RUSSIA: The Inscrutable Soviets

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 détente, 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.)