The Right Books

Vladimir Bukovsky’s The Peace Movement and the Soviet Union (The Orwell Press of the Committee for the Free World, 211 East 51st Street, New York, N.Y. 10022; $1.25) is a little book of 57 pages and about the size of a postage stamp, which, like a stamp, should be issued by the millions and directed everywhere. Of course 1 am not temerarious enough to suggest that it will or even might be— the Western intellectual community being as indifferent a carrier of sensible ideas as the U.S. Postal Service is of first-class mail. How shrewd of the Orwell Press to issue Bukovsky’s book with red covers. Perhaps it will thereby find many unwitting purchasers in those dark, crabbed bookshops that exist wherever peace marchers are found.

The Peace Movement and the Soviet Union is, quite simply, the best essay 1 have ever read on the subject. In perhaps twenty thousand words Bukovsky explains where the peace movement comes from, and what its purposes are; how it has been popularly misinterpreted in the West, and why; and the possible consequences of this misinterpretation. In the process he manages also to provide an intuitively brilliant gloss upon the bipolar nature of the twentieth-century mind.

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Vladimir Bukovsky’s The Peace Movement and the Soviet Union (The Orwell Press of the Committee for the Free World, 211 East 51st Street, New York, N.Y. 10022; $1.25) is a little book of 57 pages and about the size of a postage stamp, which, like a stamp, should be issued by the millions and directed everywhere. Of course 1 am not temerarious enough to suggest that it will or even might be— the Western intellectual community being as indifferent a carrier of sensible ideas as the U.S. Postal Service is of first-class mail. How shrewd of the Orwell Press to issue Bukovsky’s book with red covers. Perhaps it will thereby find many unwitting purchasers in those dark, crabbed bookshops that exist wherever peace marchers are found.

The Peace Movement and the Soviet Union is, quite simply, the best essay 1 have ever read on the subject. In perhaps twenty thousand words Bukovsky explains where the peace movement comes from, and what its purposes are; how it has been popularly misinterpreted in the West, and why; and the possible consequences of this misinterpretation. In the process he manages also to provide an intuitively brilliant gloss upon the bipolar nature of the twentieth-century mind.