Sizing Up Moscow: Review

Mr. [Mark Frankland], who has twice served in Moscow, does not let his readers in on this professional secret. His accounts of what Politburo members say and think are a mixture of what's in their published speeches and speculation and gossip, with little in the text or in the footnotes to sort out which is which. One of the best tells how [Stalin] had the N.K.V.D. summon Dmitri F. Ustinov, the late defense minister, to Moscow twice without explanation in 1938 and then haul him into the Kremlin. There, in front of the Politburo, Stalin said he wanted Ustinov to be commissar of armaments. ''I am for,'' Stalin intoned. ''Who is against?'' In this country at least, we want to know something else: What should we think of Mr. [Mikhail S. Gorbachev]'s reforms? Should we help him, or will helping him only hurt us? And (the other side of the coin) does Mr. Gorbachev want to con us into arms reductions so he will have the chance to fix his rickety economy, only to turn and try to take advantage of us later? Mark Frankland, like any honest reporter, does not pretend to know, but he observes that Moscow under Mr. Gorbachev is just as defensively self-righteous about its place in the world as Moscow under the czars. ''Only when the Soviet Union at last knew what it wanted to be itself,'' he concludes, ''would it also know the terms on which it wanted to live with the rest of the world.'' Tune in for the next installment.