People with some experience of the Soviet novel, together with those who know Mr. Ehrenburg primarily for his eloquent war despatches in 1941–45, may be surprised at the amiability and dryness of The Thaw: perhaps it was those qualities which affronted some members of the Union of Soviet Writers, rather than its implied criticisms of housing policy, official art and competitive careerism, or its tentative thesis that personal relations provide the warmth which may humanise a society icebound with government decrees. A prime interest of the book to British readers will inevitably be its account of that society. Mr. Ehrenburg is informative and fascinating on prevailing Soviet attitudes to the organisation of industry, to authority, to the October Revolution (still an obsession, apparently), to work in general, but these attitudes are too remote from our own to make the human behaviour which embodies them more than intermittently plausible to...