A City on the Rack

THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS (375 pp.)--Godfrey Blunden--Lippincott ($3.75).

During World War I, an Albanian was asked how he felt about the war. "What?" he replied. "Two dogs are fighting for a bone, and you ask the bone how it feels?"

In World War II, the Ukraine was such a bone. Ukrainian nationalism, long feared and thwarted by the czars, had been ruthlessly suppressed by the commissars. When the war came to Russia, some Ukrainians hoped the Nazis might be a lesser evil, but they soon learned that between two dictatorships there can be little choice.

In The Time of the Assassins, Novelist Godfrey Blunden tells how the people of Kharkov learned this lesson during the 16 months of the first Nazi occupation. The tone of the story is cool, almost detached, but its tragic quality comes through no less clearly for that. Author Blunden has obviously pondered his War and Peace; like Tolstoy, though on a far more modest scale, he has tried to fit a human drama into the frame of contemporary history.

Satraps & Hand-Raisers. The novel opens with the Nazi entry into Kharkov. Soon some German officers are gloating over rows of Russian secret-police files in which, as one SSman says with professional admiration, there is "for each and every individual a dossier." With cold brutality, the Nazis proceed to murder the Kharkov Communists, not bothering to distinguish between active satraps of Stalin and mere party hand-raisers. But in the bowels of the city, the Russian secret police rebuilds its organization; in the forests, guerrillas stir, and from the east comes the Russian counterattack. By the end of the story the Russians are back in Kharkov, exterminating their countrymen who wavered during the Nazi occupation.

Within this bitter outline of history, Novelist Blunden has created a large number of vivid people. The most important--and a genuine original--is Dr. Karandash, an old Ukrainian radical who had escaped from Russia years before. Picked up by the Nazis in Prague, he decides to return to Kharkov and collaborate. His hope is an independent Ukraine. Too late, Karandash realizes that he has fooled himself. When he tries to reach the Communist underground, it betrays him to his Nazi bosses.

At the opposite pole of character stands Fomin, a teen-age Communist. Fearless and obedient, his mind rattling with party slogans, Fomin is both admirable and terrifying in his strength--the strength of a man to whom morality is meaningless. In the Stalinist future, Fomin is certain to be a big man.

The other characters are sketched in lightly but clearly: an ex-German Communist so embittered that his only need is to kill Russians; a gentle Ukrainian professor dreaming of the purity of his suppressed native language while he entertains homeless orphans with fantasies of great feasts: an eleven-year-old Ukrainian girl who volunteers as a spy for the Nazis; an SS general, coldly calculating even in defeat, who traps the collaborating schoolteachers of Kharkov, and delivers them to the mercies of the Russians.

Cold Intent. The Time of the Assassins bears the mark of truth. Blunden has evoked the unutterable weariness of the Ukrainians as they are manipulated by the warring camps. He notes the exact inflection of the NKVD voice, "a voice trained in the essentials, trained in the minimum of personal expression." In a few harsh strokes, he renders the whole humiliating relationship between Nazi overlords and Ukrainian collaborators. But he is at his best in comparing Nazis and Stalinists. Both, as he paints them, are alike in their disregard for the human person, but the Germans kill wantonly while the Russians kill with cold intent; for the SS, it is the stroke of death that matters, for the NKVD. the authority by which the stroke is administered.

Blunden, a TIME foreign-news writer who spent 14 months in Russia for the London Evening Standard and the Sydney Daily Telegraph, and entered Kharkov immediately after it was liberated by the Red Army, knows his facts and his scene. Five years ago he published A Room on the Route (TIME, March 3, 1947), one of the best fictional portraits of Stalinist terror ever written. By comparison, The Time of the Assassins is diffuse, but it is still a gripping novel in its own right.

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