Books, Arts & Manners

Breaking with Moscow, by Arkady N. Shevchenko (Knopf, 378 pp., $18.95)

Kak izvestno—as is well known— Arkady Shevchenko was a top advisor to the Soviet Foreign Ministry and the Politburo and an Under Secretary General of the United Nations who became the highest-ranking Soviet official ever to go over to the West. He tells his story here: the believing Communist youth who joined the Foreign Ministry in 1957 and rose rapidly through the ranks to advise and hobnob with the tyrants of the East; the rising diplomat whose faith was broken by Communist oppression and dreariness at home and by KGB suspicion and surveillance of him no matter how high he rose, who was captivated by the freedom and material wealth of the West from the moment he laid eyes on the piles of fruits and vegetables outside New York City grocery stores, which would have been “snatched away” in the hungry USSR; the high official who defected to the U.S.A. in 1975 and was persuaded by the CIA, through Dostoyevskian supportive manipulation, to stay in high rank and spy for us for three more years; the tragic man who made his escape a step ahead of the KGB, which shipped his wife home by force and murdered her there, a “suicide.” Two lives under Communism.

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Francis B. Randall

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Breaking with Moscow, by Arkady N. Shevchenko (Knopf, 378 pp., $18.95)

Kak izvestno—as is well known— Arkady Shevchenko was a top advisor to the Soviet Foreign Ministry and the Politburo and an Under Secretary General of the United Nations who became the highest-ranking Soviet official ever to go over to the West. He tells his story here: the believing Communist youth who joined the Foreign Ministry in 1957 and rose rapidly through the ranks to advise and hobnob with the tyrants of the East; the rising diplomat whose faith was broken by Communist oppression and dreariness at home and by KGB suspicion and surveillance of him no matter how high he rose, who was captivated by the freedom and material wealth of the West from the moment he laid eyes on the piles of fruits and vegetables outside New York City grocery stores, which would have been “snatched away” in the hungry USSR; the high official who defected to the U.S.A. in 1975 and was persuaded by the CIA, through Dostoyevskian supportive manipulation, to stay in high rank and spy for us for three more years; the tragic man who made his escape a step ahead of the KGB, which shipped his wife home by force and murdered her there, a “suicide.” Two lives under Communism.