The Inscrutable Soviets

By LANCE MORROW

The People and the Power

by ROBERT G. KAISER 499 pages. Atheneum. $12.95.

THE RUSSIANS

by HEDRICK SMITH 527 pages. Quadrangle. $1 2.50.

The American view of Russia has been refracted over the last half-century through layers of repugnance, infatuation, loathing, horror, suspicion, complacency--and now, in doubts about detente, by suspicion again. It has run a course from Lincoln Steffens' fatuous "I have been over into the future, and it works" to the nightmares of John Foster Dulles. In imagining Russia, Americans have always had a tendency to project their own illusions upon a wall of blank ignorance.

Falling Bricks. The ignorance is understandable: the Soviet Union keeps itself as difficult to read as a Five Year Plan. Partly for that reason, the American curiosity persists, especially in the ambiguous atmosphere of Soyuz-Apollo, grain deals, Angola and the apocalyptic visions of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in exile. Also involved, of course, is the fascination of one great power with its rival.

It is a measure of that interest that Hedrick Smith's The Russians has climbed almost instantly onto the bestseller list. By rights, it should be sharing the distinction with Robert Kaiser's Russia. Smith's work is more rigorously organized, richer in anecdote; Kaiser's a bit broader, more discursive, and given to larger generalization. Both books, superb exercises in political-travel journalism, give Russia what it has always lacked for Americans: a complicated human reality.

Smith and Kaiser served identical tours in Russia from 1971 to 1974 --Smith as Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times, Kaiser as bureau chief for the Washington Post. Both were relegated to Moscow's ghetto for the foreign press. Necessarily, their accounts overlap; they frequently describe the same events--the two were the first foreign newsmen to interview Solzhenitsyn, for example--and even the same routines by Comedian Arkadi Raikin.

Both authors agree that the Soviet system works--miserably. Russia, writes Kaiser, is a superpower that lacks even a basic network of good roads. The Soviets have exploited the greatest advantage of their authoritarian system in concentrating vast resources upon narrow goals--defense and space, for example--but otherwise have built an economy that is preposterously inefficient and corrupt. Industrial plant directors bent upon fulfilling the Plan adulterate their products to increase quantity. Pills come out at half-strength. A canning engineer admits: "If we add less sugar to the jam, we can produce more canned goods and meet the Plan." Window panes are often made so thin that most are shattered before they can be installed in apartment complexes that begin losing bricks just after the tenants move in. (Jutting screens are sometimes installed above the first floor to catch the falling bricks.)

Exotic Wines. The Soviet elite enjoys opulent privileges. Writes Smith: "An entire department of the Party Central Committee known by the innocuous title of Upravleniye Delami--the Administration of Affairs--and with a secret budget, operates and equips an extensive stable of choice apartment houses, country dachas, government guest houses, special rest homes, fleets of car pools and squads of security-trained servants for the power-elite." Politburo members and national secretaries of the Communist Party use black Zil limousines, hand-tooled and worth about $75,000 each. A network of unmarked stores caters to the Soviet aristocracy. Its stock: rare czarist delicacies like caviar, smoked salmon, export vodka and exotic wines, choice meats. Those stores also carry foreign goods the proletariat never sees: French cognac, American cigarettes, Japanese tape recorders--all at discounts. Including relatives, Smith estimates, these indulged shoppers amount to several million. Everything is maskirovannoye (masked) --the guilty secrets of privilege.

All of it works by blat--influence, clout. Military families intermarry--so do scientific families, party families, writers' families. A Soviet old-boy network promotes its children's careers. Teachers can be intimidated to give better grades to sons of the powerful. According to Smith, "Russians themselves comment that the upper-class feeling today increasingly seems like Russia before the Revolution."

The unprivileged get along with what for Americans seems an odd docility. But both Kaiser and Smith point out that for the majority of Soviet citizens, the minimal comforts of housing --however cramped (10 ft. sq. per person, by Lenin's edict)--and a regular diet--however spare (sausage, potatoes, cabbage)--are better than they had before. Especially to those older Russians who lived through the hunger of the war. conditions now seem acceptable. There are even hints of affluence --a few self-service stores, prepackaged goods. Some citizens feel rich enough to afford wigs, pets and facelifts. The wait for a car, however, is one to five years.

On the Left. For Russians, shopping is an endless, degrading and sometimes adventurous experience. The rule is that if you see a line forming, you immediately join it and only inquire then what is being sold--choice items go too quickly to hesitate. The KGB is sullenly omnipresent, of course, though Soviets no longer fear so much the knock in the middle of the night. The people possess a highly developed, anarchic talent for beating the system. They arrange paper marriages so that a man or woman can get legal-residency documents for Moscow, widely considered the most desirable place in the Soviet Union to live. (The capital gets top priority on all consumer goods, for one thing.) They contrive incredibly complicated apartment swaps in a country where housing is still disastrously scarce. When they have babies, they circumvent rigid hospital rules: new mothers dangle strings out of their windows, and their husbands tie parcels of food to them. Hustling na levo (on the left) is a way of life. It encompasses using government limousines as gypsy cabs and a thousand other winked-at subterfuges.

Kaiser and Smith are at their best with the unique character of Russians -- their glazed and hostile public faces that dissolve in private in almost alarming conviviality. Their sentimentality and love of children -- the obsessive way in which a babushka watches a child in a playground to make sure its rump never touches the snow. Their alcoholism -- vodka bottles come with tear-off metal tops, and the bottle, once opened, must be finished. Their chilling fear of strangers and even friends -- the result of long experience with informers.

Like the Weather. Corruption and mistrust inhabit any society. But, as Kaiser says, "Russia really is different." It missed the Renaissance and Enlightenment. It draws upon a deep tradition of authoritarianism, and half expects it. In any case, Russians may profoundly fear the alternative, which they see as anarchy. To many Soviet citizens, the U.S., with its unemployment, racial troubles and apparently frenetic politics, is paying too high a price in instability. Oppression in the Soviet Union comes, at last, to be an expected natural force, like the weather. For Russians mistrust individualism. As a people they have a massive sense of inferiority and vulnerability -- they have been threatened and conquered too often. Smith and Kaiser note the irony: dissidents may always grope for the democracy of the West. But the Soviet heart is no longer a rebel. Today's Russian revolution is a series of fitful individual protests. It is not precisely the "class struggle" that Karl Marx had in mind. sbLance Morrow

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