Volume 14, Number 8 · April 23, 1970
Lenin Year
By Neal Ascherson
Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?
by Andrei Amalrik
Harper & Row, 93 pp., $4.95
The New Russian Tragedy
by Anatole Shub
Norton, 128 pp., $4.50
The Demonstration in Pushkin Square
by Pavel Litvinov
Gambit, 128 pp., $4.95
Message From Moscow
An Observer
Knopf, 288 pp., $5.95
My Testimony
by Anatoly Marchenko
Dutton, 415 pp., $8.95
Russia: Hopes And Fears
by Alexander Werth
Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., $6.95
War Between Russia and China
by Harrison E. Salisbury
Norton, 224 pp., $5.95
The Masaryk Case
by Claire Sterling
Harper & Row, 366 pp., $7.95
Report On My Husband
by Josefa Slánská
Atheneum, 208 pp., $5.95
It is Lenin year. This month, it is one hundred years since there was born in Simbirsk on the Volga that impatient, redheaded person who changed the world more fundamentally than any other man since Mohammed. In Moscow, the Caliphate has already stupefied its subjects with Leninolatry: thousands of little dead-white busts, a billion chocolate cakes and puff pastries bearing in relief the face of the man from Simbirsk, countless speeches and articles maintaining that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as presented by Messrs. Brezhnev and Kosygin is precisely that socialist fatherland which Vladimir Ilyich would have wanted to see. In China, the Moslem Brotherhood of Peking dismisses the Moscow celebrations as an obscene smear and claims Lenin for its own. In the pagan West, the game of quotations is played to suggest that Lenin, were he to awaken in his mausoleum, would repudiate everything he found about him.
Review, 3904 words
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