Dreams & Dust (Cont'd)

WHEN THE GODS ARE SILENT (506 pp.) --Mikhail Soloviev--McKay ($3.95).

In his early teens, Mikhail Soloviev served as mascot to Budenny's Red cavalry. Later he was sent to school to be molded into one of Stalin's new Soviet leaders. He became a writer for Izvestia, the government paper, first as Siberian correspondent and then as Kremlin reporter. Soloviev got to know most of the big shots, including Big Brother himself, but when the purges came, he was fired and packed off to an outlying province.

So far his story is routine, his experience like that of many other Russian bureaucrats. What is different is that Soloviev silently rebelled and decided to reject the philosophy of Communism entirely. During die war, he served as a guerrilla and was captured by the Nazis.

After the war, he made his way to the U.S. Now, from the depths of his knowledge and bitterness, Soloviev has written a mammoth novel about life under Stalin.

The book is clumsy but powerful, inept at creating characters but bursting with action.

Always Tell the NKVD. For some of its course, When the Gods Are Silent follows Soloviev's own career. The book opens with a glimpse of a village in the heart of the steppes, where the peasants have suffered harshly from the fighting of 1914-17. The lusty Surov boys bring home their weapons, declare a local soviet, cheerfully prod the village policeman to strip in public as a symbolic means of abdicating his authority; and to ten-year-old Mark Surov, gazing spellbound at the revolutionary bravado of his brothers, it all seems like a new world. From this point on, Soloviev charges through the nightmare of modern Russia at breakneck speed, tracing Mark Surov's career through the civil war in Moscow during the infancy of the revolution, and then a gruesome interval as commissar in Far Eastern Siberia.

The generation of Mark Surov, writes Soloviev, "had nothing; yet it was rich.

Badly clothed, still worse fed, having missed all the joy of carefree childhood, it was inspired by a great dream of the future." But the dream turned to dust.

In Siberia, Mark sees innocent peasants and dissident Communists forced to labor like slaves. Because of an order from Stalin, he must lead a winter march down the Amur River to set up the industrial city of Komsomolsk. Without proper food or clothing, the march of the Young Communists turns into a pointless sacrifice; Soloviev's description of how they follow the Amur, dig holes in the ground for shelter, and perish from cold and hunger, is a masterpiece of reporting.

Back in Moscow, Mark Surov is assigned a minor Kremlin post. His heart has turned away from the inhuman regime, but what to do next he does not know. The great purges are beginning; fear floods the city. When Mark invites friends to a party, he must inform the NKVD so that it can send an extra guest.

When he goes to the third floor of the Kremlin, he must always turn to the right --Stalin's office is on the left. Once, Mark sees Stalin publicly humiliate Old Bolshevik Volkov in accents of pretended joviality. ("Still alive, old fellow? But creaking? Don't worry; an old tree creaks a long time before it snaps, doesn't it?") Mark dreams of assassinating the Beloved Leader, but Volkov dissuades him: "The point is not to kill Stalin, but to destroy his system." "Deny It." In describing the purges, Novelist Soloviev throws in some sensational details which he does not manage to authenticate as history, but which have at least fictional verisimilitude. Stalin's bosom friend, Ordjonikidze, poisoned by Stalin's orders, shouts into a telephone as he lies dying: "Koba, I go, but you will follow me."-- Red Army Marshal Tukhachevsky refuses to confess, and is felled by a bullet from the NKVD chief, Nikolai Yezhov. Red Army Marshal Blucher is called before the Politburo, where Stalin praises him as a genius. Marshal Voroshilov sends Blucher a look, as if to say: "Deny it. Say you haven't any genius . . .

Stalin's the only one with genius among us, don't you know that?" But Blucher just smiles with pleasure, lapping up Stalin's praise. The next morning he has disappeared.

With a rousing section on World War II and a harrowing description of how starving Russian prisoners escape from a Nazi camp by digging through a latrine, When the Gods Are Silent reaches its climax. Mark Surov turns back to his native Russia, hoping that somehow he will be able to bring its martyrdom to an end.

The tempestuous vigor of his story tends to blur the fact that few of Soloviev's characters have any individual flavor or depth. Mark Surov is more a window opening on to Russia than a credible person; most of the others are stock villains or victims. Only the Old Bolshevik Volkov, apparently modeled on Nikolai Bukharin, comes to life. And appropriately, it is he who carries the meaning of the book: "We, my boy," he tells Surov, "are the victims of our own crime."

-- Koba was Stalin's pseudonym as a revolutionist in his younger days.

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