Le travail d'une vie: Memoires 1911-1986 by Robert MarjolinReview by: Fritz SternForeign Affairs, Vol. 65, No. 5 (Summer, 1987), pp. 1112-1113Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20043254 .

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1112 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

mediocrity and occasional nationalism, Weizs?ckers seriousness is all the more inspiring.

BERLIN DIARIES, 1940-1945. By Marie Vassiltchikov. New York:

Knopf, 1987, 324 pp. $19.95. Memoirs of a young Russian princess who sees the Third Reich in

wartime from the position of privileged aristocracy. Some of her close

friends and some of her superiors at the German Foreign Office, where she worked, became the heroes of the 20th-of-July plot against Hitler, and on this aspect as on the horrors of bombings and wartime deprivations she

is a superb, immediate witness. She says almost nothing about the Nazi

atrocities?an unwitting witness to an even greater silence. An extraordi

nary record, one of the best from wartime Germany.

"SCHREIBEN, WIE ES WIRKLICH WAR." AUFZEICHNUNGEN KARL D?RKEF?LDENS AUS DEN JAHREN 1933-1945. Edited by Herbert and Sibylle Obenaus. Hannover: Fackeltr?ger, 1985, 136 pp. DM9.80.

Diary excerpts from a German white-collar worker in a small town who

out of relentless curiosity collected and recorded details about the ease of

Hitler's consolidation of power, about the pogrom of November 1938 and

the wartime atrocities against Jews, Poles and Russians. A telling witness to

Richard von Weizs?ckers insistence that all Germans knew something of

the persecution of their Jewish neighbors and of wartime atrocities. Dis

turbing in its very simplicity.

THE BLACK AND THE RED: FRAN?OIS MITTERRAND?THE STORY OF AN AMBITION. By Catherine Nay. San Diego: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, 1987, 416 pp. $19.95. A popular biography with a rather deceptive title: Mitterrand's has been

a rich, ambitious life of great duality, but there has been nothing particularly Stendhalian about it. An anecdotal, breezy account of his rise in French

politics, including his outmaneuvering of the Communists, whom he

courted even as he always opposed them. Nay believes he wanted to become a "left-wing De Gaulle"; he has not. A secretive man, with perhaps few

secrets, he remains elusive in a book that gives meager references to the

sources used.

LE TRAVAIL D'UNE VIE: MEMOIRES 1911-1986. By Robert Marjolin. Paris: Laffont, 1986, 445 pp.

From the summer of 1947, when he played a key part in drafting the

European response to the Marshall Plan, until 1967, when he left the

Commission of the European Economic Community after two terms as vice

chairman, Robert Marjolin, who died last year, was at the center of the

processes of European integration. Consequently, the long sections of this

book devoted to those years constitute a historic document. Though suc

cinct and selective, the account is punctuated by careful assessments of what

it all meant. There is, however, much more to these memoirs. A poor boy,

Marjolin left school and went to work at 14 but then entered the Sorbonne; before graduating he spent a year in the United States, where the Depres sion and the New Deal turned him from philosophy to economics; during the war he was in North Africa and London until Jean Monnet took him

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RECENT BOOKS 1113

to Washington; he spent years on the boards of American and European multinationals. The combination of telling detail, reflections on the large

issues that engaged him and some pointed comment makes this a most attractive book. William Diebold, Jr.

THE RED AND THE BLUE: CAMBRIDGE, TREASON AND INTEL LIGENCE. By Andrew Sinclair. Boston: Little Brown, 1987, 179 pp. $17.95.

A breezy, inadequately documented story of the two groups in prewar Cambridge that included moles and suspected moles: the literary group? the Apostles?and the Cavendish Laboratory, with its superb achievements and the enigmatic presence of the Soviet physicist Peter Kapitsa. Here is a

glimpse of earlier British life, of secrecy, arrogance and scandals, but a

thorough account remains to be written.

The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

John C. Campbell

THE WAKING GIANT: GORBACHEV'S RUSSIA. By Martin Walker. New York: Pantheon, 1987, 298 pp. $17.95.

The Moscow correspondent of The Guardian reports on his tour of duty there over the past three years. While there is a certain sameness to books

by Western journalists on the Soviet Union, Walker's has the advantage of

being up to date and sharp in seeing the realities behind the facade. He is convinced that Western, especially American, understanding of Soviet

society is woefully inadequate?although he excepts American diplomats and journalists in Moscow from this judgment. He takes Gorbachev very seriously as representing an irreversible social revolution that has taken

place since Stalin's day?including the rise of a new class with its own

imperatives?a revolution that makes Gorbachev's push for reform not

only possible but inevitable. A good book to have at hand as the Gorbachev era unfolds.

QUALITY OF LIFE IN THE SOVIET UNION. Edited by Horst Herle m?nn. Boulder (Colo.): Westview Press, 1987, 192 pp. $22.50. A Special Study of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies.

The subject presents obvious difficulties. What is it that makes life worth

living? How do you measure or quantify quality, especially in a country that does not lend itself to the kind of studies sociologists carry out in the West? The German and American scholars contributing to this book have done their best to overcome these difficulties, and the result is a series of sharply etched statements on living standards, trends in consumption, housing, services, medical care, education, working conditions and alcoholism. The

picture is not the one Soviet propaganda presents to the world, yet this is

low-key academic analysis, not counterpropaganda. Some comparisons are made with the West, with Eastern Europe and with the U.S.S.R.'s own past, but they do not constitute the main message of the book. Further study on these and other aspects of Soviet life is surely called for as the pace of

change quickens and glasnost opens more doors to sociological enquiry.

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