I'm fascinated with Russia and always ready to read another take on it, this one from the 50s. Neither Google nor Goodreads seemed to have ever heard of this book or its author, and it turns out perhaps with good reason.

The author starts with some background to his trip to Russia. He used to be a hard core socialist, had been there back in the 20s or 30s (I think) and was now returning to see how all this Communism business had panned out after 40 years. This was the point at which it started to become clear that the book was propaganda.

The author and his wife arrive in Russia and here he brags about his savviness over other tourists - instead of paying the extorionate exchange rate to convert pounds to rubles, he brings western goods to sell and that's how he funds his trip. Interesting, but described with a sense of arrogance that pervades the whole book as he continues to pat himself on the back over his superiority to ignorant tourists.

This attitude also bleeds into his interactions with the locals. On trains or airplanes, he gets a perverse pleasure out of teasing the locals who are stuck with him for the journey by making seditious statements and watching them squirm. In one city in the far east he and his wife visit the local market to literally laugh out loud at the bedraggled merchants.

The actual content of the book has the depth of the average newspaper opinion piece, with no actual research or facts to back up sweeping statements. The author observes that homosexuality, which is "a big problem in England", seems not to exist in Russia - a place where some actual journalism may have revealed the true reason for this.

He is similarly flippant about the mass suicides of Russian POWs being returned to Russia after WWII. As far as he is concerned, this goes to show how shitty Communism is compared to capitalism that people would rather die than return to it. Never does he seem to think there might be a deeper reason.

One of the main points of his book was that the development of weapons of mass destruction were in fact a harbinger of peace, and that increasingly powerful weaponry would soon render war obsolete. 70 years later over here and I'm still waiting for that day! ( )