Double Vision

MAIN STREET, U.S.S.R. (408 pp.)--Irving R. Levine--Doubleday ($4.50).

THE PRIVILEGE WAS MINE (318 pp.)--Princess Zinaida Schakovskoy--Putnam ($4).

Of these two new books about present-day Russia, one is an information-packed Baedeker; the other is a cry from the heart. Correspondent Levine. who for the past three years has broadcast from Moscow for NBC. got the idea for his volume from a weekly radio program in which he answered questions sent in by U.S. listeners. (Sample: Are there chiropractors in the U.S.S.R.? Answer: No, but chiropractic techniques are used.) Like a less history-conscious Gunther. Author Levine ranges over the surface of Soviet life, from shops to prisons, from tractor stations to "stereokino." The book is larded with anecdotes and jokes (see box), which illustrate the Soviet mood.

Ne Kulturny, For the prospective traveler in the U.S.S.R. Levine supplies a cautionary list of what is ne kulturny (not cultured). Russians frown on low-cut dresses and stockingless legs, and scorn women who wear hats or coats in restaurants. Men should never put their feet on desks or cross their legs or keep their hands in their pants pockets. To whistle in public will cause cries of "Ne kulturny but Russians think nothing of shoving and elbowing their way through crowds or of using their fingers to tear off bits of meat at the table.

In almost every material blessing, Levine finds the U.S.S.R. far behind the U.S. But where Russia is ahead, he does not hesitate to say so, e.g., Russian autos have a "clock on the dashboard that almost invariably tells the correct time."

Like other observers. Levine sees the slow growth of a Soviet middle class "more concerned with retention of what it has than with revolution abroad.'' These Communist bourgeois hunger "for contacts with the outside world, for more goods, for a measure of self-expression," and he believes they will act as a brake on "adventurist Soviet policies."

Secret Life. The Privilege Was Mine, written by a Russian princess who fled after the Revolution in 1920 (at the age of 13) and returned 37 years later as the wife of a Belgian diplomat, is filled with insights that ring true and glitters with revealing conversations with all sorts of citizens from peasants to party leaders. It also offers evidence that nationalism knows no distinction between political systems. Though an antiCommunist, the princess is firmly on the side of the Kremlin when she feels Russia's historic interests are involved. In writing of the bloody suppression of the Hungarian rebellion, she asks: "What else could the Soviet leaders do?"

She sees Russians today as leading double lives: the collective and social one in which they are never alone, and an inner life made up of silence and closely guarded secrets. Her stay in Russia coincided with the thaw that followed destalinization. She was able to talk familiarly with the head of the secret police, General Ivan Serov (now deposed), and to visit the bleak, one-room lodging of a pious survivor of the old regime who told her of "a secret and silent procession of men and women, young and old, whose paid holidays took the form of pilgrimages to holy places and visits to anchorites who, in the guise of beekeepers or still more solitary vocations, live in the far corners of the Soviet Union."

The most ominous and, perhaps, prophetic lines of the book occur as the author describes her departure from the Soviet Union to return to France. At a last meeting with a young Soviet scientist and his wife, the man clasped her hand, said: "Remember this: today we talk about Communism and capitalism. Tomorrow we'll both be talking about the same thing: China."

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