Word: deutscher
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RUSSIA IN TRANSITION, by Isaac Deutscher (245 pp.; Coward-McCann; $4.50), is a sheaf of essays mostly written during the '50s further bolstering the author's accurate 1953 prediction (in Russia: What Next?) that the Soviet political tundra was due for a big thaw after Stalin's death. Indeed, Polish-born Author Deutscher consumes an inordinate amount of time and space just crowing ("As to my severe critics, I shall only ask how many of them would venture to republish now in book form the views they expressed on Soviet prospects six, seven, or only three years...
...Deutscher passionately believes that Russian workers and intellectuals "are throbbing and stirring," that Russia is "relearning freedom." Often scholarly and hardheaded, Crystal-Gazer Deutscher (a Communist until he was thrown out of the party in 1932 for anti-Stalinism) is also a sentimentalist who believes that Stalinism is wrong but not Marxism. With the snobbery typical of many ex-Communists, Deutscher looks down on other ex-Communists and muses about vintage years-1921 was a good year, and Communism was still fine and heady stuff; 1932 was a bad year, because the party had begun to turn sour...
Perhaps the heart of Deutscher's message is that the West should not become hypnotized by an Orwellian view of Soviet Russia as a mere incarnation of horror that must be wiped out-because, such hate will only blind the West in trying to devise sound policy. Most readers will accept this as sensible advice. But Deutscher goes on to plead elaborately that Russia is not really like 1984 at all-and in this plea he shows a pedantic failure to understand satire. Or could it be that Author Deutscher, like the characters in 1984, uses doublethink without...
...banks of issue, the Bank Deutscher Länder and the Soviet zone's Deutsche Notenbank, carry on heavy correspondence over transfers, payment regulations and new issues, though their currencies are supposedly unrelated...
Among 30-odd youth organizations to grow up in Germany since the war, none seemed more vigorous, better organized and more comfortably financed than the right-wing Bund Deutscher Jugend (League of German Youth...