of economic relief were the best means of dampening the revolutionary ardor of the Soviet leaders.

The peacemakers not only had to devise a policy toward Russia. They also had to take into account the "Bolshevik menace" threatening Western Europe, an issue that intruded itself into practically all the deliberations. Every country represented at the conference maintained that if its claims were not satisfied, bolshevism would triumph. Not surprisingly, these claims made it extremely difficult to reach rational decisions. The Germans, for instance, insisted that a severe treaty for their country would produce such despair that the people would inevitably turn to communism. But Clemenceau asserted, with no less conviction, that a mild peace for Germany would demoralize the French nation and surely pave the way for bolshevism in France. Mr. Thompson skillfully shows how these conflicting arguments bewildered and frustrated the peacemakers and led them to move from one policy to another, none of which proved to be successful. Ultimately, as the author points out, the difficulties of the diplomats stemmed from their adherence to two assumptions: "that the wicked Soviet regime could not last, and that Allied power could shape the course of affairs in Russia." Operating on the basis of these false premises, the statesmen at Versailles were bound to end their negotiations without formu. lating an effective policy toward Russia. Abraham Ascher

The Soviet Army

MICHEL GARDER: A History of the Soviet Army. New York, Praeger, 1966.

STUDENTS OF SOVIET military affairs familiar with Michel Garder's Histoire de l'Armée Soviétique, published in 1959 and generally regarded as the best historical treatment of the subject in the French language, will not find a great deal new in the present volume. With the exception of some updating of the material in the last of its four parts (dealing with the period 1958 to 1964), and some amplifying footnotes by John Erickson of Manchester University, Colonel Garder's

new volume is essentially a straight translation of his earlier book. Nevertheless, it comes as a welcome addition to the relatively small library of competent works available in English on the historical development of the Soviet military system. While not to be compared with John Erickson's own Soviet High Command for depth of analysis and wealth of documentary backup, Colonel Garder's book is doubtless more broadly instructive for anyone seeking an overall picture of the genesis and growth of Soviet Russia's armed forces.

As seen by Colonel Garder, a French officer of Russian-German extraction, the Soviet armed forces today represent a synthesis of two heritages--one stemming from traditional Russian values and the other from the Communist revolutionary experience. The fusion of these two heritages was achieved during World War II, when Stalin was obliged to soft-pedal Marxist-Leninist ideology and appeal instead to Russian patriotism in order to rally the country behind the war effort. In the postwar period, the pendulum swung back toward emphasis on Communist values, as the Soviet leaders acted to reassert party dominance within the armed forces, but this did not essentially undo the process of "Russianization" stimulated during the war.

While Garder regards the "Russianization" of the Soviet armed forces as irreversible, he does not suggest that this process threatens party control over them. Indeed, by serving as a medium for the psycho-political education of youth, and as a kind of mixing bowl for party and non-party members as well as different nationalities of the Union, the armed forces have become, in his opinion, a rather effective link between the party and the people. As for the place of the armed forces in the Soviet Union's global strategy, Garder ascribes to them a role that is essentially psychological-to deter outside attack on the socialist world and to help in expanding socialism by "morally" supporting the historical process, as interpreted, of course, by Marxist-Leninist theorists. Only in extreme cases --such as the need to repel a "counterrevolutionary" threat to a Communist regime, as in Hungary in 1956-does Garder judge it likely that Soviet arms would be used to accelerate the process of history through a direct policy of force.

Thomas W. Wolfe

Soviet Medicine

MARK G. FIELD: Soviet Socialized Medicine: An Introduction. New York, Free Press, 1967.

THE CHIEF VALUE of this slender volume lies in its comprehensive description of the Soviet medical establishment and how it works. Written for the layman, it broadly surveys the main features of the Soviet system of health administration and presents a fairly up-to-date statistical picture of the physical magnitude and categories of Soviet medical facilities, medical personnel, medical education and research, as well as of various facets of medical cost and financing. Several introductory chapters briefly sketch the historical background, the ideological or theoretical aspects, and the social functions of the system of socialized medicine as it has evolved in the USSR over the last five decades.

Mr. Field has already proven himself a capable and lucid expositor of Soviet medical institutions. In his earlier Doctor and Patient in Soviet Russia (1957), he focused his attention on the sociology of doctor-patient relations. In his new book, he attempts a more encompassing, albeit largely quantitative, description of Soviet medical institutions and services. By and large, he has produced a highly useful survey, though one that is not without certain shortcomings.

For one thing, it is difficult to understand why Mr. Field attaches so much importance to the fact that the Soviet Union today has 20 to 25 percent of the world's doctors, or why he should view this fact as "disturbing (for Americans, at least)." He seems to perceive some kind of a threat in the prospect that "the USSR, if it so chooses, soon will be able to export physicians to the underdoctored areas of the world (and) has already done so on a limited scale" (p. 204). But if the superpowers are to clash on neutral battlefields, by all means let the weapons be scalpels and hypodermic needles, and let us not fret if the Soviet arsenal of these weapons exceeds all others.

A more fundamental shortcoming is that the author consciously refrains from discussing and, indeed, provides little information which could serve as a basis for discussing-the question of perhaps greatest interest to his readers: How good is Soviet medicine? It

is not that Mr. Field feels incompetent to treat the issue, but rather that he considers the quality of Soviet medical services a separate question which can be safely laid to one side while he treats the structural and quantitative aspects. He promises to deal with the question of quality in another book, two or three years hence, which will be "intended primarily for scholars in the field of medical organization and administrators of medical programs as well as those specialists interested in Soviet affairs."

This highly unusual procedure raises some interesting questions. Since Mr. Field's future book will by design have a readership "far more limited than that of the present volume," does he not do a disservice to readers of his present book by offering them less than a full loaf? More important, does not an unrelieved presentation of quantitative data on Soviet medicine-data based largely on statistical tables from the Bolshaia Meditsinskaia Entsiklopediia of 1959 and other Soviet sources, with only passing comment on the important biases and lacunae these data are known to contain-give the book a certain imbalance which might mislead unsophisticated readers? It is like stating the case for only one side in a dispute, with a promise to clarify obscure points another day. Over-reliance on Soviet official data, simply because they are the most easily, or in some cases the only ones, available, involves as high degree of risk in the field as in any other. The validity of the message conveyed by these data (which are generally designed to demonstrate phenomenal growth rates) is simply too dubious for them to be allowed to stand alone, without benefit of critical scrutiny or explanatory comment.

Comparisons of the Soviet health system with its antecedents or with those of other countries, particularly with the rather singular American model, admittedly pose very complex problems. Perhaps, in fact, there is no entirely acceptable way of comparing like elements in totally unlike settings. How is one to judge, for example, whether more limbs are needlessly amputated, or more deaths caused by faulty diag. nosis, under the Soviet medical system than under the American? But if one elects to avoid the sticky comparisons, he should perhaps also forego the easy ones which may tell a misleading story. For instance, the information that except for Israel the USSR has the highest ratio of doctors to patients in the

world (20.5 for each 10,000 of population, a ratio double that of the United States) cries out for elucidation.

The fact that 75 percent of all Soviet physicians are women is in itself merely an interesting piece of information. Whether physicians are predominantly male or predominantly female would seem to be largely a matter of taste, or of choice (at least, where a society enjoys the right of choice). But the fact that Soviet physicians as a group seem to have the status of poorly-paid shiftworkers, spending 51⁄2 to 61⁄2 hours a day "on duty" at a clinic or on perambulatory assignment and an equal amount of time at a second job or running the family household, suggests a picture of the Soviet medical profession that is, to say the least, at considerable variance with the situation in other major countries, including some with health services hardly less "socialized" than those of the Soviet Union. It is to be hoped that Mr. Field will soon supplement his present survey with a comparative study based on a much wider range of sources and providing the curious observer with at least some estimate of the quality and human effectiveness of Soviet medicine. Albert Boiter

histories of

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by avoiding critical dissent. Yet he ascribes a number of evaluations and statements to "Soviet estheticians" or "Communist thinking," failing to contrast the ideologically "safe" approach with the recent flexibility displayed by Soviet musicologists. As a result, his evaluation of Russian composers suffers from subtle imbalances and preconceptions.

In dealing with Russia's musical past, standard Soviet textbooks minimize factors such as the church, the court, the nobility, and foreign influences, and portray the Russian people as the sole creators of Russian music. Bakst reflects this emphasis on native Russian sources: as early as the 18th century, he says, Russian composers "consciously opposed the tastes of the court aristocracy" and pursued a "national democratic musical art." Indeed, virtually all Russian composers are pictured as having been nationalists, realists, folklorists, liberals, and potential rebels. This stress on national roots leads to the neglect of certain international, Western-oriented tendencies within Russian art circles; no mention is made, for example, of the "Evenings of Contemporary Music" (an offshoot of the Mir Iskusstva movement) which played such an important role during the first decade of the 20th century. (At one point, Bakst does address himself to the East-West antagonism in a sensible manner: he explains that "Tchaikov sky and 'The [Mighty] Five' represented various aspects of Russian nationalism and . . . absorbed, in their own way, Western musical influences.")

Bakst's history of the Soviet era is curiously detached. Again, seeking to avoid political complexities, he discusses music on a purely ideational level. The two chapters, "MarxistLeninist Philosophy of Art" and "Music and Soviet Realism," say little about Soviet reality. The question as to what extent these philosophies were used to control and direct musical creativity goes unanswered. Historical highlights--the ideological struggle of the 1920's between the "Association for Contemporary Music" and the “Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians" and the decrees of 1948 and 1958 that so deeply affected Soviet music-are given marginal attention. Such culturalpolitical figures as Zhdanov or Lunacharski do not appear in the index; and the ideological shifts under Khrushchev (in 1962) and his successors are not considered. In fact, the book seems to conclude with the year 1962.

Altogether Bakst's efforts to remain non-political finally damage the objectivity of his book, for Soviet politics and Soviet musicology are indubitably intertwined. In the biographical chapters, particularly in those dealing with composers during the Stalin era, the humiliations suffered by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and other masters are treated so incidentally that the uninitiated reader cannot gauge the immense cultural crudity of Stalin's “cult of personality." For example, Bakst goes so far as to imply that the official castigation of Shostakovich in 1936 was not entirely undeserved-an opinion that seems to reflect the author's lack of distinction between esthetic and political criteria. Indeed, not only does Bakst take a light view of the consequences of non-conformism, he literally invokes the importance of political compliance: "Soviet composers are not expected to be nonpolitical and cosmopolitan but to be nationalists. . . to create representations of heroic Soviet men and women, and reflect the Messianic tendency of the party . . ." (pp. 234-35). And finally, Bakst does not mention the rebellious avant-garde that has been battling the musical establishment since the late 1950's. For a growing minority of young Soviet composers the confining guidelines quoted above are unacceptable.

Professor Bakst, who has taught music at Brooklyn College since 1936, planned this book for the "general reader." His review of musical matters is thus largely non-technical, and he devotes much attention to the interrelationship of music and the other arts. However, the general reader will find the all-Russian bibliography inaccessible, and the scholar will be frustrated by its arbitrary selectivity.

Boris Schwarz

Soviet Agriculture

ROY D. LAIRD AND EDWARD L. Crowley, EDS.: Soviet Agriculture: The Permanent Crisis, New York, Praeger, 1965.

THIS THIN BOOK (in both senses) contains a dozen papers and background reports presented at a symposium held in February 1964 at the Institute for the Study of the USSR in Munich. The papers were apparently written and edited after the poor 1963

harvest and before the removal, a year later, of the man who most obstructed real solutions to farm problems. It was a gloomy period, when observers inside as well as outside the USSR could easily have wondered if agricultural policy was ever going to get back on the rails.

With all due allowance for the mood of the time, the title of the collection still seems tendentious, and the complacently dismal tone of several of the contributions recalls nothing so much as Professor Higgins' vision of Eliza's downfall: "How simply frightful! how humiliating! how delightful!" In his summary of the symposium results, Professor Alec Nove regrets the failure of some participants to distinguish between defects caused by a low priority for agriculture and those rooted in the system itself. This is part of the trouble, but blindness to the adaptability of the system is even more pervasive and misleading. There may be such a thing as "Marxist dogmatism," but policy shifts in the past and the range of views now expressed in Soviet journals suggest that it is more of a nuisance than an iron fetter on the system.

Among the formal papers, the most useful are Nove's on agricultural administration, and Carl Zoerb's comparison of grain production patterns in Kazakhstan and Saskatchewan. Eugene Wädekin's exploration of similarities and differences in regional developments suggests the insights to be gained from this approach, but is rather unfocussed and inconclusive.

Henry Wronsky manages to write his piece on peasant incomes without ever explaining the crucial term "work-day unit." In most cases he seems to mean the collective farm trudoden (workday), a synthetic accounting unit that weights the duration of a task by its arduousness, importance, and skill requirements. But he speaks also (p. 130) of the "work-day unit on state farms" (which have never used the trudoden), and describes a collective farm employment figure for 1959 (p. 131) as being in work-day units when it is specified in the Soviet source as referring to mandays.

Some of the saltiest pages in the book are provided by Boris Wjunow, a Soviet agronomist who emigrated to West Germany in the early 1960's. His commentary on Nove's paper contains word pictures that are worth a thousand tables-for example, of a pig farm "where you could not tell whether the animals were pigs or crocodiles; they

had sinewy snouts and were blue in color because they had no proper fodder."

There are the usual unlucky misprints, a few of which might lead to confusion (Braginski, Dumnov, Obolenski, and Ovechkin are misspelled, and there are errors in sign or decimal in the tables on pp. 45 and 166).

Nancy Nimitz

Marxism and China

DONALD M. LowE: The Function of "China" in Marx, Lenin and Mao. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1966.

THIS BOOK IS AN extremely useful, if not wholly successful, effort to analyze the conceptions formed by Marx, Lenin and Mao of such non-Western societies as Russia and China. It is useful because it assembles and comments on many relevant passages from a century and a quarter of Marxist thought. It is not entirely successful because it fails to focus sufficiently on the unifying theme of the book, which is the question for non-Western intellectuals of the psychological equivalence of their "backward" societies with the dominant Western countries. For Marx, the problem was one of aliena tion from, but still within, the mainstream of development of Western civilization, but for Lenin, and even more for Mao, there was not only alienation from their own societies, but also the alienation of their societies as a whole from the modern West. Hence, the Marxist solution, both "scientific” and yet anti-Western, seemed ideal to many "Eastern" radicals.

Professor Lowe, as a student of Professor Levenson, is very much aware of the significance of this sense of alienation, and he frequently mentions it. However, by trying to make his central theme the idea of "China" rather than the larger problem of the identity of non-Western societies in a Westernized world, the author fails to make the book a cohesive whole. Thus, the relevance of the sections on the development of 19th and 20th-century Russian radical thought to the idea of "China" is questionable, although much light is shed on the problem of how to modernize a non-Western so