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Alfred Schaefer, Lenins Philosophieren, Eine Kritik seines Vermiichtnisses, Berlin, Verlag Arno Spitz, 1986, 150 S. Since the early 1960's Schaefer has been actively engaged in analysis of contemporary philosophy. To his works on Marx, Lenin and Stalin, he now adds, with his Lenin's Philosophizing, a noteworthy example of critical reflection. Lest that seem exaggerated in this day of so-called 'innovation', when the Western press is forgetting everything that has been done with the 'classics' of Marxism-Leninism in the past, it is good to be reminded just how the process works and worked in a not too far distant past. That Lenin's philosophic efforts were dilettantish, inferior and scandalous, needs little proof, and Schaefer supplies it in short order. But, more importantly, in doing this, he reveals the motivation behind it -- the "legacy". Lenin, the philosophic charlatan cannot be separated -as 'good guy' -- from Stalin, the 'bad guy' and villain. Schaefer does a good job, too, when it comes to delineating the late Lenin, the 'Casandra', who is so useful today. This book is worth reading as one of the best recent accounts on the nature of the totalitarian Party, its founder, and his current representatives.

Pavel Campeanu, The Origins of Stalinism. From Leninist Revolution to Stalinist Society, Armonk, NY and London, M.E. Sharpe, 1986, 185 pp. Born in 1920 in Bucharest, Campeanu joined the Communist youth group at the age of fifteen, and was a Communist Party member by the time he was twenty. He survived the war in jail and his career led him from She "social sciences" to the official media and, via UNESCO, to Studies in Soviet Thought 37: 333, 1989.

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propaganda activities in the West. His first published work in a foreign language, The Syncretic Society, contained his own description of a totalitarian society. However, those who expect to find something here that goes beyond the usual national-Communist statement will be disappointed. The book consists of an abstract delineation in terms of the usual terminology -feudal, bourgeois, proletarian, revolutionary, etc. -- and does a lot of apologetics, without giving sources, a reading list, or proper indices. Stalinism without Stalin. The author does the second step before the first and announces that his subsequent book will deal with the birth of Stalinism. For the moment, he is content to cite the usual scape-goat, saying: "Stalinism is an indirect consequence of world imperialism, and a direct product of the Russian revolution of 1917", making this one of the least necessary books of 1986. Translated from the German by T. J. Blakeley, Boston College University of Vienna

KURT MARKO

Vera Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks: The Persecution of Socialists under Bolshevism, Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press, 1987, viii + 216 pp. $29.50. The history of the demise of the Menshevik Party after the October Revolution is far less familiar to most students of Russian history than the story of the party's creation in 1903, its rivalry with Lenin's Bolsheviks during the last years of the old regime, and even its mishandling of power in 1917. Despite the fact that most of the Mensheviks who remained in Soviet Russia supported the concept of a dictatorship of the proletariat, were opposed to armed resistance to the new Soviet regime, and argued against Allied intervention in the Civil War, their party was systematically persecuted and eventually destroyed. During the first years of the Civil War, when Lenin needed allies at home and abroad, this persecution simply took the form of harassment: closing Menshevik newspapers, breaking up Menshevik meetings, removing Menshevik sympathizers from positions in soviet and trade Studies in Soviet Thought 37: 334, 1989.

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union bodies. Starting in 1920, however, the remnants of the party were driven underground as an increasing number of Mensheviks were arrested and either imprisoned or exiled without trial. The Menshevik Central Committee ceased to exist after the forced emigration (at Soviet expense) of several of its leading figures in 1922. With the arrest of Georgii Kuchin in 1924, the history of Menshevism in Russia if not in Western-European emigration was effectively over. The suppression of the Menshevik Party between 1920 and 1924 as well as the often heroic attempts of individual Mensheviks to protest against all forms of oppression is the central topic of Vera Broido's new book. The author is the daughter of two former prominent Mensheviks, Mark and Eva Broido. Indeed, her mother, whose interesting memoirs Vera edited in 1967, was a longtime member of the Menshevik Central Committee who was sent back to Russia by her party in 1927. She was arrested six months later and spent the next fourteen years in one or another form of Soviet detention until her probable execution in 1941. As a result of family circumstances, Vera Broido has a vested interest and a personal familiarity with her subject. She also has had access to her mother's letters and to correspondence found in the archives of the International Institute for Social History and the Hoover Institution from other Mensheviks who suffered under similar conditions. The most interesting and valuable part of her book is the penultimate chapter which is based on these letters and describes in moving detail the life Mensheviks led in Soviet prisons, labor camps and exile colonies. While the harshness of this life will come as no surprise, the fact that prisoners or exiles could receive visitors, send correspondence abroad, and for a time edit or write material for publication is often ignored in other accounts. Of particular interest is Vera Broido's brief description of the role played by the Political Red Cross in trying to ameliorate these conditions. The concluding chapter and by far the longest, which is entitled 'A Chronicle of Persecution and Resistance', provides an almost month-by-month review of Menshevik travails during this period. It also utilizes the unpublished letters mentioned above as well as often overlooked information that appeared in the Mensheviks' 6migr6 journal Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik. While some readers might wish that this material had been presented in a more integrated and less repetitious fashion, the information provided is

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often new and always interesting. One hopes that her account of the work of the Menshevik Youth League and of the role of Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik in keeping alive a sense of Menshevism in Russia will stimulate further investigation of these topics. Vera Broido is less successful in her introductory chapters. The first 86 pages are devoted to tracing Menshevik-Bolshevik relations before the war and during the revolution as well as to providing an overview of the Civil War, War Communism and the mechanics of police terror. This is familiar territiory for most readers and since the author bases this part of her book on secondary sources, she adds little to our knowledge of the period. At times her facts in this section are questionable: Lenin did not come from the "landed gentry" (p. 31), he was not in the majority in the famous vote at the Second Congress over the first article of the party rules (p. 5), the 1912 Prague Conference was not a "Congress" and it did not "expel" the Mensheviks from the party (p. 7), the All-Russian Conference of Soviets in April 1917 was not the First "Congress" of Soviets (which met in June) and to my knowledge it did not name the Petrograd Soviet as "the All-Russian Soviet" (p. 13), the Versailles peace treaties did not return to Soviet Russia lands surrendered at Brest-Litovsk (pp. 19, 42), and Russian calendar problems are bad enough without referring to events happening on 29 February 1917 (p. 12). The title of this book reveals another problem. The author, while concentrating on "Lenin and the Mensheviks", has decided to deal with "the persecution of [all] socialists under Bolshevism". Thus, she refers occasionally but not systematically to the suppression of the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Anarchists. The fate of the Ukrainian socialists, Jewish socialists, and non-Leninist Bolshevik socialists is virtually ignored. One wishes that Vera Broido would have restricted herself to the Mensheviks per se and especially to their persecution in the early 1920's. She knows this topic well, has a good command of its sources, and has something to add to a much-needed overall history of the Menshevik movement. Carleton University Ottawa Ontario Canada

R. C. ELWOOD

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Tibor R. Machan (ed.), The Main Debate: Commun&m versus Capitalism, 1987, Random House, 481 pp. + x. Tibor Machan has edited 24 essays (including one of his own) on the title topic, divided into eight parts: Dialectics, Human Nature and Human Emancipation, Ethics and Moral Foundations, Human Freedom and Political Liberty, Rights, Political Economy, Economics, and Imperialism. Unusual but deeply appreciated is the index the editor has provided. Too often collections of scholarly writings are sent into the world sans index, a tool which allows the reader to compare what the various contributors have had to say on a particular topic. He has also written a one or two paragraph introduction for each of the eight parts as well as a small lead-in to each essay. The parts contain either two or four essays, usually by thinkers of opposite persuasions. The only exception is Part Six on 'Political Economy', in which three Communists face off against one capitalist. (A note on the words 'Communist' and 'capitalist' is in order here. Machan admits he does not like the word 'capitalist' (his position) and realizes many of the opposing camp would feel uncomfortable with the label 'Communists' as a descriptive term for their views. Nevertheless, the terms are used for lack of better ones and I shall continue with their use even though individual essayists may repudiate the title applied to them.) Excepting four essays, all of the studies have been published before, the oldest being Nathaniel Branden's 'Alienation' which, although it is cited as being a reprint from his 1973 book The Disowned Self, originally appeared in a 1966 collection of essays entitled Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (edited by the late Ayn Rand) and first saw the light of day in July-AugustSeptember 1965 issues of a now defunct journal, The Obfectivist Newsletter, of which he was co-editor. I mention this fact to allay the impression that the authors knew of this collection beforehand and were writing with it in mind. In fact, by my count only four essays were especially written for this collection. Another misleading aspect of the title is to be found in the word 'debate'. Very few of the essays are of the head-on-collision variety.for the most part Machan has "chosen Marxists to defend Marxist communism and individualists to defend capitalism . . . " (p. vi) The result is a careful exploration of various topics that should interest any reader of this journal. Studies in Soviet Thought 37: 337, 1989.

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The quality of the essays is unusually high. Veteran teachers cannot help grading essays as if they were papers written for a specific course and this reviewer certainly belongs in that class. Most of the entries in this collection earned the highest mark. The exception is an item contributed by J. Roger Lee which merited a low mark for being too cute, choppy and confused [I never could figure out whether he regarded Utilitarianism and Deontologism as adequate or inadequate as possible moral defenses of capitalism; nor why he insists on using both cardinal and ordinal methods of numbering in the same sentence -- e.g., "The second way that trade on the market is alienating is that (2) the worker's labor is sold on the market" (94)]. Since it would be impractical to say something about every essay in the collection, I have decided to focus on a few 'stars'. The opening offering is by Robert Heilbroner and it successfully undertakes to explain the "thorny subject of dialectics". (p. 2) As exposition, it is clear and eminently readable and if it forestalls misunderstanding on the part of the capitalists, so much the better. What Heilbroner does not suggest is that perhaps 'dialectic' and dialectical development could be applied to capitalistic processes as well as Communistic ones. I have never been too comfortable with reading Hegel as a Communist or even as its progenitor. Certainly the debt Hegel owes to Adam Smith in his writings on 'Civil Society' in the Sittlichkeit section of the Philosophy of Right is old news, and while one can point out the fact that civil society is aufgehoben by the state, one must remember that the state is a mere moment in the dialectical march to the highest form of human being-inthe-world, viz., philosophy. We philosophers have a hard time knocking such self-congratulation. Branden's essay on 'Alienation' is a critical study of some of the writings of Erich Fromm, described by Machan as a neo-Marxist/ humanist. These writings include The Art of Loving, Man for Himself and The Sane Society. While one might disagree with Branden's short and inaccurate treatment of Hegel (he finds him more mystical than I do and regards the 'history of man' according to Hegel as the 'history of man's self-alienation' from the Whole rather than as a specifically Christian phenomenon of self-diremption typified by the Unhappy Consciousness) his analysis of Fromm is more considered and sustained. Ultimately he finds that the problem of alienation is not

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metaphysical but rather "pertains to how man chooses to use his own consciousness". (p. 80) I found it fitting that Branden, representing the capitalist side of the dabate, closes his article with a small 'commercial' for his latest (1985) book. No one interested in political philosophy is unaware of Robert Nozick, the Harvard professor whose 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia won the National Book Award and started (or continued, depending on one's perspective) a debate to which books such as Reading Nozick and the one here under review constitute a contribution. The selection included in this volume is taken from Nozick's famous work, specifically sections from Chapter Eight, 'Equality, Envy and Exploitation'. In the first section, equality is downgraded from the pre-eminent position of a final cause or telos of any just society simply because it has rarely if ever been argued for. With that, Nozick also brings into question the "legitimacy of altering social institutions to achieve greater equality". In lieu of this, Nozick, whose emphasis is on process rather than result, places the "entitlement conception of justice in holdings" which is discussed and argued for earlier in the book but not, unfortunately, in the excerpted essay. Simply put, you are (1) entitled to anything you acquire or have transferred to you according to the rules of the game, and (2) no one is entitled to a holding got by means that violate the procedures stated in (1). This is not, if I understand Nozick, to be taken as an attack against the equality before the law principle. In this he agrees with Kant who felt that equality before the law was quite compatible "with the greatest inequality in the quantity and degree of their [the citizens'] possessions, whether these be physical or mental superiority, external gifts of fortune, or simply rights with respect to others". In addition to equality, Nozick also attacks equality of opportunity, meaningful work, workers' control, and Marxian exploitation. Although the Nozick article appears in the Economics section of the collection and Kai Nielsen's 'Global Justice, Capitalism, and the Third World' is in the Imperialism section, they can profitably be read together• (This applies to many of the articles hence the need, and debt of gratitude for the index.) Nielsen starts with some "stark empirical realities" among which he includes the fact that "approximately 10,000 people starve every day". [That represents 0,00002 of the world's • . .

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population. It implies that 4,999,990,000 are not starving, approximately 100%. Nielsen does not tell us what precentage would satisfy him.] And none of us faces the "level of poverty and utter misery that nearly 40% of the people in the Third World face". His solution: Massive redistribution of resources from "the northern hemisphere to the South". Nowhere in the article does he ask how this particular distribution resulted (justly or unjustly -- the assumption is the latter but is not argued for) nor inform us what are his plans for keeping his preferred distribution intact. Will he prohibit all trade between consenting adults? And for how long? Nozick-like questions abound. I am reminded of an article I read in The New Republic which stated ominously that the grand distributor is the father of the grand inquistor. A better solution might be to prohibit all intercourse between the poor south and the rich north. If the north were indeed exploiting the south, such a prohibition would at least enable the south to develop undisturbed. But the fact that the majority of trade is of the first worldfirst world rather than first world-third world type should give one pause. If the latter is the case, why is there not a greater disparity between first world nations? Nielsen seems unaware of all of this. With all the subjectivity that accompanies such judgements I would have preferred a collection without the capitalist Lee and the Communist Nielsen. But the precentage of first-rate articles is so high that readers of SST cannot fail to profit from this collection. Errata: p. 211 'philosopohy' has one 'o' too many; p. 266 'intrepreneurs' should begin with an 'e'; p. 296 'f' should be 'of' in the title of Adam Smith's classic; p. 356 'properied' should be 'propertied'; p. 403 'ferences' should be 'differences'; and p. 465 contains a lone left-hand parenthesis.

Wheeling College 23 Mt. Oliver St. Pittsburgh PA 15210 USA

FRED SEDDON

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Lewis Feuer, Imperialism and the Anti-Imperialist Mind, Buffalo, Prometheus Books, 1986, pp. 259. The author, a distinguished professor emeritus of the University of Virginia, has written a provocative work on imperialists throughout history. Despite a splendid chapter on the Soviet Empire, and a superb narration of Jewish empire builders, the essay falls short of the necessary detachment and objectivity expected by the social sciences. The centerpiece of the book is the author's apology for America's war in Vietnam which was critically undermined, he argues, by the guiltridden intellectuals of the West who failed to recognize that empire building is natural to man and that some empires were progressive (American, British, French) and some were regressive (Spanish, Soviet). Buoyed by the world decline in Marxist fervor, the author notes the concomitant disappearance of those predicting the demise of capitalism and i~ts empires. Unlike those visionaries who hope that empires, like war, can be abolished, Feuer laments the decline of the Western empires. One may indeed welcome another revisionist story of imperialism, even a consideration of good and bad empires, of the necessary use of power, but the reader feels uneasy with Feuer's facile selection of materials with which to build his brief. Polemics aside, the author does have many interesting things to present. The book's initial premise is that theorists opposed to imperialism often have been misled by the faulty analogy of the predator and its prey in hunting. While Feuer recognizes that greed, lust for power, and desire for exploitation sometimes moved imperial functionaries, selfless idealism was common to many others; that economic growth, development of legal due process, and internal peace were striking features in the empires of Macedonians, Romans, British in India and Nigeria, French in Senegal, Dutch in the East Indies, and Americans in the Philippines. Repentant liberals, he argues, ignore the praises of James and John Stuart Mill for the economic benefits of British rule in India. An expanding capitalist empire (for which Feuer has an unabashed admiration) created consumer demands beyond what the home country could produce and so created counterpart industries in a colony. Even Feuer notes the existence of literature to the contrary. Controversial, Studies in Soviet Thought 37: 341, 1989.

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too, is the argument that population growth was an imperial benefit. Absence of civil disorders and war may have contributed to fertility but how is one to explain by the imperial argument the same growth in 18th-century China? Or in late 18th-century England, for that matter? If imperial rule caused population growth, the argument needs more evidence than is supplied. Feuer points to the selfless decision by British authorities in 1833 to provide English-language education for the inhabitants of India. To many Indians this decision was an instance of cultural imperialism. But did British education whet the appetites of Indians for modern technology? One would think that British-financed education in the Indian vernaculars would have been the more selfless approach. The British abolition of slavery in South Africa was another example of selfless, social idealism. Almost everywhere, Feuer argues, Westerners brought greater internal peace and order, improved sanitation and medicine. Even the Monroe Doctrine comes in for critical scrutiny. By removing the threat of European imperialism, American policy erased the stimulus for self-growth in Latin America. Spanish and Portuguese Americans lacked the principal motive for industrialization, namely, military technology for defense. They could always rely upon the United States, the benefactor who came to be hated by the beneficiaries. Dependency, Feuer argues, begets resentment. Feuer's position is not only that empires are natural to powerful societies; their very impetus comes from the masses. The drive to build empires is traced to Western consumers who wanted cheap transportation like the bicycle with rubber tires; or the piano with ivory keys; or Nigerian palm oil for soap; or chocolate bean from the Dutch East Indies. He calls this by the ironic title, "Peoples Imperialism". The most interesting segment of the book for this reviewer is the case study of Jews. He notes that anti-Semitism was largely absent in the progressive empires of Alexander of Macedon, Augustus Caesar, Moslems in Egypt, Syria and Spain, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Jewish revolt in 66 A.D. was a revolt of Zealots or Fundamentalists, like those "in Middle Eastern Moslem countries today". In fact, anti-Semitism only appeared in the late Roman Empire and grew stronger during the feudal centuries in Western Europe. Similarly anti-Semitism emerged in the late British Empire of the 1930's and 1940's, when liberal influences restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine.

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Not only did Jews fare better under empires, Jews were often progressive imperial functionaries. Irrespective of Feuer's polemics, his story-telling ability is generously displayed in this discussion. There was the tale of Edward Schnitzer (Emin Pasha), Jewish scientist and governor in 19th-Century Africa; of Frederick Gordon Guggisberg who helped the Ghanaian peasant proprietors cultivate the cocoa bean and who brought education to their young; of progressive imperialists like British general, Sir John Monash, Prime Minister Roy Welensky of Nyassaland and Rhodesia, Sir Andrew Cohen, British Assistant UnderSecretary of State for the Colonies, Barney Barnato, diamond entrepreneur in South Africa, Alfred Beit, gold manufacturer in South Africa, Lionel Phillips, first chairman of Rand Mines and founder of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Julius Vogel, political imperialist in New Zealand, David Sassoon, creator of the first mechanical textile fatories in India, and Bernhard Dernberg, the German-Jewish railroad builder who rose to be Kolonialdirektor. Feuer laments the harmful imperial guilt complexes. In fact, economic development lagged in the Third World whether the country had retained independence or was administered by an imperial power. The reader would have liked some ample documentation for the former. Western guilt for third-world poverty, Feuer continues, was reinforced by Marxist rhetoric even though backwardness is not the consequence of imperialist exploiters; most backward peoples were never touched by imperialists. As for atrocities upon colonial peoples, most of the documented cases were followed by parliamentary investigations (Warren Hastings, Belgians in the Congo), and occurred when state socialism suspended competitive capitalism. Cruelties were more often inflicted by primitives against other primitives. Why, Feuer asks, has so little attention been given to the many Arab atrocities upon Africans? Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw that empires were historically necessary, but V. I. Lenin's hatred of imperialism was motivated by the prospect of attracting Asian loyalties. If Lenin's analysis of imperialism is wrong, so too was that of others who ascribe it to public hysteria and national pride. But could not hysteria often characterize the modem self-hatred of Westerners, Feuer asks? He presents a sound refutation of the Marxian analysis of surplus value as a cause of empire building. The psycho-historical segment of this work is devoted to Prospero

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and Caliban complexes. The former describes imperialists as neurotic and moved by disturbed sexuality, and by a sense of personal inferiority, or guilt. Hence they chose worlds where, as authorities (sometimes sadistic), they could shield themselves against their anxieties. Feuer does not deny that sexual impulses often lent power to the imperialist dynamic, or that sometimes the worst types went to the colonies, but sexual behavior was no different in the colonies than at home, where expanding social services employed a growing army of officials. The case of Frederick J. Lugard is exhibit A. Although this British imperial civil servant had truly suffered from rejection by a lover, in his public life Lugard worked to destroy authoritarianism by his system of indirect rule in British Nigeria. Rather than transferring any feelings of aggression or resentment toward helpless natives, his career is noteworthy for the opposite qualities. When Cervantes wrote disapprovingly of the riffraff who populated the Spanish colonies in America, and when Conrad wrote something of the same in Lord Jim, Feuer suggests that such is often a guide not to history but to the psychology of the writers. He dismisses as utopian the Caliban complex which abets Western feelings of guilt by treating the more civilized as morally inferior to the less civilized. Feuer's heroes are Lugard, and Benjamin Disraeli. Both were imperialists and humanitarians, and neither was affected by the Prospero image. Another was President Theodore Roosevelt who justified America's westward expansion at the expense of the savage tribes; who sympathized with the Boers but knew they were on the wrong side of civilization; and who favored Tsarist expansion into Central Asia for the sake of progress. But Roosevelt, Feuer reminds the reader, was never cruel, and never sought to humiliate others. A successful family man, he suffered from no Prospero complex. He was praised by both the Russians and the Japanese for exhibiting impartiality in the peace negotiations at Portsmouth in 1905. He broke tradition by inviting black leader, Booker T. Washington, to the White House. He thought the Kaiser was obsessed by the "Yellow Peril". And he lauded America's melting pot, an expression that he originated. Feuer admires the participatory empires like the Roman which allowed aliens to rise up through administrative or military ranks to become consuls, proconsuls, or even emperors. Not so in the modern empires where there was no free migration or circulation of peoples.

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British, French, Americans were too guilty to maintain their old empires but repelled by the notion of a racially commingled one. Because African and Asian subjects knew they would never be full citizens of the empires, they responded as nationalists and hastened the fall of empires. Was Portugal the exception, as is often suggested? Probably not, he argues, since there were hardly more than 10,000 Portuguese in the whole empire, and most of those were without women. Indians at Goa were given a great measure of freedom but many restrictions were placed upon Africans, Brazilians and other Asians, despite a greater racial mixture than elsewhere. Feuer is most disturbed by the fall of the American Empire. The United States, he tells us, is still perceived by most people as the most altruistic nation in history. Americans even aided Bolsheviks in the famine of 1921--22, thereby saving the regime. The latter, who could not understand altruistic actions, attributed such support to American efforts to undermine the regime. Despite widespread admiration of America, Western intellectuals denounce America as a power-arrogant nation. Such critics, he argues, have been influenced by pejorative use of the word "imperialism" in the writings of Lenin and others and, therefore, are the source of the guilt feelings that hastened the fall of empires. It took many centuries for religion to erode the Roman empire. It took but two generations to destroy the American one. After 1945 the world longed for a Pax Americana that combined freedom with organization. But the ethic of human fellowship and self-punitive guilt produced self-righteous impotence as America refused to use the power of its atom bomb to intimidate the aggressors of the world. More so, America even undermined the empires of its Western allies in the Middle East (Suez) and thus opened the door to the Soviets. The United States forced an alleged humanitarian ethic upon the allies, which the Soviets could not even imagine. Feuer then compares the psychological impact of Adrianople and Vietnam. Just as the Visigoths destroyed the myth of Roman invincibility and thus opened the door to many new invasions, so Vietnam encouraged many third-world societies to challenge America's power. Feuer's scorn for the Vietnam foes ignores those who criticized from strategic considerations. His chapter on the Soviet Empire is not only provocative but the

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product of years of reflection. The ascendancy of the Soviet Empire after 1945 marked the end of the era of progressive imperialism. Assuming that the reader shares his dislike of the Soviet use of power, and so sees no need for illustrating this argument, Feuer traces the growth of the Soviet empire to Joseph Stalin. It was not rooted in the ideology of Lenin who was shocked at Stalin's ruthless destruction of the Menshevik regime in Georgia. The author notes Stalin's desire in 1939 to share with Adolph Hitler in the reapportionment of the British Empire, and his moves to expand into the Persian Gulf region in 1945. When Soviet rule was confirmed in East Europe by means of the local secret police, he compares this strategy to the Roman use of local kings, and the British use of tribal elites. The Stalinist expansion was continued by his successors when Nikita Khrushchev attempted to place missiles in Cuba. The Brezhnev doctrine was imperialism because other Communist parties were free only in so far as their decisions did not endanger the world Communist movement. The Soviets claimed the right to intervene whenever "socialism is imperilled". Hence the end of the "Prague Spring" (1968), and the response to "pleas for help" from Afghanistan (1979). Under Andropov, expansion was extended to Grenada. Why the Soviet Empire? It was not the result of surplus value, not peoples' or consumer imperialism; rather, like the Tatars looking at the flourishing cities of the West, the Soviets expand because of their own sense of economic and social inferiority. They resent the inventive achievements of the West in technology, freedom, and standard of living. Hence the assertion of power and insulation of their peoples from the West, responses as old as those of the Muscovite Tsars. Soviet insistence that there is no place for ideological coexistence stems from the old fear of contamination by a superior culture. Feuer writes: "An anxiety-saturated society diminishes its burden of anxiety if it can defeat, undermine, or eliminate its free competitor." The accumulated social and political frustrations of Soviet citizens who are denied access to public means of protest, find release in mass, collective aggression of a warlike, imperialist campaign. Just as Tatars extracted tribute from the advanced societies of the West, Soviets seek a kind of ideological tribute from capitalist powers. Lenin, who once approved Russia's expansion eastward, later courted Asian masses by predicting the

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eventual triumph of the under-civilized. Yet he blamed the excesses of Great Russian chauvinism upon Stalin. But did he really differ with Stalin, as Feuer avers, over Stalin's refusal to grant the right of secession to republics? Feuer traces Stalin's paranoia and cruelties not to Leninist ideology, not even to the unique personality of Stalin, but to a popular psychological malady resulting from the nation's backwardness. Presumably, material progress would make the Russians more humane. Do the interests of the West rest upon the success of Gorbachev's economic policies? Like many others, Feuer doubts the prospects for major economic reforms because of their threat to full employment, and to the influence of the Party bureaucracy. In his last chapter the author calls for the establishment of a new American Empire or an American-led Association of Nations that would allow each culture to resolve its own problems and would allow capable nationals admittance into the administrative apparatus, as was the case in Rome (Leninism?) Why is this suggestion apt? (1) The American-Soviet equilibrium is unstable. (2) America's go-it-alone defense program is just too expensive. (3) Anxiety over a Soviet nuclear attack would be defused by a larger empire. (4) The danger of proxy wars would be diminished. He quotes Bertrand Russell who said international anarchy can be stopped only by placing all military forces under one power. (5) In the absence of American power, third-world nations will continue to flatter and appease the USSR, and even support international terrorism. Soviet aligned nations would not be tempted to defect to the other side if there were no American alternative. Feuer's book will please those who lament the decline of American power and wish to place the blame on the liberal intellectuals. Despite its bias and lack of detachment, the essay contains some interesting and useful information for the general reader. Most scholars will wish for more.

St. Anselm College Manchester, NH 03102 U.S.A.

JOHN D. WINDHAUSEN

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Christian Schmidt-H~iuer, Gorbachev: The Path to Power, with an Appendix on the Soviet Economy by Maria Huber, translated by Ewald Osers and Chris Romberg, edited by John Man, London, I. B. Tauris & Co., Ltd., 1986, v, 218 pp. Christian Schmidt-H~iuer, a German journalist who spent years in Moscow, has written a thoughtful, readable, and objective popular political biography of M. S. Gorbachev. Schmidt-H~iuer examines the reasons for Gorbachev's acquisition of power in the Soviet Union in 1985 and analyzes Soviet economic, political, and cultural changes during his first year in office. The author's sources include interviews with Soviet officials and Western diplomats, Gorbachev's public addresses and writings, and the public pronouncements of other Soviet leaders. Schmidt-H~iuer's principal thesis is that Gorbachev, like N. S. Khrushchev, is a populist and is making a second attempt at deStalinization by assaulting the Soviet centralized economic system. Gorbachev intends to build on the economic reforms of 1965, but the author warns that expanding the production of consumer goods does not imply assimilation to a Western consumer economy. In addition, Schmidt-H[iuer argues that Gorbachev's peace offensive, in particular his opposition to Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), is the result of the need for domestic reform. For the Soviets, economic modernization means the ability to mass produce and export advanced technology. Schmidt-H~iuer objectively and realistically describes the obstacles facing Gorbachev in the transition from extensive to intensive economic growth. In spite of the Soviet leader's popularity with the intelligentsia, he has to deal with bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption rooted in Russian history and party cadres who feel threatened by the new, open style of leadership. Schmidt-H~iuer believes that Gorbachev has little chance for real success since, historically, reform from above in Russia has been unsuccessful. Furthermore, the author correctly portrays the opposition to reform among the bureaucrats and Party cadres. In his view, Gorbachev is challenging the sense of peace, community, and stability that L. I. Brezhnev offered the Party when he was in power. Therefore, open leadership will not make possible rapid, fundamental Studies in Soviet Thought 3'7: 348, 1989.

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changes in the Party structure and political atmosphere. All-out decentralization and market economics will also be impossible, if the Party is to maintain control and the Russians are to preserve their hegemony in Soviet society. Schmidt-H~iuer predicts that Gorbachev will continue with a rationalized, centrally administered economy as opposed to expanded private initiative and industrial autonomy. Yet many Western economists think that supply-and-demand mechanisms are necessary for economic growth. Even though Schmidt-Hfiuer pessimistically appraises Gorbachev's prospects for success, the picture is not entirely gloomy. According to the author, Gorbachev, as a good tactician and a pragmatist who understands the limits of political power, realizes that SDI can only be reduced, not prevented, and the West therefore should strike a deal with him. If this is true then Gorbachev is good not only for the Soviet Union but also for the rest of the world, and the East-West rivalry should be transformed from military to economic terms. Schmidt-Hfiuer has provided us with an excellent journalistic account of Gorbachev's rise to power in the Soviet Union. The book also admirably covers Gorbachev's first year in office, but it needs a sequel to handle later events in his political career. Schmidt-H~iuer's study will stand the test of time and is recommended reading for both students and scholars interested in Soviet society.

University of Northern Iowa Department of History Cedar Falls, Iowa 50614 U.S.A.

T I M O T H Y E. O ' C O N N O R

Richard Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy; Resident and Stranger. A Study in Fiction and Theology, Princeton University Press, 1986. This elegant and definitive reinterpretation of Tolstoy's philosophy, theology, and writing emphasizes his religious world view within the culture of Russian Orthodoxy. Based upon two decades of reading and thinking about Tolstoy, it gets inside the soul of an orphaned genius in unique and creative ways. Studies in Soviet Thought 37: 349, 1989.

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Gustafson begins by defining Tolstoy as both resident and stranger, a man desperate to belong to a loved community but estranged from others by his own self-centeredness. The resident achieves happiness by the soul's attraction to the good of others; the stranger believes in the primacy of the self. Following the Eastern Christian tradition, Tolstoy's imagined career of life seeks deification through an ultimate merging of the individual with God the All. Both the lives of Tolstoy's characters and the structure of Gustafson's book elucidate this merging. In the beginning is the struggle for love, exemplified by Anna Karenina, Levin's search for faith, and the death of Ivan Ilich. The soul achieves wisdom through suffering. The way to love is redemptive and divine, a Christ-like love for al! epitomized by Nekhliudov in Resurrection. The second part of the book demonstrates Tolstoy's conception of evolving states of awareness through body, feeling, mind, and will. True self-consciousness means loving the other whose name is God, being conscious of God within us. Life is evolving consciousness from separateness to unity, from stranger to resident, from physical to spiritual egotism. Recollective consciousness is central to Tolstoy's narrative technique. Both character and reader ascend by steps of prayer to moments of increasing consciousness of God. Recollection of self blocks awareness of the divine, which comes in moments of intoxication, ecstasy, and self-forgetting, epitomized by Pierre at Borodino in War and Peace. Likewise, political authority blocks the free self from achieving cooperation and community through love; the unnatural state coerces the natural community of free participation. Self-consciousness and knowledge of God produce a state of perfection and salvation possible to all who attempt to love. Finally, Gustafson shows that Tolstoy's theology involves a transformation of consciousness where the self as 'T' approaches the "nonI", the All, God. Paradoxically, this loss of self is a return to the self who knows God, the part rejoining the whole, eliminating personality and death. Gustafson's brilliant, complex, and exhaustive rereading of Tolstoy places the writer squarely within the religious traditions of Eastern Christianity. Weaving together newly translated passages from all of

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Tolstoy's work, he is able to demonstrate clearly the lifelong unity and consistency of Tolstoy's philosophy of life. Tolstoy emerges impressively as both resident and stranger of the world of nineteenth-century Russia in which he strove to live. This book ranks with Martin Malia's biography of Alexander Herzen as one of the most erudite and imaginative interpretations of any Russian writer or thinker. It will make a significant addition to the library of historians, literary critics, and philosophers. Its richness and wisdom defy the brevity of a review.

Davidson College

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