Tom Swift in Siberia

COMRADE VENKA (246 pp.)--Pavel Nil in--Simon & Schusfer ($3.75).

If the authors of the Tom Swift series ever get around to doing Tom Swift in Siberia, the hero may very well be a fellow like Venka Malishev. Like Tom, Venka is unfailingly brave and resourceful --but he is also a dedicated Communist. In Siberia during the 1920s, young Venka is an agent of the secret police (then known as OGPU). His main job is to hunt down the "bandits," who are fiercely anti-Soviet, have a large part of the population on their side, and live off the country. On skis and on horseback, he scouts the Siberian forests, running down his quarry while he dreams of the day when man and the world will be as good as Lenin's promise. There is no hate in him; he kills for a better world.

Planning to capture the biggest bandit of them all, Venka teams up with a peasant named Baukin, himself a former bandit who has gone straight. When the big raid is finished and the big bad chief is captured, Venka gives all credit to his peasant partner, assumes that he will be treated decently as a reward for his help. Instead, Venka's boss takes credit for the job as a Communist coup, has Baukin arrested as a common criminal. In a climax out of keeping with Venka's character, the young hero puts a bullet through his brain.

Comrade Venka, written during the temporary thaw after Stalin's death, was a big bestseller in Russia. Its plea for ordinary human decency is commonplace, but its point that party realism results in cruelty is so carefully spelled out that no Russian reader could have missed it. Unlike Boris Pasternak, his neighbor in the Moscow suburb of Peredelkino, Novelist Nilin attempted no sweeping indictment of Communist inhumanity. Still, his little, almost boyish novel may be read as a sign that many Russians have their doubts about the Communist world.

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