ALSSoviet World

THIS
SOVIET WORLD
BY
ANNA LOUISE STRONG
1936
CONTENTS
ON INTERPRETING A WORLD.......................................v
THE PLAN FOR REMAKING THE WORLD.................11
THE PARTY OF REVOLUTION .....................................20
THE DICTATORSHIP ......................................................30
THE GROWING DEMOCRACY .....................................40
THE UNION OF NATIONS .............................................49
THE TECHNIQUE OF LEADERSHIP ............................59
BUILDING THE NEW ECONOMY ................................70
THE STRUGGLE FOR PEACE .......................................81
THE FACTORY COLLECTIVE ......................................95
FARMING A CONTINENT ...........................................104
THE FREEING OF WOMEN .........................................115
THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF SCIENCE ..................125
THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF ART ...........................134
REMAKING HUMAN BEINGS ....................................144
YOUTH SET FREE .........................................................154
NEW MEN EMERGE .....................................................163
ON INTERPRETING A WORLD
A leading Russian Communist said to me a year ago “The mind
of our people is changing so fast under the conditions of socialism
that it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to speak to the rest of
the world. We find it harder to understand them, and they us.”
We who go back and forth between the Soviet world and the
world of capitalism—not only in space from New York to Moscow
but also in spirit from intimate life with Soviet people to intimate life
in America—feel keenly this difficulty. Important words like free-
dom, democracy, dictatorship have different meanings on different
sides of the border. The Soviet world is sharply conscious of planning
its future; the capitalist world is always arriving where it hadn’t in-
tended. And Soviet officials are not always helpful in making their
acts intelligible; they often assume that only deliberate malice can
doubt them and that the only needed explanation is the appropriate
citation from Marx.
To explain the swiftly growing Soviet world to that other world
out of which it was born is a task that becomes steadily more com-
plex. For if its outer achievements are every year more able to speak
for themselves, its inner life more and more diverges from that of
capitalism in a hundred subtle ways.
In the Berlin station a giant sign greets me with three-foot letters:
“Think of your hair!” My mind flashes back to the world I have left.
What are Soviet people thinking of? The Stakhanov drive, the Mos-
cow city plan, Marie and her sugar beets, the conquest of the north.
And hair and perfume, O yes, of course. Everyone knows of the rising
standard of living and firmly believes in a cultural life—more bath-
tubs, radios, books and dramatic clubs and doubtless more hair. But
their individuality is expressed not by possessions and polish but by
the various ways in which men create. Dynamic is the word; their
civilization is dynamic.
The regimentation of life by property is my next shock in the
capitalist world. The obscene phrases “damages for alienation of af-
fections” or “a $50,000 man” or the remark: “I do it only for the
money that is in it”—what degradation they imply of human life and
work! I see able engineers spending creative power on little models
in a government relief job just to keep alive. I see a journal of high
standard, the life-work of an able editor submerged by a new owner’s
v
THIS SOVIET WORLD
wish for quick profit. Lives are conditioned in the Soviet world also,
by trends and sages of organization, but not by the profits of a boss.
The difference appears in the use of pronouns. People under cap-
italism are contrasting “I” and “they.” “Too bad it couldn’t have been
on my land,” a man remarks of a California oil-strike. Soviet folk
would be hailing “our new oil-wells”; to them the idea of a private
oil-well is already as quaint as a private postal system. I note a remark
about American unemployment: “If it gets any worse, they’ll have to
do something.” Who is this ultimate, uncontrollable “they”? The term
betrays the class society of which the speakers are unconscious; they
are waiting for some boss to act. To hear a debate: “Is America going
fascist?” and think how much less passively Soviet folk would word
it. “Shall we go fascist? No. Then exactly how shall we prevent it?”
Soviet folk say “we” of one-sixth of the earth’s surface. Uzbek cot-
ton-pickers, toiling under the sun of Central Asia, say: “We are con-
quering the Arctic; we rescued the Chelyuskinites.” Ukrainian farm-
ers who never went up in an airplane talk of “our stratosphere rec-
ords” and “the loss of our Maxim Gorky airplane” as they take up
collections to build ten new ones. But even Mrs. Roosevelt asks me:
“Are Russian peasants getting more reconciled to accepting direc-
tion?” I feel the hopelessness of language as I answer: “No, they are
learning better to organize and direct themselves.”
Americans often ask me whether Russians are not naturally more
altruistic than Americans, more fit for communism, they imply. No,
it is something quite different. Russians at the time of Revolution
were more medieval than Americans, which means “naturally” more
petty, unreliable, inefficient, given to bargaining and cheating. Traits
of the Asiatic market-place were widespread and occasionally still
annoy the visitor. But these traits are disappearing under the fact of
joint ownership, which brings identity of individual with community
good.
Joint possession of the country’s resources and productive mech-
anism is the economic reality which unifies Soviet life and makes it
dynamic. It is this that washes out the antagonism between personal
and public good, that makes men say “we.” It is this that makes men
conscious planners of the future; for owners plan but non-owners can
only fight or drift. The chief quality of Soviet civilization is the sense
that the world is “ours,” to seize, understand and make over.
This Soviet world is my theme; I give scant space to those fast-
disintegrating forces that fought it. I tell not the “whole truth,” for
vi
ON INTERPRETING A WORLD
truth is never “whole”; there are always at least two truths in conflict:
the truth that is dying and the truth that is coming into existence.
American Tories who intrigued for King George had their truth also,
but it remains only as piquant sauce to romance; the truth of the Con-
tinental armies remained to build the modern republic. They them-
selves recalled the frozen feet of Valley Forge less as suffering than
as heroism; their raids on hungry farms passed into memory not as
banditry but as necessity and daring. History’s greatest gift to victors
is that not only they, but their truth survives.
Yet I do no injustice to those many lives which in greater or less
degree were wrenched or broken by the coming of the new Soviet
order. Even for them the new years obliterate the past. They also
change to seek their new future in the new system; Lives broken in
terms of property are being remade in terms of work. Saboteurs re-
form and win posts of honor; kulaks come back from exile to factories
and farms; children have an equal start now regardless of fathers. For
this war differs from other battles in that all men, even the conquered
foes, are absorbed into the ranks of the conquerors—joint heirs to all
the fruits of victory.
A. L. S.
vii
PART I
MEN MAKE THE SOVIET WORLD
CHAPTER I
THE PLAN FOR REMAKING THE WORLD
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world; our
business is to change it.”
— Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach
Whenever I ask myself what brings increasing visitors to Mos-
cow, what they want here and what they find, and why the eyes of the
world turn more and more to the Soviet Union with a questing hope
that hardly yet dares call itself belief, there flashes into my mind the
remark made to me in 1930 at Dnieprostroy by the young and disil-
lusioned son of a Wall Street millionaire.
Dnieprostroy in those days was the first of the famous giants of
the new Soviet Russia, “the largest power dam in the world.” 1 Hour
after hour we climbed the cliffs and ravines of its mighty construc-
tion. We fled from screaming sirens that warned of blasting rock. We
saw great stone-crushing plants, saw-mills, locomotive repair shops,
temporary power station—all sizable works harnessed to the task of
making a greater power station which should in turn serve plants a
hundred times their scope. We visited the “socialist city” where dis-
cussion raged between advocates of individual cottages or big apart-
ment houses for the future town. We saw hurriedly constructed club
houses where thousands of workers busily grabbed knowledge—
reading, writing, political economy and the technique of their new
job.
Night fell. We stood on the shore of the yet unharnessed river,
destined to rise to bury those high banks beneath a man-impounded
lake. We far down at the great sweep of electric brilliance that had
already shattered the age-old darkness of the Ukrainian steppe. It was
then that my companion said: “I think that Dnieprostroy has answered
the question that brought me to Russia.”
“What question?” I asked.
“Whether the world is to be changed by trying one at a time to
improve human beings or by changing the social environment that
makes human beings.”
In the pause that followed the sounds of construction came to us
incessantly, rising from the bowels of earth and filling the horizon.
1
Since then surpassed by the Boulder Dam.
11
THIS SOVIET WORLD
The short, sharp puffs of engines, the roar of cliffs torn asunder, the
ceaseless beat of mills grinding stone into concrete, the rasp of drills
eating down into river granite. Sharpened by night and softened by
distance, they blended into a mighty symphony—music of man, the
builder, subduing, the earth.
Dark beyond the circling lights lay Hortitz Island, in ancient days
the last stand of free-booting bandit chieftains against oppressors. We
remembered the husky peasant girl from the island whom we had
seen in overalls that morning, gang-boss over twelve men who exca-
vated rock by explosions of liquid air. Dnieprostroy had changed her
in a few months from a farm servant to a “brigadier.” We remem-
bered the blacksmith whom we had asked in the glare of foundry fires
how he liked his work and who burst forth with fiery will: “You
know, we’re going to finish her in 1932”—a simple workman push-
ing ahead by one year the estimate of Hugh L. Cooper’s world-expe-
rienced engineers.2
We recalled how competitions between workers of right and left
bank drove the dam ahead, doubling the concrete-laying estimates of
the Americans by force of newly awakened will. Signals night by
night across the raging torrent told in red and green lights the day’s
total, celebrated over-fulfillment of plan by a great red star. Night by
night, week by week each bank fought to keep its red star shining.
We remembered motion pictures, dramas, concerts, lectures which
brought the city’s culture to these thousands who had come from the
scattered farms of the Ukraine. The fine new polytechnic institute
where workers chosen from the river-gangs were being turned in
forty classrooms into engineers. We saw on the high bank the homes
of the American consultants, who understood better than the Russians
the technique of the great job but were eternally puzzled by its spirit.
Yes, Dnieprostroy gave the answer to my companion’s question.
Dnieprostroy was a new form of production under a new social sys-
tem. It was remaking individuals by wholesale.
Increasingly in the past five years Americans have come to the
Soviet Union, scientists, engineers, artists, economists all bent on
their own pursuits, dogmatic or bewildered tourists, seeking proof of
an old belief or material for a new one. Especially since the crash of
1929 smashed the world which was “inevitably getting better,” they
2
The workman’s estimate won out. The dam was finished in 1932
a year ahead of schedule.
12
have come, fleeing from the ruins of that earthquake to learn what, if
anything, the Soviet Union offers. By no means all of them put their
question as clearly as did my young companion; by no means all in-
terpret so swiftly the essence of the first construction job they see.
But the question he asked is basically what brings most of them, an
ancient quest of man which has troubled philosophers no less than
baffled tourists: “Can our world be remade? And how to remake it?”
The problem is especially pressing upon the American middle
class of today, which has seen its old world taken from it in ways that
it hardly understands. The independent small property owners,
mostly farmers, who formed a hundred years ago 80 per cent of the
American people except in the slave South, bequeathed to their de-
scendants ideals of democracy and freedom, the “liberty and equality
of men owning their own means of livelihood.” 3 But large scale in-
dustry, developing through a century, wiped out the small enterpris-
ers, increased the number of salaried employees and made the farmer
dependent on banks and markets, thus changing America to a “nation
of hired workers.” Only 12 per cent of the people live by ownership
of their own property, in place of 80 per cent a century ago.
The myth of property remained long after the reality had van-
ished. Millions of these salaried people still felt hat they owned some-
thing—no longer a store, a small workshop, an unencumbered farm,
but savings in stocks, bonds, insurance—which lifted them somewhat
above the ranks of laboring hands. Crashingly the world economic
crisis destroyed this illusion. As if to emphasize how little control
these small people had over their own property, the value of their
liquid wealth shrank from twenty-seven billion dollars in 1929 to four
billion in 1932. 4 Millions of the middle class were thrown into the
same abyss of ruin with millions of wage-workers; they wait together
on bread-lines, study together the government relief programs, hunt
together for a boss. For all of them alike, as long as the capitalist
world remains, most put their trust in bosses, someone who owns and
will give them access to the means of production and of life.
Their situation is the more distressing because for most of our
Western world the past hundred years has been what John Strachey
3
See Lewis Corey: “Crisis of the Middle Class” The Nation, Aug.
14, 1935.
4
Figures from Robers R. Doane on liquid wealth of persons with
incomes under $5,000. Quoted by Corey.
13
THIS SOVIET WORLD
aptly calls the “century of the great hope.” 5 Millions of men became
better fed, better housed, better clothed through the industrial revolu-
tion which took production out of the home workshop into the factory
and knit together the ends of earth by railroad, steamship, telegraph.
Especially America—where the arrival of the new machines and
technical methods coincided with a continent-wide expansion into
lands of vast wealth, developed by energetic oilers from all nations
for the first time unhampered by any remnants of feudalism the belief
in inevitable progress and increasing prosperity was both a conscious
and unconscious national faith. The little red schoolhouse bade every
boy aspire to be president. “Go west, young man.”... “Don’t be a bear
on America,” said successful plutocrats. But far deeper than these
conscious preachings spread the atmosphere of determined optimism
which made every man who was not a good booster seem subtly im-
moral to his friends. Did not the great lands of America, the efficient
industries of America, the productive energy of America, offer the
basis for a good standard of life for everyone—an “American stand-
ard”? It was easy to prove that they did—and do!
What happened to that faith in inevitable progress? If it still sur-
vives in some circles as a despairing habit, elsewhere it has been re-
placed by belief in inevitable doom. “Inevitable drift to fascism,” “in-
evitable twilight of the West,” “the old standard of prosperity can
never return,” are phrases common on lips that not long since hailed
inevitable advance. Others begin a frenzied search into the faiths of
past ages, to know if elsewhere than with us abides the truth. These
learn that belief in the inevitability of progress has never been a uni-
versal faith. It has been confined to definite periods of economic ad-
vancement, and to certain nations within those periods or certain clas-
ses within nations. Did not whole centuries of the Middle Ages view
the world as an essentially unchanging garden of human souls from
which religion culled a few for heaven, leaving the rest for hell? Even
today do not hundreds of millions of people—those great suppressed
races of the East—find life’s processes so fundamentally evil that
their essential faith is Buddhism in which Nothingness is bliss?
Even in our West, as capitalism decays into fascism, there arise
new denials of the inevitability of progress. Ideals of the past—the
Roman Empire, the Germanic gods, the feudal Britain featured by
fascist-striving novels—gild with emotional glamor the tenets of
5
John Strachey, The Menace of Fascism.
14
fascism: that science and machine production are evil, that democ-
racy, peace and the conquest of poverty are futile dreams of a deca-
dent society, that murderous war is man’s noblest end. For fascism is
the last stand of a desperate capitalism which can no longer use the
fruits of science and machine production, which dare no longer per-
mit either peace or democracy, since it must brutally refuse to its vic-
tims that abolition of poverty which is already technically possible in
the world.
Can human reason find a way to reorganize human society—a
way which human wills can follow? Must we go backing blindly into
the future, cheered now by faith in inevitable progress, damned now
by faith in inevitable doom, and claiming from some supernatural
world a just and rational balancing of the unjust, irrational chaos
found in this? Or can that continuous, collective application of human
thought known as science, which we have learned to take as our best,
though still unperfected guide in rationalizing and controlling subhu-
man phenomena, be expanded to rationalize and control our human
destiny? Can man master the machines he has made which today
threaten increasingly to enslave him? Can he subdue to his will those
tremendously productive forces which his science and technical
knowledge have released, and which seem adequate to abolish pov-
erty, yet which at present give increasing unemployment, economic
crises, wars?
We are asking, in other words, can men master destiny? Are all
those gleams of human reason which have given us increasing do-
minion over material phenomena but will-o’-the-wisps, luring to a
swamp which will engulf us the more blackly for the false, brief light
they gave? Or are they gleams of dawn that may brighten into an
ever-increasing daylight, in which not only a few isolated phenomena
but the whole of man’s own nature and his organized society can be
planned by human reason and carried through by human wills?
No less than this is the search that brings men over the seas to the
Soviet Union. For if to millions in our Western world the century now
passing was the century of the great hope, there are other millions in
two great half-continents uniting Europe and Asia, who look upon it
rather as the century of the great plan. The reference is not to that
Five-Year Plan which the Soviet Union made famous, but to a plan
far more comprehensive which prepares and includes all five-year
plans in all lands and all the future. A plan for remaking the world
drawn up eighty-eight years ago on instructions from a London
15
THIS SOVIET WORLD
congress of working-men of many nations, and issued in 1848 under
the title Communist Manifesto, the work of the German economists
Frederick Engels and Karl Marx.
The Communist Manifesto is usually thought of as the defiance
flung at the world by an illegal revolutionary party of hunted people.
So it was. But it was also man’s first attempt to apply science to the
analysis of human society in order to draw up a plan for remaking the
world. Previous attempts to analyze the world were exercises of phi-
losophers, not directed towards change. Previous attempts to change
the world were confined to threats or exhortations to secure specific
conversions or reforms. Many Utopian pictures had existed of how
beautiful society might be when once made over. But the Communist
Manifesto tried to answer the question: How can the thing be done?
Born in the middle years of that century in which the scientific
method was consciously remaking the material world, it sought to
analyze the elements of human society, the nature and cause of the
changes we see in history, for the purpose of producing social change
in a desired direction. That is why it claims to be Scientific Socialism.
The followers of Marx see in him the genius who combined the
three chief currents of thought of the nineteenth century—classical
German philosophy, classical English political economy and French
revolutionary doctrines. The philosophic basis of Marxism is “dialec-
tics,” which views every reality, whether of nature, the mind, or so-
ciety, as in process of continual change through the development and
clash of “inner contradictions.” This theory applied to the study of
history shows how economic, political and social systems are con-
stantly changing, at times slowly, at times by leaps, catastrophes, rev-
olutions. American capitalism of the Civil War period is not the cap-
italism of today. The democracy of the New England town-meeting
is not the democracy of the modern imperial nation. They may be
called by the same but names deceive; the thing changes even while
you look at it to disdain or admire. Even your disdain and admiration
changes, the meaning of your words and concepts. What was true,
right, desirable yesterday may not be true, right, desirable tomorrow.
Systems have their day and cease to be.
Is there any law in this change? Is there in this constant interac-
tion and conflict of systems and ideas anything basic, changing which
will change the rest? “The economic structure,” says Marx, is “the
real foundation.... The mode of production... determines the general
16
character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life.”6 For
Marx the fundamental thing about any human society is not its system
of ideas or religions, nor the form of government nor the nature of its
family life. These things are important but derivative. They are deter-
mined by the ways in which human beings get food, clothing, shelter,
by the stage of their advance and the tools they use in these funda-
mental operations. In a world whose economic structure fails to re-
ward honesty and altruism, a Marxist would not spend his efforts
preaching these virtues, but in creating an economic system where
honesty really prospered, where each man’s success must be built on
the success, rather than the ruin, of others. The new economic system
would make new people; under it, education in the new ideals would
be swift and hopeful.
How then do economic systems change? Marx finds the key in
his theory of “class struggle.” Man’s science and invention create
new ways of production, and these in turn create new “classes” of
human beings, i.e., groups of people who have different and conflict-
ing relations to production. Between these classes a struggle goes on
around the ownership of the process of production, which is the
means of life. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the his-
tory of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian,
lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and
oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time
ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in
the common ruin of the contending classes.” 7
Thus at different stages of human history new classes arise from
new ways of working and the struggle between them produces social
change. Modern capitalism has not done away with class antago-
nisms, but it has this distinctive feature—it has simplified them. “So-
ciety as a whole is more and more splitting up into... two great classes
directly facing each other—bourgeoisie and proletariat,” 8 those who
live by owning and those who can live only by selling their labor
power, by seeking a boss.
Between these two remain for a time the middle classes, dis-
traught survivors of those small property owners and independent
6
Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
7
Communist Manifesto, 10-11.
8
Communist Manifesto, 11.
17
THIS SOVIET WORLD
craftsmen who once embodied the demand for private property
against a feudal past. They suffer deeply under advancing capitalism
which dislodges them steadily and painfully into the ranks of hired
hands. They struggle against their fate, but their strivings are con-
fused, for their instinctive desire is to go back to small scale property.
Their cry is to “share the wealth,” to start over again that old society
of small owners which led to the present-day monopolies and which
would lead to them again if it could be revived. The right to private
property was once a revolutionary pledge of freedom, but this also
has changed with the passing of history. Private property in farm plots
and hand tools freed serfs from feudal masters; private property in
steel mills creates a new slavery. Even small ownership today, wher-
ever it survives or comes into being, is at the mercy of large-scale
finance.
Who owns the world? That is the basic question conditioning all
hopes of social change. What is wrong with the world today, accord-
ing to Marxists, is private ownership of the great productive pro-
cesses which are socially operated. The way out is not backward to
subsistence farms and handicraft, it is forward to social ownership.
Not “share the wealth,” but jointly owned wealth, jointly organized
by and for all who work. Only thus can the great machines be subju-
gated; only thus can science and modern technique produce plenty
for all mankind. Only thus can the present division of men into own-
ers and workers be abolished, a division which is wrecking the world
by social strife and international war. It must be superseded by one
united class of people—joint worker-owners of the world. From this
economic equality, all other forms of equality will grow. First a stage
of socialism where men have equal access to labor and receive ac-
cording to their work. Then when the habits of human beings have
been changed by joint ownership, will come the stage of communism
in which men freely co-operate in work according to their abilities
and receive according to their needs.
Who will bring about this change of ownership? Clearly not the
present private owners: their interests lie the other way. Nor can the
disintegrating middle classes achieve it, except insofar as they come
to understand that their future lies with the workers. Only one class
of people can develop the will to carry through this difficult long
epoch of change—the working class which is bound to the mighty
mechanism of modern production, mastering it yet enslaved by it.
Joint ownership is their only path to freedom; when they understand
18
this, they will accomplish it. They are thus the “really revolutionary
class,” in whom social ownership of modern production is a living
need and can become a flaming passion carrying humanity forward
to a higher stage.
The task of every Marxist is to help them understand, to make
them “class-conscious,” aware of their power and function as creators
of social progress. Millions of Americans resent the very idea of clas-
ses, and are indignant at “inflaming class-consciousness” where it
does not yet exist. But Marxian classes are not epithets inciting to
riot; they are categories in a scientific analysis. Marxists say that un-
less human society is to go down in a catastrophe of slavery, war and
ruin, men must own their tools and the wealth which these create; that
tools and wealth have grown too complexly social to be owned indi-
vidually and must therefore be socially owned; and that only the
working class can develop the fighting will to seize the power of own-
ership and through it remake society. The less the workers are orga-
nized, the less conscious they are of their power and function, the
more will the coming changes in human society be protracted, painful
and blind. The more conscious the workers are of their great task in
history, the better they are organized, the more they are able to rally
around them the middle classes, the swifter will be the change and
the less will be the human suffering.
Two generations of economists in many countries developed the
Marxian theory. Lenin built on it the Bolshevik Party which in 1917
carried through the Russian Revolution. Stalin is honored today by
Bolsheviks not only as statesman and organizer, but as the far-seeing
analyst and guider of social change, who continues and develops the
scientific method of Marx, Engels, Lenin. One-sixth of the world to-
day is being remade according to the Marxian program—the first
consciously devised pattern that men ever applied to society as a
whole.
19
CHAPTER II:
THE PARTY OF REVOLUTION
“To distinguish those who worked from those who talked.”
Lenin
Not by accident did the first socialist revolution take place in
Russia. The World War imposed great strains on many countries and
the chain of world imperialism broke at its weakest link.1 More than
any other land, Russia was tormented by war and ravenous for peace.
Tsardom, that hideous hangover from the Middle Ages, had lost all
moral authority and was hated by the entire people. For decades rev-
olution had been brewing in Russia. 2 The World War added the last
unbearable pressure and the explosion came.
Not least among the factors which made the revolution possible
and helped determine its form was the existence of the Bolshevik
Party.3 This was no spontaneous creation, born at the moment of re-
volt; for fourteen years it had been consciously welded by painstak-
ing thought and desperate struggle. Its traditions indeed went back
much further. The whole last half of the nineteenth century advanced
thinkers in Russia, under the oppression of tsardom, had sought ea-
gerly for the effective revolutionary path. Through fifty years of tor-
ment, sacrifice, heroism, incredible energy, careful study, they had
1
Hillquit called the Russian revolution an “historical accident,”
since it occurred in a backward peasant land. Norman Thomas on the
contrary holds it occurred just because the Russians were so backward
that they would endure a dictatorship such as no other people would
stand.
Stalin says: “The objective conditions for the revolution exist
throughout the whole system of imperialist world economy, which is an
integral unit.” Answering the theory that the revolution must come first
“where the proletariat forms the majority, where culture is more ad-
vanced, where there is more democracy,” he says: “No, not necessarily
where industry is most developed; it will be broken where the chain of
imperialism is weakest, for the proletarian revolution is the result of the
breaking of the of world imperialism at its weakest link.” From Stalin’s
Lectures to Sverdlov Students.
2
Marx noted this as far back as 1877 in his Letter to Sorge. See
Letters of Marx and Engels.
3
Today called Communist Party (of Bolsheviks).
20
tested many methods. They had tried to educate and organize the
peasantry; they had tried the terrorist assassination of tyrants. They
had failed. They had checked their failures by the history of other
nations and a section of them had come to Marxism as the correct
program for remaking the world.
If Marx furnished the general program, it was Lenin who devel-
oped the theory and tactics, proletarian revolution, and built the or-
ganization for the seizure of power. Bolshevism, as a trend of politi-
cal thought and a political party, exists since 1903, when the Social-
Democratic Party of Russia split into groups known as Bolsheviks
(majority) and Mensheviks (minority), which correspond to Com-
munists and Social-Democrats today in other countries. The older
leaders wanted to “widen” the Party, to take in all “supporters” and
give them all a voice in determining the Party’s program. Lenin,
though recognizing that any social change must rely on wide masses,
not only of workers but of many other “allies,” insisted that member-
ship in the Party itself “must be given a narrow definition to distin-
guish those who worked from those who talked.” 4
To organize and train the Party of Revolution became thence-
forth the central task and the greatest achievement of that world-re-
nowned leader, Lenin, who gave his whole life to the study and prac-
tice of the science of political power. Power was to him no mere per-
sonal achievement of office; it was the organized lifting of the human
race one stage forward in history. He studied how to ride the turbulent
upheaval which the conflicts in modern society would inevitably pro-
duce, how to prepare and lead men for the seizure of the state and the
creation of a new order, how at last to organize them for the conquest
of nature and of their own destiny. This was to Lenin the science of
power.
Starting with the Marxian thesis that the working class is the
group in modern society which can be organized to take power and
to build a new order, Lenin created for this class a “vanguard” of
leaders. They must be men of intelligence, will, daring; yet they must
act in a disciplined manner, reinforcing a common direction. They
must make the revolution a life-long profession, steadily studying the
economic, political and social forces of the society in which they live.
They must apply this knowledge in action. They must take active part
not only in elections and political movements, but in strikes, trade
4
Lenin’s Account of Second Congress, Selected Works, II
21
THIS SOVIET WORLD
union work, demonstrations, distribution of literature and all the other
prosaic or dangerous activities through which the working class be-
comes organized and conscious of its power. They must keep close
to the workers, learning from them and assisting them, and win the
right to lead by the confidence they inspire.
How are such leaders to be found among the great hordes of the
dispossessed and discontented? How, if found, are they to be welded
into a disciplined, fighting force? Lenin had no illusions; he knew
that the mass of exploited men who are squeezed out by the disloca-
tions of capitalism, and who turn in hope or despair towards com-
munism, contains many fools, knaves, fanatics and self-pitying fail-
ures as well as men of intelligence and will. He foresaw a long period
of difficult struggle, in which men fit to lead would be tested by fire,
men capable of learning would be trained by experience, and others
would weed themselves out by their follies. Lenin himself gave most
of his years to the slow work of building up and training a not very
large but thoroughly tested Party, which could give leadership when
the hour of revolution came. I have met simple workers to whom
Lenin devoted hours of individual teaching, and who remember today
the exact phrases he used with them forty years ago. The making of
real Communists able to lead the masses is a long and costly process.
Nothing could be more absurd than the two contradictory views
of Communists promulgated today by their opponents. They are usu-
ally pictured as planless inciters to violence and riot, people who have
a crazy desire for chaos, in the hope that something vaguely called
communism may somehow ensue. A more sophisticated view, to
which no less a person than Sinclair Lewis falls victim in It Can’t
Happen Here, portrays them as brainless sheep required to act in
blind obedience to the orders of their superiors for the sake of disci-
pline. Neither of these types could possibly lead a successful strike,
much less a revolution. A communist who increased risks by reck-
lessness would be early eliminated; a man who only took orders
would be useless as a leader. Communists must learn the difficult
combination of intelligence with daring; they must learn to act to-
gether but they must all know why.
“What we build cannot be built by passive people,” said one of
the secretaries of the Russian Communist Party to me. “We all had
strong convictions; we fought for them and went to jail for them,”
said another veteran Bolshevik. “Then in jail we fought with our im-
prisoned comrades over details of past policies, studying and learning
22
from past errors. Often we found that the mistake of a few words in
our theory had cost us a year in prison.” Again and again groups
which could not agree split off from the others. Lenin made no effort
to detain them; he distinguished sharply between those allies with
whom co-operation was possible for a longer or shorter period, and
the smaller group which would stick through everything. Thus was
built up that Party of men who had placed their lives in each other’s
hands so often that they could rely on each other with absolute assur-
ance, not through blind submission but through a habit of mutual con-
sultation and swift acceptance of joint decisions.
The most famous picture of the ideal Communist is given by
Krupskaia, widow of Lenin, in an article entitled: “What a Com-
munist Should Be Like.” “First of all a Communist is a social person,
with strongly developed social instincts, who desires that all people
should be well and be happy. Second, he must understand what is
happening about him in the world—the mechanism of the existing
régime, the history of the growth of human society, the history of
economic development, of the growth of property, the division of
classes, the growth of state forms. He must clearly picture whither
society is developing—to a régime where the happiness of some will
not be based on the slavery of others and where there will be no com-
pulsion except strongly developed social instincts. And the Com-
munists must clear the road, as you clear a path in the wilderness, to
hasten its coming.
“Third, the Communist must know how to organize creatively. If
he is a medical worker, for instance, he must know medicine, then
the history of medicine in Russia and other lands, then the Com-
munist approach to the problem of medicine, i.e., how to organize
wide masses to create from the ranks of the toilers a powerful sanitary
organization in the cause of health. He must know not only what
Communism is and what is coming, what his own job in it may be
and his approach to the masses. Fourthly, his personal life must be
submitted to and guided by the interests of Communism. No matter
how much he regrets giving up the comforts and ties of home, he
must if necessary cast all aside and go into danger wherever as-
signed.... Body and soul he must be devoted to the interests of the
toiling masses, of Communism.”
Men who have risen high in the Communist Party are character-
ized by these qualities listed by Krupskaia. They are usually reticent
about their deepest motives; it is not the thing to gush one’s devotion.
23
THIS SOVIET WORLD
One learns of their qualities chiefly through others. Krupskaia, speak-
ing to intimate Party friends at the funeral of her husband Lenin,
found the completest expression in the words: “Lenin deeply loved
the people.” Radek tells how Stalin, answering greetings sent him by
the Party on his fiftieth birthday, “said something which, in the mouth
of such a reserved man, sounded as though it came from the very
depths of his being. Stalin said that he was ready to shed his blood
‘drop by drop’ for the proletariat.” 5
Men who would lead the masses in changing the world by the
Marxian method must obviously strive for constant growth in two
directions: in ever-deepening understanding of social and economic
forces and in ever-widening participation in workers’ struggles. Per-
haps the first thing that strikes an outsider is the amount of time which
all Communists devote to the study of Marxian theory. Managers of
great steel plants and busy county officials under the pressure of har-
vest will find time, at unearthly hours like eleven at night or seven in
the morning, for their study of Marxism or their class in current
events, deeming these things as essential as their other pressing work.
Visitors to the Soviet Union are not infrequently amazed to find
that a Party secretary in a rural township can discuss international
affairs with an assurance and abundance of detail which few foreign
editors of an American metropolitan newspaper can show, and will
handle statistics and history with a good deal more ease than the
“Brain Trust.” A prominent American politician once expressed to
me doubts of the accuracy of the published interview of H. G. Wells
with Stalin. Stalin’s references to the Cromwellian revolution seemed
to him too detailed to have been available for conversation. “People,”
he said, “don’t talk that way” But any Communist in the Soviet Union
who did not know the essentials of Cromwellian revolution, and of
other historic revolutions from which he is expected to learn, would
join a class to “raise his ideological level.” A Communist who al-
lowed himself to become as ignorant of world affairs as is the average
American politician would be ruthlessly “cleaned out” of the Party,
or told to join the group of “sympathizers” to learn what he has to
know.
The emotional vagueness which is a feature of all capitalist politi-
cal platforms, and which is indeed desired in order to win wide support
without being too definite, is the exact opposite of Communist
5
Radek, Problems of Soviet Literature, 144.
24
statement. The Communists even seem to be painfully definite, to “take
refuge in formulæ,” or to split hairs over the exact interpretation of
phrases. All science and technical knowledge, however, advance by
just this splitting of hairs to find the exact chemical formula which pro-
duces the alloy or the mathematical relation which strengthens the arch
of the bridge; discussions in any congress of physiologists or electri-
cians are full of this “dull theory” without which no scientific progress
can be attained. Communists take Marxism as such a science; to rise to
eminence among them demands years, even decades, of close and pen-
etrating study of social forces. This is no dogma to be learned once for
all; it is a developing body of thought, constantly applied to and af-
fected by new conditions. By the very theory of dialectics, these forces
are changing. The speeches of Lenin and Stalin and other Party leaders
never deal in stirring oratory or spell-binding generalities but in close
and careful analysis. Stalin would no more attempt to sway a Com-
munist congress by “force of personality” expressed in brilliant oratory
and colorful phrasing, than Edison would have expected to convince a
group of American engineers of the reliability of some new formula by
emotional words. One such attempt would ruin either an Edison or a
Stalin.
But Communists must not only be scientific; they must also learn
to work with the masses. In this they face a special difficulty; the man
who has thought for years in Marxian categories may find it as hard
to explain them to simple people as an electrical engineer would find
it to explain the theory of turbines to men in a candle-lighted world.
This is more serious for the Communist than for the engineer; for the
latter can build his turbines without help from the candle-lighted in-
dividuals, but the Communist cannot make a revolution without the
people. Fortunately actions may speak as well as words, and all Com-
munists are required to do active work which brings them in touch
with the masses. When intellectuals apply for Party membership, it is
a common practice to give them some tasks around a factory, such as
teaching night classes in Russian language, civics or Marxism, or
practical assistance in trade union work. After a year or two of such
testing, the opinion of the workers is taken as to whether the candi-
date is fit to be a Party member.
Any Communist Party at any stage in its development in any
country considers persons who cannot co-operate with workers’
movements as unfit for Party membership. In the Soviet Union where
the rank and file of non-Party workers have already considerable
25
THIS SOVIET WORLD
knowledge of the Party’s ideals, it has become a common thing for
them to assist in helping the Party in its selection of members. Two
hundred thousand workers who joined the Party some two years ago
were actually nominated by the non-Party workers, through repeated
meetings and discussions as to what persons in their ranks should be
recommended for Party membership. From time to time the Party
“cleans out” its membership, and this is always done at open meet-
ings to which all workers of the given institution are invited. Each
Communist in the institution must give before this public an extended
account of his life and activities, submit to and answer all criticism,
and prove before the assembled workers his fitness to remain in the
“leading Party.” Members may be cleaned out not only as “hostile
elements, double-dealers, violators of discipline, degenerates, career-
seekers, self-seekers, morally degraded persons” but even for being
merely “passive,” for having failed to keep learning and growing in
knowledge and authority among the masses.
People admitted to the Communist Party—this admission de-
mands a period of study and probation—must give considerable time
to unpaid “Party work” i.e., the various tasks of strengthening the or-
ganization and organizing the masses around it. Having chosen as the
chief purpose of their life the achievement of the socialist revolution,
they must learn how to build a joint program. They take part in the
discussions from which arise the decisions of the Party and they are
expected to carry out these decisions energetically but never blindly.
For they must know why the decisions are made; they must under-
stand the Party Line and be able to promote it without bothering other
people for orders. They must have strong opinions and fight for them;
but they must know when to fight and when to yield. If they cannot
learn this, they will find themselves outside the Party, thrown out ei-
ther as “passive” or as “opposition.” It is not an easy lesson; there
have been many political mortalities.
Party members must learn to decide and act collectively, not only
in determining the general line, but also in deciding their own work
in it. They must consult and accept their comrades’ judgment as to
where they themselves can be of most use. In the Civil War Com-
munists were expected to be the first to volunteer for every battle-
front. In the Soviet Union today they are first to be sent to difficult
posts in industry and farming. They may be torn from jobs in which
they are successful and sent to work which they hate; they must there-
upon cease to hate it and do it well as an important task. I know of a
26
high official who was taken from a train by a telegram sent through
an obscure local secretary in a town through which he passed, and
ordered to return for a different assignment. But no order is ever the
command of a superior officer; it is the decision of a group of com-
rades with whom one has chosen to work. This is the famous Party
discipline; known as “iron” discipline but also as “conscious” disci-
pline, for it is based not on passive submission but on understanding
participation and collective choice. The reward for this discipline is
conscious participation in the making of history.
The Communists expect not only to lead the masses, but to learn
from them in a constant interaction. They must “organize the prole-
tariat”; they must “guide it in its class struggle.”6 They must “see
ahead of the working class,” and be the “experienced general staff”
which “every army at war must have if it is to avoid certain defeat.” 7
But they do not consider themselves a separate caste of leaders, but a
“vanguard” intimately a part of the working class they lead. They
modify their program to grant temporarily some “backward” demand
of the masses, or to include permanently some new form or method
which the masses invent. An example of the first was Lenin’s re-
sponse to the peasants’ demands for splitting up the land, a backward
step taken to secure peasant support and “in order that they may ed-
ucate themselves by fulfilling their desires.” An example of the sec-
ond was the adoption of “soviets” in government and “artels” in farm-
ing, neither of which forms had been foreseen by the Party until they
arose. It is the working class which must dictate and not the Party; in
1925 when Zinoviev argued for dictatorship by the Party, Stalin
fought against this “narrow point of view,” saying that the confidence
between the masses of the people and the Party must not be destroyed
by any peculiar Party rights, “because in the first place, the Party
might be mistaken, and even if it were not, the masses might take
some time to see that it was right.” 8
How can three million Communists lead one hundred and sev-
enty million people? Because they are not alien to those millions, but
are the most energetic part of them, whose capacity to lead has been
repeatedly tested and recognized by the others. Millions of non-Party
people today in the Soviet Union work loyally, even enthusiastically
6
Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
7
Stalin, Leninism, I, 88-89, Cooperative Publishers, Moscow.
8
Stalin, Leninism, I, 51.
27
THIS SOVIET WORLD
under Party direction, yet do not venture to call themselves Com-
munists. One of my best friends was a woman who gave her life to
the care of homeless children, and who said to me once: “My life
began with the Soviet Power; it alone gave me the chance to fight for
children.... I care more for the Party’s success than for anything in
life.” Yet when her fellow-workers voted her “worthy of being a
Communist,” she declined the honor, knowing she could not honestly
join while she disagreed on one or two points in the Party program.
A fifty-two-year-old wheelwright, Rosenberg, whom I met in the
Jewish Autonomous Territory of Birobidjan, had courageously dis-
mantled his home in the Ukraine and taken his family of ten to pio-
neer in the Far East. He had fought through incredible hardships to
build a collective industry which made carts; he was now a member
of the city government giving much unpaid time to civic work.
“When the Party decided to develop Birobidjan,” he explained, “I
knew it would be a great future. It goes higher and higher to the build-
ing of socialism. I myself can’t build it, but if I work and others work,
we’ll build it.” Few could have expressed the Communist goal more
sincerely than Rosenberg, yet he did not think of joining the Party. “I
don’t know enough,” he said. “I am just studying the first political
courses. Serious reading is not so easy for me. I am fifty-two years
old.”
In the Far North fourteen years ago I met Rimpalle, who had
risked his life to run the Finnish border and “help the Revolution.”
He organized the first quarries and mines in a hungry Arctic land; he
created a trade union, a co-operative and a night-school for illiterate
natives of the forests. He made $100,000 for the state that first sum-
mer and got for himself—it was the time of War Communism—only
“rations of potatoes and good, fat gravy and one resoling of my
boots.” Rimpalle said to me: “It’s a useful job. Up here so near the
border and the propaganda of the White Finns, we needed to have an
industry to give food to the people.” He was already a candidate for
the Communist Party, expecting to be admitted to full membership in
a few months.
These examples show what is required of Communists. Devoted
activity under Communist direction, such as the Jewish wheelwright
gave, is not enough. Ninety per cent allegiance, such as the social
worker offered, is not enough. Nor was it enough for Rimpalle to
work self-sacrificingly to increase socially owned wealth; he must
understand consciously the political purpose of his work. I have in
28
the course of fifteen years in the Soviet Union met an occasional
Communist who was a grafter, and many more who were stubborn
bureaucrats and unenlightened fanatics. But I have also seen how the
Party throws out dead wood—not always accurately—and renews it-
self from the working class it leads.
Such is the organized Party which carried through the Revolution
and which today welds into shape the great masses of the Soviet Un-
ion, with its vast distances, its once backward populations, its hun-
dred and eighty-two nationalities, its foes on all borders. It succeeds
by choosing its members with discrimination, by keeping them firmly
organized, forever studying and continuously on the job.
The Communist Party does not expect to last forever. “When
classes disappear and the dictatorship of the proletariat dies out, the
Party also will die out.”9 It sees its task as belonging to a definite
stage in human society, with a beginning, a development and an end.
No other political party in the world has this type of historic con-
sciousness, this supreme confidence; all others live from election to
election, and make no long-time plans. The Communist Party consid-
ers that it has a specific job in history and confidently expects to stay
in power for the time required to carry it through.
9
29
CHAPTER III:
THE DICTATORSHIP
“The conquest by the proletariat of such political power as
will enable it to suppress all resistance on the part of the exploi-
ters.”
Program of Russian Communist Party
“The dictatorship of the proletariat is not an end in itself....
(It) is a means, a path leading to socialism”
Stalin in Address to Sverdlov Students, June 1925
Most Americans shrink from the word “dictatorship.” “I don’t
want to be dictated to,” they say. Neither, in fact, does anyone. But
why do they instinctively take the word in its passive meaning, and
see themselves as the recipients of orders? Why do they never think
that they might be the dictators? Is that such an impossible idea? Is it
because they have been so long hammered by the subtly misleading
propaganda about personal dictatorships, or is it because they have
been so long accustomed to seek the right to life through a boss who
hires them, that the word dictatorship arouses for them the utterly in-
credible picture of one man giving everybody orders?
No country is ruled by one man. This assumption is a favorite red
herring to disguise the real rule. Power resides in ownership of the
means of production—by private capitalists in Italy, Germany and
also in America, by all workers jointly in the USSR. This is the real
difference which today divides the world into two systems, in respect
to the ultimate location of power. When a Marxist uses the word “dic-
tatorship,” he is not alluding to personal rulers or to methods of vot-
ing; he is contrasting rule by property with rule by workers.
The heads of government in America are not the real rulers. I
have talked with many of them from the President down. Some of
them would really like to use power for the people. They feel baffled
by their inability to do so; they blame other branches of government,
legislatures, courts. But they haven’t analyzed the real reason. The
difficulty is that they haven’t power to use. Neither the President nor
Congress nor the common people, under any form of organization
whatever, can legally dispose of the oil of Rockefeller or the gold in
the vaults of Morgan. If they try, they will be checked by other
branches of government, which was designed as a system of checks
and balances precisely to prevent such “usurpation of power.” Private
30
THE DICTATORSHIP
capitalists own the means of production and thus rule the lives of mil-
lions. Government, however chosen, is limited to the function of
making regulations which will help capitalism run more easily by ad-
justing relations between property and protecting it against the “law-
less” demands of non-owners. This constitutes what Marxists call the
dictatorship of property. “The talk about pure democracy is but a
bourgeois screen,” says Stalin, “to conceal the fact that equality be-
tween exploiters and exploited is impossible.... It was invented to
hide the sores of capitalism... and lend it moral strength.” 1
Power over the means of production—that gives rule. Men who
have it are dictators. This is the power the workers of the Soviet Un-
ion seized in the October Revolution. They abolished the previously
sacred right of men to live by ownership of private property. They
substituted the rule: “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.”
What characteristics of the new régime most obviously showed
its dictatorial character? They were the following:
First, the Bolsheviks took power without waiting for a majority
vote—in the elections to the Constituent Assembly they had just re-
ceived nine million out of thirty-six million ballots—but relying on
their overwhelming majority among the industrial workers, and an
overwhelming superiority in that part of the army near the capital cit-
ies. They maintained power by a shrewd analysis of social classes,
and by satisfying the demands of the sections of the population whose
support they needed.
Second, they organized the new government on the basis of the
workers’ organizations, thus disfranchising those classes which lived
by private ownership, and giving a greater proportionate representa-
tion in the higher government bodies to workers than to peasants dur-
ing the first eighteen years when equal voting by great masses of il-
literate small owners would have wrecked policies of social owner-
ship.2
1
2
This difference is commonly stated as a five to one proportion,
but such was not the case. Industrial districts had in the higher organs
one representative for 25,000 electors, while rural districts had one for
125,000 population, which included children. The proportion is thus
nearer two to one, a much less disproportion than exists (in the reverse
direction) between rural and city votes for many state legislatures in
America. This disproportion in the Soviet Union was abolished when
31
THIS SOVIET WORLD
Third, they took control of schools, press and all means of ex-
pression, and while encouraging the widest latitude of criticism by
workers interested in augmenting or improving the public properties,
suppressed any expressions which seemed to the government likely
to strengthen the rights of private property or injure the efficiency of
socially owned production. At certain periods when they felt their
social ownership of production threatened, whether by sabotage,
graft, or the strengthening of private owners, they suppressed these
dangers as drastically as they thought necessary by means which var-
ied from economic discrimination to deportation or shooting.
These are real characteristics which constitute dictatorship rather
than any personal prestige of Stalin. Great men attain leadership un-
der all forms of government; the technical forms through which Sta-
lin leads are fully as democratic as those by which an American pres-
ident governs, and infinitely more democratic than the dominance of
a Morgan. Nor is the existence of a single Party necessarily a bar to
democratic self-expression, which can find its way as well through
one party as a dozen, as later chapters will show. But the above char-
acteristics are definite indications of dictatorship, a rule to which not
all men have equal access. They are the tactics of all owners in all
countries and all periods of history when they feel themselves threat-
ened. They are the tactics to which owners of private property re-
sorted in Italy and Germany when the rising votes of communist and
socialist workers threatened their ownership. They are resorted to to-
day in sections of America where property feels threatened, whether
by farmhands in Imperial Valley or sharecroppers in Arkansas and
Alabama. They will be resorted to on a wider scale if American cap-
italism really feels itself slipping. Nothing in Soviet history indicates
that the Bolsheviks were any more “dictatorial” or ruthless than own-
ers of property anywhere under similar stresses. Certainly they were
far less bloody and oppressive than any of the “dictatorships of the
right”—whether in Hungary, Finland, China, Italy or Germany—es-
tablished in retaliation or prevention by private ownership which re-
ally felt itself in danger.
What were the conditions which made the Bolsheviks establish
a dictatorship? Why could they not wait until they were voted into
power, and then take over one by one, by government decree or by
the rural districts reached literacy and large-scale farming. See next
chapter.
32
THE DICTATORSHIP
taxation, the large-scale properties which they believed must be so-
cially owned? The history of fascist seizures of power in face of the
threat of socialist voting is beginning to give the world the answer to
this question. The Bolsheviks knew the answer from their Marxian
analysis of history. No owning class ever gave up ownership without
struggle. The holding of government office is not itself power.
The power of ownership over the means of life is the day-by-day
power which works incessantly, buying brains, corrupting or confus-
ing governments, persistently re-establishing itself against any “will
of the people.” Anyone who has experienced in a single American
city, as I have in Seattle, the intensity and variety of methods which
the capitalists use to fight so mild a thing as public ownership of
street-cars, anyone who knows what they did to the war-time govern-
ment-owned railroads, or today to the Tennessee Valley Corporation,
must realize the resources possessed by capitalism against anything
so mild as a popular vote. When they can no longer prevent a munic-
ipally owned utility, they corrupt it. They make it inefficient through
graft or sabotage; they subordinate it to control by private banks.
Meantime they continue to play through all the arts of high-paid prop-
aganda on the minds of the electors, who waver and turn to other
cures.
“The change from capitalism to communism is a whole epoch of
history,” said Lenin. “Till it is ended, the exploiters inevitably have
the hope of restoration.” Even after capitalists are overthrown on a
local scale or on the scale of a single country, they remain for some
time “stronger than the workers who overthrew them.” Their strength
lies in their foreign connections with international capital, in the
money and movable property which they still possess, in their organ-
izing and administrative ability, their superior education, their
knowledge of all the secrets of administration, their superiority in the
art of war. They are furthermore helped by the force of habit and tra-
ditional ways of thinking which remain even in the minds of workers
and especially in large sections of the middle classes for a considera-
ble period after capitalism is overthrown. 3
Marxists therefore hold that the working class must maintain a
dictatorial power for an “entire epoch of history” both to prevent at-
tempts at restoration of capitalism and to re-educate the entire
3
Quoted and condensed from Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution
and the Renegade Kautsky, Chap. 3.
33
THIS SOVIET WORLD
population in habits suited to socially owned production. “You will
have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and inter-
national wars,” said Marx to the workers, “not only to change exter-
nal conditions, but in order to change yourselves and to make your-
selves fit for the exercise of political power.” 4
The tactics used by the dictatorship in the Soviet Union were
conditioned by the economic development of the land and its inter-
national relations. In the first years they were affected by foreign in-
tervention and civil war; in later, years they conformed to and created
the rapid economic advance and increasing international prestige of
the country. Four chief epochs may be noted: the period of Workers’
Control in the first year of the Revolution; War Communism for the
two and a half years of intervention; the New Economic Policy from
1921 to 1928; and the final offensive against capitalism ushered in by
the first Five-Year Plan.
The new workers’ state inherited a country economically broken
by the strain of World War. Peasants were seizing lands of landlords;
factories had closed and their workers were hungry; banking was de-
moralized by the rapid fall of the currency; soldiers without food or
munitions were fleeing home from the front. “Peace, land and bread,”
was the cry of the country. The capitalists could not satisfy it and this
brought the Bolsheviks to power. They at once gave land to the peas-
ants, repudiated all state debts, nationalized banks and transport and
created a state monopoly of foreign trade. Industry was left in private
hands, but “workers’ control” committees were established from the
workers in each industry. These examined all accounts, studied the
source of raw materials and fought to keep up production against the
attempt of private capitalists to close down the factories as unprofit-
able. Internal trade remained private; on the second day of the Revo-
lution a proclamation urged traders to continue business as usual. A
policy however was announced for the gradual combining of facto-
ries into large-scale trusts, which should then be nationalized, and for
the gradual socializing of internal trade through co-operatives.
These policies—the normal reaction of a workers’ government
wishing to rebuild the economic life of a ruined country with as little
upheaval and disruption as possible, for the sake not of profit but of
human welfare—united around the government the overwhelming
majority of the population, including both workers and peasants.
4
Marx, Revelations on the Communist Trial in Cologne, 1851.
34
THE DICTATORSHIP
Opposition came from landlords, capitalists and the upper strata of
engineers, civil servants and professional people; but if these used
violence or sabotage against the new policy, they were suppressed by
governing organizations composed of great masses of the common
people.
A vivid example of dictatorship in this period is given by Lenin,
in a contrast drawn between dictatorship by property and dictatorship
by workers. “The state has forcibly to evict a family from a house.
This is done time and again by the capitalist state and will be done by
our proletarian state.... The capitalist state evicts the workers’ family
which has lost its breadwinner and is unable to pay rent.” After de-
scribing the enforcement by a squad of police of the rights of property
against poor people, Lenin continues with the picture of the dispos-
session of a rich man by the workers’ state.
“Our detachment of workers’ militia consists, let us say, of fif-
teen people—two sailors, two soldiers, two class-conscious workers
(of whom only one, let us assume, is a member of our Party or a sym-
pathizer), one intellectual, and eight members of the toiling poor; at
least five are necessarily women, domestic servants, unskilled work-
ers, and so on. They come to the rich man’s house, inspect it, and find
that there are five rooms occupied by two men and two women. “This
winter, citizens, you must confine yourselves to two rooms and place
two rooms at the disposal of two families that are now living in cel-
lars. For the time being, until with the help of engineers (you are an
engineer, I think?) we build good dwellings for all, you will have to
put yourselves to inconvenience. Your telephone will serve ten fam-
ilies. This will save about a hundred hours’ work in running to the
stores and so forth. The student citizen in our detachment will write
out two copies of the text of this state order and you will be kind
enough to give us a signed declaration that you undertake to abide by
it faithfully.” 5 This is a vivid example of a dictatorship over property
enforced by great masses of the common people.
Under pressure of foreign intervention and civil war, the limited
nationalization of “Workers’ Control” merged into the period of
“War Communism.” Attacking armies separated Soviet Russia for
two and a half years from her chief food and fuel bases. The granary
of the Ukraine, the cotton of Turkestan, the coal of the Donetz, the
5
Lenin, Will the Bolsheviks Retain Power? published October,
1917.
35
THIS SOVIET WORLD
oil of Baku, the mines of the Urals were in enemy hands. The dicta-
torship adopted “War Communism,” the tactics of a besieged land. It
requisitioned all grain and necessities of life, and rationed them under
direct government control; it seized all factories and used the broken
machines of one as spares to repair the scarcely less broken machines
of another. This policy alienated large sections of the peasantry by
crop requisition. It ruined industry more thoroughly than any modern
industry has ever been ruined, being an efficient device for using up
the last ounce of raw material and the last spare bolt. But the policy
of “War Communism” enabled an already exhausted land to carry on
for two and a half more years against the attacking armies of the
world.
Soviet power survived. With the coming of peace Lenin at once
introduced the New Economic Policy, an attempt to build up the
country’s economic life as rapidly as possible by a “two-sided pro-
cess of the development of capitalism and the development of social-
ism.” 6 Grain requisitions were replaced by limited taxes with permis-
sion for free trade. Private capitalists were allowed to enter both trade
and industry, the state retaining the “commanding heights” of land,
finance, heavy industry, transport, and foreign trade. This policy
brought the peasant, small enterpriser and professional classes back
to loyalty—a wavering loyalty, for if some had been won to social-
ism, others now hoped to grow personally rich. Capitalist nations
abroad echoed the belief that Russia was swinging back to the ancient
order. But the Soviet workers, led by the Communists, gave time on
holidays to great collective drives for repairing factories, making
street-cars and new equipment as donations to their country. During
“War Communism” they had worked for rations; now they worked
for low but steadily increasing wages, building up out of their own
sacrifice the first socialist accumulation which should give them eco-
nomic power for the final offensive against capitalism. Thus industry
which in 1921 produced one-fifth the pre-war standard was driven by
fivefold increase in 1928 to “normalcy.”
Russia in 1928 was only half socialist. Most of industry was so-
cially owned but farming was in the hands of peasant proprietors, the
stronger of whom were petty capitalists, struggling not only to sur-
vive but to grow. Class strife went on between these emerging rural
capitalists and the impoverished farmhands. Youth was leaving the
6
36
THE DICTATORSHIP
farms and flooding the cities with unemployment. Discussion had
racked the Communist Party as to whether socialism could be built
in a single country, particularly a backward peasant land. Following
the analysis of Stalin, the Party decided that it could be done by
swiftly creating modern heavy industry and simultaneously industri-
alizing farming. The Soviet Union plunged into that now famous
struggle known as the Five-Year Plan, and emerged with large-scale
industry and the largest scale farming in the world, both of them so-
cially owned.
It was a bitter fight, carried through against the upper sections of
the peasantry and part of the middle class. An epidemic of sabotage
broke out in the industries among the higher engineering staff, who
had consciously or half-consciously expected to advance towards
privilege and wealth. Men high in the canning industry put broken
glass, animal hair and fish tails into food destined for workers. A
township veterinary who hated collectivization inoculated six thou-
sand horses with plague. An irrigation engineer tried to discourage
the policy of settling yellow-skinned nomads on the soil by using an-
tiquated surveys which he knew would not deliver the water. These
cases and thousands more are taken from confessions of men who
were later repentant. The dictatorship fought back, shooting the most
serious offenders, imprisoning and exiling others. The energy of loyal
workers and engineers carried through the Five-Year Plan. Its success
won over many earlier saboteurs so that by 1931 Stalin was able to
announce that the intellectuals were turning towards the Soviet Gov-
ernment, and should be met by a policy of co-operation.7
The most spectacular act of ruthlessness which occurred in those
years was the exiling of several hundred thousand kulaks—rural
property-owners who lived by trade, money-lending or by exploiting
small mills, threshers, and hired labor—from farm homes in Euro-
pean Russia and the Ukraine to Siberia or the northern woods. The
usual assumption outside the Soviet Union is that this exiling oc-
curred through arbitrary action by a mystically omnipotent G.P.U.
That organization did of course organize the deportation and final
place of settlement in labor camps or on new land. But the listing of
kulaks who “impede our farming by force and violence” was done by
village meetings of poor peasants and farmhands who were feverishly
7
Speech delivered at Conference of Leaders of Industry, June 23,
1931.
37
THIS SOVIET WORLD
and not too efficiently organizing collectively owned farms with gov-
ernment loans of machinery and credits. The meetings I personally
attended were as seriously judicial as a court trial in America. One by
one there came before the people the “best families,” who had
grabbed the best lands, exploited labor by owning the tools of pro-
duction as best families normally and historically do, and who were
fighting the rise of the collective farm—which had the right to take
the best lands away from them—by every means up to arson, cattle-
killing and murder. Obviously the situation offered chances for
wreaking private grudges. Obviously the occasional agitator from the
city was unconcerned with kulak “rights.” The meeting of farmhands
and poor peasants discussed each case in turn, questioned the kulaks,
allowed most of them to remain but asked the government to deport
some as “trouble-makers.”
It was a harsh, bitter and by no means bloodless conflict, but not
one peculiar to Russia. I was reminded of it again in 1933 by the cot-
ton-pickers’ strike in San Joaquin Valley of California. California lo-
cal authorities deported pickets who interfered with the farming of
ranchers; Soviet authorities deported kulaks who interfered with the
collectively owned farming of the poor. In both cases central govern-
ments sent commissions to guard against the worst excesses. But the
“property” which could count on government support was in Califor-
nia that of the wealthy rancher; in the USSR it was the collective
property of the poor.
Through all these struggles of eighteen years in the Soviet Union
the Marxists had guessed right—one class held firm. Steadily the in-
dustrial workers supported and fought for their socialist state. Theirs
was the dictatorship, the ownership, the rule. Led by Communist
analysis, they made alliances with other parts of the population—
with the great mass of the people to overthrow big landlords and cap-
italists and later with the poorer peasants to overthrow the richer. The
middle classes changed back and forth in their loyalty; but the work-
ers held through.
Today the chief fight of the dictatorship is against corruption and
bureaucracy. The workers, in other words, struggle with their own
government, not to overthrow it but to improve it by weeding out
inefficiency. A vivid example of this was given by a letter from three
railway-workers published in Pravda. They told how the workers of
their station, hearing that Sizran station was considered a model,
chose three delegates to go and study it. “The election fell on us.
38
THE DICTATORSHIP
However, to our great regret, we convinced ourselves that Sizran is
no model.” The letter proceeds to expose fictitious bookkeeping
which compelled engineers to list repeated repairs as new in order to
protect the reputation of the repair shops, and other false entries
which hid inefficiencies. They noted employees who had been de-
moted for calling too open attention to troubles. They did a thorough
and technically accurate job of debunking Sizran, a station on a dif-
ferent railroad to which they had gone in search of good methods.
Imagine workers from a station on the Erie giving this attention to
study, analyze and reform a station on the Pennsylvania! Imagine
their securing ready access to all the records of an alien line! Imagine
this as routine news in a metropolitan daily paper, leading to check-
up and reprimands of railway superintendents for inaccuracy in re-
porting their work!
This is today’s routine in the Soviet Union. Scores of letters like
this appear daily in the press throughout the land. Some of them are
ironic, some statistical, some outraged. But all of them express men
who know themselves owners, and through ownership dictators of
the land in which they live.
39
CHAPTER IV:
THE GROWING DEMOCRACY
“Soviet Power is a million times more democratic than
the most democratic bourgeois republic.”
Lenin
Step by step the Soviet Union fights forward towards that com-
plete democracy which has never yet existed anywhere on earth. For
democracy is neither absolute nor static. It varies in type, extent and
intensity. It may grow or diminish. In the Soviet Union it grows.
What are the functions of government in the Soviet Union? How
wide is the participation of the people? How much of their life can
they control? Whence come the ideas that are followed in the land?
What initiative and creative energy is expressed? Who rises to high
posts and by what means? All these questions must be considered in
determining what kind of democracy exists.
Let us take first the formal facts of voting, though this is far from
exhausting in the Soviet citizen’s participation in government. The
Soviet Union has today the largest body of voters anywhere in the
world. Moreover a larger percentage of them come out to elections
than in any other country; they give more time to their elections and
decide a greater variety of questions.
All “toilers” over the age of eighteen may elect and be elected;
the word is interpreted to include students, housewives, old people
who have passed the age of work as well as those more formally
known as workers. Voting thus extends to a younger age than is com-
mon elsewhere, and there are no disqualifications for transient resi-
dents, paupers, migratory workers, soldiers, sailors, such as exist in
most countries; even non-citizens may vote if they work in a Soviet
industry. There are no restrictions for sex, creed or color, nor even
for illiteracy. The only significant restriction relates to “exploiting
elements,” but the steady decrease of privately owned enterprises has
cut the disfranchised to 2.5 per cent of the population in the 1934
elections; by 1937 it is expected that all will have the vote. In the
1934 elections 91,000,000 people were entitled to vote, and of these
77,000,000, or 85 per cent, actually participated, which is double the
proportion found in most countries.
Let us take a motion picture of a Soviet election. In December
1934 the Moscow streets were thronged with processions, continuing
40
for several days. Special street-cars, gay with banners, carried people
to meetings. Men and women gathered in side streets, formed in line
with merry chatter and went with bands and flags to the building se-
cured for their election meeting.
All over the country for more than a month elections had been
going on in far-away factories and villages. Soviet elections do not
take place on a single day but are determined by local convenience
within a period of several weeks prior to the convening of an All-
Union Congress. Localities choose dates which will enable their out-
going governments to finish their business, and give the incoming
governments time to prepare demands for the All-Union Congress.
These candidates and demands had been subjects of much discussion.
But the attitude to the elections expressed itself rather in action than
in talk. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were joining collective
farms “to break with the past and enter the elections as collective
farmers.” Factory workers were energetically completing new mod-
els of locomotives, turbines, inventions, to send as presents to the
coming congress. There were, in fact, so many of these presents that
the sending of most of them was ordered confined to reports.
In wooded mountains of Siberia the dark-skinned Oirots an-
nounced proudly: “We have abandoned the wandering life of wig-
wams; we have raised our literacy rate from 6 to 89 per cent; we enter
these elections as educated farmers, settled on our own soil.” From
the Turkoman Republic they were matching this claim with another:
“Our once suppressed women have increased the proportion who turn
out to elections from 2.5 per cent to 73 per cent in these eight years.”
The historic city of Kiev was boasting: “Half our elected deputies are
women. We lead the Soviet Union in the proportion of women elected
to office; this means that we lead the world.” But their boast was
matched by the textile city Tver, now renamed Kalinin, which has
fully as many.
Young Pioneers were reciting poems to urge on their elders:
That we may build more firmly,
Advancing more confidently to victory,
We choose to our Soviets firm, tested fighters,
Close-welded, the best of our best.
On the southern Kazak steppe an aged yellow-skinned herdsman,
dying, sent a last message to his son who had been village president
and who was now elected delegate to the All-Union Congress: “All
41
THIS SOVIET WORLD
the years of my life were dark with toil and hunger. But I lived to see
the new day. Take care of the Soviet power, my son; it is our power,
our happiness.”
Along the Arctic coast the autumn herring run began a few days
before the date set for local elections. The fishermen went to sea.
Some of the election commissioners held elections in the absence of
a considerable number of voters and were roundly denounced for it
by Pravda, central organ of the Communist Party. “A gross violation
of Soviet democracy! What right have commissioners to hold elec-
tions when workers cannot come? We are glad to note that many of
the ﬁshermen had a better sense of their obligations. Many crews held
their own meetings and sent deputies ashore with their instructions.
But they should not have been forced to this irregularity. The proper
course was found by those commissioners who held regular election
meetings on the boats and thus combined enthusiastic work for a
good herring catch with the collective decision of what to do with it.”
All of this, taken together and multiplied by millions, makes
plain the essence of the Soviet election. It is an act of joint owners
deciding what to do with their production, how to build a good life
on the proceeds. The task of officials is not to enforce some precedent
but to find ways of adjusting election machinery to voters. “The hot-
test elections we ever had,” they bragged of the 1934 elections, proud
of the increasing popular participation in government, which is relied
on to check bureaucracy and make state enterprises efficient.
The basic unit for government is the working institution, the fac-
tory or office; in rural districts it is the village. Deputies are chosen
to the local government, the village or city soviet. 1 The basis of rep-
resentation and size of the local soviet depends on the size of the
community: Gulin village, whose election I visited, has one deputy
for every forty voters and a village soviet of thirteen members. Mos-
cow city elects one deputy for fifteen hundred voters and has more
than two thousand members in its city soviet. These local deputies
meet soon after election to form the new government. They divide
among themselves the various departments, which range from the
five sections of Gulin village—farming, livestock, culture, roads and
finance—to twenty-eight sections, each with over forty deputies,
through which Moscow city does business. Besides the more com-
monly known functions, these local governments own and manage
1
The word “soviet” means “council.” City soviet is city council.
42
local industry, which in a large city like Moscow includes many mu-
nicipally owned factories, the street-cars, subway, lights, water, and
housing. They receive revenue from public properties, but their budg-
ets may also be augmented by taxes and state loans. Some cities ac-
tually bring in revenue—it will be remembered that they get all the
house rents; others need help from the higher governments.
On these local governments is built up the whole structure of
central government. 2 Local soviets elect deputies to a congress of so-
viets; the township congress elects to the province, and so on up to
the All-Union Congress of Soviets, the highest body in the country.
Each of these congresses elects its executive committee and the heads
of its various departments; for the highest government these are the
great Commissariats of heavy and light industry, finance, health, and
so forth. Local departments are both horizontally and vertically con-
trolled, by local governments and by the corresponding department
in the higher government. Thus a township health department is re-
sponsible both to the township executive committee and to the pro-
vincial health department. If orders clash, if a local soviet takes the
hospital for some other use, its health department appeals to the pro-
vincial health department which brings pressure on the local soviet
through the provincial government in the interests of public health.
The greater part of this intricate yet unified system of govern-
ment is carried on by unpaid work. Elected deputies, whether to vil-
lage or the All-Union Congress, receive no salaries of office. They
draw their usual wages from the factory or institution which sends
them and in which they keep on working, except insofar as they may
be “released from production” for the needs of government; this var-
ies with the importance of the work they do. There is thus no hard
and fast line between the citizen and the man in office. Deputies are
a link between the collective life of the factory and the larger collec-
tive life of the country. Any worker may approach them conveniently
any day in their place of work to ask about the fulfillment of instruc-
tions given by the voters. They may be recalled by their constituents
at any time simply through a factory meeting.
If voters thus constantly call on their deputies, the deputies are
equally entitled to call on the voters for help in carrying out the
2
A new constitution is in preparation which will change many de-
tails, but it will hardly change the principle of close connection be-
tween local, state and central bodies in one system.
43
THIS SOVIET WORLD
election program they have voted. A deputy is no substitute for the
people, no ruler; he is the representative who organizes them in their
own tasks of voluntary government work. Millions of citizens take
active part in the sections of the government—housing commissions,
school commissions, taxing commissions, labor inspection and so on.
Those who develop a taste for running public affairs will be chosen
at some election for more continuous and responsible work. Those
who specialize in some field, such as health, courts, housing, may be
sent on pay for some months or years of study and become full-time
civil servants in these departments.
The growth of democracy in the Soviet Union thus depends di-
rectly on the extent to which citizens can be interested in taking part
in operations of government. This interest is in part assured by the
fact that government is so clearly the direct organizing of all aspects
of the citizen’s life. In a million matters the citizens give direct in-
structions during the election. They order the increase of school-
houses or sound films, the improvement in the quality of bread, the
increase of retail stores, the transport of goods in big cities by night;
they demand the breaking-up of housing trusts into smaller co-oper-
atives, or the introduction of a less specialized education in the
schools. All of these were part of some 48,000 instructions issued
directly by Moscow voters to their city government, which reported
within three months on the fulfillment of many hundred demands and
on the disposition made of all. When instructions clash, as when some
citizens want an odorous industrial plant removed from their neigh-
borhood while others want it to stay, commissions are formed which
try to satisfy not merely the majority, but as nearly as possible every-
body, not through a showing of hands in opposition, but through var-
ious adjustments to the suggestions made by all. Capitalist ownership
of private property limits the citizen’s participation in government to
an approval or rejection expressed in conflict—of general policies.
Socialist ownership causes government policies to grow directly and
naturally from the correlated demands of millions of people, all of
whom are interested in improving the country’s wealth.
The interest of citizens in government is also consciously pro-
moted by the Communist Party which stirs up wide competitions be-
tween factories, villages, cities, as to the extent and energy of their
participation. An industrial plant where less than 95 per cent of the
workers come to the election hangs its head in shame as an institution
lacking in civic consciousness. Candidates never make speeches or
44
election promises; this would be considered highly indelicate. But the
voters pride themselves on picking deputies whose previous work has
been notable and who therefore give promise of being widely useful.
They select a fellow worker, not an outside politician. Students
choose a student, auto-workers choose an auto-worker, the Moscow
Grand Opera elects a famous singer. The future task of these deputies
is to extend on a wider scale the type of work for which they are al-
ready known. The opera singer will organize connections between
the Moscow Grand Opera and the villages, sending out artists to help
rural singing classes. The printer on the Peasants’ Gazette who mech-
anized its mailing list of two million subscribers was elected to the
Moscow city soviet with instructions to help mechanize all the news-
papers of the city. A textile worker who helps organize a good day
nursery in her factory will be elected by her fellow workers to help
improve the city’s day nurseries, and will choose to work on the
health section of the local government.
The operation of Soviet democracy is thus so intimate, continu-
ous and organic that the observer fresh from capitalist politics hardly
recognizes it as government. Where is the debate? Who determines
general policies? Can the people throw out the upper officials? Can
they throw out Stalin? The Communist Party? The Soviet voter, when
asked these last questions, replies in a puzzled way: “Why should we
want to?” The questioner thinks he has been evaded. But all elections
presuppose an existing economic system, which voting is powerless
to change. Voters in America cannot change Rockefeller’s method of
operating oil companies for private profit. Similarly no Soviet elec-
tion raises the issue of returning public properties to private hands:
this was settled by the Revolution, and forms the foundation beneath
the whole government.
Barring that question, there is nothing whatever that Soviet vot-
ers cannot change. They actually do change thousands of officials at
every election, and as their acquaintance with the wider problems of
the country grows, the forms of democracy are being widened to in-
clude direct control of the highest officials. Stalin’s chief post is not
in the government, but as general secretary of the Communist Party,
which would certainly remove him if his policy and actions should
ever discredit him with the people; at present he is by far the most
popular man in the country. To throw out the Communist Party bod-
ily would be to throw out all the leading and organizing elements in
all factories, farms, schools and enterprises; it could clearly be done
45
THIS SOVIET WORLD
only by upheaval leading to chaos. But the citizens are constantly at
work changing the very membership of the Party, any member of
which may be “cleaned out” on protest of his non-Party associates
that he is too dictatorial, too rough towards workers, or merely not a
fit leader. 3
Several elections which I attended will show concretely how so-
viet democracy functions. Four election meetings were held simulta-
neously in different hamlets of Gulin village, which had no assembly
hall big enough for all. One of these meetings threw out the Party
candidate, Borisov, because they felt that he neglected their instruc-
tions; they elected a non-Party woman who had displayed energy in
improving the village and were praised by the election commis-
sioner—himself a Party member—for having discovered good gov-
ernment timber which the Party had neglected. The central meeting
in Gulin expected 235 voters; 227 appeared and were duly checked
off by name at the door. There ensued personal discussion of every
one of nine candidates, of whom seven were chosen. Mihailov “did
good work on the roads.” The most enthusiasm developed over Men-
shina, a woman who “does everything assigned her energetically;
checks farm property, tests seeds, collects state loans.” Dr. Sharkova,
head of the Mothers’ Consultation, was pushed by the women: “We
need a sanitary expert to clean up our village.” The incoming soviet
was instructed to “increase harvest yield within two years to thirty
bushels per acre, to organize a stud farm, get electricity and radio for
every home, organize adult education courses, football and skiing
teams, and satisfy a score of other needs.
In the Moscow Architectural Institute where 1,500 men and
women are qualifying to become architects, every class in the school
held three sessions on the elections, discussing first the shortcomings
of the outgoing government, then instructions to the new government,
and lastly candidates. The fourteen hundred instructions sent in by
the students included more and better draughting pencils, evening
schools in drawing, more money for students’ excursions to see new
architecture, more exhibitions of foreign architecture, fruit trees to
beautify Moscow, artists to be held responsible for designs of state-
made textiles, township architects to be appointed to advise the new
construction on farms. Similarly the 1,500 voters of the Peasants’
Gazette turned in 1,500 proposals, which were carefully worked over
3
This is discussed in Chaps. 1 and 5.
46
by committees, published in a special newspaper issued for the vot-
ers, and given to their deputy to put through with their help. These
included adequate textbooks for all pupils in the schools, an increase
in the number of children’s theaters, strengthening the fight against
hooliganism, closing the sale of liquor on Suchevski Street opposite
school Twenty-two—the latter being the common form of the fight
against alcohol.
Instructions thus adopted become the program of incoming gov-
ernments, which they use as a weapon to get what they require from
provincial and central authorities. Some of the demands can be put
through by the electors themselves with the help of their deputy; oth-
ers need central assistance. When the All-Union Congress meets it
knows how many villages are demanding air-dromes, sound films,
textbooks, electrification. These demands, correlated by engineers
and economists, form the content for future development of the life
of the country in the direction its citizens choose. But the citizens
themselves expect to work to accomplish it. If villagers ask for a
seven-room school or a landing field for farm airplanes, they expect
deputies to investigate possible fields, make recommendations, get
the needed machines from some central authority; but they them-
selves expect to haul the timber or pay the men who haul it with labor
days credited against the joint harvest.
Democracy in Soviet life is not confined to government. Trade
unions organize many aspects of workers’ life; collective farms and
co-operatives organize production and distribution for the farmers.
Their organization is separate from that of government; it is also dem-
ocratically controlled. In the past two years democracy has become
more intimate and decentralized in both these directions. The admin-
istration of social insurance, which in 1936 will have eight billion
rubles for hospitals, day nurseries, diet kitchens, invalid benefits, old-
age pensions and the like, was two years ago given over to the trade
unions, as was also the inspection of factories and of workers’ food
stores. Similarly the whole organization of collective farming, in-
cluding the relation between fields operated jointly and plots individ-
ually worked by farm members, is today in the hands of the farmers
themselves, decided by the general meeting at which not less than
two-thirds are present. Thus democracy grows more flexible, the in-
termediate apparatus is lessened, and the various functions of gov-
ernment are handled by those whom they most directly concern.
47
THIS SOVIET WORLD
The extension of social ownership into the farms and the growth
in the intelligence of the entire electorate has made possible a third
extension of democracy. A new constitution is being drafted by the
collective labor of thousands of people in all parts of the land. Econ-
omists and historians are studying the constitutions of all countries
and considering every detail of democratic technique; their reports
will be further discussed in every factory and farm of the country be-
fore the constitution takes final form. It is known, however, that it
will include direct election, secret ballot, and equal representation for
all citizens, replacing the inequality which hitherto obtained between
city workers and peasants. It is also expected to abolish all disfran-
chised classes, since by 1937 social ownership will be universal and
all citizens will belong to one toiling-owning class.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” was said once of the
democracy of capitalist society whereby small private owners pro-
tected their rights. But socialism demands more than vigilance. Eter-
nally co-operating human energy is the price of socialism and of that
complete democracy which operates jointly owned means of produc-
tion for the expanding life of all. This is the final stage towards which
the present Soviet democracy struggles and grows.
48
CHAPTER V:
THE UNION OF NATIONS
“No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.”
Lenin
“Soviet power is to toiling Kazaks like rain in the desert.”
Letter of Kazak peasant to Peasants’ Gazette.
When the All-Union Congress of Soviets meets in Moscow, it
presents a vivid and colorful assembly. Flat-faced Tartars from old
Kazan, yellow-skinned Uzbeks and Tajiks from the hills and irrigated
valleys in the heart of Asia, slant-eyed Tunguz from the Far Northeast
over against Alaska, mix with many score nationalities from the Cau-
casus to pass the laws which shall govern all these peoples. Many of
them are dark-skinned peoples, formerly exploited by the Russians,
but equal citizens now under the Soviets. It is as if Congress in Wash-
ington contained a score of southern Negroes, half a dozen Mexican
farmers from Arizona and California, scattered representatives of the
surviving tribes of Indians, an Eskimo, a Hawaiian, an Indian from
Porto Rico, a mixed-blood from Panama, all legislating on equal
terms with auto-workers from Detroit, steel-workers and miners from
the Pittsburgh valley, and American farmers from the great west, A
British governing assembly similarly formed would show an over-
whelming majority from the dark-skinned peoples of Asia and Af-
rica.
Tsarist Russia was known as the “prison of nations.” No imperi-
alist power has a history of more brutal racial and national oppres-
sion. Nation after nation of the proud mountaineers in the Caucasus
was literally driven into the Black Sea by the conquering Russians.
The Tartars of Crimea perished by tens of thousands in their flight
across the Black Sea to Turkey. The tribes of the great plains and the
primitive peoples of the Arctic were debauched in the time-honored
imperialist way by the vodka of their conqueror and subdued in soul
by the emissaries of his religion, that they might be more easily
robbed of lands and furs. Even more bitter, perhaps, than the robbery
was the insulting “superiority of the conquerors.” “They cheated us
and afterwards despised us,” said a flashing-eyed woman Tunguz
from the Arctic. "Eh, but it was bad in the old days; all my life I hated
Russians.”
The country which fell to the Soviet power to organize was
49
THIS SOVIET WORLD
seething with national hates, incited and nurtured by the oppression
of centuries. Tsarist imperialism, like all imperialisms, not only op-
pressed directly, but also set one nation against another. Turks mas-
sacred Armenians, Armenians massacred Turks, Ukrainian peasants,
stirred up by Russian gendarmes, murdered Jews. The Soviet Gov-
ernment faced in all its intensity that “national problem" which made
Austria and the Balkans for generations the tinder box of Europe and
has added bitterness to the great conflicts of the modern world.
The Communist policy on nationality was developed over a pe-
riod of decades by applying the Marxian analysis to the history of
nations. Stalin, a Georgian, member of a proud nation which had for
centuries been decimated by the wars of its greater neighbors in that
hotbed of national hates, the Caucasus, was one of the ablest theore-
ticians. We find him in the years before the World War developing
the exact definition of “nation” as a “historically evolved, stable com-
munity of language, territory, economic life, and psychological
make-up manifested in a community of culture," 1 and defending this
conception against those who viewed a nation as a matter of "race,”
the precursors of today’s fascists, Capitalism both combines nations
and drives them asunder. It knits together peoples of earth by the rail-
road, the steamboat, the rapid mail, the newspaper. It creates the ma-
terial basis for the brotherhood of all nations but the methods of its
expansion brutally thwart that hope. It advances into the backward
lands of earth by plunder and annexation. The “civilized” people rob
the "uncivilized" ones and finally war among themselves for the right
to rob. Imperialism steadily increases both the economic unity of the
earth, and the national hates which tear the unity asunder.
The national policy adopted on the basis of the analysis by the
Social-Democratic Party of Russia in the years before the war repu-
diated every form of compulsion of nationalities, recognized the right
of each people to determine its destiny, and stated that a durable un-
ion of peoples could be accomplished only by voluntary consent and
was possible only through the overthrow of capitalism. The first prac-
tical test of this principle came in May of 1917, when the Kerensky
government of Russia refused the demand of Finland to secede. Lenin
declared at the conference of the Social-Democratic Party on May
12: “We say to the Russian people: don’t dare rape Finland; no nation
can be free that oppresses other nations.” Stalin expressed the belief
1
Marxism and the National Question, 1913.
50
that, “now after the overthrow of tsardom nine-tenths of the peoples
will not desire secession,” but that those who did wish to, must of
course be allowed to secede, while a system of regional economy
should be set up for the peoples which decided to remain.
When the October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks into
power, they at once renounced all rights to Finland, evacuated the
Russian troops from northern Persia and canceled the claims of the
Russian imperialists in Mongolia and China. The breaking up of tsar-
ist Russia gave an opportunity to the imperialist powers of the world
to fish in troubled waters. England, France, and Germany backed the
aspirations of various border nationalities with funds. Yet it was the
Bolsheviks and not those imperialist backers who first recognized
Latvia, Esthonia, Lithuania as separate states. The Soviets, however,
did not only recognize nations; they recognized the right of the work-
ers and peasants to revolt. The Ukrainian workers and peasants over-
threw the Ukrainian bourgeois Rada; the poor peasants of Turkestan
threw out their so-called autonomous government; the “national
councils” of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan were supported by
foreign money but not by their own masses. Peasants’ and workers’
uprisings in these countries were assisted by the Bolsheviks as part
of the October Revolution. The newly rising governments of workers
and peasants were given military and economic aid drawn into a so-
cialist “federation.”
This federation at first was loosely organized. Regional auton-
omy expressed itself in a variety of flexible forms. Some of these
local governments retained their own foreign offices; others issued
their own money. Each nationality received the amount of freedom
which its workers and peasants demanded. The Communists relied
on the pressure of mutual common interests to bring and hold these
peoples together, once capitalist exploitation, the source of their bit-
terness, was removed. Meanwhile, they paved the way by abolishing
all the special privileges of the “colonizers,” i.e., those Russian and
Cossack groups which had received special lands and privileges from
the tsar in return for their services in suppressing their neighbors. The
Communists also pushed the policy of recruiting local governments
from local people, established schools, courts, administrations, in the
native languages, and rapidly trained from formerly illiterate and sup-
pressed natives the future teachers and leaders of their people.
The fruits of this policy were seen on December 30, 1922, when,
on the initiative of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, later joined by
51
THIS SOVIET WORLD
the Ukraine and White Russia, the amalgamation of all the Soviet
Republics into a union took place at the very time when the states if
post-war Europe were increasingly dividing into hostile camps. Thus
was formed the Soviet Union, a union of nations. The name “Rus-
sian" was dropped from the official title of the country which is
known as the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, of which the Rus-
sian republic is only one. 2 Nearly half of its 170 million people be-
long to nationalities other than Russian. The number of these nation-
alities is variously given; the census of December, 1926, showed 182
different nationalities with 149 languages. They are people of differ-
ent races and colors. They range from the reindeer keeping Eskimo
of the north, to the Kazak sheep herder of southern deserts, from the
flax growers of White Russian swamps through the many-nationed
Volga wheat lands to the cotton producers of Central Asia.
The classic statement of the contrast between the national policy
of capitalism and that of socialism was given in the preamble to the
Constitution of the new union: “There in the camp of capitalism we
have national animosity and inequality, colonial slavery and chauvin-
ism, national oppression and pogroms, imperialist brutalities and
wars.
“Here, in the camp of socialism, we have mutual confidence and
peace, national freedom and equality, the peaceful co-existence and
fraternal collaboration of peoples.
"The attempts made by the capitalist world during the course of
decades to solve the problem of nationalities by combining the free
development of peoples with the system of exploitation of man by
man have proved fruitless.... The bourgeoisie has proved itself utterly
incapable of bringing about the collaboration of peoples.
“Only in the camp of the Soviets... has it proved possible to abol-
ish national oppression root and branch, to create an atmosphere of
mutual confidence, and to lay the foundations for the fraternal col-
laboration of peoples.”
The preamble mentioned, as reasons for a closer union, the
2
There are seven constituent republics, the Russian, the Ukrain-
ian, the White Russian, the Transcaucasian, the Uzbek, the Turkoman,
the Tajik. Many of these, and especially the Russian, which is by far the
largest, contain smaller autonomous republics within them. The number
of nations represented by delegates in the All-Union Council of Nation-
alities is forty-two.
52
economic needs of the war-ruined land, the need of a joint foreign
and military policy in the midst of encircling foes, and said that “the
very structure of Soviet government, which is internationalist in its
class character, impels the toiling masses of the Soviet republics to
unite into one socialist family.” It concluded with a guarantee of
equal status for all people, the right of secession for each republic and
the right of admission for “all Soviet Republics, whether now existing
or hereafter to arise."
The Bolsheviks did not rest content with the formal act of union.
The Central Congress, elected on the basis of population, which put
the Russian nationality in a dominant position, was supplemented by
a “council of nationalities." It is one of the two chambers of the leg-
islative and administrative government of the country, no legislation
involving national rights may be passed without it. Besides this legal
status of equality, a policy was adopted assisting the more backward
nationalities in their economic and cultural development, which alone
could give them actual equality with the more developed nationali-
ties. New industrial centers were established, modern methods of ag-
riculture and irrigation introduced, peasant and handicraft co-opera-
tives organized. Every national republic was encouraged in the fullest
development of a culture, “national in form, socialist in content."
The meaning of that phrase, ''national in form and socialist in
content,” was vividly expressed for me by a Jew of Birobidjan, the
autonomous Jewish territory rising in the Soviet Far East. “We dis-
tinguish between nationalism and nationality,” he said. "If we should
claim that the Jews are a chosen people, the best and brainiest in the
world, that’s nationalism. It’s dangerous nonsense, the kind of mur-
derous nonsense that leads Turks to attack Armenians or white Amer-
icans to lynch Negroes. The assertion of the right of one culture to
dominate another, or even to pre-eminence—that is the capitalist
wish to exploit, and it leads to war. We have no right to exploit or to
claim pre-eminence; but we have the same rights as others to develop
our own characteristic culture in peace. The free development of all
kinds of national culture adds to the variety and significance of the
world. Our policy in this matter is part of the Soviet respect for human
individuality—which again is different from individualism. We have
no respect for the individuals who hold back history; but all those
individuals who help push history forward—workers, writers, all pro-
ductive elements—must be helped to fullest expression. Hence the
Soviet Union has respect for even the smallest national culture, since
53
THIS SOVIET WORLD
each of them enriches all human culture and each of them is unique.
Eventually, we shall no doubt all merge in one nation and one lan-
guage, but the road to it is not by suppression and impoverishment,
but by the fullest development of all variety.”
National prejudices still exist in the minds of some Russians, due
to their past privilege of superiority. National grudges still remain in
the minds of formerly suppressed peoples, who long learned to dis-
trust the Russians. These form the final problem. If they lead to even
minor conflicts based on nationality, they are firmly dealt with. Or-
dinary drunken brawls between Russians may be lightly handled as
misdemeanors, but let a brawl occur between a Russian and a Jew in
which national names are used in a way insulting to national dignity,
and this becomes a serious political offense. Usually, the remnants of
national antagonisms require no such drastic methods; they yield to
education. But the American workers who helped build the Stalin-
grad Tractor Plant will long remember the clash which Lewis and
Brown had with the Soviet courts after their fight with the Negro
Robinson, in the course of which they called him “damn low-down
nigger." The two white men went back to America, disgraced in So-
viet eyes by a serious political offense; the Negro remained and is
now a member of the Moscow City Government.
What has been the result of this national policy of the Com-
munists, applied to people in all stages of development from the no-
mads of the great plains to the proudly cultured Georgians? It has
welded the strength of scores of formerly subject peoples around the
Revolution and enabled the Russian workers to beat back their ene-
mies. It has abolished age-long hates with unbelievable speed. It has
released tremendous energy of devotion which gave a great economic
and cultural impetus. It has dealt a mortal blow to that legend of “in-
ferior” and “superior" races into which capitalism divided the earth,
the former of which are the doomed objects of exploitation, while the
latter bear “the white man’s burden,”—the mission to exploit. Over
against this legend, exalted today by fascism into a religion, stands
the whole experience of the USSR. The liberated non-European na-
tions, once drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are no less
capable than Europeans of truly progressive civilization.
New centers of industry have risen m the national republics more
rapidly than in the rest of the Soviet Union, as part of the Communist
policy to ‘equalize the backward districts with the center.’ During the
first Five-Year Plan, when the industrial output of the entire country
54
doubled, it increased 3.5 times in the national republics. The progress
was most rapid in the most backward; the great plains of Kazakstan
saw a 4.5 times increase in industrial output, which the Central Asian
Republics attained a sixfold growth. Based on these economic
achievements was the growth in education and culture. Seventy na-
tionalities adopted the Latin alphabet during the first Five-Year Plan.
Many nationalities had no alphabet at all before the Revolution; they
received their written language as a gift from the Soviet power.
Among all the nations spectacular increases had been made in liter-
acy, in the growth of books and in the arts. The first All-Union The-
atrical Olympiad held some years ago showed that many nations have
developed a truly national theater, which in some cases has already
reached the level of high art.
An important chapter in Soviet national policy is the story of how
ten million nomads are being transformed into stable fanners. The
Kirghiz, the Kalmyk, the Gypsy, the reindeer herders of the Far North
and the mountain people of Central Asia and the Caucasus—tribes
which for centuries led a semi-barbaric existence under the threefold
oppression of the tsars’ officials, their native chieftains and the med-
icine men—are already developing collective farms. Seven million
of those who roamed the plains and hills and tundra have already set-
tled, it is planned to settle the remaining three million by the end of
the second Five-Year Plan. The Soviet Government gave them land
for tilling and pasture, irrigated their fields; provided money and
building materials for barns and blacksmith shops, homes and bath-
houses, for the purchase of livestock and seed. Soviet farm experts
taught them methods of farm cultivation.
Especially picturesque are the peoples of the Arctic tundra.
Twenty-six nations have been listed in this vast region, the most pop-
ulous of which, that of the Tunguz, numbers only 60,000. Before the
Revolution none of these peoples had an alphabet, a written language
or a school. Today most of them have received a written language,
and printed books. Several hundred schools in the native tongue have
pushed their way along the Arctic coast, some traveling with the rein-
deer herds of the nomads, others building dormitories where children
spend the winter.
"Once they looked upon us as wild beasts," wrote a member of
the Nentsi people, reindeer herders of the North. "There are still
Nentsi living who were exhibited in the tsarist time in zoological gar-
dens of Russia and foreign lands. They called us 'Samoyeds’
55
THIS SOVIET WORLD
(cannibals) and the tsar's government legalized this as our shameful
name—but now we begin to sing new songs. For our tundra is new.
An experimental farm center has risen beyond the Arctic circle; we
have raised vegetables! On the Pechora meadows has appeared the
first tractor. When the first radio came, how it frightened us Nentsi.
But now every day the number of literate people grows.”
During the past year many of the national republics celebrated
their fifteenth anniversary. Briefly they flamed across the columns of
the Soviet press—Daghestan with its thirty languages; Kazakstan,
largest and most arid of all the republics; northern Karelia of forests
and marble mountains, “where every fisherman has a lake of his
own"; far-south Armenia, centuries old in civilization and suffering;
each of them told its achievements under Soviet power.
To Alma-Ata, new capital of the yellow-skinned, once nomad,
Kazaks, who, as late as 1919 were believed by one of their own na-
tionalist leaders to be “doomed to a slow death," came a congress of
748 scientific and cultural workers to report on the country's educa-
tional growth. Before the Revolution there were 13,000 children in
the schools of this vast area; now there are half a million. A national
theater, an opera, a symphony orchestra, seventeen institutions of
higher learning are counted among the cultural achievements. They
arise on the industrial basis of Karaganda copper, the Turksib rail-
road, the great mines at Ridder, the Emba-Orsk oil pipeline.
On the borders of Afghanistan the youngest Soviet republic, the
Tajiks, celebrated ten years of existence. Soviet power has meant to
them 100 million rubles’ worth of irrigation, the erection of great tex-
tile plants, the sinking of mines, the creation of a network of technical
schools. Scientific excursions have mapped their high Pamirs, find-
ing gold and precious minerals on the slopes. Tens of thousands of
tractors, plows, harrows and modern farm implements have come to
the cotton fields where once the camel pulled the wooden plow. On
the site of an ancient village has grown the new capital, Stalinabad,
an industrial center. Airplanes land in mountain villages whose in-
habitants before the Revolution never saw a wheeled cart. Soviet
power found only half of one per cent of the Tajiks literate; today
nine-tenths of the children attend public school.
One by one the list unrolls of 182 nationalities, which have cre-
ated industries, modern farming, schools and a national culture under
Soviet power. Nor are the nationalities mere recipients of blessings
from the more advanced Russians. Creative energy pours
56
increasingly from them all to enrich their common Soviet life. Some
of the smaller nationalities have already made records which place
them in the vanguard of the Soviet Union. Armenia, once ravaged by
national massacres, us today a model republic of the Transcaucasus,
celebrated for its thriving industries. Kabardino-Balkaria, a district
of two Mohammedan peoples on the northern slopes of the Caucasus,
has created the most famous collective farms of the USSR. It devel-
oped the idea of “socialist farm cities” designed by architects, which
is spreading through the whole Soviet Union, and the policy of mak-
ing older farmers inspectors of quality, which brought happiness and
self-respect to hundreds of thousands of aged men in the Soviet land.
The devotion of suppressed peoples, both within and without its
borders, is the prize which the Soviet national policy has won. “So-
viet power is to toiling Kazaks like rain in the desert,” is a proverb of
the Kazak old men quoted in the Soviet press by Kliumov, eighteen-
year-old president of a Kazak village. “The Party of Lenin and Stalin
has resurrected peoples from the dead, peoples who were less than
dust. Now these peoples have themselves conquered the earth and
have come to report their victory to their leader," said the Tajik poet
Lahuti, arriving in Moscow with a delegation of triumphant record-
making cotton-pickers. “The past is a stairway of years carpeted with
pain and beggary," said Arith Shakirov, one of the cotton-pickers.
“The Uzbeks feared to go along the road of the Arabs, the Tajiks car-
ried sticks when they walked through the Uzbek quarter. Hardly an-
yone could read. The past is gone. On its ruins we build a bright new
life. Woe unto anyone who tries to take it away from us.”
When Turkoman horsemen made a spectacular run from their
capital, Ashkhabad, to Moscow, in August, 1935, the cities through
which they passed on their 4,300-kilometer way were decorated to
meet them. “From beyond the boundless expanse of our great father-
land, across the hot sands of the Kara-Kum, the Ust-Urta steppes and
the limitless collective fields," thus ran their greeting. They spoke of
the “invincible brotherhood of nations replacing the prison of na-
tions—tsarist Russia—which has gone into the past never to return.”
One of the group, Chary Kary, had been in Moscow before. “But
then," he said, “it was the city of my enemy and every person in it
seemed my personal foe. Now Moscow is the heart of my great fa-
therland and every nationality in it is my nation."
"The friendship between the peoples of the USSR is a great and
signal victory," said Stalin to one of those many delegations of
57
THIS SOVIET WORLD
Central Asiatic workers who stormed the Kremlin with their exploits
in late 1935. “As long as this friendship exists the people of our coun-
try shall be free and invincible." But the influence of the Soviet na-
tional policy goes far beyond its borders. More than any other Soviet
policy it has undermined the imperialisms of the world.
58
CHAPTER VI
THE TECHNIQUE OF LEADERSHIP
“Among the masses of people, we are but drops in the
ocean, and we will be able to govern only when we properly
express that which the people appreciate. Without this the
Communist Party will not lead the proletariat, the proletariat
will not take the lead of the masses, and the whole machine
will fall to pieces.”
Lenin at Eleventh Party Congress
If by some cataclysm of war a section of the Soviet Union should
be cut off from Moscow and compelled for a time to exist alone, gov-
ernment in these isolated areas would continue unchanged except in-
sofar as it was crushed by invading armies. A picturesque example of
this was given me by a Yakut woman, who boasted that her district
of forests and tundra a thousand miles north of the Trans-Siberian
Railway had had “Soviet Power” continuously since 1917. The years
of civil war that raged along the railway had never penetrated so far
north. To my query how this backward bit of territory knew what
policies to follow she replied that a few Bolshevik exiles had re-
mained among them and they got occasional news from Moscow over
the Great Northern Telegraph which traversed their region. Many
other sections of the country were isolated during the Civil War for
considerable periods, yet continued to follow a common policy.
For eighteen years the authority of the Communist Party in the
life of the Soviet Union has grown steadily stronger; it has kept power
now for a considerably longer time than any Party in any other coun-
try in the world. The accumulating discontents which in other lands
throw out governments do not seem to worry it. The Party itself or-
ganizes discontent for the sake of progress. In spite of exposures of
graft, inefficiency, bureaucracy, and stupid excesses—indeed
through these very exposures—the hold of the Communist Party in-
creases.
To manage the state affairs of the most extensive republic on
earth—covering one-sixth of the world’s land surface—might be con-
sidered enough for a political party. But to run the state is only one of
the Communists’ tasks. For their plan of remaking the world the appa-
ratus of government is insufficient. Great popular organizations like
trade unions, co-operatives, physical culture societies and scores of
59
THIS SOVIET WORLD
voluntary social agencies must also move in a common, yet flexible
plan. But the action of these organizations must be voluntary, arousing
the initiative of their members, or their energy and life will die.
How then does the Communist Party lead the country? By the
energy and discipline of its members, their contact with all organiza-
tions in the land, and by the authority of repeated success. In all gov-
ernment bodies and voluntary organizations the Communists belong-
ing to them act together to induce them to follow the “Party Line.”
This line, however, while firm, is not rigid; Party policy itself grows
from the discussions and active struggles of its members, each of
whom is in touch with some aspect of the country’s life. The mem-
bers serve as a living conscious bridge between the Party and all the
other organizations. They explain to the Party the desires of the peo-
ple with whom they are associated, and explain to the people the pol-
icies developed by the Party in regard to their demands.
The primary Party organizations are set up in factories, offices,
state farms, red army units, universities, villages, in any institution
which has three Party members or more. In a typical iron and steel
plant in the Ukraine, for instance, where 1,600 persons—workers, en-
gineers, office staff—work in the rolling mill, 55 are Party members,
85 belong to the Young Communist League and 30 are enrolled as
“sympathizers,” an organized group which is studying Communism
with the presumable intent to join the Party. One Communist is paid
a salary by the Party as full-time organizer; the others are scattered in
ordinary jobs through all the working gangs of the factory. Each of
them has his assigned “Party work.” Some are editors of the sixteen
“wall newspapers” which are posted in every working gang of the
mill, filled with news and discussions of the gang’s successes and
failures. Others read regular newspapers aloud during lunch hour and
conduct discussions on current events. Others stir up “socialist com-
petition” between different working gangs so that skill and produc-
tion may increase. Others are active in the trade union or help pro-
mote sports. Every Communist, Young Communist and sympathizer
does some unpaid public work of this kind; those who had none or
failed to do it would be dropped from the Party as “passive.”
Some years ago I visited an open meeting of a Party organization
in a factory near Moscow. Not only the Communists but many non-
members had gathered to hear the semi-annual report of the Party
secretary of the plant. As he sat down a storm of questions arose.
“Why have we no report about the Young Pioneers?... Has the Party
60
looked into the question of our workers’ club building and observed
that we have no summer playground? Why haven’t we a sanitary or-
ganization? Why haven’t we a ‘Friends of Aviation’? Does the co-
operative housing organization report regularly to the Party, and if
so, when are we going to get the houses?” From the secretary’s an-
swers it became clear that this factory had many voluntary organiza-
tions among its members: a “Friends for Children,” an “International
Labor Defense,” an organization to “Increase Production,” a “Society
for Contacts with Rural Districts,” and many more. All of these had
been launched with Party co-operation, usually first as small commit-
tees, and had then grown into larger organizations by the influx of
people who were not Communists. The number of organizations that
would be started would depend partly on popular demand and partly
on the capacity of Party members to stimulate and organize interest.
It would be difficult for an organization to start without Party sanc-
tion; it would not be precisely forbidden, but a score of difficulties
would discourage it. On the other hand, if a popular demand arose for
any new kind of organization—from a drama club to an Anti-Tuber-
culosis Society—some Party members would take part in it either on
their own initiative or by request of the workers or the Party, and
would be expected by everyone to keep the organization in touch with
any Party policies which affected it.
There were several ironic remarks and cat-calls in the meeting
during a report by the plant’s director, who was clearly not popular
with the workers. I happened to know that the Party secretary had
recently recommended to the higher organizations that the director be
removed to some other plant where he could profit by the mistakes
he had made in this one and start without the accumulated friction.
The manager also knew that his transfer had been recommended, and
quite possibly concurred. At the meeting, however, the Party secre-
tary said no word of this recommendation but put himself in the un-
enviable position of explaining the manager’s actions to a group
which was almost howling him down. Both he and the manager were
disciplined Communists, who did not wish to increase dissension but
to work together for the good of the plant.
The proportion of Communists in rural districts is very much less
than in factories, as might be expected from the fact that the factory
workers were the most active elements in the Revolution and also
more literate than the peasants. A typical Party organization in a vil-
lage of two hundred families—I take here the collective farm
61
THIS SOVIET WORLD
“Postishev” in the Ukraine—has five Party members, ten “sympa-
thizers,” and twenty-seven members of the Young Communist
League. The latter organization is nearly always much larger than the
Party in the villages, since it is the youth on the farms which is pro-
gressive.
Of the five Party members in this village, one of them,
Povlichenko, is organizer, giving full time to Party work. He was
born in the village, worked some years in a city factory, and was sent
back in 1931 on Party order to help organize collectivization. From
comments of peasant women I judge he was high-handed in that pe-
riod and stirred up some antagonisms which he has not lived down.
He is, however, a very energetic person, a once half-starved, half-
educated farmhand with a passion for schooling which the Revolu-
tion enabled him to realize. He runs the Party school where members
study Party history and current politics, teaches an elementary course
in Leninism and the Soviet Constitution for the sympathizers, and
organizes talks and discussions on special events, such as Party con-
gresses, or new decrees affecting the farms. At the time of my visit
these remote villagers were studying, more or less assiduously, the
reports of Dimitroff and others at the recent congress of the Com-
munist International. Povlichenko also takes active part in pushing
the local school, the village club, the motion pictures, the local news-
paper and all forms of education and culture.
The second Communist is a local peasant, president of the col-
lective farm since 1931, but now leaving for a three-year course in an
agricultural school. His salary comes from the farm, not from the
Party. The third is an electrician sent to this village because “we
needed a Communist in every field brigade.” When he came he was
entirely ignorant of farming, but his craft made him useful in a village
just beginning to import electricity from the great power plant on the
Dnieper. Recently the Party planned to transfer him to township
work, but the local farmers checked this by electing him president of
the village. “The Party,” he said, “always considers the desires of the
masses.” He may or may not have helped organize those desires. For
Party work he is attached to the third field brigade and is also adviser
of the Young Communist League. The fourth party member is a
woman who earns her living as saleswoman in the co-operative store,
and whose Party assignment is to help the village women organize a
day nursery, a first-aid society and get vacation on pay from the col-
lective farm at time of childbirth. This right is automatic in state-
62
owned enterprises, but not all the farmers’ organizations give it yet.
The fifth Party member is manager of the local co-operative store,
who, since he makes twenty or more trips to the city every month, is
used by the Party for city contacts rather than for regular village
work.
It is plain that these five Party members have their hands on the
whole life of the village. Besides their general work, the first three
each keep in touch with a different field brigade of forty or more
workers whom they are expected to know personally. “I must know
what they want, their economic conditions and working abilities. This
is called political watchfulness. If we did not know this, it would be
bad for us. We could not possibly lead the masses,” said Povlichenko.
The Party organization of this village is open to criticism from
strict Party principles in that its members hold too many local gov-
ernment jobs. They are supposed to keep a better balance between
office-holders and members “in production,” and to stimulate and
train non-Party people for some of the government work. Hogging
the offices by Party members is considered a bad sign; it means that
they have not stirred up wide enough interest. The Postishev organi-
zation is trying to do this through their work with the ten sympathiz-
ers and the Young Communists, each of whom has also Party work
of a less responsible character. They read and discuss the newspapers
in the field brigades, organize traveling libraries, chess games, foot-
ball teams, initiate competitions in reaping and threshing, help start
the musical or dramatic circle, or assist in the “cottage laboratory”
where sixty farmers are studying scientific methods.
These primary Party organizations are correlated by the town-
ship1 organization which in turn comes under the larger regions up to
the All-Union organization. The lower bodies elect the higher but are
in turn subordinate to their decisions; the system is known as “dem-
ocratic centralism.” The highest power within each organization is
vested in its general meeting or congress which elects a standing
committee to serve between sessions. The highest power of the entire
Party is the All-Union Party Congress and between its sessions the
Central Committee. The Central Committee organizes a political bu-
reau for the day-by-day determination of political policy, an organi-
zational bureau for general guidance of organizational work, and a
1
Rayon, a district about equivalent to a township.
63
THIS SOVIET WORLD
secretariat. Stalin is general secretary of the Party, but there are sev-
eral other secretaries who share this work.
Some years ago I saw a district congress of the Communist Party
in action in the city of Red Lugansk of the Donetz Basin, the valley
of coal and steel. Four or five hundred men and women gathered for
a two-day session—miners and mine managers, employees and head
of the locomotive works, some teachers and health department offi-
cials—Communists all, sent as delegates from the local Party organ-
izations of the factories and mines of the district. The problems for
discussion were the policy for heavy industry and for minor nation-
alities. They had been announced by the Central Committee as the
immediate pressing problems; “theses” on them had been published
by the leading authorities and every local Party organization had dis-
cussed them for weeks.
The delegates wasted no time in preliminaries and compliments.
Man after man spoke hotly and strongly on the concrete difficulties
of heavy industry in the mines and factories they knew. They pre-
pared reports based on the industry of their district and elected dele-
gates to carry their hottest criticisms to the regional Party Congress
in the coal center, Bakhmut, where delegates were again chosen to
the All-Ukrainian Party Congress. Then all over the Soviet Union the
special trains began running. From Kharkov, from Tiflis, from
Minsk, from Central Asia and Siberia, they bore the chosen delegates
to Moscow where two weeks’ discussion in the All-Union Party Con-
gress hammered out the “Party Line.” Thence the results rolled back
again to the Donetz, the Caucasus, the Far East to Vladivostok, borne
by returning delegates whose first duty was to explain and carry
through the decisions through trade unions, cooperatives, farms, gov-
ernment, whatever organizations they influenced.
This is the most widely organized thinking ever attempted in his-
tory. It is actually the energetic thinking of three million men and
women, gathering up the ideas of tens of millions of their neighbors,
which bears upon the All-Union Party Congress and affects its deci-
sions. The ideas are worked over by the ablest economists of the
Party, familiar with the experience of the revolutionary movement in
all countries. The decisions reached are explained to the country
through every channel of organized publicity; they are discussed and
studied in every field brigade and factory and put into action simul-
taneously throughout the land. For the test of organized thinking is
organized action.
64
The Communists do not merely reflect the will of the masses, as
a ballot might, or a showing of hands. They do not merely analyze
what the “majority want” and hand it out. It is their job to lead, to
organize the people’s will. No group of unurged soldiers would ever
vote to storm a trench. Certainly the workers of the Soviet Union
would not have voted, unurged, unled, for the hardships of the Five-
Year Plan of rapid industrialization taken out of their own food and
comforts, for the painful speed of farm collectivization without ade-
quate machines or organizers. But when the Communist Party ana-
lyzed, urged and demanded, showing the world situation and the need
of making the USSR well prepared industrially and for defense,
showing the enemy classes which must be abolished to attain the goal
of a socialist state, they were able to find, organize and create, deep
in the heart of the masses, a will that carried through. Without that
will in tens of millions, the three million could have done little. “To
bring about a revolution, a leading revolutionary minority is re-
quired,” Stalin told H. G. Wells. “But the most talented, devoted and
energetic minority would be helpless if it did not rely upon the at least
passive support of millions.”2
As an example of the interrelation of Party, government and vol-
untary workers in action, let me take the “mobilization” of automo-
biles and mechanics in the spring of 1931 to save flax sowing in Mos-
cow province. Collective farming came that year to the province in a
great drive of organization and propaganda backed by hundreds of
new tractors, which were being used chiefly to increase the area of
flax. In the first week of sowing, telegrams from the newly organized
tractor stations poured into Moscow, announcing that there was a
“break.” Tractors all over the province stood in the fields, not mov-
ing, for causes yet to be analyzed.
Who moves in such a case? The Moscow Committee of the Party
moves. Sorting over in its office the reports of all Moscow’s daily
emergencies, it decides that the break in flax is serious and calls for
a “mobilization” of mechanics.
The call goes out to Party organizations in a hundred shops and
factories. It is announced by trade-union shop committees and factory
newspapers. Not a single mechanic is compelled to answer, but any
mechanic willing to give a day or two for tractor repair to help the
sowing will be helped by foreman and fellow workers to arrange his
2
H. G. Wells’ Interview with Joseph Stalin, July 23, 1934.
65
THIS SOVIET WORLD
job. He may work at this sanctioned public task without forfeiting
wages, while others fill in the gap in his regular work. What is the
motive? The fun of participating in saving the sowing, of helping the
country, of living a varied, useful life. Automobiles also are “mobi-
lized” to carry the mechanics to the farms, and those who lend ma-
chines for such public work may hope for a cut in automobile taxes.
I volunteered for a two-day trip.
One hundred and fifty miles north of Moscow we came to the
tractor station to which we were assigned. Of thirty-three new tractors
from Putiloff Works, eleven could not move out of the railway sta-
tion. The rest were breaking down in the fields, under the hands of
worried peasant boys and girls who had seen their first machine one
month before. All night our volunteer mechanics repaired tractors.
All night the local tractor drivers stood up to watch in their eagerness
to learn. The following day I drove my car to Moscow with sleeping
mechanics in the seats. They had worked twenty hours on end in a
public emergency about which they would report next morning to
their interested fellow workers in Moscow factories. They had also
prepared a technical report charging the Putiloff tractor with certain
grave defects. It was printed within two days in the Industrial Gazette,
the organ of heavy industry, and led to a conference of industrial lead-
ers on improving the Putiloff tractor. Three weeks later the flax sow-
ing of Moscow province, which in early season threatened to lag at
50 per cent of plan, went over the top 108 per cent, the best flax rec-
ord in the Union.
“It was the work of the social organizations that saved us,” said
the Moscow Tractor Center. What were the organizations concerned?
The state, the Party, the trade unions, the automobile association had
all taken part. The state owned the Putiloff Works, financed the trac-
tor stations, and also owned, through the Commissariat of Heavy In-
dustry, the Industrial Gazette which exposed the defects. The trade
unions organized the volunteers and took care of their jobs during
absence. The automobile association organized autos. But the driving
will that saved the situation was the will of thousands of Moscow
workers organized and assigned to their tasks by the Moscow Com-
mittee of the Communist Party, of which most of the mechanics were
not even members.
Even on vacations Communists are supposed to be always
watchfully aware of their responsibility for organizing the life of the
country. I was slipping down the mighty Volga on a large passenger
66
steamer when I saw a sign asking members of the Party who might
be traveling to register with the secretary of the boat organization. I
learned that any Communist traveling on the boat was likely to be
drafted into speaking at a meeting on deck among the peasants, or at
a political school for Communists of the crew. Some of the city Com-
munists used the occasion to criticize hotly the boat Communists for
lack of attention to sanitation. The river Communists, mostly un-
trained sailors, thus got their first lesson in modern hygiene.
The ultimate destination towards which the Soviet ship of state
is steering was fixed by the Revolution. The rate of speed and the
daily and early course is charted by the Central Committee of the
Party to take advantage of varying winds and tides. Yet it is a course
which every active worker or farmer may take part in fixing. It arises
from the experience of three million Party members, each keeping in
touch with some section of the people, all of them interacting, dis-
cussing, comparing results. Communists of longest experience and
best records have the greatest authority; but, be it noted, they do not
call it “power.” “Power” resides in the will of the working masses;
“authority” is that prestige of character and insight which enables its
possessor to organize and release this power.
It is authority rather than power that Stalin possesses. Though his
standing is far higher than that of any man in the Soviet Union,
though he is cheered and quoted at all congresses as high authority,
men never speak of “Stalin’s will” or “Stalin’s power,” but of the
“Party Line” which Stalin reports but does not make. The Party Line
is accessible to all to study, to know and to help formulate. The great-
ness of the man is known by the range over which he can do this. “I
can plan with the workers of one plant for a year,” said a factory man-
ager to me. “Others much wiser than I, like the men in our Central
Committee, can plan with wider masses for years. Stalin in this is our
ablest. He sees the inter-relation of our path with world events, and
the order of each step, as a man sees the earth from the stratosphere.”
“The earth from the stratosphere”—the man who said this was
himself an aviation engineer. Men in the Soviet Union tend to see
Stalin in terms of their craft. Railway workers call him “locomotive
driver of the Revolution.” An economist said to me, speaking of the
leaders of Party and government in the Red Square on May-day: “Our
brains are there in the tribune.” Harvester-combine operators ad-
dressed Stalin as “friend and teacher”; managers of industry say in-
formally “the boss.” Yellow-skinned Kazaks of the desert on the
67
THIS SOVIET WORLD
fifteenth anniversary of their republic hailed him “great leader of toil-
ing humanity.”
Millions of simple folk in all callings have felt the direct impact
of Stalin’s analysis, giving a solution for the chief problem of their
lives. It was sometimes a way that was harsh to follow, but it was the
one clear path to the goal that the millions desired. There have been
statements by Stalin that ushered in great changes, as when he told
the agrarian Marxist conference that the time had come to “abolish
kulaks as a class.” Yet he only announced the time for a process
which every Marxist knew was on the program. His famous article
“Dizziness from Success” which called sudden halt on March 2,
1930, to widespread excesses of Communists in rural regions, was
regarded by foreign correspondents and peasants alike as an “order
from Stalin.” Stalin at once disclaimed any personal prestige there-
from accruing, stating in the press: “Some people think that the article
is the result of the personal initiative of Stalin. That of course is non-
sense. The Central Committee does not exist to permit personal initi-
ative of anybody in matters of this kind. It was a reconnaissance un-
dertaken by the Central Committee.”
Stalin does not rule personally. To a lifelong habit of collective
action he adds his personal genius, that of supreme analyst of situa-
tions, personalities, tendencies. He leads as supreme combiner of
many minds and wills, When Emil Ludwig asked him who really
made decisions, he answered: “Single persons cannot decide.... Ex-
perience of three revolutions has shown us that out of a hundred in-
dividual decisions which have not been tested and corrected collec-
tively, ninety are biased. The leadership of our Party in the Central
Committee, which directs all the Soviet and Communist organiza-
tions, consists of about seventy people. Among those seventy mem-
bers of our Central Committee there are to be found the best of our
industrial leaders, our cleverest specialists and the men who best un-
derstand every branch of our activities. It is in this Supreme Council
that the whole wisdom of our Party is concentrated. Each man is en-
titled to challenge his neighbor’s opinion or suggestion. Each man
may give the benefit of his own experience. If it were otherwise, if
individual decisions were admitted, there would be serious mistakes
in our work.” 3
3
Joseph Stalin’s Interview with Emil Ludwig, Dec. 13, 1931.
68
“The art of leadership is a serious matter,” said Stalin earlier, in
concluding his article “Dizziness from Success.” “One must not lag
behind a movement because to do so is to become isolated from the
masses. But one must not rush ahead, for this is to lose contact with
the masses.... Our Party is strong and invincible because, while lead-
ing a movement, it knows how to maintain and multiply its contacts
with the millions of the workers and peasant masses.” This may be
taken as Stalin’s analysis of leadership.
There are plenty of stupidities and violences in the Soviet Union,
yes-men and careerists, hardship and injustice, wastage of youth and
life. All man’s essential progress costs heavily in human suffering;
the Soviet Union has not escaped this law. What makes it endurable
is just this fact that it is caused not by behest of one man or even of
three million, but is part of the slow process—history will not call it
slow—whereby the tens of millions achieve the organized and con-
scious planning of their lives.
69
CHAPTER VII:
BUILDING THE NEW ECONOMY
“Either perish or overtake the advanced coun-
tries and surpass them.... This is how history has put
the question.”
Lenin
“Millions make the plan.”
Stalin
One of the most striking characteristics of Soviet life to a new
arrival is the passionate interest which citizens show in new indus-
tries, modern equipment, figures of carloadings, economic statistics
generally. The “romantic passion” of the Russians for machinery, the
visitor is apt to call it. He himself is long since bored by machinery
which has recently put him out of work; he finds it difficult to under-
stand this passion. He has come to see “the revolution,” to study the
characteristics of planned economy or the amazing change in human
concepts. He finds the revolutionary background taken for granted by
Soviet citizens; they want to show him factories.
The mood of the Soviet Union today is a mood of tremendous
struggle and incredible conquest in which individual values and prob-
lems pale before the brightness of one great problem whose solution
is told off by the ever-rising curve of production, the opening of steel
mills, the successful mastery of tractor plants, machine building
works, textile factories. It is a mood in which a newly literate servant
girl will hail the rain running into her leaky shoes if that rain means
harvest. Harvest somewhere far off on farms she never sees.
It is not surprising that economic facts have a vital interest for
Soviet citizens. The changes in the country’s economic life since the
Revolution have been stupendous and the results are felt in every per-
son’s daily living. Fifteen years ago when first I entered the Soviet
Union, the country was ravaged by famine and pestilence. Civil war
and foreign intervention had ruined farming, industry, transport.
Street-cars were not running in Moscow, street lights had long since
burned out without replacements, and two fuelless winters had so de-
stroyed the entire city’s plumbing that water pressure could not rise
above the second floors. In the best hospital of Samara, where I lay
ill in 1921 with typhus, there were but two clinical thermometers for
70
hundreds of patients. Thermometers, light bulbs, water pipes were
only a few of the million articles which long war and blockade kept
out of the Soviet Union and which could not be manufactured in the
few and backward factories of that vast agricultural land.
I have lived through fifteen years of incredibly rapid progress
which have almost wiped out all memory of the past. To dwellers in
the Soviet Union, the pre-war period seems already pre-historic, and
even 1921 seems a century ago. We have seen in these fifteen years
a more than ten-fold increase in industrial production; we have seen
a leap in farming from the sixteenth century into the twenty-first. We
have lived through a series of epochs sharply distinct from each other
in the regulations affecting our daily existence, but all these periods
have been characterized by one continuous fury of energetic en-
deavor.
The reasons for energetic endeavor were very plain to the people
of a land just emerging from foreign intervention and long blockade.
“War is implacable,” said Lenin. “It puts the question with merciless
sharpness. Either perish or overtake the advanced countries and sur-
pass them.... Either full steam ahead or perish. This is how history
has put the question.”1 All Communists hold that in the present epoch
of worldwide imperialist expansion, it is the fate of economically
backward lands to be parceled out among the imperial nations. Soviet
Russia, unless she could make herself economically independent, had
to fear the fate which has overtaken China, “a military field of oper-
ations of foreign enemies and pecked at by everybody who cares to
do so.”2
If a rapid rate of economic development was necessary to pre-
serve even the independence of the country, it was still more neces-
sary as a prerequisite for a socialist commonwealth. The abundant
life for every toiler which socialism implies demands lavish produc-
tion; it cannot be attained in a country where the means of production
is the individually owned tool. The material conditions for a prosper-
ous socialist commonwealth exist today in America far more than
they ever existed in Russia. Sharing the wealth cannot take place until
there is really wealth to share. Socially owned wealth must be based
1
Quoted by Stalin in Report on Results of the First Five-Year
Plan.
2
Stalin, Results of the First Five-Year Flan.
71
THIS SOVIET WORLD
on socially owned factories. Russia had the problem of first building
the factories.
The rapid development of Soviet Russia’s economic wealth was
considered of crucial importance by Lenin, not only for the welfare
of the Russian people, but even for the future of world-wide social-
ism. Faced by the handicap of a backward, semi-feudal land, the
workers of the new revolutionary country had nonetheless one ad-
vantage—they were the joint owners of their country and all of its
productive wealth. They must prove to the world that even against
great difficulties this one advantage was decisive. Even in 1921 in the
depths of economic ruin Lenin said: “We are exercising our main in-
fluence on the international revolution by our economic policy. All
eyes are turned on the Soviet Russian republic.... If we solve this
problem, then we shall have won on an international scale for certain
and finally. That is why questions of economic construction assume
for us absolutely exceptional significance.” 3
There is a strange paradox in the economic development of the
Soviet Union which even foreign resident must notice. It is that every
slight achievement costs infinite effort, yet mighty achievements are
won in an incredibly short time. The penalty for Russia’s ancient
backwardness is to be found in an inefficiency which hampers every
movement—taking a tramway, buying a spool of thread, securing a
room. The difficulty of making even one blast furnace function
properly arouses frantic despair in the hearts of foreign specialists.
Yet in spite of these difficulties, the Soviet Union advances at a speed
unknown even to the most efficient capitalist countries.
This speed is due to the tremendous energy and initiative of mil-
lions of workers and farmers who are conscious owners now of their
own means of production, and who know that whatever they create
will be their own permanent gain. Their initiative is correlated by a
system of social planning. Thus arises that paradoxical combination
of individual inefficiency with tremendous social momentum. In the
most developed capitalist countries the efficiencies of ten million in-
dividuals pull in conflicting directions, giving small gain to society.
But each new achievement in the Soviet planned structure, attained
with such painful difficulty, reinforces the sum total of a million
gains.
3
May 28, 1921. All-Russian Conference of the Communist Party.
72
So obvious and so widely known are these benefits of social
planning in the Soviet Union that in recent years it has become a com-
mon dream in many countries to transfer painlessly the technique of
planning to the capitalist system, thus gaining the blessings of social-
ism without the harsh shock of revolution. In America especially,
where the highly developed processes of production could so obvi-
ously produce plenty for all, the illusion arises that somehow some
genius, some group of super-brains sitting in New York or in Wash-
ington, ought to be able to find the magic secret of putting those pro-
cesses to work. It is clear that an individual owner can plan his factory
and bring it to a relatively high state of efficiency as compared with
the days of handicraft. But can a government brain trust, however
brilliant, plan the disposal of Rockefeller’s oil wells, or the internal
organization of U. S. Steel? To ask this question is to answer it, if it
has not been answered already by the history of the NRA. Only own-
ers can plan an industry and dispose of its products. Under capitalism
plans of different owners clash.
For a socialist state, the simplest and most basic act of govern-
ment is the planning by worker-owners of the expansion and im-
provement of their jointly owned properties. Planning of this type
takes place not only in those central institutions of Moscow where
the foreign visitor habitually looks for it; it begins simultaneously at
the workers’ bench. Production meetings after work discuss shop
problems, what holds back production, how much it can be increased,
and by what means. These discussions are enlarged on a factory scale;
they go from the factory to the central offices of the industrial trusts.
Word comes back from the central organizations to the shop that the
country needs certain new machines. “Can we make them in our
plant?” Delegates from other industries which need the machines ar-
rive, explain, mutually consult. The inventions and suggestions of the
local workers thus widen into a nation’s plan.
The plan is, however, no mere blueprint to be fulfilled with ex-
actness. In the absolute and technical sense, one cannot speak of it as
a final “plan” at all. For although every factory, farm, school and
government institution checks its monthly and annual achievements
by its plan, yet the proudest boast is always to have overfulfilled it,
i.e., broken the plan by doing more than intended. The plan is there-
fore a standard of what is expected, a flag of challenge, but in no
sense a limit. There is no limit set in the Soviet Union. The aim is the
fullest development of the creative and productive powers of the
73
THIS SOVIET WORLD
country. The more production, the better. It will be seen at once how
impossible such a conception of planning becomes under capitalism.
It is based on the assumption that the worker-owners of the nation’s
production will be able to use everything that they care to make.
Socialism is not created in a day; it is not achieved by voting and
not even by seizure of power. Seizure of power is only a prerequisite.
Socialism involves the expansion and organization of the collectively
owned properties of the country and the building of a good life for
everyone thereon. This was the purpose of the October Revolution,
and in spite of all the accounts in the press of the world for eighteen
years about Soviet “changes of policy,” this purpose has never
changed in the slightest degree. The tactics used have, however, been
conditioned by both internal strength and international relations. Not
until 1921, when the new workers’ state had beaten back the armies
of intervention, was it possible to begin the building of the national
economy.
When the wars of invasion were over, industry had sunk to one-
fifth of pre-war, the production of cotton goods was only 7 per cent
of normal, iron and steel production had almost entirely ceased. Grain
reserves were exhausted, and the drought of 1921 led directly to the
greatest famine in Russian history. The New Economic Policy,
adopted at that time, encouraged all forms of economic development,
both those of capitalism and those of socialism. Meantime each year
the Communists led the working class of the country to concentrate
a desperate, organized struggle for victory in one important field after
another—victories often achieved at the expense of heavy temporary
sacrifices elsewhere.
The year 1922 saw the successful fight to establish a state bank
and a partially stable currency by high banking charges which ruth-
lessly exploited all the industries of the country. In 1923 emphasis
turned to the hard-pressed industries; for the first time since the rev-
olution, their balance sheets reached “self-support,” at the expense of
excessively high prices to the consumer. There followed a two years’
effort to cut prices; consumers’ co-operatives were widely developed
as a link between the state factories and the peasants. By 1926 co-
operative and government trade had increased threefold, successfully
passing the private middle-man who had previously controlled over
80 per cent of the rural turnover. During the next two years, emphasis
turned again to the restoration of industry, which reached by 1928 the
pre-war standard of production. The Soviet workers had rebuilt their
74
war-devastated country without the aid of the foreign credits which
flowed to help all the war-injured capitalist lands of Europe.
Yet this attainment was still of low standard, the pre-war produc-
tion of backward tsarist Russia. The ancient plants were working to
full capacity, but they could not begin to supply the needs of workers
and farmers who expected a higher standard of life than before the
Revolution. Each year the shortage of goods increased. Soviet indus-
try could not expand further except by extension of basic capital, new
buildings, more machines. Any threatening war would still find the
country lacking not only in commodities, but in that heavy industry
on which, in our modern mechanized world, is based the means of
production in peace and of defense in war.
Could Soviet Russia develop her industries rapidly and make
herself economically independent, or must she live, as tsarist Russia
did, by export of farm products, chancing her future on a hostile cap-
italist world? This problem set sharply the still more fundamental
problem whether socialism could be built in one country and if so, by
what means. Russia’s basic industry was state-owned but this indus-
try was insufficient to supply the people with goods. The primitive
farming system, made still more primitive by the splitting up of the
former landlords’ estates into small subsistence farms, which partly
consumed and partly wasted much formerly marketed grain, was in-
creasingly failing to feed the growing cities. In 1927 the Russian
farms attained the pre-war sown area of 280,000,000 acres and the
pre-war grain production of somewhat over 80,000,000 tons, but only
about half of the pre-war marketed grain was reaching the market.
Socialized industry was like an island in an ocean of medieval agri-
culture, whose tides constantly threatened to undermine the base of
socialism. “As long as we live in a small peasant country,” Lenin had
said, “there will be a more solid economic basis for capitalism than
for Communism.” 4
Farming must be brought out of the Middle Ages, modernized
and made efficient. For this two roads of development were possible.
The employing peasants, known as kulaks, who already owned the
best of the rural means of production, better plows, more horses, oc-
casional threshers, creameries and flour mills, might be allowed to
expand, to acquire tractors, combines, and the additional land which
these machines could cultivate, dispossessing more and more
4
Collected Works, Russian edition, XXVI, 46.
75
THIS SOVIET WORLD
landless peasants into the ranks of unemployed. Thus capitalist farm-
ing grew in other countries out of the feudal ages. The price of such
growth for Soviet Russia under the world conditions of the modern
era would be not only continued class war in rural districts, not only
swiftly increasing unemployment, not only the steady submergence
of all socialist industry by an expanding capitalism, but the complete
dependence of this young Russian capitalism on the financial oli-
garchs of the imperialist world. Such, at least, was the analysis made
by Stalin and the Communist Party in adopting in 1928 the now fa-
mous Five-Year Plan.
The Five-Year Plan proposed the rapid industrialization of the
country, more rapid than any industrialization known in the world
before. Heavy industry must first be built, the machines that make
machines for other industry and for farming. Lighter industries to
raise the standard of living must rapidly follow. Farming must be in-
dustrialized, not by strengthening a class of rural capitalists, but by
the voluntary uniting of all non-exploiting peasants, beginning with
the poorest, into collective groups farming their lands jointly with
machinery which the developing state industry would supply. This
was necessary to make farming modern, while giving the benefits of
its modernization to all farmers. It was necessary to make Russia so-
cialist, or even to preserve the half-socialism which the city workers
had begun. It was necessary for the independence of the country and
the very existence of the Soviet government. “We could not refrain,”
said Stalin, “from whipping up a country which was a hundred years
behind and which owing to its backwardness was faced with mortal
danger.” 5
In less than five years—for the Five-Year Plan was 96 per cent
completed in four and a quarter years from October 1928 through
December 1932—Stalin was able to announce that the former back-
ward agricultural Russia had become the second industrial country in
the world. The number employed in industry doubled from eleven
million to twenty-two million. The volume of industrial output also
doubled, from 15.7 billion rubles in 1928 to 34.3 billion in 1932 (cal-
culated at prices prevailing in 1926-7); it was three times the pre-war
production. At the same time a rapid industrialization of farming
combined some twenty million tiny, uneconomic subsistence farms
5
Report to Joint Plenum of Central Committee and Central Con-
trol Commission on Results of Five-Year Plan, 1933.
76
into 200,000 large collectively operated farms (by 1936 there were
250,000) based on machine power, scientific methods, division of la-
bor. The relative proportion of industrial to agricultural output grew
from 48 per cent at the beginning of the plan to 70 per cent at the end
of 1932, thus changing Russia from an agricultural to a predomi-
nantly industrial country.
“Formerly we did not have an iron and steel industry. Now we
have such an industry,” reported Stalin in January 1933 at the plenary
session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
“We did not have a tractor industry. Now we have one.
“We did not have an automobile industry. Now we have one.
“We did not have an engineering industry. Now we have one.
“We did not have a big and modern chemical industry. Now we
have one.
“We did not have a real solid industry for the production of mod-
ern farm machinery. Now we have one.
“We did not have an aviation industry. Now we have one.
“In production of electric power we were last in the list. Now we
are among the first in the list...
“And we have achieved these enormous new branches of indus-
try on a scale that makes the scale of European industry pale into
insignificance....” Such was only part of the success reported.
The Five-Year Plan cost heavily in dislocation of populations,
exhaustion of youth, disorganization of harvests and many privations
which attended the rationing of food and other commodities. But
never in history was such an advance gained at less cost and certainly
never so swiftly; and it was gained unprecedentedly without long-
term credits or foreign loans. Had the pace been less swift, had the
Communists postponed this breathless drive towards full industriali-
zation, they believe that Soviet Russia would already have had “not
pacts of non-aggression, but war.” “We would have been unarmed in
the midst of a capitalist environment which is armed with modern
technique.”6 The advance of Japan into Manchuria in 1931 and the
stated intention of Nazi Germany to expand into Soviet Ukraine are
warnings today which anyone may read of the fate which might al-
ready have overtaken the Soviet Union but for its swiftly rising eco-
nomic and military strength.
6
Stalin, Results of the First Five-Year Plan.
77
THIS SOVIET WORLD
With the conclusion of the first Five-Year Plan at the end of
1932, the Soviet Union plunged into the second. “We have already
laid the foundations of a socialist society... and all we have to do now
is to erect the edifice—a task which undoubtedly is easier,” said Sta-
lin at the Seventeenth Party Congress in early 1934. Industry and
trade were already 99 per cent socialized; three-fourths of agricultural
production was socialized. On the base thus established, the second
Five-Year Plan proposed to abolish “all private property in the means
of production, all class distinctions, all exploitation of man by man." 7
It proposed three times as much new construction as had been
achieved in the first Five-Year Plan. It proposed a doubling and tri-
pling of the standard of living through the final technical reconstruc-
tion of the whole national economy, the mastery of the most modern
methods and the most complex machines.
Already as the year 1936 opens, it is clear that the second Five-
Year Plan can be accomplished in less than five years. In the last
months of 1935 the total monthly output of heavy industry was al-
ready five times as high as in 1928. 8 Grain production has known
three record harvests surpassing all pre-collectivization years. Rapid
increase in the standard of living—more food, better clothing, ex-
panding art and science—is evident in all parts of the country. Cotton
pickers, sugar-beet growers, combined-harvester operators, timber
workers, machinists and miners are descending triumphantly on Mos-
cow to celebrate their achievements in production and win the plau-
dits of the land.
With hammer blows the figures of the 1935 achievements were
given by Molotov in January 1936 to the Central Executive Commit-
tee. A 20.4 per cent increase in industrial production over 1934, in
place of the 16 per cent planned; 23 per cent increase in freight car
loadings, 45 per cent in raw cotton, and 43 per cent in sugar beets. A
grain harvest running close to one hundred million tons, nearly ten
million above the highest previous harvest; horses up 5 per cent, cat-
tle 18 per cent, sheep and goats 25 per cent, hogs 38 per cent—all
increases of a single year.
The abolition of the card system of rationing, reported Grinko,
Commissar of Finance, had lifted the trade turnover from 60 to 80
7
Molotov, Tasks of the Second Five-Year Plan.
8
From 404.9 million rubles, average monthly output in 1928 to
2,180.6 million in Nov. 1935, stable rubles of 1926-7.
78
billion rubles; the profits from socialist economy were 7.8 billion ru-
bles; the planned state budget receipts had been exceeded and the
planned expenditures cut, leaving a surplus for expansion. But the
most important result of the year, said Molotov, was the Stakhanov
movement “which leads to an entire revolution in industry and
transport, and opens the first page of the great advance in socialist
productivity of labor.”
Then, with confidence born of experience, Valery Meshlauk,
head of the State Planning Commission, gave page after page of the
carefully plotted future. “The 1936 plan provides for a further and
accelerated upsurge of the whole national economy.” The increase
set for large-scale industry is 23 per cent, a 15-billion-ruble advance,
which is greater than the entire output of this industry in 1927. The
increase set for agriculture is 24 per cent, for commodity circulation
25, railway transport 19.8, capital construction 34.8. The financial
income of the population is to rise from 101 to 118 billion rubles, in
the face of steadily dropping prices. Social and cultural services in
the central and local budgets are to rise from 16 to 21 billion, the
social insurance alone from 6.7 to 8 billion. But darkly across this
shining future run figures of army expansion, from the 6.5 billion
planned to 8.2 billion actually spent in 1935 and 14.8 billion planned
for 1936. For beyond the borders of the triumphantly planned growth
of Soviet national economy lie the unpredictable dangers of the cha-
otic capitalist world.
If a map of the Soviet world could be drawn pictorially and
changed with each changing year, it would show countless new cities
arising on formerly barren land. It would show tens of millions of
tiny, uneconomic farm plots merging into a rhythm of horizon-touch-
ing fields. It would show thousands of geological expeditions pene-
trating uncharted wildernesses to discover and chart nationally
owned wealth. Following these there would flash across the scene
surveyors, engineers, new railroads, steel plants, textile mills. New
timber areas open, new coal and oil fields. If the map had a sound
film attachment one would hear the summons sent forth to young
Communists, to workers in the older, better-organized factories, de-
manding heroic personnel for the conquest of the wastes. The con-
quering march of man reaches northward to settle the Arctic and east-
ward to the wild coasts opposite Alaska. And a long green strip of a
million and a half acres of new forest-zone moves steadily southward
79
THIS SOVIET WORLD
across treeless plains of Kazakstan as a mighty screen to protect the
grain lands of South Russia from the desert winds of Asia.
For the past two years the Communist leaders have begun to
speak of socialism as “victorious”; its economic base is secure.
80
CHAPTER VIII:
THE STRUGGLE FOR PEACE
“The Soviet Union needs no foreign wars for trans-
forming the world.”
Manuilski at Congress of Communist International, 1935
A socialist country craves peace for development. As the life of
the Soviet people grows richer and more varied, the one great dread
which hangs above it is the threat of war. Soviet citizens are never
subject to the illusion—most diabolical of all the contradictions of
capitalism—that war may bring a feverish, blood-bought prosperity
and eliminate unemployment by turning men into the pursuits of de-
struction. The prosperity of socialism is based on harmonious corre-
lation of production and needs, and there is no unemployment. The
Soviet world sees war as naked destruction of life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness. Even the need of preparing for war it sees as a
waste of resources which might otherwise go in direct benefits to the
population.
In the eighteen years of its existence, the Soviet Union has been
widely recognized as a champion of peace. Even its foes admit that
the USSR does not want war for the present. Yet so confused is the
world’s thinking on the subject of war and peace—a confusion pro-
moted by diplomats and statesmen—so instinctive under capitalism
has become the assumption that every advancing nation must seek in
the end the test of war, that the Soviet hunger for peace is at times
confused either with cowardice or hypocrisy. Are they not perhaps
just watchfully waiting until their economic building is accom-
plished, and their strength is sure? What are they doing in the League
of Nations? Why are they increasing the Red Army? Do they not after
all want world revolution, which world war presumably might usher
in? How permanent is the Soviet wish for peace? And, even if sincere,
can it be effective?
There are two ways to approach this question: by the detailed
examination of Soviet history and by understanding the theory behind
every Soviet action. We shall take each of these methods in turn.
Behind all Soviet action is the Marxian theory that the cause of
war is neither permanent in human nature, as militarists claim, nor to
be found in lack of goodwill and in the character of rulers, as idealist
pacifists think. Marxists hold that war arises from class conflicts.
81
THIS SOVIET WORLD
Wars in the present period of world history, according to this analy-
sis, arise from the struggle of capitalism to survive and grow by in-
vestment in new markets. This leads the major nations to engage first
in small wars of colonial oppression, the forcing of their goods and
investment upon undeveloped peoples; these lead to wars between
the imperialist nations over the territories which both sides wish to
exploit. A socialist commonwealth where the people own jointly their
means of production and receive all the fruits of their toil, wants no
expanding market for surplus profits but only equal interchange of
goods which encourages peace.
A socialist world would thus attain peace permanently. But a sin-
gle socialist country lives in a world of foes. Can peace be attained
under these conditions? Not permanently and not with assurance, as
long as capitalism survives. The capitalist world system from its na-
ture breeds war. None the less, each specific war has specific causes,
which may be studied, analyzed, hampered and delayed. Peace may
be won from month to month and year to year by specific, well-con-
sidered actions, as an able engineer postpones collapse inherent in a
faulty structure by accurate balancing of specific strains and stresses.
This is an unstable peace, but better than none, for every curtailment
of war prevents human suffering.
In applying this analysis to our present period of history, Soviet
policy holds that the economic world today is one and indivisible,
and that every war must affect the whole world. No fair words of
politicians can keep a nation out of it; no policy of isolation can be a
guarantee. For behind all those words and beneath all such policies
the economic pressures inexorably act. Trade in goods of war begins
to flow towards even a minor conflict and steadily the traders are
drawn further in. Thus was America drawn into the World War by
increasing financial commitments, till at last an American ambassa-
dor cabled from London that a panic would shake the whole United
States unless American boys followed American dollars into the bat-
tles of Britain and France. When that stage occurs, no country keeps
out of it; the president who “kept us out of war” turns about and
marches in.
Even those nations which are technically neutral—the number of
these decreases with the seriousness of the war—are involved only
slightly less than those who battle. “Any war,” says Litvinoff,
“sooner or later, will bring distress to all countries, both to the com-
batants and the non-participants. We must never forget the lesson of
82
the World War, the consequences of which are felt to this day by
combatants and neutral countries alike. The impoverishment of the
whole world, the lowering of the living standards of all categories of
labor, both physical and mental, unemployment when no one is sure
of tomorrow, to say nothing of the collapse of cultural values, the
reversion of certain countries to medieval ideas—these are the con-
sequences of the World War which are clearly felt sixteen years after
its end.”
To maintain peace is therefore a permanent policy for the Soviet
Union. To maintain peace not only for itself but in the world. But
peace is not to be had by expecting it. It may not even be won by
refusing to fight. China refuses to fight, but gets no peace. Neither
preparedness nor unpreparedness is a safeguard; unarmed and well-
armed folk have alike gone to war. The only safeguard for even that
partial peace possible under capitalism is clear, sincere study of the
whole world situation, the choosing of a policy which prevents war
or lessens it, and the backing of that policy by all available power.
One must struggle for peace; it will not come otherwise. The methods
change as the situations change.
For eighteen years the Soviet Union has made this struggle.
“Peace, land and bread” was the slogan of the October Revolution.
The hunger for peace of a war-exhausted people brought the Bolshe-
viks to power. Their first official act on November 8, 1917, was to
propose “to all warring peoples and their governments to begin im-
mediate negotiations for a just and democratic peace.” As an attack
upon the war and to remove causes of future war, the new revolution-
ary government exposed and denounced the secret treaties by which
England, France and Russia had agreed to redivide the world. They
annulled oppressive tsarist treaties which had been enforced on Persia
and Turkey, and withdrew the Russian army from Persia.
The strength of the new government was not equal to its under-
standing. The Entente Powers—England, France and the United
States—denounced the Bolsheviks for daring to speak of peace and
left their former ally to the mercy of Germany. The German general
staff marched onward into a prostrate country offering the Bolsheviks
“robber terms.” The position of the Soviet state was further weakened
by Trotsky’s attempt to deal with advancing troops by clever phrases.
He refused to sign terms but protested in the formula: “Neither war
nor peace”—an appeal to the conscience of the German people. But
general staffs are not expected to have a conscience, and no Germans
83
THIS SOVIET WORLD
acted to save the Russians. The invading army marched far into the
Ukraine and took possession, giving in the end worse terms than
those originally offered. Trotsky’s appeal reached the consciences of
idealists; I recall that it thrilled me far out in Seattle. But it was
Ukrainian peasants and workers who suffered; idealist gestures are
dangerous tactics in war.
If Germany offered the Bolsheviks only a robbers’ peace, their
former allies gave them no peace at all. On April 5, 1918, the Japa-
nese landed in Vladivostok; following them the English, French and
American armies invaded Siberia. Allied armies landed on the Arctic
coast to seize the northern part of Russia; the British grabbed Baku,
oil capital of the south. Agents of the Entente incited and participated
in armed uprisings of Czechoslovak prisoners of war along the Volga,
leading them against the Bolshevik government. From east and west
and north and south the armies of all the major capitalist powers sur-
rounded the Revolution with an iron ring of war and blockade.
Across this iron ring the starving people of the new state sent
appeal after appeal to all those governments which refused to deal
with them but especially to President Wilson. Beginning on Novem-
ber 24, 1918, and repeating their query through Raymond Robins,
head of the American Red Cross in Russia, and also by direct cables
to the State Department, they offered to consider any peace terms
whatever: recognition of debts, concessions of territory, control of
mines and natural resources. Rather than deal in any way with Bol-
sheviks, Wilson and the Allied governments sitting in Versailles is-
sued a call to all the “organized groups in Russia” to meet at the Prin-
cipo Islands, a proposal which clearly presaged the dividing of Russia
into spheres of influence after the style of China. The Bolsheviks
were not invited, but they accepted; the other governments refused
and the scheme fell through. There followed the famous trip of Wil-
liam Christian Bullitt to Moscow in March 1919 as President Wil-
son’s semi-official representative. The hard-pressed Soviet govern-
ment was ready to agree to Bullitt’s proposal that it accept all finan-
cial obligations of all past Russian governments, and divide the terri-
tory of Russia among all those governments which should be in
armed possession when the treaty should be signed. But the treaty
was never signed; President Wilson refused to receive the report of
his own envoy. Bolsheviks were made to realize that no peace can be
had from the imperialist powers of earth by any backward nation. Not
84
even the price of slavish submission buys peace for China; nor could
the offer of territory and gold buy it for Russia.
Not by appeals for peace and not by offers of concessions, but by
the desperate struggle and courage of the Revolutionary Red Army
was peace and independence finally won. It was secured in slow
stages, first cessation of battle, then trade agreements, then, much
more slowly, diplomatic recognition. At each stage the strength of the
new state was again and again probed and tested by a capitalist world
unwilling to yield it the right to exist. Under such conditions the So-
viet government stabilized its borders by granting swift recognition
to the new Baltic States. Then, in the first international conference to
which it was admitted, in April 1922 in Genoa, the Soviet delegate
proposed a plan for strengthening general peace in Europe.
“The forces directed towards restoration of world economy will
be strangled as long as above Europe and above the world hangs the
threat of new wars,” said Chicherin. “The Russian delegation intends
to propose a general limitation of armaments and to support any prop-
osition which has the aim of lightening the burdens of militarism.”
The Soviet representatives again agreed to recognize debts of past
Russian governments but now demanded in return the right to com-
pensation for the destruction caused to Russia by unprovoked inter-
vention. Failing to get response to either proposal, Soviet Russia
signed with Germany the famous Rapallo agreement, whereby both
nations canceled the debts of the other and renewed relations on the
basis of equality. This was the first gesture made by any nation to
cure the wounds of the World War and to deal with vanquished Ger-
many on a basis which set foundations for peace. Had the other na-
tions followed this example the bitter history of Europe of the past
thirteen years might have been different.
After the Genoa Conference, the Soviet struggle for peace was
marked by slow but steady establishment of diplomatic relations with
the major powers of the world. This in itself was an element of sta-
bility in Europe, but normal relations were still much shaken by fre-
quent raids on Soviet embassies and consulates in many countries,
conducted on shallow pretexts and accompanied by forged letters and
provocatory accusations unprecedented in diplomatic history.1
1
Such as the assassination of Vorovsky during the Lausanne con-
ference, which coincided with an ultimatum from the British Foreign
Office; the raid on the Soviet Embassy in Peking, April 1927, followed
85
THIS SOVIET WORLD
Similar attacks on nations in the past have counted as causes of war.
The Soviet Union responded to these attacks by steadily widening its
pacts of non-aggression with minor or hard-pressed nations—Turkey
first in December 1925, followed by Germany, Lithuania, Persia, Lat-
via, Afghanistan and others. Unlike all previous alliances and en-
tentes, these pacts were non-exclusive. They were offered to all na-
tions.
When the Preparatory Commission for Disarmament of the
League of Nations held its fourth session on November 30, 1927, the
newly invited Soviet delegation startled the world by proposing to
disarm. Five years earlier Chicherin had made a similar proposition
at Genoa; it went unnoticed and was soon forgotten. But Litvinoff’s
statement in 1927 came from a nation which had proved its economic
and political stability over a term of years. It came moreover at a time
when the peoples of the world were beginning to be disillusioned by
the ever-repeated fruitless conferences with which European govern-
ments sought to hide from their peoples the chaos which followed the
World War.
Litvinoff broke the polite façade by suggesting actual disarma-
ment, stating that the Soviet Government was ready to agree to total
disarmament or any percentage of disarmament which the other pow-
ers would accept. He made this challenge time after time in the sight
of the peoples of the world, until the constant evasion of the milita-
rists made it apparent that no capitalist power was willing even to
reduce armaments, and that the Disarmament Conference itself was
little more than a mask for the old rearmament race.
As armaments grew, the Soviet Union steadily extended pacts of
non-aggression and began to press for an internationally accepted
“definition of the aggressor,” designed to mobilize world opinion
against the provokers of war. None of the major imperialist powers
was willing to accept Litvinoff’s definition, which denounced as ag-
gression the sending of any armed forces into any other nation. A
dozen or more of the smaller countries signed it; the Soviet Union
began to win the post of champion of the rights of smaller powers,
by the execution of many of its Chinese staff; the raid on the Soviet
trading agency in London May 12, 1927; the forged “Zinoviev letter”
which swayed a British election. These were only the most spectacular
of a whole series of raids, attacks and attempted assassinations which
made being a Soviet ambassador a hazardous occupation.
86
which it was later to expand by its participation in the League of Na-
tions.
The will to peace of the Soviet Union and its intelligence in ma-
neuvering to keep out of war was soon severely tested by the growing
tensions in the Far East. Japan’s invasion of Manchuria has been rec-
ognized by the whole world as a violation of the League of Nations
Covenant, the Washington Nine-Power Pact and the Kellogg-Briand
Pact, to all of which Japan was signatory. It carried her troops to the
Soviet borders and occasionally across them in forays by armed pa-
trols which killed Soviet border guards and peasants. The most seri-
ous source of contention was the possession by the Soviet Govern-
ment of the Chinese Eastern Railway, which crosses Manchuria as
the shortest route to Vladivostok. Attacks by alleged bandits and ar-
rests by Japanese military authorities put Soviet railway employees
in peril hardly less than that of war. A report by the Soviet director of
the road related over 3,000 cases of armed attack which had resulted
in the murder of 56 people, the wounding of 825, the destruction of
four kilometers of main line track and of hundreds of passenger and
freight cars. On October 9, 1933, the USSR was able to publish four
Japanese secret documents which discussed the “great necessity for
assimilating the railway,” and made it plain that most of the attacks
were inspired by Japanese military forces.
The answer of the USSR to these provocations was neither that
of the strong capitalist nation which would long since have “protected
its interests and citizens” by declaring war, nor was it that of a de-
fenseless colonial nation like China, which continually submits. The
Soviet Union built strong fortifications on its entire Far Eastern bor-
der, obviously of a defensive nature; and simultaneously removed a
source of conflict by selling the railroad to Manchukuo at a price
hardly one-fifth of the sum originally invested by the Russians. I was
present in Tokyo when the sale occurred and noted the lessening of
tension. “The Japanese people are for the time being convinced of our
peaceful purposes; it will be some months before their militarists will
be able to inflame them against us,” said a Soviet diplomat to me,
making the distinction which Communists always make between
people and governments. The Japanese militarists were even then lay-
ing a basis for further provocation by suggesting the purchase of So-
viet Saghalin. Yet for even a temporary lessening of tension, the
USSR thought it worthwhile to make concessions.
87
THIS SOVIET WORLD
In September 1934 the Soviet Union entered the League of Na-
tions, an act which startled both friend and foe. Yet it was the logical
consequence of the changing conditions of Europe and the growing
strength of the USSR. The Soviet Union views the League analyti-
cally rather than emotionally. What is it? What has it to give? The
League is not a territory nor a state nor a super-power; still less is it
an ideal or a formula which will somehow miraculously bring peace.
The League is a diplomatic instrument through which a group of
powers meet and come to an agreement. Its policy is decided by the
powers that are in it and by the relative strength and courage of those
powers.
Behind the idealistic phrases with which at different stages each
participating power has veiled its use of the League, the purpose of
the League changes. Wilson started it as the organization of Europe
on a basis of nationality; his plan involved also “freedom of the seas.”
But “freedom of the seas” meant to Britain the domination of the
world by American gold instead of by the British fleet; and Europe
on a basis of nationality appalled Clemenceau, who knew quite well
that there are twice as many Germans as French in Europe, and that
“the interests of France” demand the splitting up of the Germans into
minorities among many nations. The League, with America out, be-
came the arena where Britain and France struggled for control of Eu-
rope, France wishing to crush Germany utterly and Britain willing to
help Germany expand slightly as a balance against France. Wall
Street helped Britain by the Dawes and Young plans of reparations,
scaling them down to “Germany’s capacity to pay,” i.e., the amount
which it was thought German capitalists could squeeze from indus-
trious German workers for several generations without revolt. Ger-
many came into the League, hailed by phrases on the “United States
of Europe,” which meant to the Soviet Union the united attempt of
world capitalism to placate Germany for the Versailles deprivations
by financing her in a drive to the East.
But Dawes guessed wrong. The world economic crisis broke
Germany’s “capacity to pay” and ability to wait. Japan and Germany
both left the League to seek expansion by their own armed might.
The war danger increased but the League itself became, by their dis-
affection, an organization of powers which had more to lose than to
gain from immediate war. “The League might become a hindrance to
warlike tendencies,” said Stalin. It still contained robber powers who
exploited colonial peoples, and small unstable states built up on the
88
loot of Versailles. The Soviet Union admits the justice of the German
grievance, but never the right of war to enforce those claims. “Injus-
tices perpetrated by one war,” said Litvinoff, “can never be rectified
by a new one, which only perpetrates worse injustices.” The Soviet
Union entered the League to strengthen it against the tendency of
Germany, Japan and now Italy to throw a torch into the powder mag-
azine of the world. She thus upholds territorial gains of robber nations
in order to increase the chances of world peace.
She even goes further. By pacts of mutual assistance concluded
with France and Czechoslovakia, she has placed the might of her in-
creasing Red Army behind the status quo of Europe. She joins with
these “robber powers” to blockade Italy, herself the first to agree to
the sanctions. Yet when oil sanctions are not agreed to, she continues
to sell this commodity to Italy,2 bewildering the idealists of many
nations. Why? Because no high example can check Italians in Abys-
sinia or stop the spread of the war infection through the trade channels
of the world. Because idealist gestures are dangerous tactics against
general staffs of armies: that lesson was learned at Brest-Litovsk. Be-
cause isolated action might turn against the Soviet Union a fascist
drive from a disintegrating Europe, helped to disintegration by her
choice of an individual stand. Only the threat of might may possibly
halt the explosive drive towards war of a desperate fascism—the
might of Europe organized through the League. The Soviet Union
throws herself into the task of organizing it3 through security pacts
which she seeks to widen. For the status quo is evil, but war is worse.
To strengthen this might the Soviet Union increases her Red
Army, the only armed force on which she can really depend. Britain
and France are camps of conflicting interests; on this the Communists
have no illusions. In both these countries are strong popular forces
supporting the USSR and the League of Nations in the policy of col-
lective security against aggressors, and other strong reactionary
forces which would prefer to support Nazi Germany in the looting of
2
In steadily decreasing amounts, in spite of American headlines
to the contrary. It is America’s sales that increase.
3
She tried first to organize an “Eastern Locarno,” a pact of many
nations against anyone who started an aggression. It failed through the
refusal of Poland and Germany. Soviet policy is still to expand security
pacts to all possible nations, including Germany and Poland, not even
the present pacts being exclusive in nature.
89
THIS SOVIET WORLD
Russia. This would launch world war with all the gigantic means of
modern destruction. Hence the struggle against world war today be-
comes inextricably linked with the struggle against fascist tendencies
in the major imperialist countries.
This war, if it comes, will be no mere war between nations. It
will arouse class conflicts throughout the world. Not at first perhaps,
but in the end in every country. This the Red Army understands thor-
oughly; its loyalty is not alone to Russia but to the Union of Socialist
Soviet Republics, wherever they exist or come into being. But not
unless invaded will the Soviet Union intervene in any other country,
either by war or by interference in its affairs. Marxian analysis tells
them that this would hamper the revolutionary development of the
other country; it would turn workers towards the capitalists of their
own country under the name of patriotism. If the world war starts, the
Red Army will advance with a rifle in one hand and pamphlets in the
other. It has shells to distribute tens of thousands of leaflets calling
on the brotherhood of all workers; it has also the means of effective
war. As the world’s most politically conscious, most mechanized
army, trained in many languages, it is able to lead and equip partisan
war on the territory of foes. It is told to get results with a minimum
of suffering.
I well remember a talk in Moscow with a high Soviet authority
on the subject of Japan in the tense winter of 1933. It was clear to us
both that the Soviet air fleet was superior and in easy reach of Tokyo.
We looked from high windows on the ice in Moscow river and dis-
cussed the chances of war.
“A good, industrious folk, the Japanese,” he said slowly. “It
would be a pity to bomb them. Do you think any Communist likes to
set aflame whole towns of toiling folk?... If war should come in the
East between us and Japan, we have not the slightest doubt that it
would be the end of capitalist Japan. Revolution would start in Man-
chukuo and spread southward through China, till all Asia was Com-
munist. Every imperialist power in the world would fight this, till at
last revolt flamed up in their own lands. The world revolution might
thus be accomplished, but the world that survived would be badly
ruined. It would cost the lives of tens of millions of toiling folk; it
would mean famine and pestilence sweeping all Asia. The world rev-
olution will be secured with much less suffering, if peace can be
maintained.”
90
“The Soviet Union needs no foreign wars for transforming the
world,” said Manuilski in 1935 at the Congress of the Communist
International. Her struggle for peace is no temporary slogan. With
every year of peace the Soviet Union strengthens, not only as a na-
tion, but as a shining example which the world will follow. As social-
ism advances in the Soviet Union, it begins to attract scientists, engi-
neers, artists; it draws away from allegiance to capitalism wider and
wider hosts. With every year of peace—granted the steadily advanc-
ing Soviet Union—the international relation of world forces shifts to
the side of the Soviet world and to the disadvantage of capitalism.
Capitalism breeds war, yet world war is not inevitable. For capi-
talism itself is no longer inevitable in the world. If the struggle for
peace can avail month by month and year by year, to check, delay
and hamper the forces that drive towards war, capitalism itself may
collapse in one war-inciting country after another on a sufficient scale
to prevent world war altogether. Or world war, if it comes, may be
greatly shortened by the revolt of all those people who suffer unbear-
ably from war.
This is the hope behind the Soviet struggle for peace. But
whether in peace or in war, the growing strength and prosperity of
the Soviet Union, achieved through two Five-Year Plans, ensures the
direction and is the pledge of the whole world’s future. The only
question now is how deep and bitter will be the struggle—even the
wars—before the far-flung peoples know and copy. But nothing any
longer can stop the advance of their worldwide forces. They have
both strength and knowledge and a conscience about the world.
91
PART II:
THE SOVIET WORLD MAKES MEN
CHAPTER IX:
THE FACTORY COLLECTIVE
In all the recent congresses in Moscow, when miners, auto-work-
ers, weavers, engineers and lathe-hands come up to celebrate their
latest achievements in production and to receive honors for increas-
ing a nation’s wealth, a phrase recurs which has no counterpart under
capitalism, because the reality which it expresses could not exist
there. Even in the Soviet Union the widening use of the phrase is re-
cent, an instinctive expression of a new and growing reality.
“I bring you greetings from our factory collective.” “Our factory
collective pledges its full support.”
The factory collective is not the plant administration. Nor is it the
trade union, the shop committee or even the Party organization of the
factory. All these organizations are a part of it, having their well-de-
fined functions in its vivid life. The factory collective is the sum total
of all the people in the plant in all their organized functions, the basic
living cell of Soviet society.
The concept of the factory collective did not spring into being
full grown. It derives steadily from the joint ownership of the means
of production which has now existed for eighteen years. This is the
economic reality which is steadily determining the minds of men and
the forms of their social life. A worker attached to a machine must be
either its slave or its owner; under capitalism he is its slave. In the
Soviet Union he knows himself owner of the machine but not the sole
owner. It is entrusted to him to master, to get from it all that modern
technical skill can give. The product belongs to him and his fellows;
through his work in the plant he connects with all society. This gives
back to man the old unity of life around the process of production
which was riven in twain when the tools by which men created passed
into alien hands. It returns on a wider scale and at a higher level by
as much as the modern machine is more powerful than the ancient
tool.
An American who had worked for some years in a Soviet factory
told me that two things especially impressed him: the relation of
workers to administration and the cultural life around the factory.
“The foreman always asks the workers’ advice in all problems; the
relations are those of two friends instead of a boss. In America my
factory was just a place to make a living, just another day to get
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
through as soon as you could. Here it is your club, your center of
culture, the thing that is closest in life.”
The life of the factory collective has three main aspects: produc-
tion, workers’ life, and relation to the rest of the country. Each of
these aspects has its own control. The director and his assistants are
responsible for organizing production. The trade union is responsible
for organizing the workers’ life, including factory conditions, insur-
ance, education and social activities. The Party organization is re-
sponsible for the political training of the workers, for widening their
knowledge of the country’s policies and of their plant’s function in
the building of socialism.
These three together—director, trade union organizer, and Party
secretary—form the “triangle,” the highest authority in the plant.
Each has his clearly defined function; all three together consult on
questions affecting the fundamental life of the factory. Orders of the
director must be taken without question in production, and he is held
responsible for everything that happens in the plant. But any director
who failed to get on with the Party and trade union organization
wouldn’t last long. As a Russian worker explained it: “If the factory
collective doesn’t like the director you may be sure the Commissariat
of Heavy Industry won’t leave him there.” 1
The relation between workers and management was thus de-
scribed to me by the American worker: “The whole working gang is
interested in production. The program for next month is discussed
with all of us. The foreman calls a meeting and tells us that the ad-
ministration wants us to put out 3,000 milling tools next month. How
shall we do it? We discuss in detail; each of us says what he can do.
It all adds up to 4,000. So the foreman goes to the administration and
raises the plan to 4,000. If we fulfill or surpass our plan, we get a
premium which we divide among the workers on the basis of what
each has done. To help us estimate this, the shop economist gives us
each month a list of each worker’s production, spoilage, idle time,
breakdown of machines. Naturally we give the most of the premium
to the best workers because they helped the whole gang win. The fac-
tory honors the winning brigade not only with a premium but with a
red banner which waves each month among the lathes for everyone
who passes to see. The best factories get honor and premiums from
1
See Chap. 6 for an example of this.
96
the whole country because everyone knows that the more we produce
the more everyone will have.”
When conflicts occur in a factory between the management and
the trade union, there are various ways in which they may be re-
solved. Often the Party organization of the plant can settle it by dis-
cussion within this wider group to which members both of admin-
istration and trade union belong. Serious disagreements are appealed
by the shop committee to its central trade union, or even to the All-
Union Council of Trade Unions which has governmental powers to
enforce the rights of workers. For individual cases of injustice appeal
is often made direct to the courts. These struggles may be time-con-
suming, but men who feel convinced enough of their case to fight it
through rarely fail of satisfaction. The head of the Nijni Auto Works
was removed in 1932 after an investigation by the trade unions which
began with a fight over living conditions started by the foreign work-
ers. In another case that I know, an engineer who sharply criticized
the plant’s manager in the factory newspaper was later fired on
grounds that he thought insufficient. Failing to interest the shop com-
mittee in his case he took it to the city organization of the Party, which
ordered an investigation that resulted in his reinstatement, with wages
paid for all time lost. The director was reprimanded, and the repri-
mand printed on the front page of the factory newspaper, in order, as
one worker expressed it, that “the director may know he is not God.”
More common are the conflicts in which local management and
trade union unite to compel action by the central offices of the trust.
The shop committee demands certain safety appliances or new con-
struction for the health of the workers. The manager replies that his
budget does not allow it. He has no objection, however, to the shop
committee making the strongest possible case through the trade union
to the central organization which supplies the budget. Since the man-
ager has no personal profit to make by cutting out improvements, but
advances in reputation and position rather through his ability to main-
tain an enthusiastic organization of productive workers, his interest
lies on the side of supplying their demands.
Workers, on the other hand, do not want a boss who is soft and
sentimental. They want one who can efficiently organize their work.
They know that their prosperity depends directly on the success of
their factory. They themselves will ask to have workers transferred
who make much spoilage, or even expelled if they steal or persis-
tently disorganize production. They consider it desertion for a worker
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
to shift jobs without reason or without training someone to take his
place. If health or family matters require a change, or if a factory can-
not use his highest skill or give him a chance to develop, he applies
for and gets “release.” But to shift merely because another factory,
better organized, can give him higher wages and better conditions is
considered cowardly.
“Somebody has to make this factory a good one. Why shouldn’t
he? His going makes it that much harder for the rest of us; we have
to break in a green man. Why should he run off to another place that
other folks organized because he finds things difficult here?” Here is
an attitude similar to that of partners in a business.
Production, however, is only part of existence. Around this cen-
ter of jointly owned production is built the whole unity of the
worker’s life. Through his factory collective he enters into the duties
and privileges of citizenship; it is the primary organization which
elects deputies to the local Soviets. Through his shop committee he
receives his social insurance, his opportunities for education, his ex-
cursions, sports and vacations, and takes part in a score of voluntary
social activities from government commissions to parachute clubs.
Let us take an example of the internal organization of a factory
collective, the Red Proletarian Plant in Moscow. The smallest unit in
the plant is the production brigade which may have thirty to fifty
workers. There are one hundred and fifty brigades in the plant, under
one shop committee. These brigades not only compete in production
records, rewarded by red banners and premiums, but also in social
activity. Homiakov’s brigade, for instance, has twenty-nine workers,
Every one of them does some social work. Some check the norms of
production and standards of piece-work; some watch over the social
insurance; three edit the wall newspaper which criticizes the short-
comings of the plant and of the workers. One middle-aged man was
inactive socially and this was a great shame to the group, which tried
to locate some tasks to interest him. They finally elected him presi-
dent of the Red Aid Branch; within a month he signed up a big mem-
bership and had an active circle going.
The brigade decides the list of “udarniks,” champion workers
who get special privileges; but its list will be further checked by the
trade union if it is too large or if there are complaints. Does a worker
need a free vacation at a sanatorium? The brigade discusses it and
sends a recommendation to the shop committee, which has a definite
quota of places, and can fight for more. Safety devices on machinery,
98
raising the technical knowledge of each operator, financial help to
workers who are in straits, are matters which start with the brigade
and are sent with their recommendation to the trade union. The union
itself as a whole is actively pushing the completion of the new model
dining-room, the expansion of the day nursery and clinic facilities—
all these on demands which originally start in the brigades. All this
work is democratically initiated, organized, carried through and
checked by the rank-and-file members.
Not the least important aspect of factory life is the cultural activ-
ity. Educational opportunities range from simple classes in reading
and writing for newly arrived peasants, which characterized the ear-
lier years of Soviet power, to the present university courses and insti-
tutions of scientific research. “You come to your factory to study, to
attend a university,” said a worker to me. “You think, ‘My factory is
going to make an engineer of me.’ After work you take a hot shower
and go to the library or gliding club. Artists and singers come from
the theaters to sing for us during the dinner hour. Famous authors
come to discuss their books with us. If you want to write or act, you
join the dramatic club or literary circle. Maybe someday you may go
away to enter a theater or a newspaper, but even then you will some-
times come back to your factory.”
The intimate sense of possession which a Soviet worker feels in
his factory was strikingly shown to me by my step-daughter Ducia,
who worked in a large electric plant near Moscow. I accompanied her
on her return to the factory after she had been ill at home with grippe.
As we approached the plant she grew excited; a vividness came into
her gestures which had been lacking during her two weeks at home.
She insisted that I notice and admire the factory laboratory where she
worked, the power plant, the restaurant, the big workers’ club build-
ing; she pointed out the pathway between the shops that led to the
park and stadium. I suddenly realized that Ducia had been positively
homesick for her factory.
Her reason for having chosen this particular factory to work in
had little to do with wages. She chose it because it had a good repu-
tation as an educational and social center, with a strong organization
of Communist youth and a first-class university. This offered her the
well-rounded life which she demanded from her labor. Her working
day was only six hours long, but she not infrequently spent twelve
hours or more in and around the factory. She would go half an hour
before her work began, drop into the Red Corner to get her newspaper
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
or to discuss with the other girls the work of the political courses; she
would come home late in the evening after her skiing club, German
class or musical circle, or perhaps still later from a group party at the
theater.
In Ducia’s set it is the accepted view, which she does not even
stop to formulate, that every human being should engage in three
kinds of serious activity: productive work whereby he justifies his
right to a share in the commonly produced goods of the country; vol-
untary social work, which holds together the whole apparatus of so-
ciety; and study which improves individual capacities. Besides this
serious activity there are recreations. All this many-sided life Ducia
finds in her factory.
The study takes different forms from year to year. In addition to
courses in physics, German and political science which she takes reg-
ularly, various campaigns urge special study upon her. It may be her
Young Communist League which makes a drive to have all members
study the history of the Communist movement of youth. One year it
was the drive for “technical minimum,” to raise the skill of all work-
ers in the country. Ducia’s technical minimum was fixed for her by a
committee of engineers who visited her laboratory, and discussed
with each employee separately the special subjects needed for his
work. She studied these subjects for several months, assisted by a
voluntary teacher, one of the engineers of the plant who agreed to
help several girls as his form of social work. “The whole laboratory
is like a university,” said Ducia, “with the six hours’ work like prac-
tice on our subjects. When girls meet on the stairs, they are always
asking whether you have finished such a formula.”
Like most of her associates, Ducia also does social work; in her
case it is the organization of the twelve current-events’ courses for
young people in the various shops of the factory She takes much pride
in keeping these running well. Not all social work is as serious as
Ducia’s. One of the girls organizes a group for parachute jumping,
another gets up theater parties, a third helps to plan excursions. Social
work is not something that an individual does “for others”; it is the
extension of his own interests, the organization in a social manner of
what he himself most likes to do. It is also of value to the community
and a direct preparation for participation in government. In a sense it
is already taking part in government, which is increasingly built up
from these voluntary social activities. A man whose financial ability
is shown as dues collector for his union, may rise to full or part-time
100
work as assistant chief of the city taxes. A woman who shows interest
and efficiency in organizing the factory day nursery may later be-
come chief of the city’s motherhood and infancy bureau.
This is in fact the normal path to political office in the Soviet
Union. I recall, for instance, Gribkova, who ten years ago was a
young, illiterate farm servant. Wishing to better herself, she got a job
as longshoreman on the Volga, thus entering the public services
where, as she put it, “the road lay open to all life.” Working down-
stream she reached a textile mill and took employment as unskilled
worker. Here she found the natural center for education and advance-
ment. She learned to read and write, took technical courses and to
handle a machine, took political courses and became an “active one”
in her factory. From this point her specialization was possible in two
directions: through technical training to higher posts in industry, or
through social work and political training to posts in government.
Gribkova chose the latter; she became interested in the voluntary
tasks of factory inspection, and was later chosen by her fellow work-
ers as part of their quota for a two-year training course which pre-
pared professional factory inspectors. She is now a full-time official,
head of inspection for a township. Hundreds of thousands have fol-
lowed a similar path; this is the typical relation between factory life
and the public activities of the country.
The life of a great factory is continuous. Just as its productive life
goes on for three shifts, so its social life continues nearly twenty-four
hours a day. If one chances to come at six-thirty in the morning to the
great Stalin Auto Works in Moscow, he may see in Day Nursery No.
41 the beginning of the day’s life. Mothers bring their children to the
nursery before reporting to work. Each child receives a swift medical
examination as he enters; if this indicates illness, the mother is ex-
cused from work to care for her child or to take it to the hospital. In
the case of nurslings, the mother is given an hour off at the end of
every three hours’ work to nurse her child. These day nurseries are
considered as essential a public service as public schools of other
countries. But whereas education is compulsory, day nurseries are
not. The picture spread abroad of a stern Soviet government forcibly
taking children from their mothers would arouse incredulous laughter
in any Soviet home. The Soviet mother regards a day nursery as a
facility which relieves her of the child certain hours of the day, and
as a center of scientific information, whose employees can assist her
in its proper care. She demands the day nursery and fights for its
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
quality. If any factory administration fails to supply adequate funds
to enlarge and improve its day nursery, the working women will see
that the director is reminded.
About the time that the mothers are saying good-by to their chil-
dren in the nursery, the newspaper office inside the plant begins to
bustle with activity. Six thousand copies of Moscow daily papers and
8,500 copies of the four-page daily of the plant, Overtake and Sur-
pass, must be delivered by eight or nine o’clock to subscribers in var-
ious shops. The plant newspaper is full of the daily life of the 35,000
workers. It organizes campaigns for production, for quality, for good
housing, co-operative stores, clubs, schools, day nurseries; it contains
complaints by workers about all these facilities; it is the organ
through which these thousands of workers communicate with each
other.
In the midst of the great shops of the auto works, a small green
square contains both the central dining room and the central poly-
clinic. The latter is maintained by the Moscow Board of Health, but
its connection with the factory collective is very intimate. The health
record of every worker is kept on file in a smaller dispensary in the
shop where a doctor, medical assistant and statistician are constantly
on hand for first aid and general care of this particular group of work-
ers. For all special services the worker goes to the central polyclinic
where a medical personnel of 300 includes specialists in all diseases.
One interesting feature of this polyclinic is its direct connection with
the diet kitchen of the factory which immediately gives the workers
without extra charge the particular diet which the doctor prescribes.
It is no sentimental glorification of manual labor which causes
the grouping of Soviet institutions around the factory. It derives nat-
urally from the unity of man as owner, creator and user, which under
socialism replaces the capitalist division of men into bosses, hands,
and buyers of goods. Even under capitalism men feel a deep human
joy in creation and mastery, a mastery which may be widened and
deepened by the machine. But capitalism poisons this joy at its
source. A crane man in Seattle once told me that when he sat aloft
picking up great loads with power and deftness, he felt “like one of
those Greek giants or ancient gods.” Then he suddenly realized that
he had no claim to that crane, but might face any morning, at the
owner’s whim, the sign: “Closed down,” and he felt himself degraded
from a god to a slave.
102
Under capitalism the association of men in production is made
hateful by a clash of interests; they seek their real life elsewhere,
building it from disjointed fragments. Under socialism this associa-
tion is strengthened by a thousand ties of mutual interest and becomes
the solid foundation on which the whole structure of political and so-
cial life is frankly and realistically built. Life becomes unified; from
worker to manager, to scientist, to artist there is at no point a break.
A worker studies and becomes an engineer; he is active in the factory
committee on inventions, and becomes a scientist; he shows talent in
the dramatic circle and becomes an actor; he devotes himself to social
work and rises in the government. Any of these interests may become
professional and take him out of the factory into a wider or more spe-
cialized life. But the factory remains the social home from which he
launched into life, and to which he often returns, either actually or
emotionally.
103
CHAPTER X:
FARMING A CONTINENT
Among the many flaming words which poured from the hearts
of two hundred combined-harvester operators meeting in December
1935 in Moscow with the heads of Party and government, amid jubi-
lation over present success and promises to make the future even
more victorious, there was one poignant phrase of contrast with the
past.
“We sons and daughters of peasants—had there been no Soviet
power, no Party of Lenin-Stalin, our lot would have been slavery to
kulaks, or dawnless poverty in the mire of small peasant farming.”
These words illumine with a piercing ray the tremendous
changes that have taken place in the Soviet rural districts in a span of
years so brief that the past still remains vivid in the minds of men not
yet thirty years old. “When I worked as a fourteen-year-old farmhand
under the tsar,” said the combine operator Kapusta, “I never saw the
leaders of the government, never saw even the boss for whom I
worked.... I never expected from life such happiness, such joy.”
Five years ago Kapusta was an unskilled worker. But not
Kapusta alone; so were they all. What else but unskilled workers were
there on the backward individual farms of peasant Russia, where fif-
teen years ago the tractor was stoned as a “devil machine?” Even five
years ago, who among Russian peasants had ever seen a combine-
harvester? Today not only are millions of peasants acquainted by
sight with the most modern farm machinery, but hundreds of thou-
sands have mastered its operation and make a more continuous use
of it than is possible on the private farms of America, which are too
small to utilize profitably this modern machine. The combine is al-
ready a machine too good for capitalism. The American average har-
vesting record per combine is 578 acres, while the Soviet average
secured in 1935 was 643. The champion operators who met in Mos-
cow spurned this average. They had made records of a thousand, two
thousand and even twenty-five hundred acres for the harvest season,
and were swearing a solemn oath to train before next harvest many
more operators like themselves.
The time of this great advance has been so short that they can all
look back as if to yesterday and recall the days of ignorance and pov-
erty, when they slaved for wealthier farmers or wasted nine-tenths of
their labor trudging from strip to strip of their medieval peasant fields.
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FARMING A CONTINENT
Today the very word “peasant” is passing from their vocabulary.
They speak of themselves as “kolkhozniks,” members of the collec-
tive economy, joint owners and users of the large-scale farm on which
they work. They know quite well that if there had been no collectivi-
zation of farming, their slavery and darkness would have continued.
For if modern machines had come to the Russian soil under capitalist
conditions, a minority of successful farmers would have gained the
means of production and risen to a brief wealth on the impoverish-
ment of millions—brief until they in turn were robbed by the big
banks of the cities, as farmers are under capitalism.
The years 1930 to 1933 will go down in mankind’s story as the
turning point in the farm history of the world. No other events of
those years will be so long remembered—not the struggles of the
League of Nations, nor the American New Deal; not even the world-
wide economic crisis which was but one more, the worst, of many
crises. Even the rise of the Chinese Soviets and the turning of Central
Europe to fascism may receive less space in future history books than
the collectivization of Soviet farming, whereby men won the dream
of centuries, security on the soil.
Security on the soil! Security from drought, from floods, from
mortgages, from the chances of nature and the exploitations of man!
Even to attain fragments of such security, if not for themselves then
for their children, men of all ages have struggled and died. American
families left the comforts of settled regions to homestead in dugouts,
for the security promised by land ownership. Then drought or the
foreclosure of mortgages showed that security based on private prop-
erty in land is illusion. Markets collapsed and land was taken away
for bare taxes. Soviet farmers today are winning not only security
against taxes and mortgages and markets but even against drought
and floods. Farming is industrialized on the basis of modern machin-
ery and division of labor. Crop losses through “acts of God” are min-
imized by better tillage, crop insurance, and assistance from the more
fortunate areas. The control of the joint farm is democratically orga-
nized; the general meeting not only elects the management, but de-
cides the plan of the farm and the division of work. Security on the
land thus co-exists with free initiative.
This change has occurred among people whose farming was for-
merly notoriously backward. Ten years ago in the central grain-grow-
ing regions of Russia, there were three homemade wooden plows for
every metal plow. One-third of the peasants had no horse at all but
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
labored for others to pay for the plowing of their own soil. Lands
were divided according to a medieval system; the twenty acres of a
single family might be divided into a dozen strips scattered miles
apart. Scientific crop rotation and seed selection were unknown. The
primitive methods of tillage steadily exhausted the soil. A typical
study of grain crops in the Kirsanov district showed a steady decline
of average yield from thirteen bushels per acre in 1896-1905 to ten
and a half bushels in the five years preceding the World War. On this
same land since the collective farm was organized in 1930 the yield
rose by better tillage to an average of seventeen bushels in 1930-33,
and twenty bushels in 1934-35.
In four earth-shaking years, the Soviet Union changed from a
country of tiny, badly tilled holdings, worked with wooden plow and
hand sickle, to the largest scale farms in the world.1 The initiative
was taken by the poorer peasants and farm hands, urged and orga-
nized by the Communists, and assisted by government credits and
machines. When the Five-Year Plan swiftly increased the farm ma-
chinery available, the new collective farm proved able to attract ever
wider and wider groups of farmers. The movement was bitterly
fought by the small rural capitalists known as kulaks, who farmed
with hired labor, lived by money-lending, or owned small mills,
threshers and other means of production and used these facilities to
exploit their neighbors. 2
The state’s donation to farming and the technical help supplied
by city workers proved decisive. During the years from 1930 to 1935,
the Soviet government issued more than a billion dollars of direct
1
In the United States farms of a thousand acres or more comprise
only 7.5 per cent of the total tilled area; in the USSR in 1935, nine-
tenths of the tilled area was made up of farms averaging thirteen hun-
dred acres.
2
Writers unacquainted with Russian rural life often confuse ku-
laks with peasants generally, which leads them to describe the whole
collectivization movement as an attack on the peasants. But for half a
century students of Russian rural districts have spoken of kulaks. In
1895 Stepniak wrote that “hard unflinching cruelty” was their main
characteristic; in 1904 Wolf von Schierhand wrote of the kulak as a
“usurer and oppressor in a peasant’s blouse.” In 1918 Dr. E. J. Dillon,
in The Eclipse of Russia, said: “Of all the human monsters I have ever
met in my travels, I cannot recall any so malignant and odious as the
Russian kulak.”
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FARMING A CONTINENT
credits to the farms for livestock and implements and spent an addi-
tional three billion for farm machinery loaned through the tractor sta-
tions;3 it also gave food and seed loans of 157 million bushels of grain
to farms in distress. At the call of the Communist Party tens of thou-
sands of skilled workers, bookkeepers, machine repairmen, teachers
and organizers, poured into the rural districts to help organize the
farms. The most difficult period was from the 1932 to the 1933 har-
vest when kulak sabotage, added to difficulties of inefficient organi-
zation, caused a grain shortage that put the whole country on short
rations. Success was won by the 1933 harvest which reached nearly
90 million tons of grain, the largest harvest ever known in the Russian
land; it was succeeded by an equal or larger grain crop in 1934 and
1935. These harvest successes helped create a government budget
surplus in 1934 of 437 million rubles, which was at once applied to
cancel debts owed to the state by the farmers for early expenses of
organizing and equipping the collectives. This wiped out 53 per cent
of the still outstanding indebtedness, including all debts incurred
prior to 1933.
The economic results of collectivization have been an increase in
the sown area of 30 million acres, from 293 to 323 million; a grain
crop which for three years has been 15 to 20 million tons higher than
the average for the five years before the collectives were formed; 4 an
area sown to sugar beets which is double the pre-war or any previous
record; and an area sown to cotton which is two and a half times either
the pre-war or the pre-collectivization area. Livestock suffered cata-
strophically during the early years of collectivization but has been
climbing rapidly back in the past three years. 5 The indications for the
future are even brighter, since the rapidly improving methods of till-
age and increase of fertilizer are counted upon to increase harvest
3
For tractor stations 5.5 billion rubles, for direct loans 1.9 billion;
these were “hard rubles” whose value may be estimated as fifty cents.
4
The average before collectivization was 78 to 80 million tons; in
1933 and 1934, 90 million; in 1935 nearly 100 million tons.
Cotton area 688,700 hectares in 1913; 802,000 in 1927, and
2,051,000 in 1933.
Sugar-beet area 648,700 in 1913; 665,000 in 1927, and 1,212,000
in 1933.
5
See Chap. 7.
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
yield year by year. 6 At the end of 1935 Stalin in conference with the
harvester-combine operators announced that “in the very near future,
in three or four years,” 120 to 130 million tons of grain would be
expected from the farms.
By 1935, the new forms of collective farming were sufficiently
stabilized for the permanent fixing of boundaries. For at least two
years practically no members had wished to leave the collective farms
to return to individual farming; crop rotations and the location of
fields were becoming settled. The Soviet Government thereupon is-
sued a decree granting “perpetual use of land” to the farm collectives.
All over the country today rapid surveying of boundaries goes on fol-
lowed by village celebrations which record the deed for perpetual
use. Speakers celebrate the change of recent years, recalling days
when most of the land was owned by landlords and tenant peasants
worked in the slavery of debt, when freehold peasants sold their land
bit by bit to pay taxes. “From perpetual debt to perpetual ownership
is the change we have made,” said a Tartar farmer.
In place of the old disused boundary posts with the tsarist eagle
and the inscription “Each for his own,” there arise new boundary
posts with the sickle and hammer and the letters, “USSR.” All the
land is unitedly owned by the whole country of workers and farmers,
say these symbols; its use is granted perpetually to specific organiza-
tions of working farmers. As Soviet citizen, the farmer is ultimate
owner, as working farmer, he is permanent user. Both ownership and
use are democratically organized and the relation of the smaller group
to the whole country is fixed in part by permanent law and in part by
annual contracts designed to encourage efficient production and to
guarantee right to the fruits of toil. Security is gained by the perma-
nent use of land which cannot be alienated by sale, lease, or mort-
gage. Freedom is secured by the democratic organization of both
farm and country.
6
As an example 46 per cent of all spring seeding in 1935 was
done on winter-fallowed land, as compared with 25 per cent in 1930,
and three-fourths of the autumn sowing in 1935 was done on summer-
fallowed land as compared with 30 per cent in 1930. Similar increases
have occurred in the use of selected seed, of fertilizer, scientifically
planned crop rotations, and so forth.
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FARMING A CONTINENT
What is this group which thus becomes permanent user? The
model constitution adopted by the Congress of “Farm Udarniks”7 and
ratified by the Soviet Government February 17, 1935, states that it is
a “voluntary union of working farmers” who unite “in order to build
with joint means of production and jointly organized labor a collec-
tive, i.e., a social husbandry, to secure full victory over the kulak and
overall exploiters, to secure full victory over need and darkness, over
the backwardness of small individual husbandry, to create high
productivity of labor and thus insure a better life for the members.
“All boundaries formerly dividing the fields of the members are
abolished....
“All draft animals, farm implements, seed reserves, fodder for
the collective livestock, and buildings necessary to carry on the joint
farming and the processing of the farm products are socialized....
“Living quarters, family cattle and fowls and the buildings nec-
essary for their use are not socialized but remain for the private use
of the members’ family.”8
All persons over sixteen who toil on the farm have equal vote.
The general meeting elects the management, accepts or expels mem-
bers, decides in conference with state experts the plan for farm pro-
duction, crop rotation and new improvements and sets aside within
certain limits private family garden plots ranging from half to one and
a half acres for the individual use of members. It also contracts for
the use of machinery from the Machine Tractor Station, a service cen-
ter which supplies machines and expert knowledge over about a fif-
teen-mile radius. These stations were originally organized and fi-
nanced by the state but are becoming in part co-operatively owned
through shares taken by the collective farms they serve. The farm
must make certain deliveries of crops to the state at low prices fixed
by a state commission; it must also pay the tractor station in kind.
These two payments amount to about one-fourth of the average crop;
as tractor station service increases and with it the payments for
7
A delegate congress from the farms that have made the best rec-
ords; their recommendations have weight as expressing the best farm
practice.
8
Up to two head of milch cattle, one brood sow and her brood,
ten sheep and goats, unlimited rabbits and chickens and twenty bee-
hives in the grain, cotton, and beet regions; larger numbers are allowed
for individual use in the regions devoted to livestock.
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
machinery, the direct deliveries to the state somewhat diminish, mov-
ing towards a time when the state will receive its quota as direct pay-
ment for machinery.
When these deliveries are made, and the seed and fodder fund set
aside, the rest of the harvest may be divided among the members in
proportion to the work they have done. The “work-day” is the unit
for payment, but work-days are of different value according to the
quantity and quality of work done. A tractor driver’s day may count
as two ordinary work-days, a night watchman’s as three-quarters of
a day. When possible, work-days are related to a definite amount of
labor done—an area plowed or harvested—and additions or subtrac-
tions are made for work above or below the norm. The general meet-
ing also sets aside part of the income for expansion and common uses
such as field kitchens and day nurseries. This at first led to abuses by
over-zealous farm officials wishing to build up central funds, but
these amounts are now limited. In the past two years, the increased
harvests have led to an increasing surplus above the government de-
liveries and the food required by the members. This may be freely
sold, either individually or collectively, and either in town markets or
through the village co-operatives, which have been greatly strength-
ened during the past year.
Some fifty miles from the railway, in a northern flax and rye dis-
trict, the Kalinin Collective Farm showed me its “Farm Plan,” a doc-
ument of eighteen long pages, neatly stitched into a pamphlet. It was
a printed form issued by the Commissariat of Agriculture, with de-
tails filled out by the local organization. Acreage, meadows, arable
land, orchards, crop rotations, farm implements, draft animals, cows,
pigs and chickens—everything you could wish to know about the Ka-
linin farm is here recorded. Not only are all people listed but allow-
ance is made for babies yet unborn; an estimated 2 per cent annual
increase of population must be provided with a growing standard of
living. The farm plans to provide food for people and animals, pro-
duce the marketable crops recommended for the district, erect new
buildings, reclaim new fields and create an increasingly prosperous
life for its members. To this end work must be assigned to use as far
as possible the entire working-time of the hundred able-bodied mem-
bers.
The farmer-members have discussed this plan for months before
they adopted it. The township surveyor helped them plot the fields;
the township land office and the Soviet newspapers have informed
110
FARMING A CONTINENT
them that the country’s standard of living is to double by 1937, and
that they must do their share. This involves increasing wheat at the
expense of rye, doubling the oat ration of their horses, increasing fats
and meats. They know that the state expects from them a certain
amount of flax, the chief marketable crop of their district. On the ba-
sis of all this knowledge they plan for the coming year, counting on
a constantly increasing crop yield through more machines and ferti-
lizer and better methods, and on a constantly increasing prosperity
through the rational assignment of work to the members. The plan
includes the labor organization, with the number of total work-days
needed for sowing and harvest, and the amount of labor left over for
building a new library, equipping a playground and stadium or in-
stalling electricity and radios. No one need be out of a job, for all
labor can be utilized to increase in various ways the prosperity and
culture of the village; all will be paid by shares in the joint harvest,
according to the quantity and quality of work done.
When the entire plan is accepted by the general meeting, it is
registered with the township office and becomes part of the economic
plan of the whole country, which is derived from and in turn controls
all lesser plans. Sowing and harvest are not the affair of the individual
farmer only; they are the great annual rhythm on which the nation’s
life depends. The whole country knows this and relates itself con-
sciously to the plans of the farmers. Scientific conferences consider
questions of insect pests and seed selection; heavy industry makes
plans to manufacture more tractors. Government and Party con-
gresses outline the changing demands which the growing life of the
land makes on farming—increase of area or yield, or a change in the
proportion of crops. Congresses of farmers meet by township, prov-
ince and on national scale to discuss problems of tillage and farm
organization. The Russian winter which in former days was a season
of hibernation in snow-bound villages, is today a season of active
farm-planning on a nationwide scale. Not even the farthest farm is
isolated; visits of experts and newspaper campaigns keep it in touch
with the life of the country.
When spring begins in the south, hundreds of press correspond-
ents pour forth to cover the sowing. Izvestia alone sends a dozen staff
correspondents and tells sixty local correspondents to concentrate on
farm news. The Peasants’ Gazette keeps several small airplanes
busy, each as the center of a group of a dozen persons covering the
farms. The news-gathering organization which some of the Soviet
111
THIS SOVIET WORLD
newspapers put on the sowing or harvest is beyond the scope of the
biggest dailies in the capitalist world. Every provincial paper adds its
reporters. The story is the world’s biggest annual story with more re-
porters than covered the World War!
These reporters are not mere observers; their reporting is planned
to help the harvest. One journalist of my acquaintance spent forty-
four days in an airplane covering harvest in the North Caucasus; he
visited one hundred farms and forty Tractor Stations, and slept in the
fields without one night in a bed. His reporting was for a concrete
purpose; he would drop in a field, apply his yardstick and count the
grain ears lost on a square yard of harvested ground; he compared
various farms, discovered which ones harvested best and how they
did it. Within three days he was meeting with other journalists who
made similar surveys; they discussed the chief harvest problems of
the season and the best ways in which these were being met. These
results were at once radioed to all the farms and published through
the press of the country for the benefit of other farmers as the harvest
traveled north. Every season hundreds of new ideas are thus culled
from the experience of the farmers and broadcast by press and radio
for the use of other farms.
“A characteristic trait of the collective farm system,” says Vavi-
loff, chief of the Plant Institute of Leningrad, “is its ability to assim-
ilate new technical methods and make new scientific experiments.”
The most striking example of the organization of great masses of
farmers under the leadership of science was shown by the united fight
of 1934 against the great drought which affected the whole southern
half of Europe, including large areas in the Ukraine and Crimea. In
many places no rain fell from April till harvest. In days of individual
peasant farming, the peasants would have killed cattle for food and
gone to the cities for work, putting back agriculture for several years.
The collective farmers met swiftly in delegate congresses to declare
“War Against Drought.” They took stock of all resources and made
plans to suit each region. Near the Dnieper river they seeded the over-
flow meadows. On the slopes of the Caucasus the Kabardinians dug
thousands of miles of irrigation ditches, declaring: “We have moun-
tains; we don’t need rain.” Other farms organized continuous hauling
of water by fire-department wagons, or planted swamps and forest
glades. Children stormed the fields in organized detachments to pull
up every moisture-sucking weed. Scientists busily determined for
each district what second crops could best grow where winter wheat
112
FARMING A CONTINENT
had failed. The press gave directions about this second planting; the
government shot in by fast freight the necessary seed. The USSR se-
cured a crop equal to the bumper harvest of 1933, and even most
farms in the drought-stricken regions came through with food for man
and beast, and with organization strengthened.
The Soviet farmer has come out of his old isolation; he stands on
the highways of the world. Through his collective farm, like the in-
dustrial worker through the factory collective, he connects with the
wider life of science and art. Seven thousand farms in the Ukraine
have established during the past two years their “laboratory cottages,”
where the farmers carry on scientific experiments based on their own
fields. In a typical one I found exhibits of wheat grown under varying
conditions, samples of new crops, collections of insect pests, instru-
ments for weather recording. “Sixty farmers take part in our experi-
ments,” they told me. “We exchange data with the Zaporozhe Exper-
imental Station.” These not long since illiterate peasants who
grubbed the soil blindly are farmer-scientists now, collecting nation-
ally useful data for the conquest of harvest yields.
More than a hundred thousand drama circles for self-expression
have sprung up on Soviet farms. Sport and recreation of all types
grow also with tremendous speed. Farmers learn gliding, parachute
jumping, even aviation. The small farm airplane which can land on a
harvested field is a not infrequent visitor in farm campaigns. Extra-
early sowing done by air into the mud of melting snow is a recognized
means of combating drought in many regions.
By no means all Soviet farms are yet well organized, but effi-
ciency steadily increases. By no means all of them are prosperous,
but prosperity steadily grows. The change which is most apparent is
in the faces of the farmers. They have lost the dull, unresponsive stare
of the peasant; they are more vivid, alert. “Formerly even the peasant
with the best income lived like a pig,” said a Soviet farmer to me.
“His only use for his surplus was to get drunk. Today he has a read-
ing-room, a hospital, a school, a laboratory; he reads the newspapers
and knows about the world. His children go from the village to build
factories, to discover minerals, to conquer the Arctic, to become ‘he-
roes of the Soviet Union’.”
More than two million letters a year from farmers pour into the
offices of the Peasants’ Gazette in Moscow, a high-piled mountain
covering many tables. I asked an editor how their contents revealed
the changing life of the farm. “When our paper began its existence,”
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
he said, “in the years before collectivization, we got chiefly individ-
ual complaints and requests for simple information on farm tech-
nique. ‘My taxes are too high!’ ‘How shall I care for my cow?’ Such
were the letters.
“What do they write about now? The education of children, the
position of women, the farm theater, the economic crisis in foreign
lands. We got five hundred original poems on the death of Kirov and
seventy on the disaster to the Maxim Gorky airplane. They comment
on world affairs, on China and Italy. You can’t compare them with
what they were ten years ago. Instead of ‘my horse and cow,’ their
interest is wide as the world.”
On the northern slopes of the Caucasus mountains, a small dis-
trict of once suppressed non-Russians, known as Kabardinia, prides
itself on creating “the farms of tomorrow.” Its collective farmers have
been known to vote the greater part of a harvest surplus to add to the
government’s school fund and build for their own village “the best
school in the valley.” They bring architects from Moscow to help
them plan “farm-cities,” settlements which shall combine expert
farming with the culture of the town, high schools, laboratories, li-
braries, sound-film theaters. A forty-mile highway runs through the
Kabardinian valley. Last summer travelers passing, on foot or by cart,
found seven rest-stations at five-mile intervals. Brightly painted, tile-
roofed pavilions were furnished with wash-basins and beds with fresh
linen; large plates of watermelon were placed on the table to quench
the visitor’s thirst. An old man attendant refused all payment for the
refreshment, saying: “This is the farm ‘Dawn of Socialism’; we
planted two extra acres of melons for the traveler.”
114
CHAPTER XI:
THE FREEING OF WOMEN
“Every kitchen maid must learn to rule the state.”
Lenin
Throughout the world a struggle goes on for women’s equality
and freedom, with varying methods and varying success. The meth-
ods most commonly known are those of different women’s organiza-
tions which fight, decade after decade, for new specific increases in
women’s “rights.” They count their victories by the number of
women who one by one attain high office, by the number of rights
slowly secured, the right to vote, to enter industry, to inherit property,
to divorce, to some individual status after marriage.
Undoubted gains they have known, and also many disillusions.
A tireless woman in New England recently told me that she had
fought for thirty years to get “a decent inspection of women’s labor
in our state” and that they would “probably lose it at the next elec-
tion.” Nor does the elevation of the occasional woman to high posi-
tion necessarily improve the lot of women generally. From Cleopatra
down to America’s women officials, exceptional women have occa-
sionally been permitted to rule; it is not recorded that the mass of
women gained more consideration from them than from men rulers.
Women the world over are still unequal to men, bound by a thousand
discriminations. In the backward lands of the East hundreds of mil-
lions of women are still a subject sex. Not even in the most advanced
capitalist countries are they quite equal with men; the long list of dis-
abilities against which the National Women’s Party protests in Amer-
ica is evidence of that. Nowhere in capitalist lands have they equal
access to all universities, equal pay for equal work in all industry,
equal right to advance in all professions, equal rights in marriage and
in the care and custody of children. Even those rights which they have
attained are today under attack by fascism, which under the phrases
of chivalry drives women back to the Middle Ages.
It is therefore the more amazing that Soviet women should have
gained so swiftly an equality unknown elsewhere in the world. They
receive equal pay for equal work and no jobs are closed to them. They
have equal opportunity in education and in government. They have
equal rights and duties in marriage; they are free to have or not to
have children. They have full political, economic, legal and social
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
equality, as human beings and citizens. This has been attained in
eighteen years in a country where women were once suppressed not
only in the European but also in the Asiatic manner. Tsarist law made
Russian wives the property of their husbands “in duty bound to render
him love, respect and in all things obedience to his wishes.” They had
no right to separate passports; if they ran away, the police returned
them to their husbands. This law was reinforced by brutal peasant
customs; Gorky relates the sight of an unfaithful wife bound naked
to a cart and flogged by her peasant husband into unconsciousness in
the midst of a jeering, applauding crowd. In tsarist Central Asia mil-
lions of dark-skinned Mohammedan women lived in the seclusion of
harems and behind black veils.
The freeing of women takes place in the Soviet Union swiftly
because it is not a woman’s fight alone. It comes as part of the freeing
of human beings by giving them joint ownership over the country’s
means of production, irrespective of sex, color or race.... “The eman-
cipation of women is not only the work of women Communists but
of men Communists also, just as the fight for socialism is a mutual
fight,” said Krupskaia, widow of Lenin. The Communists hold that
the gains in women’s freedom made through centuries have been
chiefly due to change in methods of production. The modern factory
freed women from the patriarchal home, but imposed its own form of
slavery; it used women to cut down wages, thus increasing the antag-
onism of the sexes. Economic slavery is the basis of all other inequal-
ities, the key-log in the jam which must first be loosed that all others
may rush free.
No freedom comes without battle. The October Revolution cre-
ated the economic, legal and political basis of woman’s equality. The
industrialization of the country was the consciously applied weapon
for making woman equal with man. Yet in every village and factory
women still had to fight their way over the traditional habits of cen-
turies, which lingered in their own souls and in the souls of men. But
these barriers of the past were no longer buttressed by ancient law
and by the need of private industry for cheap woman’s labor.
The first women to establish their freedom were the workers in
the factories who took part with their men in the Revolution. I recall
Dunia, who was once an illiterate textile worker, living with husband
and children in the same room with another family, nine people in all.
Dunia was one of those who in the first year of Revolution seized the
manager’s house for a day nursery so that her children might have
116
space to grow. She learned to read and began to rise in political and
social work, as did simultaneously millions of others. She said to me:
“Once life went on without us workers, still more without us women.
The father gave her to the husband; she was slave to her man and her
factory. Now I am slave to no one. The road is open to all life.” This
phrase of the “open road to life” I have heard hundreds of times from
working women.
The emancipation of peasant women came more slowly. Scores
of women presidents of villages have told me of their difficulties with
the peasant men who jeered at “petticoat rule.” “They laughed at the
first woman we elected to the village Soviet so much that she could
do nothing; at the next election we put in six women and now it is we
who laugh.” This was a typical statement.
The widespread collectivization of farming in 1930 gave
women’s freedom in the rural districts its needed economic base.
Farm women everywhere in the collective farms are awakening to the
implications of their independent income. Drunken husbands are no
longer masters in the home. “I got for myself a warm new coat, a
dress and shoes; I got clothes for the children,” said a farm woman
displaying her purchases in the local market. “But my man spent his
money on drink and I’ll buy him nothing. I’ve told him if he gets
drunk again I’ll throw him out of the house and not even feed him.
The farm will back me up, unless he quits drinking and loafing. I can
get along without him in the collective farm.” Some thirty million
farm women from Leningrad to Vladivostok are awakening to the
amazing fact that they can get along economically without their hus-
bands.
Most cruel and bloody of all was the fight for women’s freedom
in those lands of Central Asia where for centuries veiled women had
been sold like chattels to the harems. Here local religion and custom
supported men who murdered their wives for the crime of unveiling.
When young folks in Tashkent schools spent vacations agitating for
women’s freedom, one girl’s body was sent back in a cart. Accompa-
nying the hacked pieces were the words: “This is your women’s free-
dom.” In another locality of Central Asia, nine murders of women
occurred before any were discovered by central authority; every at-
tempt of a woman to get justice was met by local vengeance.
But the women of Central Asia, led by the hope which the new
government gave them and the new industries encouraged, fought
their way into freedom. The blood of martyrs stirred them to greater
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
struggle; fifty thousand women marched at the funeral of the Tash-
kent girl student. In Bokhara, citadel of Mohammedan orthodoxy, a
spectacular unveiling of women in great meetings and processions
took place on International Women’s Day, March 8, 1928. Amid in-
describable enthusiasm they tore off veils, stamped on them, threw
them on the streets and at the feet of speakers. When one woman was
murdered by her husband for this unveiling, a public trial was held in
a great mass meeting; the murderer was swiftly condemned and exe-
cuted. From that time women walked unveiled in holiest Bokhara.
Today a woman, Abidova, who at the age of twelve was sold in mar-
riage to pay a fifteen-ruble debt of her father, is vice-president of the
Uzbek Republic, and its permanent representative in Moscow.
These women of the East are quite aware of the relation of their
new freedom to the socially owned means of production.
The roar of the factory is in me.
It gives me rhythm,
It gives me energy,
sing the Uzbek girls of the state silk mill which brought them out of
the harems. Another song makes the application wider:
Flower of the East,
the time has come To cast off the veil and the paranja....
For a thousand years you slept in darkness under the yoke.
When you awake, when you arise from deep sleep,
The workers of the world await you!
Steadily the share of Soviet women in industry and in public life
has climbed upward. The percentage of women among industrial
workers has risen by a steady 3 per cent a year during the Five-Year
Plan, and is now (1935) 42 per cent of all persons gainfully employed.
In technical higher schools 36 per cent of the students are women, in
medical schools 75 per cent; in no institution of learning is there any
discrimination against women. The percentage of women who took
part in elections rose from 28 per cent of all eligible women in 1926
to 80.3 per cent in 1934. Women constituted 18.2 per cent of the
membership of city soviets in 1926; this rose to 32.1 per cent in 1934.
The change in the rural districts was greater; a 9.9 percentage of
women in 1926 in village soviets rose to 26.4 per cent in 1934. Only
0.6 per cent of the villages had women presidents in 1926, though
even this figure testified to the successful fight of thousands of
118
women; by 1934 the figure was over 8 per cent. More than a million
women today hold some form of public office in the soviets, includ-
ing 400,000 elected members of soviets, 400,000 members of local
government commissions, 112,000 “co-judges” in the courts, a func-
tion similar to but somewhat more specialized than that of our jurors,
and 100,000 members of managing boards of co-operatives.
The city of Tver, now renamed Kalinin, gives an example of the
varied kinds of work done by women. As a textile town, its popula-
tion included a large proportion of women textile workers before the
Revolution, a fact which explains its present status as a progressive
city, boasting itself among the first Soviet cities in which women at-
tained their full half of the seats in the city government. (Other cities
are steadily following, as women through initiative and education
take advantage of their legal right to equality.) Tver’s two most im-
portant women are Anna Kaligina, city secretary of the Communist
Party, than which no higher post in the city exists, and Feodorova,
who held till recently the prize of “best weaver” for the USSR. Thou-
sands of others follow in the footsteps of these leaders.
Policeman Lily travels fearlessly through dark woods about the
city to round up criminal gangs. On one occasion, when she was con-
voying a prisoner caught setting fire to turf fields, she was set upon
in the woods by two of his accomplices and brought back to jail not
one criminal but three. That same evening she played the part of frag-
ile heroine in lilac gown in the local dramatic club, for Lily is an ar-
dent amateur actress specializing in dainty feminine parts. Black-
eyed Katya is a street-car conductor, with the best record among the
twenty-seven-woman conductors of Tver. She is also in the second
year of the workers’ college, where she studies Turgenieff and geom-
etry. Morosov, the motorman, writes poems about her.
All the young men admire Nina, eighteen-year-old glider pilot,
who three days a week sails through the air on light wings. Her reg-
ular job is in the car works, making valves for railway cars. But her
pastime is the aviation club and she expects some day to be an aviator.
Zoya is champion motor mechanic in a clothing factory and also
chairman of its shop committee, handling trade union affairs for five
hundred and sixty women; in her spare time she is an enthusiastic ski
runner, who took second place in a contest held by the clothing work-
ers of five provinces. Marusia is studying to be a doctor; Tonia is a
former spinner who did such good work on the wall newspaper that
she is now a full-time writer. Dusia was the first woman chauffeur in
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
the city; the boys used to run after her yelling, “girl driver.” One by
one the girls of Tver have conquered every trade and profession. So
have the women throughout the USSR.
Foreign visitors are occasionally shocked to find women taking
part in heavy and dirty labor, field work, street-cleaning, even dig-
ging the subway. But Soviet women are still of the generation of
peasants, who worked in the fields. They know that in all ages women
have done heavy labor; it is the skilled work from which they have
been barred. They know that equal share in labor means in the USSR
equal share in ruling and in all opportunities of life. So young girls
fought for the right to equal work on the subway, against engineers
and miners who didn’t want to let the women underground. They
worked knee-deep in water alongside experienced men, challenged
them to records and often beat them. “The subway was the richest
experience of my life,” said a prize-winning girl.
There are, however, regulations governing women’s labor,
which prohibit work proved by experience more dangerous to women
than to men. Women may not engage in trades involving danger of
lead poisoning, may not lift weights above a certain amount. Special
regulations, reinforced by medical observation, surround the whole
period of pregnancy, and the last six to eight weeks women may not
work. 1 Many labor processes are constantly under investigation to
determine whether or not they are injurious to women; when experi-
ment shows that they are, they are prohibited. This is no sex discrim-
ination but part of the ordinary routine of the public health service,
which steadily investigates the effect of occupations and bars from
them those groups of the population which might be injured. Thus
sand-blasting trades are prohibited to youth, which is more suscepti-
ble than older people are to tuberculosis from sand-blasting. No trade
or profession is prohibited in advance as “unwomanly”; any trade
may be barred after investigation to any group or individual on
grounds of public health.
Not access to heavy labor but to skilled professions distinguishes
Soviet women from those of other lands. Anna Kofanova won fame
as operator of a combined-harvester, harvesting 1,500 acres in one
1
Six weeks before and six weeks after childbirth for office jobs;
eight weeks before and eight weeks after for physical labor; longer pe-
riods may be ordered at any time by the doctor, and are given without
loss of wages.
120
season, the township record. Natalia Mikhailova is director of a ma-
chine tractor station entirely manned by women which services the
15,000 acres of thirty-two collective farms. Shchetinina, a ship cap-
tain, navigates the ocean. The envelopes of Soviet stratostats were
designed by a woman chemist. Irene Rousinova was the first woman
polar explorer, wintering several seasons in the north; she has been
followed by hosts of others, including Nina Demme, who for two
years has managed the scientific station on North Land. Galina
Medovnik weeded tobacco in tsarist days as a girl of eight, fought in
the Red Army during the civil war and was several times condemned
to death; she escaped to become today a representative of housewives
in the Moscow Soviet, where she superintends the building of apart-
ment houses for workers.
Equality in work has given to women equality in every field of
life: education, politics, marriage. The assumption behind the Soviet
marriage code is the equal human dignity of both parties in deciding
their intimate relations—a decision with which the state has no right
to interfere. State action is limited to protection of children and pre-
vention of force or fraud. Young couples appearing at the Marriage
Registry Bureau are therefore required to give name, residence, oc-
cupation, past marital history, any children, and the future name
which each intends to take. Questions to each are identical. The same
name is often taken but not always. A person who infects another
with disease is criminally liable. Property owned before marriage re-
mains individual; that later acquired is jointly owned. Any married
person who desires a divorce gets it, nor has the state the right to ask
the reason. Both parties are responsible for the care and support of
children up to eighteen and for giving the other partner any needed
temporary economic aid to establish the independent relation. Recent
much publicized changes in the divorce code were only a better
bookkeeping, ensuring that both persons actually knew of the divorce
and were actually held for the support of children.
Recent comments of Soviet leaders that more time should be
given to family life are similarly part of the general emphasis on
richer human relations now possible through increasing leisure rather
than any belated recognition of the family. Casual attitudes toward
marriage have been discouraged from the beginning; no one was
more emphatic on this than Lenin. But the pressure is social rather
than legal. Trade unions, collective farms and Party organizations
will penalize, even to the point of expulsion, persons who cause
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
social havoc through their sexual instability. But they consider con-
crete situations, not traditions. The continuous and open living to-
gether of two people is respected, whether or not they are “regis-
tered”; it constitutes marriage in both the social and legal sense. Tak-
ing advantage of another person is penalized, through whatever forms
accomplished. Peasants who took advantage of the marriage code to
secure brief brides for harvest work soon stopped when they found
this gave the woman equal right to the harvest. One notorious case
some years ago was that of a man who seduced a girl by marriage and
threw her out next morning; he was convicted of rape, which is le-
gally defined as sex relations obtained through force or fraud, and
was punished by imprisonment. The fact of the marriage registration
was rather an aggravation than otherwise; he had used a Soviet office
to assist fraud.
Problems occasionally arise in marriage from the fact that both
partners have jobs. I met a girl tractor-driver in Siberia who married
a tractor-driver on another field brigade. They spent their honeymoon
some miles apart; once each week the young man walked ten or
twelve miles on his free day to stay with his bride. The girl never met
him half-way; she was boss of the winning brigade and took no
chances. To my casual query why they did not get into the same field-
gang, both exclaimed: “Desert my brigade in sowing-time!”
A woman’s relation to the state is always individual; it is never
through her husband. Not even the wives of great men may live by
reflected glory. When Stalin’s wife died, the black-bordered an-
nouncements in the press gave her own name and occupation in the
artificial silk industry, and only after this mentioned that she was the
“close friend and companion of Stalin.” Kalinin’s wife wins recogni-
tion by creating a state farm and center of culture in the Altai Moun-
tains, where they call her by her own name, not by the name of the
president.
The tradition that love is “woman’s whole existence” is chal-
lenged by a new assumption, a refusal to admit that any human be-
ing’s happiness can be completely dependent on one other human be-
ing. When Salima, a young woman of Turkestan, accepted a scholar-
ship to study in Tashkent, her husband ordered her to return, and, on
her refusal, divorced her, boasting by letter that he had taken another
wife “obedient and illiterate.” Salima showed her quality by replying:
“I received your letter telling me that you have another wife. I will
have my revenge. When I finish my studies I will come back to the
122
village and teach your second wife to read and write.” The older gen-
eration may be horrified by the flippant Salima, but the new Soviet
generation will applaud her as free and self-reliant citizen.
The freedom of every woman to dispose of her own body, to
marry or not to marry, to have children or not to have them, irrespec-
tive of marriage, is taken for granted by Soviet law, and is restrained
only by social opinion, not by legal penalty. Dr. Milashkevich, head
of the Gynecological section of the great polyclinic, where a medical
personnel of three hundred serves the thirty-five thousand workers of
Stalin Auto Works, told me that all women working in the plant come
to her as part of their routine health examination. “If they are married
I ask them: ‘Do you want children?’ Then I give them medical advice
according to their intentions. If they do not want children, the poly-
clinic supplies the means of prevention.” She further informed me
that every attempt was made to discourage abortion, by urging
grounds of health, and by sending nurses and even neighbors to rea-
son with the wife and husband, but never by absolute refusal. “To
compel a woman either to have or not to have children we would
consider an infringement of human rights,” said Dr. Milashkevich.
“If she decides to have them, the state gives every assistance, through
free medical and hospital care, special funds for milk and children’s
clothing and the use of day nurseries to care for children during her
working hours.” That the women are deciding to have children is
clear from the average increase of population of three million annu-
ally—in the past two years of growing prosperity three and a half
million2—an increase unparalleled in any other land.
Every year the Soviet Union produces its crop of national heroes,
who spring into fame for some notable achievement and whose meth-
ods are widely copied. In 1935 the names most heard were those of
Stakhanov, a miner, and Marie Demchenko, a farm woman. A former
farm servant of the sugar beet districts, Marie had risen through col-
lectivization of farming, and the knowledge she gained in the labora-
tory cottage, to challenge in spring of 1935 all the beet growers of the
land. “Let us flood the land with sugar. My brigade will get twenty
tons of beets per acre.” Hundreds of letters accepted; hundreds of vis-
itors came to inspect the fields which Marie’s determined brigade of
women nine times hoed, and eight times cleared of moths by setting
fires at night. They conquered a rainless August by the local fire-
2
Figures from Soviet Statistical Dept. 1936.
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
fighting apparatus, pouring twenty thousand buckets of water on their
fields. They won twenty-one tons per acre and came to the November
celebrations in Moscow to receive the Order of Lenin amid the plau-
dits of the entire country.
Who were these women singled out for honor? They were
women who got down in the dirt to dig sugar beets, who soiled their
hands with slimy insects that a beet crop might be improved. What
made their achievement honored? This—that their beets were no
commodity for private profit, but sugar for the workers of a nation.
They were leaders in the public task of farming a continent. This
made of the hitherto unregarded toil of farm women a heroic collec-
tive epic, worthy to be classed with the work of explorers who raid
the Arctic or scientists who storm the stratosphere.
124
CHAPTER XII:
THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF SCIENCE
“Russian is now recognized in American universities as a scien-
tific language,” said a young Californian who was visiting with me
the Leningrad Institute for Plant Protection. “Four years ago the uni-
versities wouldn’t take it as one of the two languages required for a
scientific degree. But now my professors tell me that for my specialty
of farm pests, it is the most important language of all. More original
work is appearing in it than in any other language. German and
French research is older and was translated some years ago. But our
universities haven’t funds today to translate all this new research ap-
pearing in Russian.”
This American youth hardly connected in his mind the decline in
German and French research and the lack of American university
funds for translation with the world-wide economic crisis. He knew
little of the collectivization of Soviet farming and the stimulus it had
given to his branch of science. But across two seas and two continents
the results of these causes had reached the aloof halls of a university
in California, interpreted thus “Russian—a scientific language—
original research not yet found in translation.”
Visiting scientists at the Fifteenth International Physiology Con-
gress which met in Leningrad in August 1935, expressed an appreci-
ation not untinged with amazement at the high respect paid science
by the Soviet government and the rapid strides made by Soviet sci-
ence in recent years. “No government ever ‘took up’ science as has
this government....” “Even the Americans are startled by the amount
of resources which can be placed at the disposal of science by a gov-
ernment planning on a national scale....” Such were some of the com-
ments which found their way into the press of New York. Professor
Walter B. Cannon, of the Harvard Medical School, told the Congress
how science suffers today in all the capitalist countries, and added:
“In the Soviet Union, where the social importance of science is ap-
preciated, the funds made available for the development and prose-
cution of science are greater than in any country in the world.” The
report of the Congress later given in Science, official organ of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, noted “the
respect with which scientists are treated,” “the important position
which science, pure as well as applied, occupies in the national econ-
omy,” and the “ardor of the army of young scientific workers.”
125
THIS SOVIET WORLD
Soviet citizens take it for granted—Marxists in fact have taken it
for granted ever since the days of Marx—that science must naturally
reach a much freer and fuller development under socialism than is
possible under capitalism. Capitalism, whose early expansion a cen-
tury or more ago encouraged and boasted its science, has already
reached the stage where science is an embarrassment, since the pos-
sibilities of human development which it reveals are unrealizable un-
der private ownership. Science itself under capitalism suffers from a
lack of aim. In England the head of the oldest agricultural experiment
station in the world told a visiting Russian scientist that he hardly
knew what to investigate since the declining condition of farming in
England and the antagonisms in Egypt and India prevented the appli-
cation of everything he discovered. In America the hostility between
science and capitalism is only in its first stages, and is marked by
increasing suppression of new knowledge which would interfere with
profit. In Germany where a collapsing capitalism has taken the form
of fascism, there is already a deep distrust of human reason and a
propaganda against the very existence of science.
In the Soviet Union science is rapidly expanding. Communism
demands the thorough-going application of science to remake all hu-
man life; it assumes that the intellect of man can progressively under-
stand and subdue nature to his collective will. “A new historical
epoch will begin,” said Engels, “when men and their work will im-
prove to such an extent that all previous achievements will seem as
but a feeble shadow.” “We are confident that in our epoch we are
entering an era of unparalleled progress in science,” is a typical edi-
torial comment today in a Moscow newspaper. President Karpinsky,
of the All-Union Academy of Science, spoke of the USSR as “the
country where science is given a place of honor,” when he greeted
the visiting physiologists “on behalf of hundreds of research insti-
tutes.” Even the famous physiologist, L. P. Pavlov, who was always
antagonistic to Bolshevik ideas, said recently that he wanted to live
to be a hundred because “the Soviet government has given millions
for my scientific work and my laboratories flourish as never before.”
Those doubters who fear that state subsidies for science interfere
more with scientific freedom than do the subsidies of individual mil-
lionaires, and who promote abroad the idea that the Soviets “perse-
cute scientists,” ignore the fact that a high esteem for science is quite
consistent with a deep suspicion of individual scientists. Conflicts did
persist between the Soviet government and certain scientists who
126
used their knowledge to fight the Revolution. That sabotage by sci-
entists and engineers occurred on a very wide scale during the early
years of the first Five-Year Plan has been acknowledged by thou-
sands of former saboteurs. Only when the victory of the Five-Year
Plan was assured beyond question did these waverers finally come
over to find that socialism gives far greater opportunities for their
science than capitalism ever did or could. 1
The Academy of Science has been greatly expanded from the
three departments, mathematics, natural sciences, and historical phi-
lology, which it comprised before the Revolution. It is the center for
planning and co-ordinating the scientific activity of the entire country
through its twenty-one large departments and its frequent inter-de-
partmental sessions. It works hand in hand with the State Planning
Commission which indicates to it the requests for widespread scien-
tific research in particular fields needed for the development of the
country. It is also the court of appeal for all scientists who disagree
with government departments or research institutes on questions of
their work, or who want to do research for which no appropriation
yet exists. In all conflicts on the objectives of research the Academy
decides, being liberally financed directly under the All-Union gov-
ernment. The city of Moscow has recently assigned to the Academy
1,250 acres on the Moscow River, where the first of forty-two pro-
jected buildings are now being built.
More than one thousand scientific research institutes in the
USSR, employing 41,000 scientific workers, were claimed at the
Physiology Congress by Akulov, Secretary of the Central Executive
Committee of the government. Many of these institutes are of monu-
mental size and scope. The All-Union Institute of Experimental Med-
icine, for instance, is the organizing center of all medical research in
the USSR. Scientists, doctors and engineers worked for two years on
the construction plan of its new home where 5,500 employees are to
study “the biology and pathology of the human being from every as-
pect.” Hospitals of the institute make continuous study of typical
cases of various diseases and healthy people are also studied as “con-
trols.”
One of the largest of the scientific institutions is the All-Union
Academy of Agricultural Sciences, which correlates the work of
nearly sixty institutes for research in soil chemistry, plant protection,
1
See details in Chap. 3, page 37.
127
THIS SOVIET WORLD
livestock breeding, microbiology, agrometeorology and similar
branches of science. The work of the agricultural institutes is based
upon material obtained in 200 experiment stations and more than
1,500 smaller research stations in state and collective farms. Each of
the subordinate institutes is an important organization in itself; the
Institute for Plant Protection, for instance, has a central staff of 250
scientific workers and dozens of branches all over the country.
The expansion of Soviet science arises not only from the need of
socialism for scientific planning, but from the wide interest and co-
operation on the part of the people. The Academy of Science is no
secluded institution of the aristocracy; it is the unity of the scientific
brains of the country with the masses. Science in the Soviet Union is
dear to all the people, for every citizen knows that its discoveries will
become his own possession and not the property of a small privileged
group. “We scientists used to feel ourselves rather unimportant, since
we had already discovered so much more than people were able to
apply, but now that the collective farms demand our science, we see
our work for several thousand years,” said Vaviloff, Vice-Chairman
of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences and world-famous discov-
erer and creator of new plants.
The wide interest of the Soviet population in science expresses
itself not only in honor to scientists but in active participation in sci-
entific work by great numbers of people. Every scientific institution
receives much popular co-operation, from workers, farmers, even
from children. When the All-Union geological survey sent some two
thousand annual expeditions with seventy to eighty thousand partici-
pants to explore and map the resources of the Soviet Union during
the first Five-Year Plan, these official expeditions became the corre-
lating center of a still broader popular movement. Thousands of
grammar school children became “discoverers of our country,” going
with their teachers to study geological outcroppings. Tens of thou-
sands of hikers learned from geologists what to look for on cliffs and
mountain slopes and occasionally made discoveries of significance.
One of the stimulating causes of the first great Pamir expedition came
from a Khirghiz nomad who carried a gold nugget several days jour-
ney to Samarkand and fought his way through many bureaucratic of-
fices because he “thought the government ought to know about the
gold in the Pamirs.”
Every large factory has its bureau of workers’ inventions through
which inventive genius of workers finds connection with the wider
128
world. Workers and farmers who make practical discoveries are often
asked to report them in their own non-technical words at scientific
congresses. Scientists in turn give frequent lectures in factories on
subjects applicable to the work of the plant. Analysis of steel by the
spectrum method will be reported to a machine-building plant, and
discussions on organic chemistry will be given by scientists at a rub-
ber works to a large attendance of interested workers.
So deep and thorough is the interest taken by workers in science
that the cleavage between workingmen and scientists already lessens,
presaging that time predicted by Marx when the distinction between
mental and manual labor will disappear. At a banquet held by the
Academy of Science in the Neskuchny Palace in Moscow, a number
of leading factory workers were present as guests. A foreign newspa-
perman, wishing to interview Professor Bach, a well-known member
of the Academy, approached a man who was pointed out to him from
a distance. They chatted half an hour about the revolution in culture,
the creation of a new life, and the new type of human being now ap-
pearing under socialism. In parting, the correspondent asked for the
Academician’s autograph. The man to whom he was speaking started
in surprise. “My name Is Ivanov; Bach is the person sitting next to
me,” he said, pointing to a man who had been attentively listening. “I
myself am a locksmith from the ball-bearing plant.”
One of the most striking examples of the democratization of sci-
ence is the “laboratory cottage,” which has developed in the last two
years on the collective farms. Seven thousand of these centers of ex-
periment are reported in the Ukraine alone. The head of the laboratory
is sometimes a teacher of the village school, but more often a self-
educated farmer who has the scientific instinct and whose enthusiasm
has organized other farmers to make experiments in their fields and
correspond with scientific stations.
“This scientific tendency in human beings takes such varied
forms,” said an editor, “that one cannot even classify them. In the past
these scientific instincts often died stillborn because of poverty. To-
day we seek them out through many agencies; one of these is our
Peasants’ Gazette. Today a new type of experimenter is developing
who does not experiment secretly but organizes the masses around
him to discover and carry out new ideas. There is often some waste
of time and destruction of machinery in these experiments. But this
does not worry us. What is important and valuable is that the human
being is striving to change, to improve. Waste of time and destruction
129
THIS SOVIET WORLD
of materials matters nothing, if thereby we add even one drop of
knowledge which enables man to increase his understanding and con-
trol of nature.”
One such natural scientist was Akulov, a peasant of the Genich-
esk district. As a World War prisoner in Austria, he saw one head of
grain much bigger than the surrounding heads. He kept it and even-
tually brought it home to his own garden to breed new giant heads.
When the collective farm was formed in his village in 1930, Akulov
had four bushels of this special grain to give them. The big heads
were planted and cherished until there were several score acres of
them. The samples were then sent to the All-Union Institute of Plants
and found to be a new variety existing nowhere else in the world.
Seventy-five-year-old illiterate Barashev was another such natu-
ral scientist. For nearly twenty years he worked to produce a frost-
resistant flax; the collective fields of his farm are harvesting it this
year. Pechtilief, in the Leningrad district, stirred up such an interest
among his neighbors in discovering why two fields on the same farm
gave such different yields, that the whole village became one vast
experimental farm, planting several thousand acres in various ways
and comparing the results of different types of tillage. Pechtilief ap-
peared before the Congress of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences
to demand that scientists find a way to produce a new variety of wheat
which should combine the high milling quality of one variety with
the non-shattering characteristics of a second. Kolosev, another col-
lective farmer, has challenged the scientists to work out types of seeds
and tillage which will ensure different ripening times for the various
crops and thus get an even load of work through a maximum period
for the harvesting machine.
The assimilation of new scientific ideas proceeds far faster under
the new collective farm system than under the old individual farming.
Some entire districts have already become agricultural experiment
stations. In Zhadryansk district, near Cheliabinsk, several thousand
experiments were carried on in a single summer with oats, wheat,
green peas, sunflower seeds and other crops. Special conferences
were held attended by two hundred or more delegates from the vari-
ous laboratory cottages. All these popular experiments are in constant
touch with the scientific organizations of the Commissariat of Agri-
culture, and are protected against undue loss by a government policy
of crop insurance.
130
Several achievements of Soviet agricultural science are already
of world significance. The method of “vernalization,” which changes
winter wheat to spring wheat, late cotton to early cotton and biennial
to annual plants, has made it possible to grow Algerian wheat beyond
the Polar circle, at 67.4 degrees of latitude in Khibiny. The northern-
most botanical gardens in the world are on the Kola Peninsula, where
experiments with six hundred plants found twenty-five that could be
adapted to the Arctic. The Soviet Union has developed its own rubber
industry from the newly discovered “rubber” plants, tau-sagiz and
kok-sagiz, found in the mountains of Turkestan and cultivated later
as far north as the Ukraine. The brilliant work of Michurin in devel-
oping frost-resistant varieties of fruits made him famous not only
among scientists of the world but among millions of Soviet farmers,
tens of thousands of whom journey annually to his plant-breeding
station to report on their use of his varieties.
New machines have been developed, a machine for retching flax
which is revolutionizing the flax industry, a “northern” combined-
harvester suitable for grain of high moisture content. Even the ordi-
nary combine first imported from America has undergone sixty im-
provements and is said by experts to be the best in the world. Re-
search into soil microbiology has made, according to Vaviloff, “the
role of micro-organisms in the soil a calculable factor.” The artificial
fertilization of livestock, in which the spermatozoa are sent by mail
or airplane from experimental stations to the laboratory cottages, is
today applied to half the country’s livestock, insuring rapid improve-
ment of stock from pure-bred males. Under the constant co-operation
of collective farmers with scientific centers, the agricultural map of
the country is rapidly changing. Sugar beets expand towards the
Urals, cotton appears in South Ukraine, irrigation and tree-planting
begins to reclaim the wastes beyond the Volga, and wheat marches
steadily towards the Arctic. Thousands of acres are today success-
fully farmed in the Murmansk district on the Arctic Ocean, in place
of a scant twelve acres a few years ago.
The most spectacular example of the planned advance of man
under the leadership of science is the conquest of the Polar regions,
which has stirred the imagination and enthusiasm of the whole Soviet
land. Scientists of the All-Union Arctic Institute first seriously
broached the idea of a Great Northern Sea Route in 1930, though
other scientists declared that traffic along the northern coast of Eu-
rope and Asia was “impracticable during the present glacial epoch.”
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
The Soviet government backed its bolder scientists, established the
Central Administration of the Northern Sea Route and gave it ships
and funds. Step by step the rapid advance was made, first by dozens
of expeditions which mapped coasts and charted waters, then by
thirty-nine Polar scientific stations, equipped with radio and airplane
service, then by trading fleets led by ice-breakers first from the west,
then from the east, and then along the whole Polar coast from Atlantic
to Pacific.
The whole world remembers the epic of the Chelyushkin, its
tragic wreck northwest of Bering Straits, the skillful landing on ice
which was crashing around them, the two months of heroic organiza-
tion of “normal life” in their floating home on the ice-floe, where
Professor Schmidt, dressed in deer-skin coat and fur cap, delivered
lectures on dialectic materialism or the Freudian theory, and found
time to edit the galleys of the Unabridged Soviet Encyclopedia which
he had brought from Moscow, and to write a preface to a book on
higher mathematics. The history of Polar expeditions has known
many examples of daring, but never such courageously casual organ-
ization of normal routine under abnormal conditions as this “Soviet
Republic on the Ice” which got out its “wall newspaper” with car-
toons and self-criticism, and comments on the Communist Party Con-
gress then taking place in Moscow, received by the Chelyushkinites
by radio.
Today special ships are built in Soviet shipyards, embodying the
experience of the Chelyushkin for the conquest of the northern seas.
Steadily the designs of airplanes and clothing have been adapted to
Arctic weather and the plane is now the “eyes of the north.” Four
ordinary freighters in the summer of 1935 made the whole trip around
the north of Europe and Asia, and scores will follow in 1936. The
network of heroic scientists, wintering in thirty-nine stations, begins
to be supplemented by miners, timber-workers, even farmers. Exten-
sive prospecting has been done for minerals, especially coal and oil
to serve the northern trade route. A new type of man is following the
explorers and scientists—engineers, technicians, builders of the Arc-
tic. And science pushes farther north in the expedition of the Sadko,
to discover, at latitude 82° 40’—the farthest north ever reached in
free sailing—the re-emergence of a warm section of the Gulf Stream
which may make the northern sea route practicable for more months
of the year. Of all the world’s eight ships which have reached during
132
the past half century the latitudes around 80°, two were American,
two Scandinavian and four were Soviet ships of the past few years.
It is the support of the whole Soviet country which strengthens
these men of the north in their conquests. The entire Soviet popula-
tion regards these Arctic subduers as their representatives and cham-
pions. It shares their lives by radio hook-ups, Moscow talks through
the six months’ night with Dixon Island, which issues the Arctic Ra-
dio News. All Russia thrilled when a young ex-criminal, sent to the
far north to “make himself over,” was reassured across three thousand
frozen miles by the voice of his factory sweetheart urging him to
make good. When a winter childbirth in a distant Arctic station de-
veloped complications, the neighbors got the Dixon Island surgeon
on the radio and for more than three hours he directed over the air
every detail while the whole of a much-worried Arctic listened in.
When the child and mother were safe, congratulations poured in from
thousands of miles of icebound waterfront.
Even under capitalism science breaks the boundaries of nations,
steadily to lift the power of man. Under socialism it becomes the con-
sciously applied and swiftly expanding strength of the whole popula-
tion, conquering for man his world.
133
CHAPTER XIII:
THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF ART
“Heroic people call into being heroic artists.”
Editorial in Soviet Literary Critic
If science is the instrument of man’s dominance over nature, art
is the means of his self-expression. Tens of millions of people from
earth’s most backward races have awakened in the Soviet Union from
long slumber. They are seeking self-expression. They themselves
write, sing and paint; they push up from their ranks novelists, poets
and dramatists. They love these poets and dramatists; they criticize
them and make serious demands from them. Soviet art is not private
property, it is the wealth of the nation, and the nation is jealous and
proud of its wealth.
When the first All-Union Congress of Soviet writers met in Mos-
cow in August, 1934, thousands of letters poured in from all corners
of the union, congratulating, greeting, giving practical suggestions
and advice. Workers, collective farmers, students, Young Pioneers,
scientists, engineers and artists thus expressed their interest in the
Congress. In Moscow alone, more than two hundred factory confer-
ences were held between readers and authors. Delegations represent-
ing millions of readers came to speak at the Congress. Each day after
the meetings, authors found throngs of workers who had been unable
to enter the crowded hall waiting outside to hail their favorite writers
with applause. Throughout the country, millions of people concen-
trated their attention on questions of esthetics, the function of poetry,
the form of literature best suiting the present age, subjects reported in
detail in the press. Literary work in the land of the Soviets is becom-
ing the affair of all the toilers.
There are no bounds to the desire for every variety of culture.
Soviet Russia in its first fifteen years published five billion books, as
contrasted with two billion in the last thirty years of tsardom. The
number keeps growing. At the end of the first Five-Year Plan, book
production in the USSR was greater than that of England, Germany
and France together. Especially amazing is the growth of literature
among the national minorities whose self-expression was suppressed
under tsardom. Every year since 1929 has seen the publication of
more books in the Ukrainian language than were published in the
whole 118 years before the Revolution. One publishing house alone,
134
the Moscow International Book House, publishes books in eighty-
five languages, some of which had formerly no alphabet—novels,
textbooks, folk tales, technical works, translations of classics, short
stories and dictionaries.
The Soviet world feels itself the heir of the ages. Anniversaries
of poets, scientists and artists of all countries are widely celebrated.
The ancient Persian poet Firdousi, the English Shakespeare, the Ger-
man Goethe, the famous French writers, are honored by mass meet-
ings and columns in the press. The best works of Flaubert, Mérimée,
Maupassant, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain and Jack London appear by
the hundreds of thousands of copies and disappear almost as quickly
from the shelves of bookstores which never expect to retain volumes
more than a few weeks. Russian classics are even more popular. Ler-
montov, Nekrassov, Korolenko, Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov appear
in editions of seventy to a hundred thousand. The favorite poet Push-
kin has been issued for several years in repeated editions of two hun-
dred thousand copies, and his collected works in six volumes now
face a subscription demand of three hundred thousand copies, exclu-
sive of sales to the shops. Tolstoy is the most popular of all; eleven
and a half million copies of his works have been sold since the Rev-
olution.
The Soviet reader demands not only the art of the past but the art
of today. The most popular novels are those like Sholokhov’s Quiet
Don and Soil Upturned, which paint on a wide canvas the personali-
ties, difficulties, struggles and victories of the present. “No artist of
the past had such material at his disposal as is given by the earth-
shaking events occurring in the USSR in the last eighteen years,” said
the Soviet writer Panferov speaking at a Paris congress. “The work-
ing class built a dam on the surging Dnieper and made its unruly wa-
ters serve man. It transformed the misty Urals into an industrial cen-
ter, mastered the wild and distant Kuzbas.... In remaking the country
the working class at the same time remade itself.... The outcast
dweller of the mountains, the illiterate, solitary Yakut, the northern
Nentsi, the wild Bashkir, the Mordvin with his trachoma, the perse-
cuted Kalmyk—tens of millions of peoples in scores of scattered na-
tionalities went into the furnace of civil war and are energetically re-
building the country, conquering the strongholds of culture, bringing
new life to the whole world.... Socialist realism was the inevitable
phenomenon of the proletarian era—active, cheerful, bold and dar-
ing, like the era of the proletarian revolution itself.”
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These tens of millions of people are not only the subjects for art,
they are also the artists, readers and audience. They show a wide in-
terest in all forms of artistic expression. Theaters are constantly
crowded; art museums are packed with visitors; popular exhibitions
sometimes have lines before the museum entrances waiting until
there is room to go in. Nor are the factory workers and collective
farmers at all backward in expressing their opinion on the products
of brush and pen. Are they not all also writers, artists, musicians and
actors, if and when the mood seizes them? They are not only consum-
ers of art, millions of them are amateur producers of it.
More than one hundred thousand “circles for self-expression”
have grown up in the past two years in the USSR. The drama circles
alone have 1,200,000 members, while the total number in the singing,
music, dancing and graphic art circles exceeds five million. Writers,
cartoonists and photographers for the local press or wall newspapers
are probably as many more. A chief characteristic of the new type of
person now emerging in the Soviet Union is his dynamic energy in
self-expression, usually in some collective form.
The first and most direct self-expression of large numbers takes
the form of participation in the press. They write their opinions about
corrupt officials or inefficient farm management for the hand-lettered
sheet posted on a factory wall or a village tree-trunk; more important
communications they send, often with several signatures, to the great
metropolitan Pravda or Izvestia with their million and a half subscrib-
ers. Two million letters a year pour into the office of the Peasants’
Gazette in Moscow, reflecting the life and problems of the farm; only
part of them can be published but all of them are answered, filed, and
carefully studied as material for novels, for history, and for the law-
making of the state.
In a northern township, fifty miles from the railroad, where be-
fore the Revolution only six people subscribed to any newspaper at
all, I visited a congress of some two hundred rural press correspond-
ents preparing for a sowing campaign. These were only part of the
energetic writers of this township. Its collective farms had 470 field
brigades, every one of which during the sowing campaign posted up
a wall newspaper. One picturesque seventeen-year-old boy in a vivid
shirt of old rose sateen under a black jacket proudly reported the over-
throw of the corrupt management of his collective farm by his articles
and editorials. “We got out nine numbers,” he explained to the meet-
ing, “then we stopped for want of paper. But we had already aroused
136
the farmers, and the general meeting removed the president and two
members of the management.”
Nine single sheets of crude newsprint stuck in successive weeks
on a tree, protected from the rain by an overhanging board, had de-
posed the management of a farm, shamed idlers, carried the sowing
through to success, finished the hoeing and brought the brigade on
record time to the haying season. The number of these collective farm
wall-newspapers throughout the country is estimated by the Peas-
ants’ Gazette as half a million, with at least ten village correspond-
ents for each. There are more than three thousand factory newspa-
pers; these range from weeklies of a few hundred copies to dailies
with a circulation of twenty thousand and more in the larger plants.
These newspapers are both an organizing center for factory and farm
life and a training school for young writers. With such a writing and
reading public, it is not surprising that there are more than eleven
thousand printed newspapers in the Soviet Union with a circulation
of more than thirty-six million copies—thirteen times as great as be-
fore the Revolution.
An ever-growing stream of writers enters literature through the
gateway of the factory and farm newspapers, which make modest but
insistent demands on the humblest worker able to use a pen. Literary
groups arise in centers like the Urals and the Donetz basin, or around
some tractor station which serves the nearby villages. Many of the
Donbas group of writers embarked on their literary careers when
through with their day’s work of furnishing coal. Their magazine Lit-
erary Donbas has produced a noteworthy crop of stories and poems
widely popular among miners.
The literary society of collective farmers at the machine tractor
station in Voronovo village had as members two stablemen, a black-
smith, a reaper, a tractor-driver, a bookkeeper, a warehouseman, four
day-nursery attendants, three teachers, two presidents of collective
farms, one village president, three editors of field newspapers and
sixteen farm women. In one year the members published through
their own printshop two books of verses, the play Miscalculated, and
a book of character sketches, Bolsheviks of the Politodels. They an-
nounced for the following year a play, According to Merit, a novel
Quiet Subversion, The Diary of a Tractor Driver, and The History of
the Machine Tractor Station.
It is difficult to conceive of the wide extent of amateur art activ-
ities of all kinds. Thousands of short-line popular stanzas known as
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chastyshki appear in the most distant parts of the Soviet Union cele-
brating the freedom of woman, the heroism of tractor-drivers, the
growing prosperity of collective life. They vary in merit from mere
doggerel giving rhymed technical guidance for reapers and cattle
herders to verse of real beauty. The Donetz coal region alone reports
more than eight hundred brass bands, three hundred orchestras, two
hundred and fifty choruses, thousands of dramatic circles and even
forty-two ballet schools. Some of the Soviet dancers who attracted
attention at a recent London dance festival came from these “self-
expression groups.” Amateur circles in drawing and painting also ex-
ist all over the country, and give local exhibitions which often unearth
talent.
A constant interchange of ideas and personnel goes on between
professional and non-professional groups. The Soviet press takes ac-
tive part in establishing these connections. The newspaper Culture
and Sport publishes reproductions of the best art from famous galler-
ies. It encourages would-be artists to correspond and send in their
work to be judged by well-known artists; those who show talent are
sent to art schools. The magazine Collective Farm Theater every
month issues eight or ten special supplements containing plans of car-
avan theaters, rural pageants and festivals, choral programs, texts of
one-act plays. It connects the self-expression groups with the nearest
professional theater which can help them in their technique. There
are today one hundred rural theaters of professional standing.
One among many movements which swept the farms in the sum-
mer of 1935 was a campaign to discover musical talent among chil-
dren. Hundreds of local musical festivals were held to many of which
professors from the Moscow Conservatory came by airplane to act as
judges. As a result, 715 of the most talented children are being sent
to special musical schools; the twenty-five best ones were brought to
a specially created branch in the Moscow Conservatory of Music.
Not only in music but in poetry, drama and dancing, nation-wide
Olympiads were held in the summer of 1935. In Leningrad, for in-
stance, juries of artists visited the factories to select eleven hundred
contestants for the district Olympiad from fifteen thousand amateur
musicians, singers, dancers, acrobats, orators, accordion players and
even jugglers. On a collective farm in Smolensk, an illiterate peasant
woman of sixty-four years wrote a play, dictating it to a younger
woman; the young folks of the farm produced it at the Olympiad in
Smolensk. Besides the Olympiads, many “culture expeditions” of
138
both scholars and composers penetrate the wilderness where live
Khirgiz, Buryat-Mongols, Tajiks, Uzbeks, to seek and preserve the
music and poems which shed light on early culture. A symphony or-
chestra recently organized made its first tour, playing old Cossack
melodies in modern style, across what not so long ago was the steppe
of half-savage nomads. Collective farms sent delegations hundreds
of miles to insist that the orchestra visit them.
Out of this artistic ferment in the lives of millions, arises the
vigor of Soviet art, which feels itself called upon to find adequate
expression for the awakening genius of the people. Soviet writers to-
day, if they would be popular, must not confine themselves to delving
in the depths of a single human soul; they must depict the vast variety
of changing social relations. They spend much time in deepening
their contacts with intimate details of factory or of farm; Sholokhov,
for instance, makes his permanent residence in the village whose
changing life is the subject of a whole series of novels.
Nor is the artist’s human material passive; the human material
talks back. The Vakhtangov Theater invites the audience to discuss
plays between the scenes and at the end with the actors; witty and
fruitful discussions occur. Meetings between writers and readers have
become a popular feature of factory life. Authors like Sholokhov and
Tretyakov have long adopted the custom of reading drafts of semi-
finished manuscripts to audiences of workers and farmers. Frequently
a worker is able to give sound advice on the handling of an industrial
character. “Our reader, while a friend, is also a very severe critic,”
says the Soviet writer, Vsevolod-Ivanov. “Intercourse with him is the
best and most precious school.”
Soviet readers demand simplicity and vividness of writing. They
are not interested in complex analysis of burdened souls. Their whole
life faces outward. Their interest is in people who do things, who
change the relations of society. In the first decade after the Revolu-
tion, a typical theme in literature and drama was the hero who died in
the moment of victory while the collective achievement marched on.
The hero might be a Chapayev shot down before his victorious com-
rades appear on the scene, or a village organizer killed by a kulak and
drawn to his grave in triumphal procession by the newly-arrived trac-
tor which his labor had secured. The victory was collective, attained
through the sacrifice of the heroic individual. Thus was the natural
expression of the period of revolution and civil war.
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New themes begin to dominate Soviet literature and drama of
recent years. The hero no longer dies; he struggles, achieves, learns,
and is himself made over, not by introspection but by the clash of
action. He is the optimist—builder type creating a glorious and happy
future. What the people demand of writers, they demand also of the
graphic arts: an art that is inspired by and in turn inspires the great
moods of the day. The workers of Stalingrad sent a famous open letter
to the artists: “Don’t give us colored photographs, we are tired of
them. We expect from you an art that is stirring and inspiring.”
If the responsive demand of a great new public is a constant stim-
ulus to Soviet artists, a second stimulus is found in co-operation with
members of their craft. Writers, actors, painters—all have their or-
ganizations. They maintain club houses for social contacts, discus-
sions and exhibitions; they have country retreats to which members
withdraw for rest and creative work. They assist beginners with loans
and subsidies; they foster high standards; they assist members in the
sale of their work. The writers’ organization issues literary journals,
organizes courses, consultations and criticisms for new writers and
runs a literary university for workers. The actors’ club holds special
midnight performances where its members meet famous visiting art-
ists and see the season’s best in music, dance and drama.
Four thousand artists belong to a co-operative which not only
handles exhibitions all over the country, but also owns numerous fac-
tories producing artists’ supplies, workshops for stone-cutting, metal-
casting and frame-making and studios for lithography and engraving.
This co-operative has a yearly turnover of forty-two million rubles.
It accepts on behalf of its members orders from city soviets, large
industries, and workers’ clubs which wish decorations and paintings;
some of these orders run over the million-ruble mark. When the ten-
year reconstruction plan of Moscow creates a demand for architec-
ture, sculpture, landscaping and monumental art, the artists’ organi-
zations arrange discussions and excursions of sculptors and architects
and initiate experimental fresco work on a large scale. Instead of be-
ing an isolated craftsman, the Soviet artist is part of a rich and influ-
ential organization which connects him with the government plan-
ning departments and the organized life of the country.
From this close association of artists with their fellow craftsmen
and with their public has arisen a method of collective production
which is becoming increasingly popular; it extends to the collective
writing of books by a score of writers and even by whole factories.
140
Thirty professional writers combined to produce Belomor, the fa-
mous tale of the building of the Baltic-White Sea Canal. “We tried to
tell how a canal was built in a far, cold and rocky place and how the
chekists made new men out of prisoners,” said Vsevolod-Ivanov.
“We were authors entirely different in taste and in age, but we all
tried to make that book united, wide-horizoned and mighty. That
book is dear to me even today. In writing it, I learned that we writers
are really not such individualists as we like to call ourselves.” The
Events of the High Mountain, which told the history of an iron mine
in the Urals, was written by more than one hundred miners. The min-
ers consulted, wrote and improved it in common, as together they
created and improved their mine. The book is a great political and
artistic document, energetic, fresh and vital.
The History of the Civil War, the History of Factories and the
now projected History of the Russian Village contain whole series of
books, each of which compiles the experiences of hundreds or even
thousands of people. The characters are not described by others; they
describe themselves, each seeking in consultation with the others a
significant artistic form. The meeting of two hundred village corre-
spondents which I attended, decided to issue a book giving artistic
form to the history of the township. They selected the best writers
from each of twenty-five villages to work with two professional au-
thors who had come from Moscow. Each local writer chose with the
help of his village some vivid and significant episode or character
whose story illumined the changes made by the Revolution. One con-
trasted the intimate family relations in his father’s household with
those in his own Soviet home. Another described the people who had
successively looked out of the windows of a certain ancient build-
ing—once a school for the daughters of the nobility and now the cen-
tral club of the collective farm. The result was a book which was
lacking in style and finish but vivid and unforgettable with actual life.
It was not yet art, but it made part of the rich soil out of which great
art may well grow in the next few decades.
Great art movements in the past have followed periods of eco-
nomic expansion which gave stimulus to new creative life. “We are
already in the great epoch; artistic values of permanent worth are al-
ready appearing but not yet the great masterpieces. Where else in the
world are there even high artistic values?” said a Soviet writer to me.
In literature Ostrovski’s How Steel is Welded, Sholokhov’s Quiet
Don; in motion pictures, Potemkin, Chapayev, the Youth of Maxim,
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are among the many lasting contributions which the Soviets have al-
ready made to art. The Moscow subway is one of the first significant
expressions of the epoch in architecture. As forums and temples ex-
pressed the spirit of ancient Rome, cathedrals and castles the Middle
Ages, and skyscrapers the power of centralized finance, so this beau-
tiful subway expresses the rhythm of millions of workers in efficient
motion. The Lenin library in Moscow and the House of State Industry
in Kharkov, and some of the new factories, children’s centers, and
sanitoriums, also foreshadow the new architecture.
Are Soviet artists “in uniform”? Only in so far as they lack intel-
ligence to respond to their social environment and the will to fight
their way through to expression. Artists whose souls were formed by
an old world felt the coming of the new as a thwarting of impulses.
They had to find their way about among new publishers and new of-
ficials, who were trying more or less intelligently to protect the new
order. Often groups of rising artists hogged the Revolution and orga-
nized to lord it over their fellows. Thus the RAPP (Association of
Revolutionary Writers) succeeded in imposing its narrow standards
for a considerable period, till other authors learned the new environ-
ment and smashed the RAPP. The social environment also changes;
when that excellent play, Days of the Turbines, featured a tsarist of-
ficer as hero before post-war audiences where budding capitalists
cheered him, Young Communist organizations fresh from fighting
those officers protested wrathfully and had the play suppressed.
When Nepmen followed the civil war into the past, the play revived
to more tolerant audiences.
All authors everywhere adjust themselves to editors, publishers
and readers; these are necessary media no less than words or paint.
Not even in America could “proletarian authors” come into being,
until there were new readers who pushed them up. Soviet society also
presses in various ways on artists. We authors deal with publishers
who are worried by their paper quota; their criterion is “importance”
rather than profit, since any half-good book is sure to sell. They rely
in part on “political editors,” officials of the Commissariat of Educa-
tion, whose function is to give advice on the demands of the educa-
tional field and the political significance of the work. My own con-
versations with these political editors—they dislike the name cen-
sors—are singularly like those with publishers’ readers in America.
They make suggestions, some extremely valuable, some moderately
useful and some of which I protest; they themselves yield to reason
142
and prefer authors who know what they do. Only crude authors take
them as enemies; through mutual discussion the product is improved.
If differences lie too deep, one seeks another publisher; in the Soviet
Union there is also the wider appeal. No one autocrat censors every-
thing. Political editors more and more become highly educated spe-
cialists. Important plays are usually previewed by selected audiences
of leading critics and persons familiar with their theme, both children
and educators previewing a drama or motion picture destined for chil-
dren. Only on military matters and material likely to injure the Sovi-
ets’ international relations is the censor absolute; 1 and these matters
are hardly the realm of art.
If art survived the censoring by the whims of princelings in the
feudal ages, and by the profit-motives of American publishers, why
should it not survive the decisions of educational authorities and ex-
perienced critics who estimate its importance for a socialist society?
To the artist now growing up in a Soviet environment, art is the nat-
ural expression of the collective life of millions given significant
form by his own special talent or genius. Such an artist feels no re-
pression in this new environment; he feels its great creative urge. Mil-
lions of rural journalists, thousands of dramatic clubs, tens of thou-
sands of farm and factory orchestras furnish an alert and appreciative
public. The leisure made possible by the social ownership of great
modern machines is already widely used in the Soviet Union for pur-
suits of science and art. The barriers thus begin to wear thin between
manual and mental labor; the same person does both. Genius, wher-
ever it arises, finds ready access to widening expression. From such
a soil, watered by the artistic strivings of millions, great art must
grow. More than great art—a people to whom art becomes man’s nat-
ural self-expression, which no longer flames and dies.
1
The most striking recent example was the suppression of infor-
mation during the difficult year of 1932, a suppression which turned
several American journalists permanently against the Soviets. The So-
viets believed with some reason that derailed knowledge of their diffi-
culties would provoke the threatened Japanese invasion.
143
CHAPTER XIV:
REMAKING HUMAN BEINGS
When the All-Union Song and Dance Olympiad was held in the
summer of 1935 in Moscow, the first prize for dance groups was won
by a troupe who would be classed in the capitalist world as convicts.
They were sentenced criminals who were still living in Labor Com-
mune Number Two, to which they had been sent for reformation.
Their performance of an Ukrainian folk-dance “The Snowstorm”
took first place against fifty thousand entrants. To anyone unfamiliar
with the Soviet technique for handling criminals, the dancing of the
group was less amazing than their free association with other groups
of artists in all the local and provincial dance festivals, which brought
them at last to Moscow.
The remaking of criminals is only one specialized form of the
process of remaking human beings which goes on consciously today
in the Soviet Union. Unlike those who justify ancient abuses with the
formula, “You can’t change human nature,” the Marxist knows that
human nature is constantly changing. The serf of the Middle Ages
was a different human being from the highly skilled industrial worker
of today, not only in methods of work but in mental outlook, nervous
reactions, and even physical motions. Today a remaking of people in
greater or less degree takes place across the entire Soviet Union. Il-
literate, slow-moving peasants become attuned to rapid work in a col-
lective labor process. Scientists, artists, engineers, doctors, once ac-
customed to depend upon capitalists for their living, adjust them-
selves to the new controls of a socialist state as employer. Some wel-
come the change, others resent it, but in all men the habits derived
from the past are at war with the demands imposed by the present,
and this struggle changes both the human beings and their environ-
ment.
To some the process of change is only half conscious, and there-
fore bewildering and painful. To the happiest it is a consciously wel-
comed process. For men in all ages have desired to change, to become
in some direction “better.” Moral teachers have urged them to effect
this by an emotional decision to be good, honest, industrious. But this
is a struggle in the dark with forces which the human being does not
understand. His emotional conversion lasts as long as he can focus
will and attention. But if the old environment continues, the old habits
reassert themselves.
144
To a limited extent a human being may change himself under any
social system, not by efforts of will but by calmly analyzing himself
and his environment and placing himself under the impact of other
forces which will change him. So much free will man has. But these
individual efforts are limited by the social possibilities. Can a prosti-
tute change her environment so that street-walking will become un-
necessary? Only if an honest job is somewhere accessible. Can gang-
sters reform? Only if honesty is really the best policy; for him who
would prosper under capitalism there is a time to be honest and a time
to steal, and the criminal is the unlucky or stupid person who stole at
the wrong time and in the unaccepted manner. Only a social system
which insures to ordinary honest labor greater rewards than can be
obtained by even the luckiest dishonesty will produce instinctively
honest men.
A remarkable tale of the change in social standards is written by
a newspaper correspondent from the Ural gold fields. Formerly, ac-
cording to the writer, everybody admired clever miners who were
able to steal nuggets which legally belonged to the private owners of
the fields. This attitude persisted long after the mines were owned by
the government. But recently at a party given to celebrate a betrothal,
the young man in the heat of dancing pulled out his handkerchief and
with it a gold nugget which fell to the floor. There was a sudden si-
lence and the party broke up without comment, even the girl turning
away from the man thus revealed. “Everyone knew him for an en-
emy,” wrote the correspondent.
The sharpest test of conscious remaking of human character is
found in the Soviet policy for handling law-breakers. The Soviet
criminologist holds neither of the theories on which the prevalent sys-
tems of prison régime in capitalist countries are based. He does not
believe in the existence of “born criminals” whose will must be bro-
ken by brutal suppression nor does he rely on emotional appeals to
the “better nature” of the criminal, for he knows that this better nature
exists as yet only in rudimentary form. “We don’t assume that a man
of anti-social habits will be at once reclaimed by gifts of chocolate,
nice bathrooms, and soft words,” a leading Soviet penologist told me.
“Men are made over by a new social environment and especially by
their work done collectively.”
Soviet law aims to make over social misfits while protecting so-
ciety from their attacks. Punishment as vengeance has no place in
such an aim: revenge merely incites revenge in return. To make
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prisoners sit in solitude and think of their sins produces a fixation on
crime. To “break a man’s will” or lessen his human dignity in any
way injures him as material for a creative socialist society. Soviet
justice therefore aims to give the criminal a new environment in
which he will begin to act in a normal way as a responsible Soviet
citizen. The less confinement the better; the less he feels himself in
prison the better. Soviet justice began to fight crime under the harsh
conditions of civil war, replying with ruthless measures to counter-
revolutionary plots. “We have a double approach” said Attorney-
General Vishinsky in an interview. “Active, confirmed enemies of
our Soviet power who stick at nothing to injure us must be ruthlessly
crushed. But even among these alien elements, among nobles, land-
lords, tsarist officers, capitalists, whom we had robbed of their private
property, we had to be able even there to find those individuals who
could be made over into useful workers. We cannot begin with clean
hands and fresh bricks to build socialism; we must use even old bricks
for the new building. But if we had tried to apply the idea of absolute
humanitarianism to bitter enemies we wouldn’t be here today.”
Many social offenses are handled without bringing them into or-
dinary courts at all. A whole series of “comradely courts,” in facto-
ries, schools and apartment houses, try informally people who disturb
their neighbors. These courts have the right to fix small fines for the
benefit of the local club or library; they refer cases which they cannot
handle to the public courts. There are even “children’s courts” in
which children judge each other in the presence of interested adults.
One such children’s court in an apartment house tried a boy for cru-
elty in killing a cat, and came finally to the conclusion that the real
culprit was the superintendent of the apartment house who persis-
tently failed to provide a place to play. The superintendent, who was
present, accepted the decision, and organized with the children a
committee to make good the shortcoming.
“Not only in the court but out of the court my job is social pro-
tection,” a rural judge told me. “I must prevent court cases when I
can.” He told how he had prevented crime at a recent saints’ festival.
“Men always drink hard on such occasions; they fight and knife each
other. So I called together the presidents of collective farms and the
Party members, and we went through the crowd before drinking be-
gan and took away the knives and canes. They got drunk later, but
nobody was badly hurt.”
146
I sat in the court session which this judge held under the village
trees and heard a dozen cases—stealing hay, bootlegging and the
like—disposed of in an afternoon. The commonest sentence was
“compulsory labor” which did not remove the offender from his
home but required him to do without pay some socially useful work,
such as road-building, school-construction or even office work in the
village soviet. Only one serious case appeared: more than half the
calves in a collective dairy had died under circumstances which
seemed to implicate the dairy manager of something worse than the
criminal negligence charge which had been brought. The judge found
that he was “guilty of negligence at least,” but held the case over for
further investigation to see whether he was guilty of “something
more,” i.e., intentional conspiracy to smash the farm. In that case he
would be “sent away” from the village to a labor camp for a period
of perhaps three years.
The labor camp is the prevalent method for handling serious of-
fenders of all kinds, whether criminal or political. Most of the old
prisons have been abolished; I have found them in rural districts con-
verted into schools. The labor camps have won high reputation
throughout the Soviet Union as places where tens of thousands of
men have been reclaimed. They have, however, been the center of
some of the most spectacular attacks on the Soviet Union in recent
years. Allegations of brutal treatment and even of torture have found
their way widely into the foreign press. While it is clearly impossible
to check every one of these accusations, they are contradicted by
every competent observer who has ever seen the camps. Dr. Mary
Stevens Callcott, the American penologist who has studied prisons
all over the world and who has had the unique experience of visiting
the larger part of the Soviet camps, including those for the worst—
and for political—offenders, has commented both in her book Soviet
justice and in conversations with me personally, on the “amazingly
normal” life that differentiates these camps from prisons in any other
part of the world.
She notes the freedom of movement over large areas of territory,
the very small amount of guarding, the work done under normal con-
ditions—seven hours for ordinary labor to ten for men whose tasks,
such as driving a truck, permitted frequent rests during work. She
could find no speed-up; laws of labor protection operated as in facto-
ries. Wages were the same as those outside, with deductions for living
expenses; all above this could be sent by the prisoner to his family,
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saved or spent as he chose. “No uniforms with their psychological
implications, no physical abuse; isolation only in extreme instances.
Privileges and special rewards replace the system of special penal-
ties.” Among these special rewards are the two weeks’ vacation in
which the prisoner may leave the camp, and the opportunities given
for his family not only to visit him but even to live with him for ex-
tended periods. Normal human association goes on; men and women
meet and may even marry while serving sentence, in which case they
are given separate quarters.
What most impressed Dr. Callcott, however, was the type of men
in charge of these camps, and the relation they had to the prisoners.
She tells of going through the Moscow-Volga Canal camp with its
director. Prisoners hailed him with obvious pleasure and informality.
A girl rushed up to detain him by seizing the belt of his uniform lest
he get away before she could tell him something. A teacher whose
term was about to expire expressed a wish to stay on and work under
him. There were only five officials in the central administration office
of this camp of many thousand prisoners; all the work, including most
of the guarding, was done by the convicted men themselves. “In fact,”
said Dr. Callcott, “I could never see what kept men in this camp un-
less they wanted to stay there. No convicts I have known would have
any difficulty if they wanted to break away.” Both prisoners and of-
ficials, of whom Dr. Callcott asked this question—she talked with
prisoners freely without the presence of officials—replied they didn’t
run away because if they did, “nobody in my working gang would
speak to me when I came back. They would say I disgraced them.”
There are, however, a certain number of incorrigibles who run away
repeatedly, and these are given somewhat closer guarding for a time.
Political prisoners, she noted, were treated like everyone else, except
that those who had been persistent and dangerous in their attacks on
the government were sent further away from the possibility of con-
nection with their past associates. In all her conversations with these
“politicals,” she was unable to find one who had been sentenced
merely for expressing anti-Soviet views. All were charged with defi-
nite action against the government.
“I did everything I could to destroy this government,” one such
man frankly told her, “sabotage of the most serious kind. But the way
they have treated me here has convinced me that they are right.”
Another prisoner, who had been in Sing Sing, San Quentin, as
well as in jails of England, Spain and Germany, before he was picked
148
up by the Soviets for grand larceny, had been reclaimed by the Baltic-
White Sea Canal. He had done a bit of engineering in his youth, and
was promptly given a chance to work at this specialty. He won a
medal, pursued his studies further, and was doing brilliant work on
the Moscow-Volga Canal when Dr. Callcott met him. To her query
about his reformation he replied:
“In the other countries they treated me like a prisoner, clapped
me in jail and taught me my place. Here they clapped me on the back
and said ‘What can we do to make you into a useful citizen?’” Dr.
Callcott conversed with many men now high in Soviet industry who
had previously been reclaimed by the labor camps. Nothing in their
attitude or that of those about them showed any stigma remaining
from their prison life. “Of course, when it’s over, it’s forgotten,” one
of them said to her. “That,” says Dr. Callcott, “is real restoration.”
Information from many other sources and from my own obser-
vation corroborates Dr. Callcott. In August 1935 I visited the town of
Bear Mountain, center of the administration of the Baltic-White Sea
Canal, which is widely known in the USSR not only as a great con-
struction job but as the place where tens of thousands of men won
new lives for old. It is still the distributing center for the labor camps
of this district.
The chauffeur who drove me over twenty miles of wilderness
without a guard in sight was one of the prisoners. He talked quite
freely and said that he didn’t like the north but at least he had a chance
to study a trade or become an engineer. A dozen types of industry had
been established to utilize and train all kinds of workers. They took
pride in their modern equipment and the high quality of goods pro-
duced. In the holiday celebration going on in the public square during
my visit, one could not always tell who were prisoners, who were free
workers and who were “guards.” The atmosphere was that of any new
construction job in the country. Such, indeed, was the intention—to
establish the atmosphere of normal constructive life, with certain old
associations shut out.
What most interested me was the splendid theater, whose direc-
tor boasted of his production of the opera Eugene Onegin, the Red
Poppy ballet, and many of the latest Moscow plays. We learned later
that he was a well-known Moscow producer, sent north for a serious
crime. The camp authorities at once decided to build a theater, in or-
der to utilize his abilities to the full. The theater cast itself consisted
of lawbreakers, government officials, free workers and the families
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of all of them, mixing in the democratic intimacy of a dramatic per-
formance. One wonders which of all his achievements this director
will most boast of in old age, his work in Moscow or the northern
theater created in Bear Mountain.
Many former prisoners from the Baltic-White Sea Canal, after
receiving freedom together with special prizes and high honors for
their good work, went of free choice to help build the Moscow-Volga
Canal, another convict-labor job. Here they were especially valued
because through their own experience they understood the process
through which new prisoners had to go and were especially skilled in
helping them make themselves over. As in other Soviet construction
camps, the workers on this canal had their art studio under profes-
sional direction, their musical circle and literary magazine, and their
bureau of inventions through which four thousand proposals to im-
prove the work of the canal have been offered by the prisoners them-
selves. Several prisoners, given their freedom because of inventions,
refused to leave until the canal should be finished.
So well-known and effective is the Soviet method of remaking
human beings that criminals occasionally now apply to be admitted.
I met one such man in Gulin village. Notorious locally as thief and
drunkard, he had a dozen convictions to his discredit, till at last he
went to the authorities saying: “I’m a man destroyed, but I want to be
made over.” They sent him to a labor camp whence he returned a
qualified worker. Bolshevo Commune, the most famous “cure” for
criminals, can be entered only by application approved by the general
meeting of members. Its waiting list is so long that it accepts only the
most hardened cases, priding itself on being able to make over per-
sons who cannot become cured in any other institution. Its strength
lies in its large membership of intelligent former criminals, who ap-
ply to new entrants their intimate knowledge of the criminal mind.
Crime today is rapidly diminishing in the Soviet Union. From
1929 to 1934 sentences for murder decreased by one-half while sex
crimes fell off to one-fourth. The cause is found in the growing
strength of the Soviet environment to remake human beings; the pe-
nal policy is only a supplementary force. A striking example of the
play of both causes may be found in the figures of prostitution. Pre-
war Moscow had 25,000 to 30,000 prostitutes; these sank by 1928 to
150
about 3,000, 1 diminution clearly due to economic causes. In 1931,
after the Five-Year Plan had abolished unemployment, the number
sank still further to about eight hundred. To reclaim the more habitu-
ated, prophylactoria were established. These rose to the number of
thirty-four in the whole USSR in 1934, and then swiftly declined to
nineteen as their work was done. They are still declining for want of
inmates; only one of the original five is left in Moscow. No woman
was ever compelled to go to a prophylactorium; the chief punishment
for breaking rules was to be put out. Nine-tenths of those who entered
left cured both of physical disease and of old habits and were ac-
cepted without comment into the normal working life of the city.
An eventual disappearance of crime is expected by Soviet au-
thorities as the mental habits produced by a socialist system become
established in Soviet life. For crime, in the Marxian view, arises from
the conflicts of a class-exploiting society and will follow classes and
exploitation into oblivion. In the first years of the new system, the
sharp conflict with classes from whom it took privileges led to a de-
cided increase both in crimes and in the repressive measures used by
the state. Kulaks committed arson, cattle-killing, murder, and were
exiled in large numbers; anti-Soviet engineers and officials sabotaged
and were sent to labor camps. Today the kulaks have been amnestied,
not only because many of them have recovered their civil status by
honest labor, but also because the collective farms in the villages are
strong enough to withstand their attack and absorb them. The labor
camps which supplanted prisons are themselves diminishing, partly
because they have “cured” their inmates, and still more because the
normal free life of Soviet society is becoming strong and prosperous
enough to have a direct regenerative influence on those social misfits
that remain.
In unforgettably lyric language the Soviet writer Avdeyenko,
who a few years ago was by his own confession 2 “two-legged beast
of prey,” told the Congress of Soviets, to which in 1934 he was a
delegate, the story of the degrading of a youth into a criminal and the
subsequent remaking of the criminal into an honorable and famous
man. “In 1926,” he said, “under one of the cars of the Moscow-Tash-
kent express, lay two little passengers, myself and my comrade, voy-
agers making our way closer to the sun, searching for good people
1
Material from Dr. V. Bronner, head of Institute of Venereal Dis-
eases, Commissariat of Health.
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who would not be offended when we robbed them.” He tells how the
conductor threw them out on the damp earth, how they wandered in
rain and sleet, seeking warmth and light, thrown out everywhere till
exhaustion turned to anger, anger to despair, despair to a great hatred
for mankind. In this hatred they fired a haystack set against a house.
“A warm, calm feeling filled my heart. Tears of joy and vengeance
came into our eyes. We embraced, laughing and crying, and spent the
rest of the night in a public toilet, pressing against the warm wall to
warm first our backs and then our chests till we fell asleep standing.
“I was destined to live many years—one-fifth of my life—with
the feelings of hatred, malice, revenge that were born in me at that
station. After that I robbed and threatened without remorse.” He tells
how he stole fur coats and jars of butter, robbed drunkards in dark
alleys, hooked vagrants off freight cars to steal their clothing, till he
gradually became “a human beast, that most fearful two-legged
blood-thirsty species without love or goodness or feeling or pity. To-
day it is frightful for me even to remember such a person.
“Today in this historic hall, I stand on the tribune, a member of
government. I am a citizen with full rights. I am strong. I cherish the
best human feelings: love, devotion, honesty, self-sacrifice, heroism.
I write books. I dream of creating an unforgettable production. I love
a girl unselfishly. I am continuing my race—it will be a happy one.
“I am happy, full of the joy of life, unshakably exuberant. I go to
sleep with regret, I awake with joy. I shall live a hundred years. I can
fly to the moon, go to the Arctic, make a new discovery, for my cre-
ative energy is not trod on by anyone.
“Today I recall my past for the last time. In filling out my appli-
cation blank, under ‘places of work,’ I wrote: “Till 1931 socially
harmful activity. I begin the story of life from 1931’ And they an-
swered: ‘So be it.’ So you see I am four years old, the youngest here.”
Avdeyenko gives the stories of other former law-breakers who
have been made over. He traces the source of their anti-social past to
the heritage of capitalist exploitation; he finds the force that redeemed
them in the new socialist industries and the life that arises around
them. “All of you know the institutions where such people are re-
educated. But our whole Soviet system is one big workshop for re-
educating men. I know people of two generations whose lives were
no better than mine. We are engineers, writers, aviators, journalists,
machinists, administrators of cities, scientists, Arctic explorers. The
industries of our country remade us, and the industries were
152
established by the Stalinist policy of industrializing the country.
Comrade Molotov spoke of the newly created factories, cities and
whole industrial regions, but he did not refer to the giving of life,
human life, to the two-legged beasts of prey I have described.”
153
CHAPTER XV:
YOUTH SET FREE
“The generation which is now fifteen years old will
see Communism and will itself build it.”
Lenin
“Life is good and to live is good—in such a land, in such an
epoch!... We, young owners of our country, called upon to conquer
space and time....”
In June of 1935 these words of Anna Mlynek, young valedicto-
rian of the first Moscow class to complete the new ten-year school,
awakened in thousands of hearts the world over a realization of what
youth’s outlook might be in a socialist land. To youth in capitalist
countries the outlook is gloomy. They look outward and see unem-
ployment; they look inward and find confusion. They are developing,
rational beings propelled into a world whose irrationality even their
parents and teachers cannot explain to them. Those who love them
best offer only a host of illusions; they are taught to look at the past
and go backing into the future. So there goes on within them what the
well-known psychiatrist, Dr. Frankwood Williams, calls a “mighty
struggle in the dark... with all the emotional complexities and uncer-
tainties that home, school, community have woven into their being.”
Soviet youth have not escaped struggle. Their birth was in the
flames of civil war. Their childhood endured the famine years. Their
adolescence was strained by great tasks of constructing a country.
Many young lives were cut short or crippled in heart or lung or nerve
in those years of battle and building. Even today they see across the
future the dark threat of world war which may be launched at any
time by the capitalist chaos beyond their borders, and in which they
know that many of them must perish.
What then is the source of the explosive joy which becomes in-
creasingly plain in the words, the sports, the celebrations of Soviet
youth? It lies in those words “young owners.” Men in the past have
been subjects of kings or even proud citizens of democracies. Never
till socialism dared they call themselves owners of the land in which
they live. Ownership brings freedom in planning, clearness of goal,
harmony of intellect and will in expanding life. Joint ownership
brings comradeship reinforcing freedom, and a new, widened will to
conquer space and time.
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YOUTH SET FREE
A letter sent by thirty-one young men and girls from a collective
farm to Moscow to greet the assembling of congress in early 1935
expresses it: “We go a road that is rich with life. We know our goal.
What we are doing we do with clear consciousness. We know that
what we do is important, necessary, great and glorious. We know the
aim of our collective farm tasks. We know what will be tomorrow for
we ourselves create it. Today is good, tomorrow will be better, the
day after tomorrow immeasurably better. We often think of the glo-
rious future of our farm, our township, our dear district, all our be-
loved land. We think of the bright future of all mankind which will
be freed by the world-wide proletarian revolution.”
Not on any mystic faith do these thirty-one young people base
their hope for the future, but on homely details of daily fact that seem
at first sight quite inadequate to explain their joy. They relate the
changing of poor soil to good soil. “Our village never knew wheat till
the Bolsheviks pushed it to the north!” They tell the expansion of
music, drama, sport and science built on the firm economic founda-
tion of their increasing harvest. They see the clear connection be-
tween their farm’s success and the success of their country, and base
on this their expectation of international revolution. Their life is an
integrated whole from the farm to the world. They have grown up and
been formed by a new social order.
What are the qualities demanded of joint owners, which the So-
viet schools seek consciously to develop? Neither the combativeness
nor the submission which are the contradictory demands of capital-
ism, but a high degree of initiative and scientific interest, a high de-
velopment of individual variety combined with highly developed so-
cial instincts. The aim of the Soviet school is not to create standard-
ized people, suited to the demands of some undefined future boss, but
to help youth discover and develop its own desires and capacities. In
a hundred ways the schools are constantly asking: What do you most
like to do? In a hundred ways they help this developing choice relate
itself to the equally developing choice of others.
An American teacher who has taught for years in Soviet schools
tells me that the approach to the child is far more individual than in
America. Persistent efforts are made to find the child’s particular ap-
titudes and interests. In the elementary grades there are two types of
teachers:—group teachers remain with one group of children for sev-
eral years, visiting their homes, becoming thoroughly acquainted
with them and relating them to the special teachers who develop
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special aptitudes. By the seventh grade, which is roughly equivalent
to second year of high school in America, psychological tests help
the child decide what he can do best; they tell him his capacities but
impose no compulsion on his choice.
Summer camps and excursions are also planned to help children
discover their special interests and widen the field of their choice.
The best camps, such as the famous Artek in the Crimea, maintain
amateur work of a high order in geology, botany, care of animals,
study of sea-life and construction of airplane and automobile models.
Children spending their summer in such camps discover and develop
hobbies which may, or may not, develop into their life’s work. News-
paper discussions also draw out the self-expression of children; a spe-
cial newspaper, the Pioneer Pravda, is written almost entirely by chil-
dren.
Last summer I met twenty young “Arctic explorers” under six-
teen years of age on the Murmansk train bound for Polar regions.
Their energetic study of maps, Arctic cruises, Northern peoples had
been sufficient to win from their teachers a recommendation which
included them in an organized cruise of the north. They would meet
adult Arctic explorers who would treat them smilingly but courte-
ously as possible future colleagues. Ten of the best pupils in botany
were similarly allowed to make an expedition at government expense
to the Altai mountains, where they hiked two thousand kilometers
and found twenty-seven new varieties of black currants and a type of
onion which resists 45° of frost. Two of these young explorers went
as delegates to deliver the plants to the aged plant-creator Michurin:
When he asked: “Weren’t you afraid to cross wild rivers and sleep at
night in the woods?” they answered: “Sometimes we were afraid. We
feared that our expedition would fail to find any new plants and we
would disgrace ourselves as Michurin’s grandchildren.”
Such trips are the reward of marked aptitude, but all children take
some part in the “grown-up” activities of the country. In Molvitino
township the farm children told me proudly of scores of tons of bird
droppings and wood ashes collected to fertilize the exhausted fields.
In the 1934 “war with drought,” when a chief harvest problem in the
south was the low, dry stand of easily broken grain, children’s groups
of gleaners followed the reapers and competed to save great piles of
grain heads. Every Soviet child knows the heroism of Mitia who
caught three harvest thieves red-handed. In Artek Camp I met a child
who had prevented a train wreck by reporting a loose rail and another
156
YOUTH SET FREE
who saved an aviator by lighting a bonfire at night to guide the errant
plane: these children won wide renown among other children and
were rewarded by a summer at Artek. Children of railway workers in
Tiflis built and operate a half-mile railroad in the Park of Culture and
Rest; it is a serious enterprise which carries passengers, takes in a
thousand rubles each holiday and spends the money in proper Soviet
style to “expand the road.”
These out-of-school activities of children became at one time so
absorbing that they threatened health and education. Young Pioneers
“saved the harvest,” reclaimed drunken parents, denounced village
grafters and debated whether their first duty was to the school or to
“help the country.” Today children are reminded that “learn, learn,
learn” is Lenin’s statement of the three most necessary things for
young humans to do. School dominates and organizes all other child
activities. But it never excludes them. In all their learning many forms
of activity have part.
The early discipline of children is largely through mass pressure,
highly effectively organized by the children themselves. Children of-
ten come to a teacher with suggestions about the best way to handle
difficult cases. They inform the teacher of home conditions which
have made certain children backward in study or in comradeliness.
They organize committees to go with the teacher to the homes. Chil-
dren will themselves expose violations of child labor laws, or write
to the papers about parents who beat other children. The highest
honor given to able children is to be asked to help more backward
ones with their studies in a spirit not of condescension but of good
team-work, like that of a basketball player who helps his team excel.
The strongest penalty in any school is given when children ask to
have a child excluded on the ground that his conduct disturbs their
work.
All these activities of children directly reflect and prepare for
their coming adult life. The encouragement of individual variety har-
monized by regard for the rights of others expands into the more def-
inite yet wider interests of youth. By the end of the ten-year school,
which is roughly equivalent to a combination of the American ele-
mentary grades and high school, the boy or girl usually has some in-
terest which he wants to test in serious work. Some young folks go to
work even earlier, spending part of the years between fourteen and
eighteen in a factory trade school with part-time work. Some go di-
rect from the secondary school to the university. But the commonly
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
encouraged procedure is to finish ten years of school and then go to
work in the late teens for a period of self-testing before deciding on
specialization.
These are not odd jobs to earn one’s way through college, such
as are known in American life. They are part of a youth’s conscious
self-education in the actual world of production. They are related to
his already appearing interests, which they test and develop. I know
a boy of nineteen who chose to work on a farm in the summer. Since
he already knew that he wanted to become an entomologist, the farm
was expected to give him scientific work. He sorted apples for dis-
eases, staked cabbages to count the bugs in sample areas, and other-
wise used his special interest for farm production, improving his sci-
entific technique while he worked. If an emergency had occurred, he
would have helped in other ways, but emergencies which waste the
time of young people in blind alley tasks are a blot on the reputation
of any Soviet industry. When four girls of my acquaintance went to
work in a chemical laboratory in Siberia and found it so disorganized
that there was nothing really useful to do, they protested to the Party
against this waste of their time, and the organization which was em-
ploying and paying them was censured and ordered to release them
for other work. The time of youth is a precious treasure of the com-
munity. The most accepted reason which any youth can give for leav-
ing a job is that it offers nothing more for him to learn.
At no time in life is there any gap between work and schooling.
Education is not a commodity purchased by money and consumed in
childhood or in four charmed years of isolated university life. It is a
personal and public necessity, without limits, freely available from
childhood to old age. Courses of general culture are not crammed into
a special period; they are taken after work in any quantity desired.
They are paid for by state or trade union; any group of workers any-
where may decide to study chemistry, music or parachute-jumping
and call on their trade union to pay the teachers. When young people
feel that they have chosen a permanent specialty, for which they need
some years of concentrated study, they apply to enter a university or
a research institute. For these institutions their ability and seriousness
is tested by severe entrance examinations. If they pass, study becomes
their regular work, paid for as such by the state. It is fully as strenuous
as the factory; they spend six or seven hours a day in class rooms and
laboratories in courses chosen on a broad basis, but all consciously
directed towards preparation for their profession.
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YOUTH SET FREE
I visited the dormitory attached to three institutions of higher ed-
ucation in mining, metallurgy and non-ferrous metals. A pretty girl
was specializing in blast furnaces, a former book-binder was studying
mining engineering, a factory-worker was becoming a geologist for
Central Asia, a broad-faced yellow Kazak was preparing to work in
copper in the newly opened mines of Kazakstan. All of them were
paid for their study by the Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Their
stipends ranged from one to two hundred rubles monthly, the higher
pay rewarding the best students. Every summer they chose their
“practice work” from a dozen localities which offered, and as soon
as they found some place where they wished to sign up for a job after
graduation, they got additional wages from their chosen industry. The
majority decided by the third or fourth year of the five-year course.
Thereafter they felt themselves bound to work, for at least a time after
they finished the university, for the institution which had paid for
their education. This was not felt by them as compulsion but as the
intelligent specializing of their own choice on the basis of a wide
range of opportunities. Any good reason, such as personal health or
the demand of some national emergency, would be recognized by
them and their fellows as grounds for release. But a frivolous change
of occupation without reason would brand a youth as undependable,
while to give up a job because conditions proved difficult would be
stigmatized as cowardly. For what was he trained if not to make the
conditions better? Has he not at his disposal for this all the resources
of the land?
What jobs does youth choose? By no means the easy ones. When
has youth, when free to choose, ever asked for the easy way? Youth
wants conquest. Youth is explosive energy, so explosive that under
capitalism it must be befogged with illusions, lest it wreck the world’s
ancient ways. Soviet youth is encouraged to make the world over; it
responds to the call. In every difficult struggle faced by the Soviet
state from its beginning, a mighty host of youth has volunteered.
Youth does not wait to be asked; it takes the initiative. Through
its organization, the Young Communist League, it repeatedly de-
mands the right to battle on each new important “front.” I know
young women who fought in the civil war, divorcing the husbands
who would have prevented their going. The Stalingrad Tractor Plant,
the first Soviet conveyor, was built and manned by young folks com-
ing from every part of the country. “We give our youth to this strug-
gle,” they said to me six years ago. “We do not spend it in ease or
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
amusement. We shall not stop till we have built the socialist city of
Stalingrad.” I have vivid memory of the boat that came at eleven
o’clock one night for a long-expected boat-ride after a hot day and
was turned down by young voices, without a word from their elders,
as too late. “Got to go home; got to be fresh for the line tomorrow,”
they said as they turned away.
Thus was launched in the far northeast of Asia the new ship-
building port Comsomolsk on the shores of the Ohotsk Sea, a city
proudly carved from mosquito-ridden forests by the forces of youth
alone. Thus was built the Moscow subway in a titanic drive by youth
to create “the most beautiful subway in the world.” Moscow’s Young
Communists left office jobs, postponed university courses and
requalified as underground ditch-diggers to build it. Every great con-
struction job has its special tasks seized by youth; they take over the
building of a blast furnace in competition with one raised alongside
by their elders. They organize special farms which make proud rec-
ords. They pour into the new industries, master the new technique,
form the new staff of engineers.
Like young folks everywhere, Soviet youths have the problem of
the relation between work and marriage. This is never a question of
whether they can afford to get married; that is taken for granted. The
problem is to find time for a satisfying family life. One troubled youth
writes to the Komsomolskaya Pravda in the discussion recently held
on this question: “I am a turner. I am also a Young Communist. Be-
sides that I am working on an invention. My days are so full that I
don’t have time to breathe. I see my wife only at night and then I'm
so dead tired that I fall down and sleep like a corpse. Lydia weeps. I
am not a beast; I am sorry about Lydia. But I try to organize my time
and I can’t even find an hour for my class on planning, much less for
my family.”
This is an extreme case; it is balanced by young Kuznetsova who
lays down her specifications for a husband: “I wouldn’t have a man
who was not a good social worker. But neither will I live with one
who is interested only in his factory. I don’t want a one-sided man. I
want a husband who will play volley ball with me, do skiing, appre-
ciate the theater, music, general culture, read a book with me and ar-
gue about it afterwards. All these things have place in a well-rounded
life.” These are the problems of a rich, abundant existence, which
needs only to be organized. Soviet youth never feels that it must re-
nounce any of these satisfactions.
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YOUTH SET FREE
Each year when September First brings the International Youth
celebration, hundreds of telegrams pour into the offices of Komso-
molskaya Pravda, organ of Communist Youth, announcing achieve-
ments of youth and the gifts which it offers the country. A group of
young steel men wire that they have dismantled and reassembled an
open-hearth furnace in six days instead of the usual ten; a group of
young miners sends an extra train of coal manned by a train crew
especially chosen from scores who competed for the honor. Other
groups announce the organization of “cultured field camps” where
music, drama and books enliven the evening’s work on the farm. Still
other groups blazon sport records on floats in the great demonstration
which storms the Red Square. Young Communists of the Red Dawn
Telephone Factory hiked to the Mongolian border, 5,400 miles in 180
days. Another group is back from climbing the Altai, covering 1,200
miles on foot. They celebrate the Baikal-Murmansk ski-run across
half Asia and half northern Europe; they announce Alpine and para-
chute records made by youth. Nor is there any sharp line between
records in sport and in steel-mills. All are one unified, advancing life.
Not in conflict with work but around it in the social life of the
factory collective, Soviet youth develops activities of sport and rec-
reation which make up a well-rounded life. Tsarist Russia possessed
thirty thousand members of sport and athletic clubs; there are six mil-
lion today. Tens of thousands of cheering spectators turn out to soccer
matches between Moscow, Leningrad, Central Asia, Turkey and
Spain. Soviet sportsmen begin to invade world records. But the char-
acteristic of Soviet sport is not the straining for records in one field
at the expense of all round physical fitness; its symbol is the GTO
badge—“Ready for Labor and Defense”—to receive which one must
pass certain standards in walking, running, swimming, rowing, ski-
ing, jumping and every kind of summer and winter sport. Two and a
half million persons have qualified for this symbol, and a second de-
gree of GTO is now established, requiring high diving, parachute
jumping and other difficult tests.
Parachute jumping has become almost a national sport in the So-
viet Union, typical of its sky-storming youth. Flying, gliding, jump-
ing, youth fills the heavens above Tushino field several times each
summer with its aviation festivals. One hundred and fifty at a time
they leap from great carrier airplanes and come sailing down under
canopies of many-colored silk—red, white, blue, orange, lilac—cov-
ering the sky with rainbow hues. Week after week they make new
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
records, young men and girls in individual or group jumps. Nina
Kameneva, descending from icy space nearly twice the height of
Mount Blanc and breaking a world’s record, made the remark which
was seized by Soviet youth as a new slogan: “The sky of our country
is the highest sky in the world.”
162
CHAPTER XVI:
NEW MEN EMERGE
The emergence of new people has been noted with growing fre-
quency in recent years by the Soviet press. Editorial writers have tried
to analyze their qualities; novelists have attempted to portray them.
A Russian author suggested a year ago to the Moscow News a series
of half-column novelettes, each containing the snapshot of a life. To
the editor’s query how many of these stories he had, he answered
casually: “About a thousand.”
“A thousand!” exclaimed our editor.
“That’s not so many,” replied the author, “to describe the great
variety of people now appearing in our world.”
Lincoln Steffens told me of meeting one of these new people, a
Soviet youth in Hollywood, “so new that he could not understand
these United States.... He was a unit; he thought and acted together.
He was constantly puzzled by the tactics of American capitalists, con-
sidered from the standpoint of their own survival.”
Increasingly I also meet new people in the Soviet Union. Not in-
frequently I have misunderstood them; their approach to life was dif-
ferent from anything I had known. Their respect for my will, their
unwillingness to use their personality to convince my intellect, I mis-
took for aloofness, so accustomed was I to the salesman’s method of
putting himself over. On another occasion, traveling on a Siberian
train, I made the opposite mistake and took for promiscuous flirtation
the expansive joy of a high official whose deft approaches to every
person he met drew forth answering flashes of life. Then I saw him
evade a kiss from “Little Slant-Eyes,” a Tartar girl with whom for
two days he had been joking.
“Kissing is for the beloved one,” he said, smiling. “But the joy
of life is to be shared with everybody.”
“Do you know what they have thought of you on this train?” I
asked him then.
“What they think affects them, not me. They will also learn if it
is in them.”
Never had I seen a more poised personality. Later he remarked,
“We Bolsheviks, as Kirov always said, must be the happiest people
in the world. But I must be one of the happiest even among Bolshe-
viks. Our older men are marked by too many years of combat. Our
younger men can hardly appreciate the grimness of what they have
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
never known. But I spent my childhood in oppression and my youth
fighting for freedom; I am old enough to know the conquered past,
yet young enough for a whole new life.”
Is it possible yet to say in what direction this new humanity is
developing? Are there any characteristics common to these millions
of people who are becoming subtly differentiated from the past?
Many attempts are being made to analyze them. When the Turkoman
horsemen descended on Moscow after their amazing 4,300 kilometer
run across the deserts, Stalin said: “Only clearness of goal, persever-
ance in attaining the goal, and firmness of character breaking through
every hindrance can achieve such a glorious victory.” Pravda elabo-
rated this theme into an editorial on the Soviet ideal of character, de-
claring it to be the exact opposite of that “unquestioning obedience”
which Hitler had previously demanded in an impassioned speech to
fascist youth.
“Strong and original individuality,” was claimed by Pravda as
the basic quality of a Soviet citizen. Not the “rugged individualism”
which capitalism in its early stages glorifies for its upper classes, and
which sinks into gangsterism in the fascist decline. Not conforming
obedience responding under all conditions to “God and country,” the
capitalist ideal which under fascism becomes blinder submission for
men whose destiny it is to be bossed. Not that ability to look on both
sides of the question which intellectuals under capitalism prize as a
sign of high intelligence, but which Pravda disdains as “division of
personality and double-mindedness, Hamletism in romantic colors.”
“Not submission and blind faith does the Communist Party im-
plant, but consciousness, daring, decision. It is just from the clear
goal, seen by millions, from fighting perseverance and firmness that
there grows that remarkable voluntary discipline which bourgeois so-
ciety cannot even imagine.... Clearness of aim, perseverance and
firmness won the victory in the civil war, restored our ruined econ-
omy and created socialist industry and collective farming. Clearness
of aim, perseverance and firmness made way through the ice of the
Arctic, lifted our heroes of the air into the stratosphere and brought
close to the Communist Party many of the great representatives of
science, literature and art.... The Communist Party draws out from all
the toilers of our great fatherland the quality of strong individuality,
inseparably connected with the strong collective of the toilers....”
To many persons in capitalist countries these words will be only
partly intelligible. They have been so accustomed to considering that
164
NEW MEN EMERGE
their own life is “free” and Soviet life “regimented” that they cannot
at once grasp a viewpoint which holds the exact opposite. Yet even
the casual observer of human beings today in the Soviet Union no-
tices that while they have certain characteristics in common they are
by no means regimented into uniformity, but show a vivid individu-
ality at least as great as is found anywhere in the world. A business
man in Chicago who had never seen Moscow but who was something
of an art critic, told me that he was especially impressed in all Soviet
photographs, whether of demonstrations in the Red Square or of ath-
letes and factory workers, by the quality of will in the faces. “Utterly
different from the sheepish or brutal faces of Nazi pictures,” he
added. It is clear to anyone who talks with Soviet workers or the more
advanced of the collective farmers that they feel themselves pos-
sessed not only of freedom, but of a peculiar type of reinforced and
collectively supported freedom which is strong enough to conquer all
the obstacles in the world.
Freedom is never absolute; it is concrete and specific. It means
different things to different classes and generations of men. The
American pioneer faced the wilderness ax in hand with the mood of
a free creator, saying: “What shall I build?” His freedom was condi-
tioned by the loans he made or failed to make for his migration, by
the railroad that came or failed to come, and by the subtler limitations
of his own skill and character, yet with ax in hand, he felt free. His
ownership of his primitive means of production was the source and
guarantee of his sense of freedom.
When the means of production became the factory, the meaning
of freedom slowly changed. Freedom became to the owner the right
to fix prices and wages, to the worker the right to drift from job to
job, seeking an easier boss. Freedom in government became the
“right to choose one’s rulers,” not the right to own and rule. Freedom
of thought and speech became the right to complain, to voice transi-
ent shifts of opinion, not the right to drive one firm consistent thought
into life. As capitalism advanced, men became diversified in their
work and capacities, but standardized in their instinctive reference to
a boss. Soviet workers notice this quality in Americans who come to
their factories. “They know how to complain and make suggestions,
but not how to desire and will.”
“Desire and will” is the form which freedom takes when men are
owners. When they are joint owners, a form of will develops—not
unlike that in a family, a partnership or a committee—which
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
determines itself by consultation. “He does not make individual de-
cisions,” is already a compliment in the Soviet Union; it is applied to
Stalin. It is as if one said of a scientist that he refuses to base conclu-
sions on a single experiment. Men always have made up what they
call their own minds through the influence of other minds as well; but
now they grow conscious of these sources of their choice; they or-
ganize even these sources. They criticize, but from within, not from
aloof isolation. Workers express discontent not by strikes against an
alien owner, but by joint fights against bureaucracy to improve the
organization of the land. Freedom becomes less a protest and more a
steadily burning choice; not a fight, but a seeking. It is seen not as
absence of restraint, but as conscious selection of one particular, in-
dividual place in a living complex mechanism whereby a thousand
similar freedoms are welded into flame and power.
In the latter half of 1935 the Stakhanovites began to shake the
country. People compared it to an explosion, an earthquake. The
movement appeared simultaneously in a hundred places and a score
of industries. Despite the great variety of its people, the fundamental
characteristics were the same. Workmen operating new machines be-
gan to shatter past standards of production often against the indiffer-
ence or opposition of engineers and managers but accompanied by
the strained attention of their fellow workers. Each of them had to
fight his way against old concepts and habits; one or two of them
were killed by angry workers, outraged by this sudden burst of speed.
But overwhelming public opinion hailed and copied the innovators.
Swiftly, in the midst of their local elation, they found themselves ac-
claimed across the land as heroes.
Within two months every country in the world was forced to take
notice, disguising the information as best they could under the name
“speed-up.” For this was no mere routine news from Russia. This was
a storming of the world frontiers of productivity and science. Miners
in the Donbas were doubling Ruhr production. Blacksmiths in Gorky
Auto Works broke standards set by Ford. Shoemakers in Leningrad
made records 50 per cent higher than the world record held by the
Bata factories of Czechoslovakia. Young girl weavers ran far ahead
of America’s best achievements. Swedish saw-mill machinery, stand-
ardized to cut ninety-six cubic meters of lumber, was impertinently
pushed to nearly three hundred by woodsmen in Archangel.
Hundreds of American engineers and workers, who tried five
years ago to “teach the Russians,” and who today are scattered in jobs
166
NEW MEN EMERGE
and out of jobs all over the world, must have grumbled glumly when
they heard of it: “Why couldn’t they do it when we showed them
how?” For the events which have happened are externally obvious.
The Soviet Union equipped itself throughout with modern machinery
and methods, and drew eleven million greenhorns into industry to
operate them. The greenhorns broke machines, wasted material and
learned. They could not learn at once when their teachers told them;
it had to grow in their nervous systems. But what they have learned
is not only the technical skill of America. It is all that skill with the
pride of ownership added. Ownership of the whole great mechanized
process that makes the modern world.
People who were allowed to attend the first All-Union Congress
of Stakhanovites—and everyone in Moscow wanted to go—told of
the indescribable enthusiasm, the irrepressible, thundering cheers.
The Soviet press grew lyric over “taming the fiery steed of science,”
“washing out the barriers between manual and mental labor,” “pre-
paring the way from socialism to communism where each shall re-
ceive according to his needs.” Stalin was saying to the assembled del-
egates: “We leaders of the government have learned much from you.
Thanks, comrades, for the lesson, many thanks.” Those men in the
Congress believed—and the country believed with them—that the
plan made by Marx was coming true. They had established a new
economic system. They had painfully equipped it with modern meth-
ods. They had slowly learned to manage it jointly, and now the pre-
dicted results appeared. Socialism was beating capitalist production,
just as capitalism beat feudalism.
What are the characteristics of these Stakhanovites? A joyously
dynamic initiative, a pride in mastery of complex technical processes,
a conscious co-operation with society, a hunger to learn. Every phrase
dropped in their discussions shows exultant power in creation and
desire to share the new skill with others. Busygin, the blacksmith who
made the crankshaft record in the forge of the Gorky Auto Works,
declares, “There’s nothing I dream of so much as studying. I want to
be not only a smith but to know how hammers are made and to make
them....” Marie Demchenko who made the sugar-beet record asked
as a reward a course at an agricultural college—and got it. Stakhanov
himself went down in the mines to make his record as the chosen
representative of his fellows. “International Youth Day was ap-
proaching and I wanted to mark the day with a record in productivity.
For some time my comrades and I had been thinking how to break
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THIS SOVIET WORLD
the shackles of the norm, give the miners free play, force the drills to
work a full shift.” When Slavnikova wanted to beat the record on a
machine she had carefully studied but never yet used, the foreman
opposed her. “I'm a fearless parachute jumper; that norm doesn’t
scare me; I'll upset it,” she replied. She drove the machine to a five-
fold record. She relates the sequel: “At four in the afternoon we had
a meeting and they gave us flowers for our good work.”
Bobilev, the steel smelter, wants you to know that he is a scien-
tist: “We are no sportsmen. We tested out our open hearth; we re-
paired her and asked how much she could give. She told us 11.33
tons.” Vasiliev, the blacksmith who holds the record for forging con-
necting-rods, uses the words “boiled up” and “exploded” to describe
his feelings about his forge. When his 1934 record was beaten by
Andrianov, he “boiled up” and went back to the works with four days
left of his vacation. “I beat Sam Andrianov but I saw in a newspaper
that a Kharkov smith had made more than a thousand. Then I ex-
ploded! I made 945 in one shift. The smith Stadnik also exploded and
made 975. I consulted my gang how to organize our work-place; we
got 1,036. We talked it over with the foreman and told him how to
change the furnace; with true Stakhanov zeal he gave us in four days
a furnace that could heat 1,500 in a shift. What stops us now? We
talked it over and placed the metal in such order that it would be eas-
ier to take up. On October 27 I made an all-Union record 1,101 in a
single shift. Comrades, I haven’t yet got out of that hammer all she’ll
give, but I'm going to get it out to the very bottom.”
Characteristic of the Stakhanovites is their disdain for overtime
work as a confession of inefficiency; their insistence that a rhythm
shall be found which shall not be physically exhausting—“if the work
is done right you feel better and stronger”; and their zeal in teaching
the new skill to their fellows. The locomotive engineer Omelianov,
demands the “worst engineer” as a pupil, and makes him also a beater
of records. Slavnikova is asked by an inefficient woman: “You’re a
Young Communist; why don’t you teach me?” She gives time to in-
struct the older woman, who also begins to improve.
Life in the new factories is by no means ease and harmony. It is
more like an explosion or a battle. An engineer of my acquaintance
finds the Stakhanovites frankly terrifying. “They put up signals over
their lathes when out of material. These signals pop up everywhere
and I have to keep them satisfied, or they’ll say I sabotage. You can
lose your reputation. You can be cleaned out of the Party. I'm sitting
168
NEW MEN EMERGE
up nights to plan the flow of work.” The demands of these new men
are breaking the old technical processes. For “every worker knows,”
says the weaver Lisakova, “that over-fulfillment of the norm will not
only improve labor conditions in the factory, but also the kindergar-
tens, nurseries, dining-rooms. All this depends on the efficiency of
organization, the spirit of solidarity, the fulfillment of the plan.”
It no longer even occurs to these joint owners that a rise in
productivity might throw men out of work. Shifts of workers there
will be from one job to another; but industry bears the expense of
retraining workers. Conflicts there will be, harsh problems and many,
but they feel quite sure that they can plan and achieve. They have
won through civil war, pestilence, famine; they tightened their belts
to build the first Five-Year Plan. They are driving rapidly through a
second, which increases food, clothing, housing visibly each year.
They haven’t the faintest doubt that as owners of their country they
will always have worthwhile things to do.
“Ten years hence,” said a Stakhanovite to me, “farming and in-
dustry may cease to be our main occupations. But there are other oc-
cupations when once we produce all the goods we need. Human de-
velopment, exploration, science—to these there are no limits!”
Whatever kind of world will be made by these new builders, one
thing is certain: it will be built on conscious planning and will. Not
regimentation but choice will make it, a choice that develops its own
social guidance. If more people want geology, there will be more ge-
ology; if more want medicine, there will be more medicine. More
comforts or more leisure, more music or more exploration of the Arc-
tic? Our new world will be what we choose to make it. And if excess
of choice in one direction leaves any fields unfilled, the social ways
of influencing choice are clear and conscious. A combination of ma-
terial rewards with social recognition, is already the method of at-
tracting volunteers. The announcement in January, 1933, that agri-
culture was the most important front, brought hosts of recruits from
the ablest people of the country. Calls for help through the League of
Communist Youth supplied the driving personnel for Stalingrad
Tractor Plant and the Moscow subway. Increased wages and short-
ened hours have supplemented statements of public need to attract
more people into fields as diverse as medicine and mining.
Are there any bounds whatever to man’s advance? These new
men recognize none. “If in so short a time and with so backward folk
we owners of one-sixth of earth have done so much, what shall we
169
THIS SOVIET WORLD
men not do when we own the resources of our planet, unhindered by
the fear of wars? If the earth grows old, shall we not remake it to suit
us? If the solar system runs down, shall we not find ways to give heat
to our sun? Need we fix any limit to attainment, when the earth is our
jointly owned workshop and home?”
Such is their confident philosophy. So they answer, when they
take time to discuss at all. A new religion? No, that is a word dis-
dained. A widening science, they would say. Their approach to ulti-
mate reality is not one of faith and submission, on which all religions
have been based. It is one of defiance and conquest through intellect
and will. When the conflicts between slave and master, serf and
baron, worker and capitalist are ended, and the classless society is
attained, there begins the titanic conflict of conscious men with un-
conscious nature. Not by faith but by analysis, not by submission but
by defiance shall we rise in that unending battle. Unending? Rela-
tively only, not absolutely. But that end is beyond our present power
even to imagine.
170

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