Books for Americans about Russia usually

have been written in libraries or in the com-

fort of Western-style apartments in special

Moscow ghettoes designed for carefully

monitored journalists and diplomats.

Now comes a book by a young lawyer

who lived in Leningrad and studied Soviet

law in the university where Tchaikovsky.

Stravinsky, and Lenin studied for the bar. The

author s graduate-student status permitted

him the fi-eedom to roam at will this most

cultured of Russian cities--a privilege en

vied by Western correspondents. He was able

to live with the Soviet people rather than

merely observe them. They became his

"companions in hardship and laughter."

There was student life in the dormitory at

25 Sbevchenko Street, with his roommate

Zhenya, who never quite got around to finish-

ing his thesis. He moved among intellectuals

and dissidents, traveled throughout the na-

tion, toured with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band,

and knew incidents of a darker sort he was

arrested for taking pictures in a grocery store,

there were border searches, underground art

exhibits, and KGB reprisals against friends

who were human rights activists.

In sum, what he found was a people of

considerable warmth and curiosity, feartully

tangled in red tape, short of food, and hob-

bled by inefficient burcaucracy and agri-

cultural disasters, and, at another level, a

political hierarchy of men in their seventies

with no plan of succession and a "missing"

generation of leaders leaving a potentially

violent human vacuum for the near future. It

is a revealing view-from-the-inside of a Rus-

sia in trouble.