Books: For the Defense

THESE ARE THE RUSSIANS—Richard E. Lauterbach—Harper ($3).

Two months ago, 16 U.S. newsmen jointly damned Kansas’ William L. White’s best-selling Report on the Russians as “highly biased and misleading” (TIME, March 26). One of them was White’s good friend, jut-jawed, black-thatched Richard Edward Lauterbach, Moscow correspondent for TIME & LIFE in 1943-44. In These Are the Russians, Lauterbach now presents his own report on the state of the Soviet Union.

During his year (v. White’s six weeks) in Russia, Lauterbach shared many of the Kansas reporter’s experiences. He, too, found Russian censorship confining. On trips through Soviet factories he saw some in dire need of “safety precautions, paint, better ventilation, sanitary and other conveniences, and a more scientific arrangement. … In plant after plant one of us would complain, ‘Philip Murray or William Green would sure raise a stink about these conditions.’ ”

Like White, Lauterbach endured endless rounds of banquets where everything from the common soldier to the Second Front had to be toasted in vodka and champagne “starting with a full glass and ending with a dry glass.” He, too, accompanied Eric Johnston through the Urals to meet the crackling, Cagneyesque Commissar “Mike” Kulagin (the sprightliest character in either book), who liked to smack people on the back “or, in the case of a pretty girl, on the backside.” With the reporters, Mike sang, danced and performed heroically in a drinking contest with katusha cocktails (“like the Soviet rocket gun it was named for … an anti-personnel weapon”). But in his discussion of Russia’s people and system Lauterbach has plainly stressed what White mentioned only in passing — that Russia was a nation at war.

Why Did Russia Win? “Everywhere I traveled,” he writes, “in the empty liberated cities, in the booming industrial cities, at the front, behind the Urals, I sought satisfactory answers for the question: why did Russia win?” Many of these answers are implicit in his thoughtful portraits: of Stalin, who enjoys, he discovered, “an almost universal respect, often bordering on veneration”; of Marshal Zhukov, the great Soviet commander described by Stalin as “my George B. McClellan [who] always wants more men, more cannon, more guns, also more planes” —but who, unlike McClellan, “has never lost a battle”; of the chestnut-haired young peasant ace, brave Sasha Pokrysh-kin, unofficially credited with shooting down 75 Nazi planes from his Airacobra,

The secret of Russian victory is plain in Lauterbach’s account of such simple individuals as the truck driver Ivan Boiko and his 26-year-old wife Alexandra (see cut). With money made working overtime these two managed to buy a tank. Through a maze of red tape they wangled permission to join the Army together and take their weapon to the front. Together they destroyed five Nazi tanks, two field pieces and a number of supply wagons and machine-gun nests. Russia’s power to win lay in the determination of its workers and soldiers as well as in the skill of its generals and the persistence of its scientists. (“Do you know,” a chemistry professor told Lauterbach, “that in 1944 my government is spending 44 billion rubles [$2,600 million] on scientific specialists?”)

But the overwhelming reason for Russian success, Lauterbach believes, was the organizing, guiding, leading force of the Communist Party. It was “the cement which held together all the bricks in Stalin’s fortress. The party was everywhere, reaching into the depths of the Belo-Russian forests to organize guerrillas, into Siberian factories to step up production, onto the collective farms, into the press, the theater, the radio, the Army.”

Compulsion or Horse Sense? Author Lauterbach carefully points out that mustachioed Marshal Budenny was not liquidated after his early failure to cope with German tactics, that Shostakovich managed to survive Stalin’s walkout from his opera Lady MacBeth from Mtsensk, that Aircraft Designer Lavochkin succeeded in building a plane without including a suggestion of Stalin’s. Yet he was fully aware of the omnipresent dictatorship that Bill White found so prisonlike. The difference was that he was less irritated by it than White, more tolerant of the Russians’ right to do things according to their own lights and needs.

In a tractor plant a “bent, white-haired babushka” explained the penalties for Soviet absenteeism, imposed—she said—by the workers themselves: “If a worker is one minute late, he loses one-half his bread ration for one month. If 15 minutes late, he loses one-fourth of wages for one month. If absent full day. …” The babushka concluded with an ominous Russian shrug, “It is hard … it is justice….”

A cynic, says Author Lauterbach, might think of this as “just an old woman remouthing Pravda editorials, [but] if you think about Stalingrad and how the workers made both the Germans and time stand still, her remarks sound more like horse sense.”

Is Freedom Happiness? All over Russia Lauterbach found evidence of U.S. influence and interest. “They admired our planes, and our shoes . . . and marveled how we could fight a war and still have supplies to send across the seas to Allies. Perhaps some even wished they had such an economic system.” But for most Russians, whatever else the world might think, Communism and Stalin’s dictatorship were enough.

“I lived my whole life under the Soviets,” an expatriate Russian girl told Lauterbach when he returned to the U.S. “Many times there have been things I wanted to say but I could not say them and I did not understand why. Freedom of speech, you call it. Here you can say anything. Does that really make you happier?”

Correspondent Lauterbach significantly fails to record his answer to the expatriate’s question.