After more than two years of gathering data, classifying and analyzing it, and putting out magazine articles, compilations, and book reviews, the Russian Research Center is going into the book publishing business. Its first volume, which is slated to appear this spring, is a volume by Alex Inkeles, research associate at the Center, on public opinion in the Soviet Union.

There will be a steady flow of such books on specialized topics like this for the duration of the Center's work, which ends in 1953. At that time, there will also be one comprehensive volume uniting the political, economic, and social aspects of the investigation of the Soviet Union.

The subject matter of this investigation is divided into three main areas, though all research is supposed to cut across department lines. The first project, under the direction of Merle Fainsod, professor of Government, is the Communist Party, past and present. The second is a survey of all sides of the Soviet economy, conducted by Alexander Gerschenkron, associate professor of Economics. The third study is a sort of amorphous lump, entitled Psychology and Social Life, which, along with several "miscellaneous projects" takes up everything except politics and economy.

The study of the Communist Party is being conducted "not only from the point of view of the political scientist but also from those of the economist, psychologist, and sociologist." Thus such studies as "party Policies in Literature" and "An Interpretive Study of Marxist Method" take their place alongside specialized investigations of purely political events.

The official four-page outline of the party study breaks downs into sections on the history, composition and organization of the Party, its ideology, its relation to Soviet society, and its implications as a world Communist movement. IN reality, most of the studies spill over, several of these areas and no special effort is made to confine them.

Fainsod's main worry in his work is the difficulty of getting information on the contemporary status of the Russian Communist Party. He gets official government documents and party journals direct from the Soviet Union, and these constitute the bulk of his working material. In addition, several workers in his general field have access to U. S. government information on Russia.

Another important source has been people who have fled to Western Europe and America from Russia and her satellites. So far, no "top" members of the Party have emerged from behind the "Iron Curtain," but several minor officials and numerous people not officially connected with the Party have contributed valuable bits of information.

It is not only under the Soviet government that Russia has become a grudging source of information, Fainsod asserts. Back in the days of the Czars, Russian censorship was tight, tighter in fact than during the early thirties.

Money Problems

In analyzing the Soviet economy, Professor Gerschenkron has the problem both of getting material and then translating it into American terms. This second stop is necessary, he states, because while the Russians have not been known actually to falsify statistics, their production comparisons are often distorted by significant omissions.

Ingenious juggling of Russian production figures is absorbing several members of Gerschenkron's staff. Donald Hodgman is constructing an independent index of Russian industry, based solely on Russian figures, which "have a considerable upward bias." Hodgman will then try to make some sort of comparison with U. S. output.

Franklyn D. Holzman is doing extensive work on Russia's taxation system, which differs from ours in its relation to the economy. His study is important because it may help to show why Russia is subject to the same sort of ups and downs that plague free enterprise societies.

The third investigation, that of psychology and social life of the Russian people, is in many ways the most novel, because "the fields of anthropology, psychology, and sociology have hitherto play little part in Russian studies." There is no specific outline for the study, and this looseness reflects the difficulty of applying usual research methods to the Soviet Union.

Among the most important work in this section is Raymond A. Bauer's study of "the conception of man in Soviet psychology." This is expected to shed light on the Russian government's official view of the nature of man.

Inkeles' book is designed "to explain the effectiveness of Soviet propaganda." In it, he will try to balance two fundamental facts about Russian mass communication. "On one hand," he thinks, "the Russian system is a well-planned, smoothly-run, and fully-utilized apparatus. But on the other hand, it is not designed with the purpose of facilitating the free flow of ideas among the Russian people."