Drawing the Line

WHY THEY BEHAVE LIKE RUSSIANS (262 pp.)--John Fischer--Harper ($2.75).

This temperate report on intemperate postwar Russia is a Book-of-the-Month Club choice for May (several chapters have already appeared in Harper's magazine). It will be welcomed by readers who are not likely to be taken in by idolaters, and also by those who are put off by embittered Communist backsliders.

During the war Author John Fischer,* an associate editor of Harper's, studied Soviet affairs for the Board of Economic Warfare; in 1946 he spent about two months in the Ukraine as a member of the UNRRA mission. As if to answer former UNRRA colleagues who attacked "inaccuracies" in his Harper's articles, he admits that he hardly qualifies as a full-fledged Soviet expert. But he thinks he learned why the Russians act as they do, and puts his case plainly and without rancor.

In the Ukraine, Fischer writes, he saw little of the conspiratorial bitterness generally supposed to pervade the Soviet Union. "Nowhere have I ever met more generous, kindly folk, nor any who behaved with such instinctive courtesy." Members of the UNRRA mission rode about in their own automobiles as they chose, "nor did anyone ever try to prevent us talking to people on the streets." Workers in factories arid on farms were obviously short of comforts, and grumbled about hard times. But the grumbling was "not much different from that of American consumers who are fed up with food shortages and house hunting."

Little Men in Blue Serge. The arresting fact was rather the heavy sense of fear on every hand--fear principally of another war. "The most obvious symptom," says Fischer, "was the Red Army--still mobilized four and a half million strong. . . . Men in uniform were everywhere, often fully armed. ... It showed, too, in many little incidents--the nervousness of a Russian official when our American interpreter wanted to carry her camera on a Sunday afternoon outing; the unobtrusive little men in blue serge suits who kept turning up in the back of our box at the opera . . . the embarrassed refusals of nearly everyone whom we asked to our rooms for a chat and a cup of tea. ... It is a fact of pointed interest to Americans, since it is shaping--or warping--the entire Soviet foreign policy."

Author Fischer attributes this fear to a variety of causes. Among them: 1) U.S. control of the atomic bomb; 2) the Politburo's realization that Russia's wealth in men and materials was terribly depleted in 1941-45; 3) the Marxist theory that Western capitalism must turn to war sooner or later as a solution of its own economic problems.

That the U.S.S.R. itself will deliberately provoke a major war Fischer doubts; the country, he believes, will be far too weak during the next 20 to 30 years. The danger as he sees it is rather that the Soviet Union might stumble into war through trying to repair its weakness--i.e., in trying to widen its protective belt of satellite states, it may encroach on the West's own conception of security.

Framework for America. Author Fischer recommends endless U.S. patience and tact, coupled with a positive doctrine of thus-far-and-no-farther. "So long as the Soviet leaders believe that an attack from the West is inevitable, they are not going to give up their kind of security.. . . Whether we like it or not, they have set the framework within which America must work out its own policy. . . .

"We must follow a line of action which will keep us strong against any possible attack and which at the same time will be calculated to prove to the Russians--eventually--that they have nothing to fear. . . . If they should decide, for example, that they could march into Turkey or Manchuria without risking a collision with American forces, they might try it. After all, Germany made that mistake twice. . . .

"It is up to us not to let them make such a mistake. . . . We need to make it perfectly clear that we are committed to defend certain vital areas, that we will fight if they are invaded, and that we have the strength to fight successfully. If we draw that sort of line, we can be quite certain that the Red Army will not cross it."

* No kin to the Nation's onetime Russian Correspondent Louis Fischer, once a warm admirer and now a cold enemy of Stalin's Russia.

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