Book Reviews : Thirteen Days That Shook the Kremlin. By TIBOR MERAY. (New York: Fre derick A. Praeger, 1959. Pp vi, 290. $5.00.)

• Published date: 01 September 1960
• Author: Joseph S. Roucek
• DOI: 10.1177/106591296001300338
• Date: 01 September 1960
• Subject Matter: Articles

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charts on economic-industrial administration contradict one another; as a matter
of fact, the latter chart more accurately depicts contemporary organizational
structure.
Soviet Dictatorship would leave the impression that citizens of the U.S.S.R.
today live in an atmosphere of omnipresent terror which has permeated &dquo;every
corner of life.&dquo;
The immediate objective of such terror, the authors observe,
is to induce in the populace a feeling of fear, foreboding, and helplessness. And,
presumably in discussing current practices of the secret police, we read that
&dquo;the MVD
and KGB usually seize their victims silently and swiftly, often in the
late hours of the night&dquo; and that &dquo;whole villages may be swept up without warn-
ing and deported to distant regions.&dquo; The problem here is one chiefly of meth-
odological supposition. McClosky and Turner assume the historical immutability
of communism in its most odious forms has a more enduring vitality than have
any, or all, of the post-Stalin reforms.
Whatever Khrushchevism is it is not Stalinism, and to persist in the tena-
cious view that Soviet society does not and cannot change over the years in
any significant degree, this reviewer suggests, is to brush aside in too cavalier a
manner the gradual evolution of communism. Present revisions in the legal
codes of the U.S.S.R., for example, though hardly transforming the dictatorship
into a model democracy, nevertheless appear to be rather marked improvements
over the complete absence of legal safeguards under the preceding regime. In
Molotov’s case too, one might conjure up a fate worse than being appointed
Ambassador to Ulan Bator for openly opposing not only the dictator, but the
party will, not to mention the party line. And, by McClosky and Turner’s own
testimony Pasternak, instead of being seized &dquo;in the late hours of the night&dquo; for
his crimes, was instead merely denounced and condemned as a reactionary.
Students of the Soviet system...