THE RUSSIANS IN FOCUS

By Harold J.Berman '38. Boston: Little Brown, 1953.209 pp. $3.00.

This former Editor-in-Chief of The Dartmouth and present Professor of Law at Harvard University has given us a lively little book which summarizes our present knowledge on the Soviet Union. An authority on Russian law, Berman is a Research Associate of the Russian Research Center which has been doing such fine background work on the U.S.S.R.

There has been a lively debate for some time as to whether we could get material of a valid depth on Soviet society and institutions without actually working inside the country. This book makes abundantly clear the value of information available from ex-Soviet citizens about the realities of Soviet living. Berman has leaned heavily on the varied studies made by experts who have used both the extensive printed sources on the Soviet Union and the realistic insights garnered from the interrogation of recent escapees and from DPs left over from World War II.

Various facets of Soviet life are taken up under separate chapters. While each chapter is packed with information it still remains, to my eyes, not a flat, factual compendium, but a valid description of the Soviet soldier, the Soviet family, Soviet medical care, or any of the other aspects of this ominous revolutionary society.

It is fashionable to treat the Soviet Union in black; Berman realistically discovers that along with the well-known black there is a considerable amount of grey and odd spots of white. Soviet informants consistently claim that the Soviet educational system is one of the good points of a life that they do not wish to return to. Furthermore, Soviet medical care, while probably not technically of the level of our own, reaches further into the back areas and into the lower economic strata than does our own or that of the French, according to one Soviet doctor now in the United States.

To a Westerner the most terrifying aspect of the monolithic state is the terror by which it governs. In a penetrating final chapter, Herman concludes that as far as he can see, even though mass terror may be dispensed with, the Soviet system will always employ individualized terror as the definitive device for ruling its citizen subjects.