Cogs in the Wheel

Unlike hardened anti-Communist cold warriors, Heller avoids ideological mudslinging. His portrayal of the Soviet Union as an unfree society, one where each individual becomes a small cell in a vast organism, is devastating and convincing. A Sorbonne instructor who coauthored Utopia in Power, Heller insists that the Soviet state's overriding goal is the same as it was under Lenin and Stalin: shaping ""human raw material'' into obedient, passive cogs in a machine. Today in the U.S.S.R., he notes, all references to the Bible and the Jewish people have been removed from school texts; women do the heaviest physical work and bear most of the family's burdens but have practically no voice; men act as capricious boys, working off their feelings of powerlessness by abusing their wives. Heller's surprising expose of Gorbachev's touched-up Stalinist vocabulary is brilliant. This is one of the best books ever written on the making of Homo sovieticus and the dilemmas of the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s. (May)