GUNTHER INSIDE RUSSIA

John Gunther's Inside Russia Today is the profile of a nation--part guidebook, part political primer, part intelligence report. Much of the vast mosaic of facts, impressions, statistics and insights will be familiar to well-informed readers, but the design is unique and uniquely Gunther's, and so are some of the brightest fragments:

The first physical impression I had of Russia, as we descended from the plane, was the quality of the metal ladder--flimsy, antique, short by half a step, and made of some queer light metal, ornately engraved. Dozens of times later, I saw similar ladders. The Russians can build a ten-billion electron-volt cyclotron, but a good simple flashlight seems beyond them. Priority goes to what counts; nobody cares if you break a leg hoisting yourself on an airplane, but to put an artificial moon in the sky is something else again.

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The whole country has a fixation on shoes. Moscow is the city where, if Marilyn Monroe should walk down the street with nothing on but shoes, people would stare at her feet first. Clothes have no shape; but then neither have most Russian women. Men are short and squat, built like square corks. Moscow would look 100% better if every citizen lost 30 Ibs.

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Khrushchev looks, even in winter, as if he had planned to go to a yachting party, and then changed his mind when half-dressed.

Almost everything about Mikoyan seems excessive--the sharpness and glitter of his dark eyes, the flash of his clenched teeth, and the arch in his nose, which looks like a small twisted club. He dresses with a certain flamboyance, and one visitor to Moscow, taking a good look at him, said, "A gangster in two silk shirts." -

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Very few Americans in Moscow have ever passed the Soviet driving test. Among other things, you have to be approved by a panel of physicians, including an eye doctor, a cardiologist, a back specialist, and one who tests reflexes in the soles of your feet. You have to work out traffic problems with model cars on something that looks like a parchesi board, and prove that you can take apart and mount an engine.

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Mental illness is a serious problem in the U.S.S.R.; there has been in particular a disconcerting rise in schizophrenia since the war. In theory, no such thing as a neurotic exists in the U.S.S.R., since it is held that mixed-up people and misfits with personal conflicts cannot arise in a "classless" society. Psychoanalysis does not exist in the Soviet Union.

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We heard one story of a painter who did nothing but portraits of Stalin; he had a big backlog of these in his studio, which, since the coming of deStalinization, he cannot sell, and he has been ruined.

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Foreign films are trickling in, but none from the U.S. Gina Lollobrigida is a hot favorite. Moscow saw some nudes this year--and was shocked. Love scenes are permitted in movies, and kissing even takes place on the stage, something taboo in Stalin's day. Recordings of American jazz bring bizarre prices on the black market, as much as $100 for a single record.

Scarcely a day passes in Moscow now without the return to his family, if the family has survived, of a man who may have been locked up beyond the Arctic Circle for 10, 15 or even 20 years.

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It is my duty to report that one mosque in Bukhara has been converted into a poolroom, not very handsome, and that Samarkand, the pivot of the old Silk Road to China, has traffic lights more or less like those on Fifth Avenue.

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The average Russian boy or girl gets more than five times the amount of science and mathematics that is stipulated for entrance even into such a specialized American institution as M.I.T. Every Russian student is paid to go to college. The Russians have the most formidable educational machine in the world, but they are also the most ignorant people in the world about affairs outside their own country.

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With certain exceptions, the Soviet authorities translate nothing that does not serve a utilitarian or propaganda purpose. Two big hits in Moscow were The Quiet American, by Graham Greene, and The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway. Mr. Greene's novel attacked colonialism and is profoundly anti-American in a subtle and effective way, and the Hemingway book shows what happens to an old fisherman in a bourgeois society who does not have social security.

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I asked a veteran diplomat if the Soviet attitude was, on a certain subject, "genuine" and "sincere." He answered dryly: "The most menacing thing about this country is that its leaders are the most sincere liars in history. When uttering the basest lies, they are at their most sincere.

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