The System: A Life in Soviet Po

Arbatov, who has headed the Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada (a major Moscow think tank) since its founding in 1967, claims that he is as controversial at home as he is in this country. And this account of Soviet governance going back to 1953 provides plenty of fodder for his partisans and foes alike. Although Arbatov acknowledges his own conformity in pre- perestroika Russia, expresses shame ``for living according to the rules of the day'' and stresses that survival required submission, the book is no apologia. Rather, in it this ingenious unreconstructed Socialist bears witness to the apparat's follies, cronyism, corruption and blatant abuses of power. which quashed undercurrents of liberalist impulse. From his vantage as adviser to every Soviet leader from Khrushchev to Yeltsin, he reviews the conflicts accruing to Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin's criminality at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, the tentative reforms and persecutions, the subsequent attempts at re-Stalinization, the Cold War, then detente and Brezhnev-era stagnation. He condemns military power as an instrument of politics, yet skirts certain sensitive matters, as when he writes, ``What was actually going on as far as the so-called Jewish problem was concerned, I do not know.'' Arbatov is well versed in the language of politics, practiced at saying both more and less than he appears to, and this affects one's reading of his memoir. But read it one must. Author tour. (Aug.)