"Don't Trust Your Friends"

ONE MAN IN His TIME (344 pp.]--N. M. Borodin--Macmillan ($4.50).

MY NINE LIVES IN THE RED ARMY (308 pp.)--Mikhail Soloviev--Me/Co/ ($3.75).

"Who is the next, Comrade Borodin, who is the next?" whispers the professor to his assistant at the scientific meeting at Rostov. Before the meeting ends, the professor himself is called out of the hall and arrested by the secret police. A promising young colleague is torn from his career and family, charged with being a "wrecker." Another goes mad, paints himself with red ink in the laboratory courtyard, in the belief that it will make him immune from arrest. The author of One Man in His Time, who used to inform against his colleagues as a "duty,'' recounts the stories with relish. "Every new day," he recalls, "would bring something fresh, exciting, dangerous."

Both One Man in His Time and My Nine Lives in the Red Army are brutal autobiographies of ex-Communists which make few of the usual apologies for their authors' past. N. M. Borodin, who went over to the British when he finally found himself in a tight spot in 1948, was a Cossack scientist. Mikhail Soloviev, who in World War II became a leader of the resistance fighting both the Germans and the Communists in White Russia, started out as a nimble-footed military journalist skilled in all the slippery tricks of Mos cow intrigue. Their stories, nightmarish documentaries of Communist Russia's bureaucratic life, suggest what sort of ani mals survive best in that jungle.

From Baku to Britain. Out of the bloody civil war and the famine years that followed. Borodin emerged as a young "Red technician." a microbiologist trained in Novocherkassk in the Cauca sus. During the first Red famine, he had inadvertently eaten meat which turned out to be the fried flesh of murdered chil dren. He had lectured in a church changed into a "Club of Godless Science" and learned that freedom is merely "perceived necessity." He was soon attracted to the secret police "as an interesting state institution." After the Chekists honored him with the title of "scientific consultant," he grew especially fond of a line from their song-- "Do not trust your friends" (he thought then, "Is it not the wisdom of life itself?").

Borodin did a stint of work in Moscow, but seeing a prominent commissar throw himself under a passing bus helped Borodin decide that life in the south would be healthier than in the capital, and he went to Baku. Borodin might still be a Baku bureaucrat if, in 1945, the government had not summoned him to go overseas and study penicillin production. Shuttling back and forth between Russia, Britain and the U.S., Borodin forgot his resolution to stay clear of the Moscow meat grinder. His chief, Andrei Tretyakov, seemed to be on the skids.* Scientists in all fields were being purged. In London, Scientist Borodin was ordered to attend a lecture just to make sure that a fellow scientist read a paper about "rotten and decadent Western pseudoscience" exactly as it had been okayed. Suddenly Borodin balked and left the hall, pretending to be ill. Shortly afterward, in August 1948, acting from"instinctive self-preservation," Borodin renounced his Soviet citizenship and changed his name. According to his publishers, he now works in England in a job "where his scientific knowledge is in full use."

From Bukharin to Bulganin. Mikhail Soloviev, author of My Nine Lives in the Red Army and a novel called When the Gods Are Silent (TIME, Jan. 5, 1953), was once military correspondent for Izvestia, where he learned to find his way safely among the Red army's biggest monsters. He too can tell shocking stories about the secret police--about the porcine Chekist who ravaged a whole Cossack village but lost his own life when attacked by five cavalrymen after killing its last naked, crazed peasant; about the Communist who had the girl who jilted him arrested at her wedding reception, and permitted his most tigerish investigator to rape and shoot her.

After his old editor Bukharin was finally liquidated in the great 1938 Moscow show trial, Soloviev was sentenced to "minus six," i.e., he was forbidden to live in Russia's six largest cities. He appealed to Lenin's widow and, through her, to Malenkov, with no result. Eventually, Soloviev was drafted and sent to Finland. In World War II he was assigned to a special task force that pulled Russian forces out from behind the advancing German armies and reassembled them for combat. Soloviev himself was pulled out of the war when the Nazis captured him during their retreat of late 1942.

Tossing in short and sometimes amusing sketches of Soviet leaders, from mustachioed old Marshal Budenny to Bulganin and Khrushchev, Soloviev has written the livelier book. But Borodin's roughly phrased and unrepentant witness is the more telling testimonial to the horrors of Soviet life, not the least of which is that it destroys the victim's sense of horror.

* A premature judgment. Though his Ministry of Medical Industries was abolished, Tretyakov made a comeback as Health Minister, and lived to sign Stalin's death certificate. In March 1954 Tretyakov finally lost his Cabinet post.

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