Who Whom?

WINTER IN Moscow--Malcolm Mug-geridge--Little, Brown ($2.50).

The Russian Revolution was at first, and for many a subterranean year, an Idea. Translated into the impurity of fact it has ceased to please such pure anarchists as Emma Goldman, such pure Bolsheviks as Leon Trotsky, such pure individualists as Max Eastman (TIME, May 14). It never pleased Poet e. e. cummings. Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge, for eight months Moscow correspondent for England's Manchester Guardian, went to Russia as Guardian men go everywhere--determined to be liberal. In spite of all temptations, however, he "took a great dislike to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," went home and wrote a scathing account of his Winter in: Moscow.

His book makes no attempt to be unbiased. Author Muggeridge dislikes the Soviet system and says so in as many ways as he can manage. Though he has changed people's names to save skins and faces, writes much of his account in fictionalized form, he denies having made anything up. By implication he accuses most of his fellow correspondents of falsifying facts. "It is not generally known that foreign journalists in Moscow work under the perpetual threat of losing their visas, and therefore their jobs. . . . The result is that news from Russia is a joke." The news Author Muggeridge retails (especially of the foreign hangers-on, cranks, visitors, converts) is also a joke, boisterously but bitterly told. Some of his wilder scenes remind the reader of Evelyn Waugh.

To the invariable Soviet defense against its critics ("You can't make an omelette without cracking eggs") Author Muggeridge turns an unsympathetic ear. He accuses the Soviet Government of direct responsibility for famine conditions, of attempting to belittle and conceal conditions. He implies that dislike of the Soviet system is widespread in Russia, says the Russian experiment "cannot be carried through to the end because it depends on hate. It presupposes a society in a perpetual ferment of hate, or of class war. . . . No whole society can hate long enough to destroy itself; and self-destruction is the only conceivable end of Bolshevism and of the class war." But even if the Soviet dictatorship were good Author Muggeridge would not like it. As one of his real-fictitious characters remarks, the gist of the matter is "Who whom?" (Who rules whom? What class exploits the other classes for its own benefit?)

Sample of Author Muggeridge's distaste for Russia: "Jerry-built immensity made and inhabited by slaves. Everything most bestial and most vulgar--barbarian arrogance and salesman servility; humanitarian sentimentality and hypocrisy; rotarian Big Business and Prosperity. . . . Do you really believe . . . that these awful plays are good; these wretched people happy; these revolting Jews, great leaders and prophets; these decrepit buildings, fine architecture; these dingy slums, new socialist cities; these empty slogans bawled mechanically, a new religion; these stale ideas (superficial in themselves and even then misunderstood), the foundation and hope of the future?"

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