Volume 16, Number 3 · February 25, 1971
Dead Souls
By George F. Kennan
Khrushchev Remembers
translated and edited by Strobe Talbott, with an Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by Edward Crankshaw
Little, Brown, 618 pp., $10.00
The temptation to resort to deliberate obfuscation as a means of promoting one's political fortunes has been present everywhere and in all times, but nowhere has its appeal been greater than in the murky and dangerous mists of Russian internal political intrigue. The annals of Russian political life are replete with forgeries, falsifications, and mystifications of every variety. The Soviet period is far from being an exception in this respect. If it differs from earlier periods, it does so only in this sense: that in addition to a respectable number of pure forgeries (the 'Litvinov Diaries,' the various Bessedowski products, etc.) it supports a very considerable number of productions that are mixtures of truth and fiction. The 'Sisson Documents,' published (and vouched for as authentic) by the United States government in 1918 to prove that the Bolsheviki were German agents, had their origins mostly in the fertile imaginations of Ferdinand Ossendowsky and one journalistic associate; but they did incorporate some genuine material lifted from the files, or tapped from the telegraphic wires, of the Provisional Government.
Review, 3309 words
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