A Sop to Cerberus

SILENCE by Yuri Bondaryev. 254 pages. Houghfon M/ffl/n. $4.95.

Russia is a Cerberus that grows more than 3,000,000 heads a year, many of them hungry for truth. The Soviet leaders appease this appetite with huge helpings of technological and scientific fact, but when it comes to political truth, they either stonily ignore the demand or cynically toss a sop to Cerberus.

As sops go, Yuri Bondaryev's Silence is an especially cynical one. It was tossed to the Russian public at a time (1962) when Khrushchev was touching up his image as a liberalizer. It is tossed to the U.S. public at a time when the Soviet regime is anxious to make the West forget that two Russian writers--

Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, better known pseudonymously as Abrarri Tertz and Nikolai Arzha---are about to stand trial for publishing books that criticize conditions under Communism (TIME, Dec. 17).

At first glance, Silence seems to be criticizing Communism without restraint. The villain is an ambitious young member who brings false charges of "deceiving the Party" against a public-spirited young Communist. The charges stick, the hero is expelled from the party, the villain moves on to bigger and better betrayals-and nobody smells a rat in the apparat.

On second inspection, however, Bondaryev seems to be dealing more in apologetics than in admonitions. He carefully distinguishes between the villain and the party. The villain is presented as a fascist infiltrator who got into the party by a trick; the party is presented as the Mystical Body of Marx, the Bride of History invested with infallibility. Current conditions are meticulously unmentioned. Conditions under Stalin are discussed with an almost complicitous complacency--police brutality, for instance, is noted only once, and then it is dismissed as a "mistake" that stems from "love for Stalin" and certainly "cannot last." At the end, the hero gets the girl he loves and the job he wants in a land of unlimited opportunity for all--even for citizens in political disgrace.

Like, say, Sinyavsky and Daniel?

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