LOOKING AT RUSSIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 652, 4 January 1952, Page 10

LOOKING AT RUSSIA

RUSSIA BY DAYLIGHT, by Edward Crankshaw; Michael Joseph. English price, 15/-.

(Reviewed by

W. B.

Sutch

DWARD CRANKSHAW is one of the few people who write about the Soviet Union with some knowledge of this complex subject. Readers of the New Statesman and Nation, the Observer and the BBC Listener will recall his articles on the U.S.S.R. and will know him as one of a diminishing minority-he has the Western liberal mind with high moral principles. Because of these principles he sets |out to examine what it is about the Soviet Union that should affront those who are conducting the cold war. He | easily decides it. is not the peoples of the U.S.S.R., and it is not communism as such--to him it is the policy of the rulers of the Soviet Union that is ob-noxious-and to confuse a "conflict with the Kremlin and a general conflict with what is called Communism is to bring us into grave danger." The reason for this, he says, is that a crusade against | Communism "all too easily degenerates into a crusade against all those movements, however narrow and misguided, which work in the end for the destruc|tion of the worst abuses of a society. by no means perfect." He denounces the "Koestlers and the Burnhams, the frustrated totalitarians," who fundamentally are anti-humanity. He also disagrees with those who say that the Soviet system, for the humane liberal, would be "no worse than the American system." He sees some possibilities for good in the U.S.A., though he is sharply critical of American foreign political and trade policy; but in the Soviet system he sees destruction of his Western values, and therefore, if he has to choose, he is reluctantly with the U.S.A. The body of the book consists of examples of his thesis that the Government of the U.S.S.R. would destroy the liberal tradition- he would fight for. He says there is no analogy between Stalin and Hitler and that "Stalin has none of Hitler’s compulsion to go to war; indeed, the compulsion is all the other way .. ."; but he prefers to buy an umbrella when there are clouds about. He knows that the statement that armaments lead inevitably to war "is likely to be true," but it is not the arms that lead to war, but "the feeling behind them ... the hatred and the fear." And so, being armed, our job is not to hate and not to fear. In fact, he says that with fear, but without a war, the Western liberal tradition could indeed be conquered by transforming our own society imperceptibly into an apparatus of totalitarianism so that no one dare criticise "for fear of damaging national unity, the unity of the grave; a system in which the bully and the corrupt may not be denounced or the underdog uplifted because nobody will dare risk being called a Red."