RUSSIA: The Inscrutable Soviets

(3 of 3)

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. ∙Lance Morrow