Through Kansas Eyes

REPORT ON THE RUSSIANS--William L White--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

"Its author is a certain shady newsboy named White," snarled Pravda when a condensation of this book appeared in the December 1944 Reader's Digest. "The book itself ... is the usual stew from the Fascist kitchen, with all its smells, calumnies, ignorance, and hidden anger." U.S. Reds were equally outraged by what balding, square-jawed Bill White, son of the late, great William Allen White, had to report of his six-week trip through Russia with Eric Johnston. And even non-Communist friends of the Soviet sharply criticized him for attempting to measure by U.S. standards a very different set of values and circumstances. But most readers are likely to accept and appreciate Report on the Russians for what it is: an honest, highly personal account of how the Russians (whom he liked) and the Soviet system (which he disliked) looked to a seasoned newsman who has seen a lot of the world but kept the basic viewpoint of his native Kansas. Readers will also find the book (which corrects some errors in the Digest version) no less vivid and readable than Author White's best-selling Journey for Margaret, They Were Expendable, and Queens Die Proudly.

Girl Scouts & Young Republicans. The Russian people struck Bill White as being very like Americans. In endless tours of factories (everything in Russia from a farm to a hospital seemed to be called a factory) he saw young, earnest, sober-minded executives, who looked exactly like the businessmen at a U.S. junior chamber of commerce luncheon. They were Communists just as their American counterparts were Republicans, "because it was the party of respectability and its hallmark would be helpful to a young man anxious to get on in the world." The Komsomol, or League of Young Communists, seemed to White "a combination of the Girl Scouts and the Young Republican Club." The Society for the Godless was young Russia's Epworth League.

In Siberia, Commissar "Mike" Kalugin ("strictly Tammany" said another U.S. correspondent) walked down a factory assembly line "talking to the workers, a wave of the hand to this one, a pat on the back for that -- a ward-boss patrolling his precinct." But to Reporter White's Kansan eyes all these familiar people seemed to be living in "a moderately well run penitentiary, which kept [them] working hard and provided a bunk to sleep in, three daily meals and enough clothes to keep [them] warm." It was a prison whose "walls were covered with posters explaining that freedom and justice could only be found within its bars, that outside was only disorder, strikes, uncertainty, unemployment, and exploitation. . . ." It differed from the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing only in that "a talented inmate can work himself up to be warden, which would be impossible in Lansing."

How to Understand Capitalism. By U.S. standards, White found many of Russia's factories unclean and inefficient, its buildings drab and shoddy. "What is missing," he asserts, "is competition. Nobody bothers to put up a striking store front or a beautifully arranged window display. . . . The architect who drew the plans for that dreary workers' apartment had to please not the people who live in it, nor the promoter-owners who hope to keep it rented, but the Government officials. . . . This does not mean that the Russian people do not want beauty ... it means that they have a poor system for getting it."

"Their system," said Ed, a young U.S. Army technical adviser, "doesn't give them the drive, the personal ambition, the incentive that ours does--they have to talk to so many people before anything gets done." The Government is everywhere, even determining what mildly dirty jokes may be told at a banquet. "Walt Disney is more often than not in the Soviet doghouse since Mickey Mouse frequently deviates from the party line."

Concludes Kansan White: "The way to understand Capitalism is not to memorize the long words economists use. It is to go some place where they don't have any. ..."

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