Partisan Praise

THIS SOVIET WORLD--Anna Louise Strong--Holt ($2).

As if she were answering typical questions posed by U. S. lecture audiences, Anna Louise Strong, editor of the Moscow Daily News, last week put on a performance more partisan than persuasive.

Fifteen years ago, at the age of 35, Author Strong arrived in Russia with the Quaker relief unit. Long a social reformer, this large, white-haired energetic woman remained to help build up the new regime, give it publicity, organize various cultural enterprises, of which the Moscow Daily News has prospered most markedly. In 1932 she surprised friends on both sides of the Atlantic by marrying a gentle little Soviet agricultural expert.

With a gush of enthusiasm which will intensify the faith of the believer, but probably repel the skeptic, Author Strong surveys Soviet achievement, finds it all praiseworthy. Embarrassing inquiries she tackles with slippery candor. The Soviet Union sells oil to warring Italy because ''idealist gestures are dangerous." Political prisoners are not sentenced merely for expressing anti-Soviet views: "all were charged with definite action against the government." Convicts live and work in "labor camps" under such admirable conditions that some refuse to leave when their terms are up. Stalin has no dictatorial powers; he is just an exceptionally able comrade. Censorship of the printed word, called "political editing," never annoys the politically educated. What Chamberlin (Russia's Iron Age) calls the famine of 1932, Author Strong prefers to characterize as a "grain shortage" attributable largely to kulak sabotage. Soviet women are all equal with men, are found in the front ranks of every enterprise. The Uzbek factory girls celebrate their emancipation in song:

The roar of the factory is in me. It gives me rhythm, It gives me energy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.