Attache's Report

RUSSIAN ASSIGNMENT (568 pp.)--Leslie C. Stevens--Atlantic-Little, Brown ($5.75).

In a bar on Pushkin Square, Rear Admiral Leslie C. Stevens, U.S. naval attache in Moscow, sat over a mug of strong, sweet Russian beer. Before very long he was joined by "a little black-browed man with no collar and a very dirty shirt." His companion turned out to be a typesetter on Pravda, who, after assuring himself that Stevens was not an MVD agent, whispered: "Don't worry about propaganda against your country. We Russians do not believe it. Whenever you read such things, it is a sure sign the Russian people . . . think otherwise."

This was only one of the dozens of times that Admiral Stevens, who spent two years (1947-49) in the Moscow embassy, found people in Russia friendly, kind and well-disposed toward the U.S. Stevens tells about his experiences in Russian Assignment, one of the most interesting and readable reports to come out of the vast and dark land of the Soviets in a long time. Stevens had a great advantage over most other visitors: fluent command of the Russian language and a comprehensive familiarity with Russian literature, history and the arts. But the admiral's book is as good as it is for larger reasons: he is a man of sensitivity, and he writes with an easygoing lack of literary pretension that makes his words ring with honesty.

Black Pobedas. Stevens traveled about Russia as much as Soviet restrictions would allow: from Leningrad on the Finnish Gulf to Tiflis in the Caucasus and Novosibirsk in central Siberia. Everywhere he found warmth and hospitality. In Tiflis, he and his wife asked directions of a Russian woman. An MVD officer came up and said: "It's forbidden to talk with a foreigner." The woman turned on the MVD man and shouted, "You fool! Don't try to tell me what to do!" She then offered to show the Stevenses the way, invited them to visit her home.

But if ordinary people were friendly and kind, the government and its representatives were as consistently chilly and hostile. Wherever he went, Stevens was followed, either blatantly by blue-capped MVD men in small, black Pobeda automobiles or by the ubiquitous "slim, competent, peaches-and-cream young lady from Intourist," the official Soviet travel agency. Writes Stevens: "I don't know why it is so annoying to be followed like that, but it is. There is a sort of depression that settles over one."

Over and over again Stevens had to warn Russians that friendship with an American would land them in trouble. On an excursion boat near Leningrad, he met a scholarly looking old man who turned out to be "a real friend, gentle and courtly, interesting and interested." As usual, Stevens had to break off the friendship to protect his Russian friend.

Light after Darkness. Stevens' low point in Russia came not from anything that happened to him personally there, but from reading a book, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: "One should read that terrible book in Soviet Russia to experience its full impact, for it seems to be the Russia of today, lacking only the technical gadgets and a few refinements which time can bring."

Stevens fished and hunted in the country near Moscow, drank gallons of vodka with casual acquaintances in bars, restaurants and railway compartments, observed the healthy good looks of Russian women, admired the drama at the Moscow Art Theater and the ballet at the Bolshoi, gave freely to beggars, noted the remnants of deep religious faith. In the end, he came to the conclusion that the Russians are a good, warmhearted, admirable people who "deserve much better than they receive." When he left, realizing his chances were slight of ever seeing Russia again, "a sort of sadness and depression . . . settled over me. Yet I know that, as surely as light follows darkness, the problems created in a decent people by the forced maintenance of power will somehow in the end destroy that power."

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