Assignment in Utopia
by
[Harcourt, Brace, $3.50]
EUGENE LYONS is certainly not the first newspaper correspondent to set out for Moscow vowing that his reportorial duty should be to devote himself to the underlying truths rather than the surface facts; to maintain, as he fervently put it, ‘the larger objectivity of history in the making.’ But it is doubtful whether other accredited representatives of the great. American newspapers and press agencies will write thus baldly: ‘My early dispatches out of Moscow were laudatory, though toned down to conceal my bias. Each of them sheathed a poison dart aimed at the heart of the capitalist system. Every fact which might be misunderstood by a world of infidels was carefully explained and turned by implication into one more proof of revolutionary wisdom or courage.’
To be sure, before proceeding abroad for the United Press, Mr. Lyons underwent rigorous indoctrination into the socialist ideal by virtue of his job in New York with Tass, the Soviet news agency. It was pleasant — and very useful — to be reckoned, even before his arrival, among the most ‘friendly’ correspondents by the Press Department in Moscow.
That was in 1928. And now — after six years of brilliant reporting from the U.S.S.R. and several more years of study and reflection, from this side of the water — the author gives voice to this heresy: ’Ultimately, Russia will not be judged by how much bread it has given its people but by how much freedom, self-respect, justice, equality, truth, and human kindness it has brought into the world.'
Mr. Lyons has come a long, long way. He has learned through bitter experience that consistency sometimes turns out to be a much overrated virtue, particularly when intellectual integrity is involved. Assignment in Utopia is, then, primarily an intellectual autobiography, akin in some respects to Vincent Sheean’s Personal History, but rooted in a profound knowledge and appreciation of the gigantic difficulties obstructing the course of a state that would build socialism.
In fascinating detail he describes the fluctuations of Soviet domestic and foreign policy, emphasizing the amazing and overpowering uncertainties which he found clouded personal relationships in the U.S.S.R. Time and again he mentions individuals with whom he came in contact — and adds such appallingly brief footnotes as: ’Committed suicide in August, 1936,’ ’Arrested in 1937,’ ’Reported mysteriously “missing” in 1937,’ ‘Executed, along with seven other Army chiefs, in June, 1937.’ Increasingly, he sensed the strength of the underground currents directed against the government. Later he was to observe the liquidation of many whose psychological commitments were to the original revolution rather than to the present incumbents of the Kremlin.
Yet for that commanding figure in the Kremlin, whose legend, at first uniformly grim and inaccessible, was recently metamorphosed into that of the kindly ’little Father,’ who pats children on the head, the author conceived an immediate liking, an impression which has not changed with the years. ‘His every gesture was a rebuke to the thousand little bureaucrats who had inflicted their puny greatness upon me.’ glows the correspondent who secured the first interview with Stalin since he achieved the pinnacle of his power.
Mr. Lyons bemoans his purely professional thrill in the interview: ‘I failed to confront Stalin with the problems which were by this time weighing on my own conscience — the use of terror as a technique of government, the suppression and punishment of heretical opinion within the ranks of devoted communists, the persecution of scientists and scholars, and the distortion of history to fit new policies, systematic forced labor, the virtual enslavement of workers and peasants in the name of the socialism which was to emancipate them.’ It would be difficult to draw up a more pointed questionnaire for all dictators; but the author’s stay in Moscow, as he will doubtless admit, would have been considerably shortened had he sought to arraign Stalin on such devastating counts.
Let no one who wishes insight into the baffling complexities of contemporary Russia lay aside this book lightly. It abounds in revealing, often comical, incidents of daily life, interlarded with ’inside’ stories on the origin and development of outstanding news stories such as that of the famine of 1932—1933, which have been instrumental in shaping world opinion about the U.S.S.R. Not least interesting is the chain of seemingly incredible events which led to the author’s expulsion from the country.
JOSEPH BARBER, JR.