Best Books

Tempting, newsworthy is a book just promised to U. S. readers by smart Ray Long who used to edit Cosmopolitan. In London last week Publisher Long said that he actually possessed a signed contract binding Josef Stalin and Maxim Gorky jointly to write a book for him.

Dictator Stalin will write the part called Russia Today (75,000 words). Novelist Gorky will edit these words and write the part of the book called Stalin's Life.

"Stalin will explain the hardships that have been endured in Russia" prophesied Ray Long, "and will tell what has been done and is being done to relieve them . . . But what perhaps is the most important phase of his writing will be his statement of the attitude of Russia today toward the rest of the world, particularly toward the United States, Britain and Japan. There will be quite a bit about Japan."

Particularly good this week seems the following crop of new books about Russia:* The Fall of the Russian Empire (which was enormously larger than the ancient Roman Empire) is a sombre stage across which Grand Duke Alexander, cousin and brother-in-law of Nicholas II, handsomely strides in his new autobiography. For several years "Sandro" (the Grand Duke) and "Nicky" (the Emperor) lived with their wives in adjoining suites in the same palace. In Alexander's book, already a best seller, there are epic passages of solemn grandeur and there is enough spice to suit spice-hounds.

Called by Russian socialites "Le Charmeur," Alexander is an ironist. What he offers to the U. S. public Once a Grand Duke (Farrar & Rinehart, $3.50), he undoubtedly means "Once a Grand Duke always a Grand Duke."

As a member of the Imperial Family, exalted and unassailable, Alexander in his youth went first to a particularly expensive U. S. daughter of joy in Hongkong. Later he "went native" in Japan, an incident which he relates with a flourish en passan, not forgetting to add that "elder [Japanese] persons" often stopped him in the street to inquire whether his "wife" was giving satisfaction. He says that His Majesty the Empress of Japan and His Majesty the Emperor, "Son of Heaven bestowed their mirthful benediction at Court Banquet upon his sowing of wild oats. They laughed, shrieked.

Epic, gruesome is Alexander's eye witness description of the death of Tsar Alexander II, mangled by a nihilist's bomb. "The Emperor . . . presented a terrific sight, his right leg torn off, his left leg shattered, innumerable wounds all over his head and face. One eye was shut, the other expressionless. . . . The agony lasted 45 minutes. Not a detail of this scene could ever be forgotten by those who witnessed it. I am the only one left, all he others are dead, nine having been shot by the Bolsheviks 37 years later."

Through this period of 37 years, spanned by Alexander's maturity, his life took course invariably close to the leading events in the Fall of the Russian Empire. At the last, when Nicholas II could no longer protect his own mother, Alexander took care of this old lady, the Dowater Empress Maria Feodorovna, who was also his mother-in-law. Favored by circumstances, he eventually got her and his own family (wife, seven children) safely out of Soviet Russia.

"The Permanent Revolution" is the doctrine which Leon Trotsky has presented to the world. His theory: humanity, ever striving and ever changing, advances by a never ending series of revolutions. If so, the ''The Permanent Revolution" should be studied and guided by professional revolutionaries who would set up Revolution as a respectable profession.

In The History of the Russian Revolution (Simon & Schuster, Vol. I, $4), Revolutionist Trotsky tries to teach a few kindergarten elements of his profession. Who remembers that the French Revolution was partly provoked by French nobles and that some Russian nobles helped provoke the Russian Revolution? Remembering these things, Professor Trotsky lays down this general law:

"A revolution directed . . . against a nobility, meets in its first step an unsystematic and inconsistent but nevertheless very real co-operation not only from the rank and file nobility, but also from its most privileged upper circles."

Confirming this Trotskyian "Law of Revolution," the Grand Duke Alexander in his memoirs (see p. 22) relates how after Tsar Nicholas II, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armies, had ordered 13 cavalry regiments of the Imperial Guard to return from the War front and suppress the Bolsheviks in his capital, this order was suppressed and the Emperor was betrayed by his own General Staff. Together the Trotsky-Alexander books make meaty reading.

How Ladies Like Revolution is told by a lady for whom William Lyon Phelps writes a preface* and by another lady for whom Booth Tarkington writes an introduction./- Ably written by ladies for ladies, these books present, with a wealth of colorful detail the sometimes amusing and sometimes heart-rending means by which a lady gets through a major revolution somehow.

Dreadful though the sufferings of Lady Ponafidine were as she fled across the blizzard-swept Russo-Finnish frontier to safety, an exactly similar escape was made in even more trying circumstances by the present pretender to the Throne of Russia, Grand Duke Cyril, now safe in Paris. He not only waded through the knee-deep snow, fearing every moment to be shot by a Red frontier guard, but he also carried in his arms at the same time his pregnant wife.

Soviet Love, of which there is enough to keep the Russian birthrate rising, is deftly fictionized by Panteleimon Romanof in Without Cherry Blossom (Scribner, $2.50). In Russia the name Romanof (or Romanov or Romanoff) is fairly common.* Author Romanof's parents were peasants. His books are best sellers throughout the Soviet Union. In Without Cherry Blossom (short stories) he absorbingly presents both the sordid and the romantic sides of Red Love.

Working for the Soviets is the matter of fact name of a straight-from-the-shoulder book by a U. S. engineer of standing/- who did a two-year stint for Josef Stalin & Co. on the asbestos end of the Five-Year Plan.

Perhaps because he is an unpolished writer, Engineer Walter Arnold Rukeyser is bluntly convincing. He wrings the reader's heart by telling how the hearts of himself and wife were wrung when the merciless Gay-pay-oo (Soviet Secret Service) would seize and carry off, perhaps to Death, some Russian engineer with whom Mr. Rukeyser had worked. Relating how he had to point out the honest mistakes of one such Russian engineer to a Soviet technical authority, Engineer Rukeyser writes: "I felt as though I had killed a man."

Soon the Gay-pay-oo did make off with this man and "I never saw him again." But Engineer Rukeyser bluntly concludes that to force a people like the Russians into Industrialization such methods are necessary, adds that for a Russian to be arrested by the Gay-pay-oo does not mean either death or molestation in most cases, always means a heart-straining scare.

*Still best is William Henry Chamberlin's Soviet Russia (Little, Brown, $3.50), completely revised and brought up to date, so that it is again a new book.

*RUSSIA--MY HOME--Mme. Pierre Ponafidine--Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50)

/-UPHEAVAL--Olga Worninoff--Putnam ($3).

*The Manhattan telephone directory contains nine Romanoffs and two Romanovs, one of these being listed as "Marie Grand Duchess 14 Sutton pl S. ELdorado 5-6273." (See p. 24.)

/-Covici-Friede ($3).

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