Essays of a Kremlinologist : TYRANTS AND TYPEWRITERS Communiques From the Struggle for Truth <i> by Robert Conquest (Lexington Books / D. C. Heath: $19.95; 208 pp.; 0-669-21222-9) </i>

The first thing that strikes one about “Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques From the Struggle for Truth” is that its splendid title is a misnomer. Ostensibly presenting portraits of Soviet writers and their works, and showing how, over time, the pen has proved a mighty weapon against oppression and a primary stimulus for glasnost , this book really offers a loosely connected collection of reviews and essays by Kremlinologist Robert Conquest, author of numerous books on Soviet politics and history.

Each piece in the collection was written to stand alone and appears without prefatory comment. Thus not only does no continuity exist between pieces, but proceeding from one to the next is a bit like being thrown successively into the deep end of vastly different swimming pools. We’re not given an opportunity to dip our toes into the water first, to understand what we’ll be dealing with; and by the time we’ve managed to struggle to the surface, we’re plunged into yet another unfamiliar pool.

It’s not that these waters aren’t worth our efforts, however. Taken individually, Conquest’s reviews and essays offer important insights into a wide range of writers and their works. These self-contained analyses are grouped into three rather arbitrary sections (only one of which is preceded by an introduction)--”Witnesses,” “Literature” and “History and Pseudo-History.”

Among the 10 pieces in “Witnesses” is a discussion of Hungarian-born novelist Arthur Koestler’s masterpiece based on the Moscow trials of the 1930s, “Darkness at Noon.” Conquest’s historical critique of this work illuminates our understanding of how Koestler was able “to effect one of the first major penetrations of the Western consciousness by a true feeling for the element of vast and ruthless deception in the Stalinist scheme of things.” Two other notable inclusions are a review of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Andrei Sakharov’s “Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom” and a detailed assessment of the impact of “The Gulag Archipelago” by Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

A brief introduction entitled “The Issue” precedes the second section, “Tyrants and Typewriters.” Simply put, in Soviet literature the “issue” is artistic freedom--the ability to speak one’s mind without catering to a political agenda.

Although Conquest claims he approaches the 11 authors and works grouped under “Literature” from a “fundamentally literary point of view,” he provides ample discussion of related political situations and implications, particularly in the essays on Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and former editor (of the influential literary journal Novy Mir) Alexander Tvardovsky. And this is all to the good, because such discussion is Conquest’s real strength. The more strictly literary analyses (on poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, for example) aren’t nearly as compelling.

The final section, “History and Pseudo-History,” contains 16 pieces. Included are a particularly insightful review of Roy Medvedev’s “Let History Judge,” a discussion of genocide as revealed in Alexander Nekrich’s “June 22, 1941,” and a review of Harrison Salisbury’s “The Siege of Leningrad” that examines mortality statistics. A short epilogue on Solzhenitsyn forms the volume’s conclusion.

Discussing Solzhenitsyn’s role in the West and his impact on Soviet leadership, Conquest notes that now is the time for the Kremlin to consider the author’s advice as set forth in his 1973 “Letter to Soviet Leaders.” “He asked of them not that they abandon power,” Conquest writes, “but that they withdraw the autocracy to the realm of political rule only, allowing an autonomous civic, legal, economic and intellectual life to their citizens; and that they renounce their expansionist world mission.” It was Solzhenitsyn and the other writers examined in “Tyrants and Typewriters,” Conquest avers, who were responsible for crippling the Soviet system’s “huge organism of falsehood” and who showed “the best way forward for a return to reason and reality.”

Unfortunately, though this sounds impressive and may well be true, “Tyrants and Typewriters” never clearly shows how this happened. The book’s introduction claims that, in addition to dealing with political themes, “Tyrants and Typewriters” is “about writing in general, as the sphere in which the individual asserts autonomy against the power of the state.” Although we see this indirectly throughout the volume, Conquest never makes the connections explicit enough.

Perhaps the book’s main problem lies in its very concept. Assembling a diverse collection of reviews and essays into one coherent statement is a difficult task at best; one way of ensuring at least a modicum of unity, however, is by linking together the separate pieces. “Tyrants and Typewriters” would have been far better--and more accessible to a broader audience--had each piece been put into context and related to the rest. As it stands, this critical compilation will be of interest to (and understood by) only a very small group of Soviet specialists.

Regrettably, this is one case in which the total is less than the sum of its parts.