REUNION IN RUSSIA

If your files take you back (in the Service) to 1944, check with the report on p. 158 for a review of Mrs. Louis Fischer's My Lives in Russia, in which she records the years of hope and despair and gives an intimate feel of the struggle to live and what the daily round was like- and the years that separated her youth there and her return in 1927 to stay until 1939 with her journalist American husband. Now for the first time since then she goes back in 1960. Fearful of the Secret Police at first she was hesitant, then gradually was able to talk with a wide range of people, from charladies at the hotel to professional people, many of them old friends. She came to realize that the new regime had brought a new freedom to Soviet life, and that the people were eager to forget the purges and terrors of the '30's. Her book- as did the earlier one- includes a great deal of detail about life in the Soviet,- the housing shortage, the shops and prices, the family cohesiveness, the return of religion, the press, the existence of class consciousness. Everywhere she went she met friendliness, a determined defence of present day Russian policies, and a distorted view of the United States matched only by the ill informed prejudices towards Russia of most Americans she encountered on her return. While the literary quality of her book leaves much to be regretted, the zest of the writing and the vividness of an insider's view of how Russians today actually live and think, make this worth careful consideration.