The analysis of dezinformatsia here provided by Richard Shultz and Roy Godson is overloaded with scholarly paraphernalia, ranging from statistical tables of Soviet “overt propaganda themes” to an erratic glossary containing a pompous and unnecessary definition of “forgery” (“Forgery, one of many disinformation techniques, is the use of authentic-looking but false documents and communiques”). Because...
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Fuzzy Focus & Clear Vision
Every now and again a book appears which, despite its pervasive deficiencies, is destined to become a minor classic simply because it epitomizes the delusions of an epoch. Such, for example, were the bogus Sir John Mandeville’s Travels, a compendium of medieval credulity about men who walked on their heads or had eyes in their...
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Selling the Rope…and More
Joseph Finder: Red Carpet; New Republic/Holt, Rinehart & Winston; New York by Henry L. Mason III One of the most persistent sources of confusion among educated Americans is the failure to realize that the Soviet Union’s relations with the outside world are conducted on levels which do not correspond to those of democratic societies. On...
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Traveling in Spiraling Circles
Harrison E. Salisbury: A Journey for Our Times: A Memoir; Harper & Row; New York. A Journey for Our Times is a frustrating, almost schizophrenic book. One approaches it with anticipation if only because the author is an experienced journalist with a unique fund of knowledge about the Soviet Union. But ultimately, Salisbury manages to...
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A Flounder and the Shark
Vladimir Bukovsky remarked that without a guide through the “labyrinths of the Soviet soul,” studies of socialism “are simply useless—or worse, they make the subject even more obscure. “ Were it not for the fact that Adam Ulam has been interpreting the Soviet Union since long before Bukovsky made his comment, one could suspect that...