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The United Front underground organization includes about 75,000 Communists, 75,000 Revolutionary Socialists and 80,000 trade unionists. Wrecked by the Feb. 12, 1934 revolt, the Social Democratic Schutz-bund still has a fearless nucleus and lots of guns. Against these is a Nazi organization of 55,000, chiefly among farmers and students.
Czechoslovakia is a democracy but Spivak included a chapter on its terror because Czechoslovak peasants, like Poles, eat potatoes without salt, give up everything they have to tax collectors to pay for Czechoslovakia's huge Army.
Europe Under the Terror, like the peasants' potatoes, must be taken with a little salt. Readers will be considerably baffled to know how this U. S. investigator, who speaks only English and German, managed to evoke such dangerous confidences from the most illiterate classes in Italy, Poland and Czechoslovakia through interpreters. Author Spivak is a shade too ready to forecast the collapse of tyrannies, to overestimate the potency of the rebellious spirit. His book is valuable as a document of a kind that rarely emerges from the censored murk of dictatorship.
*Simon & Schuster, $2.50.