Soviet Sinners

THE PLEASURE FACTORY by Valeriy Tarsis. 224 pages. John Day. $4.95.

In The Bluebottle, a 1962 novel about an intellectual's disenchantment with contemporary life in Russia, Valeriy Tarsis mercilessly unstitched the britches of Soviet Communism--and let the whole world watch them come down. For slipping the book out of the country and having it published abroad, Tarsis was sent to the loony bin. After six months he was released and in 1965 came Ward 7 (also shipped out and published abroad), in which Tarsis made it clear that only in a madhouse can a Russian speak his mind. This time he was allowed to leave Russia. But while he was on a lecture tour in England, his Russian citizenship was taken away. He became a Greek national, and now lives in West Germany. The Pleasure Factory is his best book to date. It shows that he has read his Chekhov and Turgenev with profit--and that neither greed nor the other passions they wrote about have been abolished in the new Russia.

Tarsis has hit on a setting with its own built-in fascination, a Black Sea health and fun resort, where deserving proletarians are allowed an official, 25-day binge once every five years. Set in another country, the story might be called a comedy of manners. Actually it is a tragicomedy of Soviet morality.

The Pleasure Factory is so named by the resort's manager. Vartan Lipyan, a clever Armenian who runs the place splendidly for the customers, the state and especially for himself. No Communist, Lipyan has made his first million, and is happily stacking up a second. The local party boss knows that Lipyan is not one of the faithful, but he is too shrewd to rock a setup that makes him look good. The truth, says Tarsis, is that these socialist vacations on the regime leave plenty of opportunity for grafters, people who charge exorbitant rents for private houses and those who haul in the tips of the big spenders. Simply by meeting Moscow's quota and more, Lipyan pleases his masters and has enough left over to make him that theoretically impossible anachronism: a happy capitalist in a proletarian society.

Author Tarsis is no more interested in the guests than Lipyan is. To the manager, the healthy ones are suckers who madly and drunkenly throw away their savings. The really sick cannot be cured in so short a stay.

The people Tarsis does concentrate on are the locals, who, like Lipyan, are mostly interested in money, sex, their genuinely desperate love affairs and their unfulfilled lives. The townspeople practice adultery on the grand scale, get rich on tips and graft and, when party functionaries are not around, openly voice their contempt for the bureaucrats who try to order their lives. The few idealists among the party members are stubborn but become steadily disillusioned. For them, life is a double-cross. Not only do they love as hopelessly as others; their personal lives are wrenched out of shape by loyalty to a cause that they know has become a farce, a police machine instead of a socialist dream.

Tarsis' ironic view of Soviet Communism is devastatingly effective, but his theme and his message are bigger and deeper now: Communism cannot survive because it is alien not only to freedom but also to man's nature. He makes no hero of the manager of the Pleasure Factory simply because he beats the system through sheer efficiency and self-interest. But Vartan Lipyan, visited by a party functionary, could be speaking for Tarsis as he forms an unspoken thought: "What the hell . . . we've cracked harder nuts than him be fore now. Life is on my side. And life is the most reliable and unbeatable ally anyone can have."

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