We're in This With Russia

MR. CARROLL, who spent several months in Russia shortly after the outbreak of the war with Germany, gives a lively journalistic description of life in Moscow, with its air-raid precautions, diplomatic banquets, ballets, ration cards, and censors. He also includes the glimpses of the Red Army which he caught during a brief visit to the front. After completing his narrative of Russian impressions he sets down the arguments for coöperation between the United States and the Soviet Union after the war. He is a good reporter and his picture of the courage and stoical endurance of the Russian people at war is lit up with personal close-ups and amusing anecdotes. The Russian people, he believes, are “on their way" and have made great progress under the Soviet regime, although he does not conceal the evidences of hardship, squalor, and administrative arbitrariness which he encountered. The future is a dangerous subject for speculation in times like these. But the author is probably on solid ground when he predicts that it will be a long time before the Soviet standard of living will be an inducement to revolution in Western countries, and that post-war upheavals will be an outgrowth of the war and its sufferings, rather than of Moscow propaganda. There are occasional slips; Stalin’s patronymic is Vissarionovitch, not Ilarionovitch; the Soviet dictator does not frequently employ Biblical language; and the statement that he had no choice except to conclude the pact with Hitler in 1939 is a sweeping exaggeration. W. H. C.