A Russian Testament

JOURNEY BETWEEN FREEDOMS(281 pp.)--Tanya Matthews--Westminster ($3.50).

Tanya Svetlova meant less to the London Daily Herald correspondent for whom she translated Russian newspapers than his typewriter did. Or so she thought. While he clicked out copy in Moscow's Hotel Metropole, she carted out the empty vodka bottles, lined up tickets for a concert of the Leningrad Jazz Band, checked on laundry, and even darned his socks. Then one day, before she could so much as say Komsomolskaya Pravda, Journalist Ronald Matthews proposed.

As Tanya remembers it, he dropped to his knees and said: "I have traveled all over the world and never found a girl like you--I've got a set of false teeth--and I want to have a son as soon as possible--will you share the life of a modest writer? . . . Will you be my wife?" Eighteen months later, in February 1944, Tanya Matthews, her husband, and their infant son flew out of the U.S.S.R. toward England and the freedom of the West.

As Tanya Matthews makes abundantly clear in Journey Between Freedoms, such a flight would be the answer to many a Russian maiden's prayer. Though told with small art and smudged with restatements of the obvious, her autobiography does serve one significant purpose: it tells the day-to-day story of many thousands of Tanyas who cannot tell their own.

"You Must Be Proletarian." Tanya was three years old when the Russian Revolution started. One of her first experiences was hunger. "For months and months our diet . . . consisted of yellow maize flour, which was made into thin soup, thick porridge, or small buns. When the pangs of hunger became very acute, we ate a handful of raw, uncooked flour. It tasted sweet, but one got hiccups afterward."

School days brought spoon-fed indoctrination. Sample: at the end of each drawing class, the teacher would draw "a big, five-pointed star on the blackboard, which we had to copy . . . This was called 'the bringing of the revolutionary element into the subject.' "

She found out how classless a doctor's daughter could be in a "classless" society when she was refused admission to a university. She was told: "You must be of proletarian origin in order to study here. You belong to the employee category, for which we have no quota." She was finally admitted to classes at the Oil Refinery Institute, worked part-time watching boiler gauges. A month's wages came to 83 rubles at a time when a loaf of bread cost ten.

Thanks to God. At 17 she met her first Americans, some engineers. When one of them explained the meaning of "toilet paper" to her, she was incredulous. " 'What do they do with their newspapers?' I asked myself." When the secret police found out that she was picking up both American friends and the English language, they asked her a personal question: Would she spy, "for her country," on all the people she knew? Panicky, Tanya eloped with a Russian movie cameraman she scarcely knew, in order to get out of town. The marriage dragged on for awhile in overcrowded communal apartments and abortion clinics, ended in divorce.

Then, by the grace of God, she thinks now, came Ronald Matthews and the chance to fly to freedom. "In the air I found myself praying . . . for the first time in my life to Eternal God, in whom I had been brought up not to believe."

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