THE ROAD TO TEHERAN—Foster Rhea Dulles—Princeton University ($2.50).
RUSSIA AND THE UNITED STATES
Pitirim A, Sorokln—Dutton ($3).
USSR: THE STORY OF SOVIET RUSSIA—Walter Duranty—Lippincott ($3).
RUSSIA AND POSTWAR EUROPE—David J. Dallin—Yale University ($2.75).
Despite a few fumbling attempts to forbid the banns, the writers of three of these books insist that the U.S. should prepare for a golden honeymoon with postwar Russia. There is unabashed wooing in Foster Rhea Dulles' The Road to Teheran. More surprising is the headlong courtship of Pitirim A. Sorokin, the Harvard sociologist who was once a member of Kerenski's Cabinet and an unrelenting foe of Lenin and Trotsky. There is nuptial jubilation in Walter Duranty's USSR. But there is little besides gloomy foreboding in David J. Dallin's Russia and Postwar Europe.
For Balance of Power. Professor Dulles' book is the least controversial. From the library and the newspaper morgue he has assembled the facts about U.S.Russian relations during the great crises of 150 years of history. There have been four high points in these relations:
¶ When Napoleon was Europe's Hitler, the governments of Thomas ' Jefferson and Czar Alexander I had similar interests in opposing both British interference with neutral shipping and Napoleon's efforts to create a western European autarchy. When the Czar espoused the reactionary Holy Alliance, which planned to regain the rebellious South American colonies for Spain, the U.S. answered with the Monroe Doctrine.
¶ In the early 19th Century the fur-hunting Russians came pelting down the Pacific coast from Alaska, established a colony some 50 miles north of San Francisco. War between Russia and the U.S. might have resulted, but just then the sea-otter trade began to peter out, the Court of St. Petersburg lost interest in its California and Oregon claims.
¶ In 1863, when the North feared that Britain would recognize the Confederacy, units of the Russian Navy put in at New York and San Francisco. The Russians had really scattered their fleet to have it free for raiding should war come with France and England over the Polish question. But the North took the visit as a symbol of U.S.-Russian solidarity.
¶ The U.S. was enthusiastic about the Provisional Government that succeeded the Czar, but when the Bolsheviks took Russia out of World War I the U.S. sent "protective" U.S. forces to Archangel and Vladivostok. The Bolsheviks considered this part of a general capitalist plot against the "Workers' Fatherland," though the presence of U.S. troops kept Japan from biting off eastern Siberia.
Standing on high geopolitical ground, Dulles argues that the U.S. and Russia will always tend to remain friends since they tend to have the same enemies when ever a European or an east Asiatic power gets too big for its breeches.