Volume 29, Number 21 & 22 · January 20, 1983
Under the Volcano
By Leonard Schapiro
Stalin's Secret War
by Nikolai Tolstoy
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 463 pp., $18.50
Confiscated Power: How Soviet Russia Really Works
by Hélène Carrère D'Encausse, translated by George Holoch
Harper and Row, 401 pp., $19.95
USSR: The Corrupt Society
by Konstantin M. Simis
Simon and Schuster, 316 pp., $14.95
Notes of a Revolutionary
by Andrei Amalrik, translated by Guy Daniels
Knopf, 343 pp., $16.95
When during the late war British military observers were first allowed to visit the Soviet Union and see the armed forces in action, a number of them came back appalled by what they had seen. War equipment was primitive, as was the cartography, the supply system was rough and inadequate, the troops looked backward, and so forth. It was difficult for them to understand why such an army appeared to be winning. But it was. What the British generals had failed to grasp was that the strength of the Soviet system of rule lay precisely in its ability to live with and to survive the chaos of the society which it ran. Primitive equipment was the only kind that was suitable for use by what was still largely a peasant army. That the regime worked amid the disorder and the confusion was ensured in large measure by its skill in concentrating on essentials, and in leaving the rest to muddle through. But as Count Tolstoy shows in his new book, a large element in the survival was the terror that Stalin unleashed against his own people, in his 'secret war.'
Review, 2675 words
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