Inquisitive American

PROFILE OF EUROPE (386 pp.)--Sam Welles--Harper ($3.50).

For ten weeks, Russians of all classes (there are as many classes as ever in the "classless" Soviet society) saw the strange sight of a tall, heavy and exceedingly inquisitive American at large in their land. In a shiny ZIS limousine, usually reserved only for the very best party members, he drove 1,200 miles through the Russian countryside; in Moscow alone, he walked 300 miles. He talked to shopkeepers, housewives, farmers, Communist Party bigwigs and little wigs, schoolchildren, university professors, assembly-line workers and anyone else he could buttonhole.

For six months after that, he continued the process in other European countries, taking copious notes on everything from an eider duck in Sweden to vegetable prices in France. The peripatetic American was Sam Welles, associate editor of TIME (and onetime State Department man). His Profile comes in two halves: one on Russia, one a brisk who's who and what's what of European affairs west of the Soviet Union. His conclusion: Europe's morale is by & large better than that of either Russia or the U.S.; Europe can recover in about 15 years--with adequate U.S. help. The far more remarkable half is "A Look at Russia." It is the best and closest look anyone has taken in a long time at the tragedy of Russian life.

The Some-Day Dream. Welles was admitted to Russia along with 35 other U.S. newsmen when the Iron Curtain parted slightly during last year's Foreign Ministers' Conference at Moscow. These reporters had more freedom to look & listen than Moscow's regular correspondents' corps (probably one of the world's most frustrated groups). Welles poked around the ruins of Stalingrad, inspected the crude new barns of the collectives, went to see the Moscow puppet theater's dramatization of The Jungle Book ("the only filing that jolted me ... was hearing Bagheera the panther say 'nichevo' when the monkeys ran off with Mowgli"). He saw the country roads with gangs of shivering slave laborers, the lonely tractor stations whose mechanics double as police agents, the secondhand market in Moscow where free enterprise of sorts is still permitted ("One frail white-haired lady who strikingly resembled my 74-year-old Aunt Pauline was holding up a soiled pillow with bare, blue-veined hands . . ."). The dominating fact that emerges from Welles's story is that the great materialist revolution, which destroys freedom for the sake of "economic security," has left Russia's people in bitter material want. Russians, he found, still have a hungry look in their eyes. They tremble at the thought of losing their jobs; loss of a job in Russia means loss of the precious living space that goes with it. The small daughter of a Russian intellectual expressed a general Russian dream in a song she recently composed:

Some day I am going to have a little house,

It will be painted and have a nice green lawn,

And there will be a light in the toilet.

Perverted Capitalism. Typical of what happens to Russian dreams is the case of the Palace of the Soviets, a huge skyscraper the government started building in the early '30s. The planners chose a likely site, blew up a cathedral which was in the way--only to find that the ground they had chosen was too swampy to support the projected building. All work had to be abandoned, cranes and tools were left to rust. When Welles told these facts to a Russian girl, she said bitterly: "You are trying to blacken our dreams."

Welles finds Soviet Russia "the most wasteful form of society in human history." Economic progress has been made only at staggering cost--including some 15 million lives. The Kremlin, having an absolute monopoly on all business, fixes absurdly low prices on the goods it buys, absurdly high ones on the goods it sells. Thus Russia employs a sort of perverted capitalism--"capitalism gone totalitarian . . . more ruthless than that of any American robber baron."

Russians pay enormous taxes (hidden indirect sales taxes average 350%). In exchange they get an all-pervasive police system whose members are far better fed and clothed than the people themselves; medical care which is dubious by American standards (Welles came across Russian doctors whose cold remedy was mustard powder sprinkled in the patient's socks); and an education which takes 76% of all Russian children no farther than the fourth grade. Writes Welles: "The Kremlin . . . culls out the best children to form the elite governing class ... It makes workers of the rejects."

War or Peace? Hatred of America is systematically inculcated in Russians. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow (relates Welles) never locks its front door--because the penalties for associating with Americans are far heavier than the penalties for theft. He recalls Lenin's words: "We cannot live in peace; memorial services will either be sung over the Soviet republic or world capitalism." Welles nevertheless believes that war with Russia can be avoided forever if the U.S. will help non-Communist countries to help themselves.

In one moving passage, he speaks to the Russians: "Your rulers tell you many harsh things about America . . . Yet any American who visits the Soviet Union comes away deeply aware that, for all his country's shortcomings, America has a most precious heritage: freedom. Not the four freedoms, or this freedom, or that one. Freedom . . . We Americans hope that some day you may find out these things. We hope against hope that some day your leaders, who take such pride in having taught you how to read, will let you decide for yourselves what to read. Only then would you be able to read such a book as this without a qualm . . ."

But he speaks to Americans as well, believes that theirs is the main responsibility for Europe's future. He thinks that any advocates of an attack on Russia would be as wrong as the appeasers.

"I saw for myself that there is slavery in Russia . . . But you cannot stamp out slavery simply by war . . . People do not change very fast by fiat . . . Many Americans think that the woes of the world would be solved if the rest of the world would only imitate 'the American way of life' . . . The world really might be better off if we prated less about our ideals and practiced them more . . . Nothing we can give to others will have any lasting value until we have created it with faith and sweat inside ourselves."

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