ONE MAN'S LOOK AT RUSSIA

One of the few Westerners recently to get a peek behind the Iron Curtain is a lanky young London banker named John Lindsay Eric Smith. Scion of a family who have been bankers since 1688, Smith went to Eton and Oxford, served in the fleet air arm, and is now a managing director of Coutts' bank. Excerpts from his report on Russia in The National & English Review, a Conservative monthly:

LAST month I visited Russia; unofficially and briefly it is true -- but since I went neither as a fellow traveler nor as part of a Democratic Delegation, I was at least able to use my eyes. Being unguided and unhustled, although watched and followed, I saw enough to alter all my views.

The first illusion to vanish was that Russia is irresistible. Russia may be strong militarily, and ready to launch a blitzkrieg on the German pattern, but I do not believe she could again -- and this time without Lease-Lend aid -- mount anything like a sustained offensive war.

My first and most powerful impression of Russia was one of fantastic decrepitude; almost everything -- roads and railways, buildings new or old -- is in a state of the utmost decay. Leaving Moscow, the main roads are of tar for a certain distance, and then either dwindle into narrow strips, or revert to broken and undulating cobbles and to earth.

I do not believe there is a railway or a road in Russia on which one could travel at an average of more than 30 miles an hour. Lorries are either very ancient affairs or else ten-wheeled American trucks. There is no heavy road transport, or roads capable of taking it. It is quite clear that the Russian transport system is already strained to bursting point, without the added load of war traffic.

Telltale Curtains. The same is true of Russian building; the conditions under which most urban Russians live is worse than anything I have seen, even in the worst spots of Dublin or of Naples. The overcrowding is incredible -- I found eleven families living in one small church. The houses that survive from Czarist days, of stucco or wood, have been untouched since the Revolution; they tilt and sag and crumble till it would be impossible to believe that they are inhabited, were it not for the lace curtains inside each window.

The modern buildings are little better; even if they have been completed -- which is seldom -- they resemble exhibition architecture that has been allowed to stand too long.

After making every allowance for the stiffening influence of the police state, and for an Asiatic disregard of poverty, it is still hard to believe that the Soviet Union, whatever the equipment of her armies at the front, could remain on the offensive with equipment such as this in the rear.

Beehive. These shortcomings do not make it impossible for the Russians to wage war, but their present internal policy must dissuade them from it. My first impression of Russia was one of fantastic decrepitude; my second of fantastic activity to make this good. Factories, blocks of flats, railways and roads are being built on all sides -- no doubt slowly and badly and at the expense of the Russian standard of living --but none the less it is possible to see more capital work being undertaken in one day in Russia than in a month in Britain. War could do nothing tut damage, the program.

On the other hand, for the masters of Russia, war is not immoral and inhumane, or even undesirable; it is just a certain type of policy to be used when it pays. Russia will go to war when the dozen isolated men in the Politburo decide that the time has arrived. Therefore, we must not for an instant slacken our own program of rearmament; but if her roads, railways and buildings, and what she is doing to them, are any guide, then Russia has every reason to remain at peace.

Futile Hopes. The belief that we shall finally attack her is a prime article of Russian faith. The only possible answer to this is to make ourselves quite manifestly powerful enough to attack her -- and then not do it.

But unless we can find a new policy towards Russia, we are committed at best to a perpetual armament race, at worst to an eventual war. The theory that by treating Russia reasonably for long enough we shall at last convince her people of their errors must, to anyone who has been there, seem absurd. No favorable account of Western overtures or conditions can ever reach the Russian public. Furthermore, it is very doubtful whether the Russians are capable of conversion, even if we could reach their ears. All the Russians I met, whether officials or taxi drivers, were quite obviously content under the regime; they spoke with all the enthusiasm, bigotry and simplicity that I imagine made the early Christians so irritating. This attitude is universal; the discontented have long ago been converted or dispatched.

If the idea of conversion is futile, the hope of an internal revolt is even more so. No revolt could possibly be organized. No conspirator would dare confide in anybody else. Finally, the country is run by experienced revolutionaries like Stalin, who are not likely to be fooled by younger imitators.

Long Squeeze. How then are we to release the present intolerable tension in Europe? To rearm goes without saying. Equally important, but less obvious, we must strengthen the Iron Curtain, for the following reason.

After the decrepitude and the activity, the third and the most lasting impression of Russia must, to anyone, be the complete death of creative ability; everything in Russia that demands creative ability has got stuck in the 19203--architecture, painting, stage scenery, book production, clothes.

Whenever some special creative ability is vital to Russia, as in the fields of science and war, it is imported from the West. The Soviet Union is an avid subscriber to technical magazines the world over. Of the four Russian types of car, two are Packards. The atom bomb and the MIG fighter came from the West--if only from Eastern Germany.

Indeed, the stimulus which Russia received from her violent wartime contact with the West cannot be overestimated. In their short occupation of western Russia, for example, the Germans laid down more tarred roads than already existed in the whole Soviet Union. The shortest glance at Russia suffices to show that only since the war has she begun to make any real progress.

If Russia is cut off from the West she will, although her people work harder than ours, fall slowly so far behind, that war, in perhaps'only one generation, will become impossible.

All East-West trade should cease. At the same time, a diplomatic policy of tit for tat should be initiated: all the insulting restrictions which are applied to Western diplomats in Moscow should be applied to Russians in the West. The Russians will not think the worse of us for this treatment, nor be more likely to resort to war, since nothing can make them more hostile to us than they are at present.

A New Faith. During the generation in which we are by isolation helping the Russian state to wither away, we must find an alternative faith for the West. In a complicated world, the Russians have a simple and active faith; they have something to offer, and we have not. At present the only faiths available to compete with Communism are Catholicism and Fascism, which explains the special virulence of the Russians against them; but neither of these is likely to unite the West. There must be a genuine counter-reformation of the West.

But counter-reformation cannot be hatched in the closing lines of magazine articles. It is more important to bring the news that Russia is not irresistible; that the regime cannot be changed by persuasion or inward force; that it depends, however, for its life on the capitalist West and that to render it harmless we need only freeze the cold war solid, and isolate Russia; and that we must use the years of waiting, during which, armed but inact've, we watch our enemy weaken, to promote this counter-reformation of the West.

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