lin's policies and purposes have been amply spelled out in its own literature and conduct.

Yet the fable persists that nobody knows nothin' about the Soviet Union. Why?

First, I think, because Communist propaganda has been so successful in breeding confusion. It has buried even the best documented truths such as slave labor or the dismal failure of collectivized farming or the tensions between the regime and its subjects-in mountains of doubletalk. Those who tell truths unpleasant for the Kremlin are expertly vilified and, if not wholly discredited, at least covered with doubt and suspicion.

Second, because so many people in non-Soviet countries have an emotional stake in shielding their illusions about the wondrous land of Soviets. The theory that the Russian "enigma" is impenetrable enables them to linger a little longer among their fading enthusiasms for the "great experiment."

Again and again, some journalist, emerging from a long Soviet assignment, makes a sensation with his inside, closeup revelations. A couple of years later his successor in Moscow comes out and makes roughly the same revelations and once more it is a sensation, as if his predecessor hadn't existed. Communist Russia is the one America that is being continually rediscovered.

At present our country fairly teems with these Columbuses. In 1958, it is estimated, some 5,000 Americans made the Russian tour. This year the figure is expected to be around 10,000. And a large proportion of them will again retail approximately the same discoveries in articles, pamphlets, interviews, personal appearances on the air, and before luncheon clubs.

The marvel of it all is that the American public, seemingly so eager for a glimpse of the "Soviet truth" through the eyes of hurry-up tourists, steadfastly resists the temptation to read first-rate books on the subject. It wants the information fresh, fragrant, and, above all, trivial.

It would be pleasant to record that the current surge of tourism is helping to enlighten the non-Soviet world. Unhappily it is merely adding dimensions of confusion to the image of Russia in the public mind. I have read a great deal of what the more voluble pilgrims have said and written on their return from the hegira. Very few of them, it is clear, even suspected the ferment, terror, desperation, and soul-searching behind the official facade.

Many of them, of course, do pick up scraps of truth, especially in the fields of their particular competence. Now and then someone who has done his homework and goes there with some background of knowledge brings back significant insights. But for every tourist who catches a glimpse of the grim realities, there are dozens who simply act as innocent transmission belts for Moscow's propaganda wares. The general public, of course, is unable to separate the grains of truth from the chaff. Since the chaff, in the nature of the case, is vastly greater in volume, the total effect on public opinion is always misleading and often mischievous.

The idea that a personal visit to a distant land entitles the traveler to pronounce judgment on its people, conditions, and institutions is largely a superstition anyhow. One might as logically say that anyone can grasp the essentials of nuclear science by walking through

Brookhaven. Everything depends on how well prepared the viewer is to comprehend what he sees-even if he were permitted to see all of it, which decidedly is not the case in a totalitarian country.

Most people have only a limited understanding of their own country, where they've lived all their lives. So why expect them to acquire, in a couple of hectic weeks, dependable opinions on a foreign land? The expectation is especially bizarre when the foreign land is as vast and complex, its life as unrelated to their own experience, as Soviet Russia-a country where unchaperoned travel is almost impossible, where the concealment of truth and the gulling of foreigners are prime arts of statecraft; a country whose language and history they do not know, where people rarely forget the risks of talking too frankly with outsiders.

It is not necessarily a reflection on the honesty and intelligence of tourists to note the fact that their findings are for the most part shallow, often grotesque, and in the aggregate worthless. The average tourist to Russia-and in this context he's average no matter how eminent he may be in his own field--can only hope to collect a miscellany of surface impressions. Those of us who remained in the Soviet Union for long periods know how wrong one's initial impressions can be. It takes many months, even years, to overcome the first bewilderment, shake off the hypnosis of slogans, and begin to discern a pattern under the strangeness.

Yet, amazingly, the short-term explorers bring back full-blown views on all things Soviet which, more amazingly, are accepted uncritically by so many of their countrymen. A tourist returning from France or Peru doesn't pretend to know whether its people are "happy," whether the country has "improved," whether its citizens love their rulers. He'd be astonished if anyone asked him such riddles or took his answers seriously. But the tourist to Russia, with few exceptions, feels himself under a social compulsion to display opinions on such recondite matters. I am still waiting for the miracle of a returning tourist who, when asked whether the Soviet people are loyal to their dictators, will answer, "How would I know, after 2 or 3 weeks?"

REPEAT PERFORMANCE

I admit that I am prejudiced against quickie experts on Soviet Russia. It happens that in the early 1930's I witnessed a tourist invasion of the country even larger and louder than the one now underway. I can testify from personal observation that the inspectors of that period saw little and understood less. It is not entirely coincidence that illusions about Communist Russia were most prevalent in the West precisely when Western tourism to Russia was at high tide. It was a time of hideous terror, universal hunger and wretchedness, pitiless extermination of entire classes of the population. But the visitors were rarely aware of these obscenities and, indeed, refused to believe it when we tried to tell them. They trooped gaily among the assorted horrors, then hurried home to exclaim over the lovely "sacrifices" which were producing "progress" and "improvement." They blandly "denied" the famine while it was raging and slave labor when it had passed the 10 million mark.

The resident foreign correspondents, even the most pro-Soviet in the lot, and the Soviet guides without exception, had a scathing con

tempt for the oh-ing and ah-ing Intourist customers. Several guides who were my friends used to ask me whether all Americans were so simple-minded or only the simple-minded could afford the Intourist prices. One sensitive woman, after a day of professional lying to her American charges, would cry with frustration because her prescribed lies were being believed.

As for Soviet officials, they despised the gullibility of the visitors even while exploiting it to the limit. During the terrible manmade famine in 1932-33, correspondents and diplomats were confined to Moscow, but tourists were allowed to visit some cities in the stricken areas. That seemed to me a good measure of the Kremlin's contempt for the breed; it counted confidently on their inability to detect the obvious.

While the famine was underway, Edouard Herriot, then the French Premier, came on a state visit. His conducted journey took him through the famine area. On getting back to Moscow he "denied" the rumors of famine. The only resident correspondent allowed to accompany him, a French newspaperman, had tried to open Mr. Herriot's eyes but, as he told me sadly, failed completely.

It is against those memories that I have been watching the present swarm of tourists, and it has seemed to me a repeat performance of the tragicomedy. The present score for comprehension is no higher, the score for political fatuity no lower, than in the early 1930's. In almost the same cliches as their forerunners in Stalin's era, they report

1. All-around progress and improvement; and

2. Perfect harmony between the dictatorship and those to whom it dictates.

There have been a few striking exceptions and there will be more, but it can be safely predicted that this is what thousands of them will tell us again this year and in the year to come. We are in for another plague of obiter dicta on things Soviet by 2- and 4-week experts.

Even if both their major claims were true, a few weeks of agitated sightseeing would hardly suffice to confirm it. Few of the tourists have enough concrete knowledge on which to rest a verdict of "progress." Fewer have any means of ascertaining the nature of relations between the rulers and the ruled.

Even under the best circumstances the true feelings of 200 million human beings—a complicated mosaic of classes, races, cultures, and conflicting interests are not so easily assayed. Private "Gallup polls" are futile. In Soviet Russia, the parroting of "safe" slogans and "correct" views has become second nature, a matter of survival. Anyone who talks politics to a stranger, according to a Soviet adage, is either "a fool or a tool."

In my own experience, the people who seemed most pro-regime on first acquaintance often turned out to be the most hostile to the system when years of friendship finally enabled us to talk honestly. Why casual tourists, including one-shot journalists, should expect any sane Soviet citizen to confide his real sentiments to him, especially within earshot of a third person, is a mystery.

I recall, in this connection, a wartime classic of tourist naivete. The late Wendell Willkie, having gathered a number of prominent Soviet writers in his Moscow hotel suite, locked the door and ad

dressed them to this general effect: "Gentlemen, we're now alone, so let's let our hair down and talk frankly." Mr. Willkie could hardly have realized the absurdity of his proposal or he would not have recorded it so proudly. For he was inviting his guests, in effect, to commit political suicide. Aside from the fact that the suite was probably "bugged," no one of them would dare talk freely in the presence of the others, knowing that his words would surely end up in this secret police dossier.

REGIME VERSUS PEOPLE

A remarkable recent book by a German who had been brought up in Soviet Russia as a zealous Communist- "Child of the Revolution," by Wolfgang Leonhard-touches on the visits of foreign delegations at a plant to which he was attached. One of his comments should be made prescribed reading for prospective tourists to Russia:

It can happen [Leonhard writes] that in conversation with people from the West, an official who is wrestling with the severest internal doubts will stubbornly, and apparently with complete conviction, defend the official party line. His Western interlocutor leaves him with the firm conviction of having been talking to a 150 percent Stalinist. He sees the whole conversation as a pointless waste of time, whereas in reality the same official, who is already at heart in opposition, will subsequently describe his conversation in detail to a small circle of fellow members of the opposition, and spend hours discussing it.

Yet nine American Governors, after 3 crowded weeks of officially supervised travel in Russia, jointly announced:

We saw no indication that the Soviet people entertain any desire to abandon their system of government and economy, any more than our people intend to abandon their basic beliefs.

Is it likely that anyone in a police state would have confided to visiting Americans the sort of dangerous secret he does not dare confide to his own family? Were these Governors equipped to recognize any "indication" of the will to revolt if they had stumbled on it? All that their widely reported judgment means, in the light of commonsense, is that the Russians they encountered, being sane, stuck to the safe formulas of enthusiasm in answering questions.

Dr. Charles I. Schottland, of the Brandeis University faculty, told the press that the Russians he met on his trip were all "happy, satisfied, and terribly patriotic." On the basis of this overwhelming evidence he declared that to expect the people to turn against the regime was "whistling in the dark." One wonders whether such scientific methods of inquiry would pass muster in his classes.

Stewart Alsop, in a Saturday Evening Post article based on a month's diligent foraging, gave us his professional word that "the Soviet citizen has been successfully taught to love his chains." When this news was repeated to a Soviet sailor soon after he had defected from his ship in Formosa, his angry comment was: "If the Kremlin allowed people to go out, you'd soon find out how they felt about the regime." But the clinching comment came about a year later, from Stewart's brother Joseph. Having foraged in the same preserves, Joseph declared that the chink in the Kremlin's armor was precisely its failure to win over the people. Clearly both brothers couldn't have been right.

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Or consider the case of J. Edward Murray, managing editor of the Los Angeles Mirror-News. He began his report on a Soviet tour by attesting that "you see mainly what Intourist wants you to see." Moreover, to his Western eyes life seemed—

a gray tone scale *** a dullness and drabness, as if the esthetic sense were missing or stunted.

He found construction shoddy; even in the big Leningrad stores, "quality (was) atrocious, selection limited and prices exorbitant"; the sight of women doing backbreaking work "shocked" him; life was gummed up by bureaucracy and shadowed by "thought control."

Nevertheless, Mr. Murray decided that the Russian people "didn't seem enslaved and didn't want to escape across the nearest border." They seemed to him "as free as they wanted to be" and "seemed to feel they were living under the best of all possible systems." In short, he made the assumption, so insulting to Russians, that they were content with dullness and drabness, unaware of shoddiness, happy to see their mothers and wives working as longshoremen and hod carriers, pleased with the shackles of thought control and the frustrations of bureaucracy.

Anyone who has lived among Russians for years, as I did, can assure Mr. Murray (and others who underrate the humanity of Russians) that his judgment was as mistaken as it was ungallant.

With hundreds of durably built structures from the pre-Communist past around them, they could scarcely believe that construction must be shoddy. Having produced in the recent past, as history is reckoned, magnificent music, art, literature, ballet, they could hardly be indifferent to pervasive ugliness or unaware of its political implications. If a lot of them didn't have the impulse "to escape across the nearest border," their dictators would not have made an attempt to do so a capital crime.

Mr. Murray recounts one little episode which, if he had searched for its inner meaning, might have saved him from his more puerile judgments:

A Russian with whom he had engaged in conversation one evening invited him to his own home. When the American editor got there next day, he was intercepted by a messenger with a note calling off the meeting on a lame excuse. Could it have been "a warning from officials" that caused the cancellation? No, Mr. Murray decided, more likely it was just "objections from the wife."

Obviously he does not begin to understand the mechanics of fear in a totalitarian society, or he would have known that the two explanations amount to the same thing. No formal "warnings" are needed for people who know from sad experience the dangers of consorting with foreigners. If the wife "objected," she was merely being more sensible than her spouse.

To those who have lived under a police state, red or brown, such an episode is replete with the pathos of an oppressed population. But an insensitive outsider reduces it to a domestic squabble and informs his readers that the victims are "as free as they want to be."

I have been especially intrigued by the report of 21 editors of American company magazines, who made the tour in the summer of 1958. Their objective was to study "communications in industry," meaning communications between management and employes. They