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From International Socialist Review, Vol.23 No.2, Spring 1962, p.59.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Russians as People
by Wright Miller
E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., N.Y., 1961, paperback edition; 202 pp. $1.35.
This book is a lovely literary journey through Russia with a travelling companion both knowledgeable and. perceptive, who is able to recreate the flavor of life in the USSR. Wright Miller is a free-lance writer who with the help of a Russian staff edited an English-language newspaper in Russia during World War II. He has also made prolonged visits to the country both before and since. A subtle and poetic writer, his impressionistic descriptions of Russian life are enriched by the comparisons he offers both to British life and to the many other countries which he has visited.
Miller in his own words has “tried in this book to write about the Russians as people not primarily as victims of communism or as enthusiasts for communism but as people different from ourselves who are only partly formed by communism and partly by the inescapable geography, history, manners, and morals and tastes and traditions which being Russians, they are born to.”
What he writes is colored, of course, by the fact that he is a liberal Englishman, not a socialist. He measures Russian society by the goals and achievements of other industrial societies, never by the ideals of October. Nevertheless, Russians As People remains a charming book.
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Last updated on 22 May 2009