The Russians by SMITH, HEDRICK

Ballantine Books, NY: 1977. Softcover. Reading copy. For all the efforts to understand it, Soviet life has remained to most of us a system of totalitarian robots or, since detente, people just like us. These cliches are shattered in this superb new portrait of The Russians. The Russians emerge in this new light as a richly paradoxical people driven by contradictory energies that are as enduring as Russia itself: latent anarchy poised against a preoccupation with control, a sentimental warmth behind an almost brutal coldness in public, a brooding sense of national inferiority beneath a convulsion for extravagant claims, an egalitarian idealism undercut by an obsession with the order and perquisites of status, a general acquiescence to the system and an inbred instinct to beat it. Includes an Index. ISBN: 0345255216.