Books in Brief

Only in Russia, by Howard Norton (Van Nostrand, $4.95). Anyone befuddled by incantations about Soviet “growth,” or confused by Moscow’s juggling of doctored statistics, should read this book. Howard Norton, former Baltimore Sun correspondent in the USSR, displays little or no animus against the Soviet regime, and certainly none against Russia as a nation. Yet he has written as damning an indictment of Soviet “progress” as can be found anywhere in print. And as the fact accumulates, it becomes increasingly clear that Soviet technology is a farce and a failure. “No new Moscow apartment house,” Norton reports, “is complete without a semi-permanent wire netting which stands out parallel with the ground for five or six feet in a solid circle around the building at the second floor level.” Otherwise, passers-by would be killed by the stones exfoliating from these marvels of Soviet construction. There is no transportation net to bring produce to Moscow from the South; production “advances” are blatantly copied from old-hat American models; Moscow, a city of five million people, has no telephone directory, and precisely eight commercial gas stations. Yet this is the nation supposedly “overtaking” the United States, with a space technology of superhuman efficiency! For those who would know the truth about the physical assets of our enemy, Mr. Norton is more informative than all the government’s Kremlinologists combined.

M. S. EVANS

Featured Tags

Only in Russia, by Howard Norton (Van Nostrand, $4.95). Anyone befuddled by incantations about Soviet “growth,” or confused by Moscow’s juggling of doctored statistics, should read this book. Howard Norton, former Baltimore Sun correspondent in the USSR, displays little or no animus against the Soviet regime, and certainly none against Russia as a nation. Yet he has written as damning an indictment of Soviet “progress” as can be found anywhere in print. And as the fact accumulates, it becomes increasingly clear that Soviet technology is a farce and a failure. “No new Moscow apartment house,” Norton reports, “is complete without a semi-permanent wire netting which stands out parallel with the ground for five or six feet in a solid circle around the building at the second floor level.” Otherwise, passers-by would be killed by the stones exfoliating from these marvels of Soviet construction. There is no transportation net to bring produce to Moscow from the South; production “advances” are blatantly copied from old-hat American models; Moscow, a city of five million people, has no telephone directory, and precisely eight commercial gas stations. Yet this is the nation supposedly “overtaking” the United States, with a space technology of superhuman efficiency! For those who would know the truth about the physical assets of our enemy, Mr. Norton is more informative than all the government’s Kremlinologists combined.

M. S. EVANS