LANCASHIRE AND THE FAR EAST
JAPAN’S FEET OF CLAY
JAPAN’S GAMBLE IN CHINA
CHINA AT WAR
THE DREAM WE LOST
THIS BOOK is in part a record of my personal experiences in the U.S.S.R. during the five and a half years I lived there, and in part an account of the new system of exploitation developed in Russia by the Communist dictatorship. This new system is one which not only orthodox Communists, but a whole host of socialists, liberals, and so- called progressives of various kinds, call “socialism,” and regard from afar as a beacon light of hone for a crisis-ridden and war-torn world. Perhaps this new system is socialism, but anyone who knows what life is like in Russia must recognize that this new society has nothing in common with the society of the free and equal which socialists believed would follow the breakdown of the capitalist system. I hope that those socialists and Communist fellow travelers who still reason, and whose humanitarian impulses have not been entirely destroyed by “religious” zeal and scholastic dogma, will have the patience to examine the facts here presented, and to listen to the experiences of one who once also believed that the Communists would emancipate mankind.
Not only do Stalin and his henchmen wield a power more absolute than any despot of past ages, but it is obvious from an examination of official Soviet figures of wages and production under the Five Year Plans that the Russian people are worse fed, housed, and clothed than before the Revolution. There is grave doubt as to the accuracy of the Soviet Government’s statistics, but if the true state of Russia’s national economy is even worse than I have depicted it in Chapters VI, VII, and VIII of this book, the picture revealed by a careful analysis of the official data is dark enough to disillusion all those who do not refuse to see. It should also now be clear to the plan-mad liberals of the Western world that Russia’s reputedly planned economy is a myth, and that production and distribution are in a far more chaotic state in the U.S.S.R. than under the capitalist system in its periods of worst crisis.
I shall, perhaps, be accused of being prejudiced by my personal ex- periences. So also, no doubt, have the victims of all tyrannies been prejudiced, whether they were slaves in the ancient world, or heretics persecuted by the Inquisition, or victims in Nazi concentration camps.
My disillusionment did not, in any case, come suddenly as the result of my husband’s arrest and imprisonment without trial in 1936. It was a disillusionment which had begun in 1930 and had become more abso- lute with each month and year I lived in the U.S.S.R.
Disillusionment is, however, a negative process. Unless one is to abjure life itself one must endeavor not only to learn from experience but also to face disagreeable realities. Because the hopes of one’s youth are dimmed, because history has not worked out in the way one ex- pected, and because certain basic changes are taking place in the world which are distasteful or hateful, one should not ignore them or think one can halt them by force. We can perhaps moderate present histori- cal trends, and to some extent control our destinies, by a fearless ex- amination of what is occurring. But we cannot bid the world stand still because we dislike its evolution. For this reason I have not confined myself in this book to an account of the Soviet way of life, but have added some chapters dealing with the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution and comparing Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia.
My thanks are due to the authors or publishers who have given me permission to quote from the following books: Stalin’s Russia, by Max Eastman (W. W. Norton) ; Stalin, by Boris Souvarine (Alliance) ; Proletarian Journey, by Fred Beale (Hillman- Curl); World Communism, by Franz Borkenau (W. W. Norton); Vingt Ans au Service de L’U.R.S.S., by Alexandre Barmine (Albin Michel) ; In Stalin’s Secret Service, by W. G. Krivitsky (Harper and Bros.); The Voice of Destruction, by Hermann Rauschning (G. P. Putnam’s Sons); The lrampire Economy, by Guenter Reimann (Vanguard) ; The United States of Europe, by Alfred Bingham (Duell). My particular thanks are due to Professor Vladimir Tchernavin for permission to reproduce in Chapter IX a long passage from his per- sonal account of life in a Russian concentration camp, published in the Slavonic Review. I have made a number of references to the valu- able work done on Soviet economy by Mr. L. E. Hubbard, author of Soviet Trade and Distribution, and other works published in England. I have also referred to data supplied in Professor Florinsky’s well-documented Toward an Understanding of the USSR.
| PART I | ||
| I | Prologue To Disillusionment | 3 |
| II | The Miscarriage Of Bolshevists | 33 |
| III | Learning The Soviet Way Of Life | 59 |
| IV | Life In Moscow-1932-1936 | 94 |
| PART II | ||
| V | What Is Socialism | 125 |
| VI | The Servitude Of The Peasants And Taxation Of The People’s Food | 147 |
| VII | Servitude Of The Workers | 172 |
| VIII | The Cost Of Soviet Industrialization | 196 |
| IX | The New Method Of Exploitation | 218 |
| X | Arrest | 260 |
| PART III | ||
| XI | Nazi Germany And Soviet Russia | 277 |
| XII | Making The World Safe For Stalin | 312 |
| XIII | Can National Socialism Be Tamed? | 335 |
| Index | 365 |
I FIRST VISITED the U.S.S.R. in the summer of 1927, at the time when Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” was still in force, Trotsky not yet exiled, although already eliminated from the political scene, and the people of Russia enjoying a measure of material prosperity and a degree of liberty unknown three years later. Although there was still a society which might be called semisocialist, the signs of degeneration were already perceptible if one had the wit to see them. But I came as a delegate, an enthusiastic and youthful Communist recently emerged from the chrysalis of the Labour party, ready to believe most, if not all, that I was told, and without any previous experience of a police state to teach me that no one would dare speak his mind to a foreigner. The days when I was to live in Moscow as an ordinary citizen were still far off; and such Russian friends as I had in Moscow, although not all of them Bolsheviks, still fervently believed in the “good society” being created in the U.S.S.R.
“One’s character is one’s fate,” and one’s character is no doubt mainly the product of environment. But it is only as one approaches middle age that one can look back and see how the influences of one’s early youth determined the course of one’s life. Those influences in my case were both socialist and liberal. It was a passion for the emancipa- tion of mankind rather than the blueprint of a planned society or any mystical yearning to merge myself in a fellowship which led me to enter the Soviet Union and to leave it six years later with my political beliefs and my personal happiness alike shattered.
I came to communism via Greek history, the French revolutionary literature I had read in childhood, and the English nineteenth-century poets of freedom; not as a revolt; against a strict bourgeois upbringing, nor on account of failure to make a place for myself in capitalist society, but profoundly influenced by a happy childhood, a socialist father, and a Continental education. For me the communist ideal seemed the fulfillment of the age-long struggle of mankind for freedom and justice. I was, perhaps, mainly attracted to communism by its internationalism and its anti-imperialism. The Labour party in England had alienated me by its participation in the exploitation and oppression of the conquered races of Africa and Asia. My studies both of ancient history and modern economics made me abhor slavery in any form, and the Communists were the only socialists whose ideal was a world-wide equality and liberty. The same influences of my upbring- ing which by 1925 had turned my hopes toward the U.S.S.R., were to make it impossible for me to accept the Soviet regime once I came to know it intimately. I was, in Stalinist phraseology, a “rotten liberal,” a “petty bourgeois intellectual”-one who foolishly desired social justice, freedom, and equality, and had imagined that socialism meant an end to oppression and injustice.
My father, whose influence over me was profound, had known William Morris in his youth, had been a friend of Marx’s daughters and an associate of Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, and other Fabians. He had taken part in the great labor struggles of the late eighties and nineties, had been arrested with John Burns in a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, and had spoken from the same platform as Friedrich Engels in Manchester. Although he had retired from politics soon after I was born, I had been brought up in the socialist tradition.
My mother, daughter of a radical North Country family, had met my father at the age of sixteen when Aveling (the famous translator of Marx’s Capital, who married Eleanor Marx) had brought him to my grandfather’s house in Manchester. My grandfather, although a “bourgeois,” being a manufacturer, was a free-thinker and a republi- can, and boasted of how his wife’s mother, when very ill, had hidden the great Chartist leader, Feargus O’Connor, in her bed when the police were searching the house for him.
My mother, one of nine children, had shown an unusual inde- pendence by leaving her comfortable home to train as a nurse in London, and had there secretly married my father against the wishes of my grandfather. For in spite of his radicalism he considered marriage to a poor journalist most undesirable. When my mother left the hospital to live with my father, he was both leader-writer and musical critic on the Star, most famous liberal newspaper of the time.
My father’s Marxism, like that of many English Socialists, was colored and humanized by the nineteenth-century liberal atmosphere, and he early implanted in my mind those libertarian values which have consciously or unconsciously motivated me all my life.
The favorite tales of my childhood were Greek legends and Norse sagas, and when I first started to read history my heroes were Pericles and the Gracchi. From an early age I loved the poems of Shelley, and in my teens I could recite long passages of Swinburne and the choruses of Euripides by heart. Swinburne’s love poems I rejected as incomprehensible aberrations from the glorification of freedom and the denunciation of tyranny which I loved. I thrilled to such lines as
Pride have all men in their fathers that were free before them, In the wan-iors that begat us freeborn pride have we; But the fathers of their spirit, how may men adore them; With what rapture may we praise who bade our sotlls be free. Sons of Athens born in spirit and truth are all born free men; Most of all, we, nurtured where the North wind holds his reign. Children all we sea-folk of the Salaminian seamen, Sons of them that beat back Persia, they that beat back Spain.
Brought up to be an atheist and to consider religion as the root of tyranny and cruelty, freedom of the spirit appeared to me as an indispensable condition for the economic and political emancipation of mankind, At the outset I failed to perceive the religious side of communism, but later it was my deeply rooted distrust of idolatry and superstition which finally made it impossible for me to accept Stalin as a god, and impelled me to recoil in horror from the degradation and enslavement of the human mind which are the predominant features of Stalin’s Russia. The rationalism of my upbringing and its anti- religious and international emphasis made it impossible for me to persuade myself that “socialist brotherhood” justified the imposition of torture and death on millions of innocent people, and the excommunication of those who questioned a single act of the self- appointed Communist “Leader.”
Max Eastman, in his illuminating analysis of the motive patterns of socialism, has distinguished the “fraternal passion” impulse as the one which finds satisfaction in Stalin’s totalitarian state capitalism. Socialists motivated by the “thirst for co-operative emotion, for the sense of membership in a totality” can excuse the crimes and cruelty and hypocrisy of the U.S.S.R. and find nothing wrong with a society in which not only is human freedom dead, but the very concept of freedom has become “counter-revolutionary.” Hence the Dean of Canterbury praises Soviet Russia from the same unconscious motives as impelled the Dominican friars to uphold the Church of Rome in the days of the Inquisition. The Russian Bolshevik party to him, as to the Webbs, the editors of the New Republic, and scores of other “socialists” in England and America, is-or was-a “brotherhood” which they uphold as Catholics and Protestants upheld the religious fanatics who drenched Europe in blood during the Wars of Religion.
To these so-called socialists and liberals, Stalin’s bloodstained tyranny, which has enslaved the whole Russian people, is a “classless” society to be praised, lied about, and imitated. They have been as ready to condone the crimes of the Soviet Government as sincere Christians on either side were to glorify the devastating wars and the persecution inflicted to ensure entry into Paradise for the converts to the “true faith.”
Those, on the other hand, whose motive pattern is the emancipation of mankind, cannot accept tyranny, cruelty, and oppression as good, merely because a new set of people are inflicting them upon the mass of the people in the name of a new ideal. Lenin himself saw human freedom as the goal of the class struggle. The tragedy has been that in confining the conception of freedom to a minority and in inflaming the hatreds of mankind, he laid the foundations for a worse tyranny than the world had yet known.
Looking back at the influences which shaped my political thought in early years, I realize that the experience of going to an expensive boarding school in England helped to lay the psychological foundations in my unconscious for the militant communism which in my twenties supplanted the vague and academic socialist outlook of my early youth.
From the age of nine to thirteen, I had lived on the Continent, first traveling with my parents and then, at the age of eleven, being sent to boarding school on the Lake of Geneva. Those two years at school in French Switzerland among German girls “finishing” their education, was one of the happiest periods of my life; the four succeeding years at boarding school in England among the most unhappy. In Switzerland I was at first the only English pupil, and later one of two. I was also the youngest. The atmosphere was not unlike that of my home-studious, tolerant, kindly, and healthy. We skated, skiied, and tobogganed in winter, bathed in the Lake of Geneva, and rowed and walked in the summer. But sport was regarded as a pleasure, not as a duty, and study-real hard study-was demanded of us all. My brother was at school a quarter of a mile away across fields, and I had the run of his school as well as of my own. There were boys there from at least a dozen countries and of all ages from twelve to eighteen. I went there for fencing lessons, and my brother and I also had riding lessons together. One summer I went climbing in the mountains for a fortnight with the boys of his school, dressed as a boy and climbing the same mountains as boys of seventeen and eighteen. In that period of my life I had no feeling that boys and girls were so very different; and, mixing with English, Germans, French, Swiss, Italians, and other nationalities, speaking French fluently and German almost as well, I was little aware of national barriers and was imbued with an international outlook which neither my father’s in- fluence nor theoretical socialist teaching alone could ever have given me.
From those pleasant and educative days in Switzerland, I was plunged into the frigid, mentality-destroying atmosphere of an English boarding school for girls which aped the British “Public Schools” for boys. There was no fagging and physical brutality as in the boys’ public schools-being physically very strong I should have been able to cope with that. But there was mental, or perhaps one should call it social, bullying of the worst kind. The greatest offenses against the social code which ruled the school were to study hard, or to show any originality in dress or behavior. I was handicapped from the start by having a slightly foreign accent-my r’s were French r’s-and I offended constantly. I can still remember being made to stand up in class to say “stirrup” over and over again, unable to pronounce the r in the English way.
I worked hard and I refused to be dictated to as to whether I should wear a black or a colored ribbon in my hair. I tried to avoid the disciplined games which bored me to go for walks instead. My sins against the social code were at first unconscious, then deliberate. The spirit of rebellion now, for the first time, had been awakened in me. Dimly I began to feel that the social hierarchy and the social code which governed the school were precisely that “capitalist system” which, as a socialist, 1 thought was the cause of all social injustice. The girls at my school came in later life to symbolize “the imperialist English bourgeoisie” in my unconscious mind : class-conscious, sublimely self-confident and scornful of learning. (The profound change brought about by the World War in the outlook of the English upper classes has since those days transformed the atmosphere of English private schools as of English ruling circles.)
Of course I made some friends, but they were rebels like myself. I was a favorite pupil of the head mistress, who imagined I was going to reflect glory on the school by future academic distinctions. She lent me books, gave me special facilities for study, in particular a room to myself. But in the end she did more to awaken my budding revolutionary outlook than anyone else. When the war came in 1914, my father was ruined. I was sixteen and had already passed my Little Go (entrance to Cambridge University). The head of my school, still thinking I would go to the University and win laurels for the school, gave me a year’s scholarship. I began working for a scholarship to Cambridge, but it soon became clear that when I got it I should not be able to go to Cambridge, because my father was becoming more and more ill of tuberculosis and I should have to start earning money as soon as I left school. The head mistress began to make it very clear to me that my presence at the school was no longer welcome. Instead of arranging for me to go to London University-where, as I learned years later, I could have obtained a scholarship sufficient to keep me altogether-she cast me off, as no longer of any interest or value to the school. She let it be known that I was in the school free and that my people were now almost destitute. My home world had fallen to pieces, my brother was in the army, my father becoming so ill that we knew he would soon die. I left school with no regrets, and with personal experience to teach me that the social system could fling one into poverty from security, and prevent one from having an education even when one had proved one’s mental qualifications.
At school I had been earnest, wary and distrustful of my fellow creatures, purposeful, and, I imagine, sadly lacking in a sense of humor. Life was serious, life was earnest, and one must struggle without ceasing against one’s environment. As soon as I began to earn my living in an office, I began to find the world as friendly and decent a place as I had thought it when I lived in Switzerland, or traveled in France and Italy with my parents. I found the lower middle-class clerks I worked among at the War Office friendly, kind, and pleasant people. I even learned to laugh.
The death of my father in January 1918 brought me the first great grief of my life. I had loved him very dearly, and I had thought him the most wonderful person in the world-wise, tolerant, kind, never ill-tempered, and until the last absorbed in the course of history rather than in himself. He had died in extreme poverty in a tiny cottage in Cornwall, so primitive that my mother had to fetch water in a bucket from a pump across the fields. I was eighteen, and I had seen him choking to death as his exhausted heart could no longer pump blood through his diseased lungs. Half unconscious at the end, he had murmured Shakespeare’s words about the bourne from which no traveler returneth, and said to us he was now only curious to know whether he was right in thinking that death was nothingness.
My brother was in Mesopotamia, and I brought my mother up to London. We lived in a small flat on the £2.5.0. which I was then earning as a clerk in the War Office. Fairly soon I earned more; but with a rent of 16/- and war prices for food, we had a fairly hard time.
During these war years I was too busy coping with the economic difficulties which had overwhelmed us, to think much about socialism; but, although I had gone to work as a clerk in the War Office early in 1917, my father’s teachings and my Continental education pre- vented my ever becoming a “patriot.” I never thought of the Ger- mans, among whom I had been at school from the ages of eleven to thirteen, as any worse than the English, although I had some slight prejudice against the French as the most chauvinist and military- minded nation in Europe. This was probably due to the overdose of French literature I had swallowed while at school in Switzerland, which had given me a conception of the French as a nation eternally seeking la gloire and honoring the Napoleonic tradition above the revolutionary one.
At the War Office I soon became a branch secretary of the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries, then endeavoring to organize women “black-coated” workers. Through this trade-union I obtained, in 1920, a Bursary to study at London University. My brother Temple, wounded for the second time in France in 1918 and demobilized early in 1919, was already at London University on a grant from an officers’ fund. Once at college I began to take an active and prominent part in the socialist movement, becoming secretary of the King’s College Socialist Society, and later chairman of the London University Labour party. I joined the Independent Labour party and devoted all the time I had over from study and from teaching in the evenings, to political activity.
Since my brother and I were supporting my mother, our Bursaries were not sufficient for us to live on. We both gave lessons in English to foreigners, helped by our knowledge of French and German. My brother had pupils at the Czecho-Slovak Legations- his checks, we called them-and I had Russians. Teaching English to the Soviet employees of the Trade Delegation first brought me in contact with Bolshevik theory. From the beginning I had been a defender of the Russian Revolution; but I had no more knowledge or understanding of communist theories than the Parlor Bolsheviks of today have of Marx. Nor did my first pupils enlighten me, for they were high Party officials out to enjoy life in the “capitalist world” after the rigors of Moscow, and confining their “propaganda” to jokes about England. Then I met Plavnik, an old Bolshevik who had lived long years in exile in Germany after the revolution of 1905. To him Bolshevik theory was the breath of life. He was honest and sincere, although extremely vain. His “English lessons” usually became my German lessons and lessons in Marxian theory, from which, however, I might have benefited more had he been a little less philosophical, dialectic, and involved, and a little more concrete. For I was by this time an ardent and active member of the Independent Labour party, admiring the Soviet Union, convinced that the official British Labour party was too “reformist” ever to establish socialism, and in revolt against the underlying imperialist concepts of the British Labour movement.
Plavnik was the most humane of men, and later on in Moscow where he remained my friend, he sank more and more into his shell, unable to defend, but unwilling to condemn outright, the atrocities committed by Stalin; unable to face up to the fact that the revolutionary movement to which he had given his whole life had failed and degenerated into Stalin’s tyranny. We saw less and less of him because meetings were too painful between friends who dared not speak out their thoughts to each other. Plavnik was lucky enough to go into an insane asylum just before the great purge began; at least that is where he was supposed to be early in 1936, and we knew his mental faculties had been failing since the death of his wife a year or two before.
As early as 1923 I was a passionate defender of the U.S.S.R. In that year I was the college speaker in a debate on Russia, together with H. N. Brailsford. Our opponents were C. H. Driver, a fellow history student, now a Professor at Yale, and Sir Bernard Pares. When next I met Pares twelve years later, he and I had changed places. He had become the defender of the U.S.S.R. and I was back in England, hold- ing my tongue for my husband’s sake, but hating Stalin’s Russia. The change, I believe, was in Russia, not in us.
From 1925 onwards I was drawing ever closer to the Communists. I stood with them against the Right Wing in the London University Labour party, and in the University Labour Federation. I began to read their literature. The only influence which held me back for a time from joining the Communist party was that of Bertrand Russell, and unfortunately it was insufficient. I had met him first when he came to speak for the King’s College Socialist Society in 1923, and this had led to a friendship which has been one of the most precious and valuable things in my life. In the Easter vacation of 1926 I spent a month with him and Dora Russell in Cornwall, teaching his young son in the mornings, walking, talking, and bathing in the afternoons, reading aloud in the evenings. B. R. tried hard to convince me that the Marxist theory was untenable in the light of modern physics. I wrote to my mother in April 1926:
Tell Temple I have been driven to try and understand relativity in order to understand what Russell thinks about Russia! I am reading the A.B.C. of Relativity, with Russell sitting near me to explain what I don’t understand. He is most awfully kind to me.
Unfortunately, I never understood the theory of relativity. In spite of Russell’s patience and the time he was prepared to waste on my education, my mind could not grasp either the theory or the basic connection between Marxism and Newton’s theory of gravity. Nor would I accept the truth of his Theory and Practise of Bolshevism. This book, written in 1920, is uncannily prophetic of the Russia I was later to know. Bertrand Russell was one of the very few who, in those early days of the Revolution, was able to perceive what manner of tree would grow from the seed which Lenin planted.
Although only experience could teach me the truth of Bertrand I Russell’s philosophy, and he failed in 1926 to prevent my making a mess of my life, his teaching did at least help to prevent my becoming a Trotskyist when I revolted against Stalinism.
When I came back to England for a few months in 1931 and stayed at his house, I was still convinced that the horrible society being created in Russia was Stalin’s fault, and that if Lenin had lived or if Trotsky’s policy had been followed, all would have been well. Bertie would bang his fist on the table and say, “No! Freda, can’t you understand, even now, that the conditions you describe followed naturally from Lenin’s premises and Lenin’s acts? Will you never learn and stop being romantic about politics?”
The General Strike of 1926 was the turning point of my earlier political development. The high hopes then raised and the “betrayal” of the workers by the T.U.C. and the Labour party led me finally into the communist fold. I became convinced of the reality of the class war, and of the fact that socialism could not be obtained “gradually”; that there was no solution for unemployment and low wages under the capitalist system; and that only the “overthrow” of the capitalist system and the “unity of the workers of the world” could save humanity from poverty and imperialist wars.
The General Strike stirred all my emotions, the more so as I was then living at Westfield College1 as a research student among the most conservative set of University teachers I had ever met. My crude, some- what childish, but I believe sincere, revolutionary reaction is expressed in the following letter written to my mother in Devonshire on May 10, 1926:
I have never lived through such a terrible week. I feel all hot inside and trembling all the time. It is such an unequal fight for us, and I want so much to help. I am speaking tonight at Edgware, I am glad to say. I wish I could speak all day-never was there a more unjust issue and more lies told by a government. Yet the Government is so ruthless it may win. It is parading armored cars about and soldiers are all over the place. The buses are running with two policemen on each and volunteer O.M.S. labor. Everything is quite safe for ordinary people like me-1 almost wish it were not! I cannot write properly, dear, I am too worried and upset. It is so dreadful not to be able to help and to have to listen to the mis- representations of the capitalists. Westfield is impossible except for a few students. I spent last night with the Boothroyds. 2 I saw Wilmot,3 who is half expecting to be arrested for sedition. Anything almost can be called sedition. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the churches proposed terms of peace: withdrawal of both lock- out and strike. The Government would not allow the proposal to be broadcast! It would be acceptable to us and not to them. I am sending you a British Worker [organ of the T.U.C.]. Will you ask Cole [a Labour man in Sidmouth] to stick it up in Sid- mouth . . .
A few years later I was to realize that the behavior of the British government was like that of a loving mother in comparison to that of the Soviet government toward the Russian working class. But I still remember the passionate anger I felt in 1926 against the “capitalist government” and its most ruthless member, Winston Churchill, who was responsible for the show of armed force and who was prepared to have the workers shot at if the strike went on. Ten years later Winston Churchill was to be the darling of the Communists and their fellow travelers; to me he has remained the prototype of a Fascist.
Today I also realize how tolerant were the Principal of Westfield College and even the staff members whom I hated and despised. No one interfered with me, even when I took a group of the undergraduates to T.U.C. headquarters to offer our services. Nor when I went off to Cornwall with A. J. Cook, Secretary of the Miners’ Union, and other speakers.
The day I was invested with my M.A. degree was the day the General Strike was called off. After bicycling across to the Senate House at South Kensington and sitting impatiently waiting in a borrowed cap and gown to receive my scroll, I tore off to T.U.C. headquarters. The bitterness of defeat and the long agony of the miners which was to follow the end of the General Strike have quite obliterated from my mind any feelings of satisfaction I may have had at the time at having got an M.A. degree with distinction.
A year later I was invited to visit the Soviet Union as representative of all the Labour and Socialist clubs in British universities (the University Labour Federation). My writings had attracted the attention of Ivan Maisky, then Counselor of the Soviet Embassy in London, and I was by that time well known, not only to the British Communist leaders, but to the chiefs of the Soviet Trade Representation. Moreover, I had met Petrovsky, the Cornintern representative in Eng- land during the General Strike, and had become very friendly with him and his wife. I was regarded, I suppose, as a promising young “intellectual” whose complete “conversion” would be useful, and who had shown some understanding of Bolshevik theory in the articles I was contributing to the New Leader, the Socialist Review, and the Labour Monthly. I intended to join the Party as soon as I returned, since it was considered desirable that I should wait until then. The propaganda effect would be greater if I joined after, not before, I saw the U.S.S.R.
My excitement at the coming trip to the Land of Promise knew no bounds. My brother, then as for a year past lying in bed in a tuberculosis sanitorium in Surrey, wrote me a few last words of caution:
MY DEAR FREDA:
This is just to wish you luck in your adventure. I think in one way you are quite right. I would do the same thing if I wanted to, I expect. After all, one must follow after one’s own thinking and one’s own desires. It is an adventure, but I do not expect for a moment that you will find what you are seeking for intellectually. Men are much of a muchness everywhere, and they behave much in the same way whatever they profess to believe.Of course you will see the country and the people and society as you wish to believe they are, at first. But later, your skepticism will re-assert itself.
But don’t join the Communist party. It seems to me a terrible thing for any intelligent person to adhere to any creed or dogma. To have to say that you accept any empirical generalization as an article of faith. I do not see why you should not work for them and with them and yet reserve your opinion about their fundamental propositions.
These sweeping generalizations are to be distrusted. Even when you are dealing with a subject like Physics-a subject by which human desires and fears are little affected in its findings, as more and more is discovered and its fundamental premises examined you are all the time modifying and modifying.
And what a phrase that “materialistic conception of history” is: “Matter’‘-the word is not really used in Physics. Bodies have mass and the mass of a body is its weight divided by the acceleration due to gravity. That is all Physics knows about it.
Matter psychologically is one’s sense of resistance-pushiness- quite different. Matter is also a “banner word,” a symbol with emotions attached to it used by various sects to throw at one another. But I must end half finished or I will lose the post. I need another four pages to explain myself.
The best of luck, my dear. All my love-
TEMPLE.
But my actions were not guided by science or philosophy; I brushed aside my brother’s arguments as I had those of Bertrand Russell. I couldn’t see that they had anything to do with the question of how to get socialism. They were all too abstract, and mine was then a concrete world. Or perhaps I was disregarding all appeals to reason in much the same way as a convert to Catholicism. I had faith and I must lose myself in the body of the church. The truth of my beliefs was not a matter of philosophical argument.
I replied to Temple from Moscow: “In spite of what you say, I must join the Communist party. I cannot live without feeling I am doing worth-while work, and I see no hope in the Labour party. I think the communist thesis is right.”
I traveled with Maisky from Berlin to Moscow, together with an- other Russian and J. W. Brown, Secretary of the Clerical Association, one of the most militant trade-unions in England. Two days after our arrival we stood in the Red Square in Moscow to witness the funeral of Voikov, murdered in Poland. This was the first demonstration I saw in the “socialist fatherland”; and I still remember vividly the exaltation, triumph, and excitement which filled my heart and mind as I stood close to Lenin’s mausoleum in the sunlight under a blue sky and saw the Red Army parade and the thousands upon thousands of demonstrators. My mind in those days was full of romantic libertarian images, and I wrote my mother after the demonstration: “People in the street look well fed enough though poorly clothed, and there seems to be such vitality and purpose among the people one meets. . . . The soldiers in the demonstration especially looked so splendid more like the Greeks of Xenephon must have looked than like the usual wooden soldier.. . .”
Visitors to the U.S.S.R. in those days were comparatively rare. There was no Intourist, and only invited delegates from trade-unions and Labour parties got the chance to travel over Russia. One was lapped around with kindness, hospitality, and good fellowship. Nor were outward signs of prosperity lacking. The market places of Moscow and other towns were overflowing with vegetables, dairy produce, milk, and other foods. New apartment houses and office buildings built in the severe but pleasing style introduced after the Revolution were much in evidence. There were no queues for bread and other foods at the state and co-operative shops, and one could buy the most delicious pastries in the world for only five kopeks. There was a shortage of manufactured goods even in the cities, but it was not to be compared to the shortage which came a few years later after the “gigantic successes on the industrial front.”
One is tempted to imagine what Russia might have become if the N.E.P. had been continued. Lenin was dead and his influence dying out. As early as 1924 the “Scissors Crisis” (the disproportion between the price of manufactures as against agricultural produce) had split the Central Committee into Left and Right factions. The disagree- ments in the Party began concerning the question of how much to take from the peasants for industrial development, and ended in the bitter controversy over collectivization. With the aid of Bucharin, Tomsky, and the others on the Right who maintained that any at- tempt to force the pace of industrialization would destroy the stimulus to labor, Stalin had just overcome Trotsky and was soon to exile him and the rest of the Left Opposition. Once quit of the Trotskyists, Stalin, in 1929, was to wipe out the Right Opposition and embark upon an ultra-Left policy of forced collectivization and intensive industrialization, Soon the U.S.S.R. was to become a country of starved peasants and undernourished workers cowed and whipped by fierce punishments to toil endlessly for a state which could not provide them even with enough to eat. But, unfortunately for my own future, I saw the U.S.S.R. during the brief period of prosperity which began in 1924 and ended in 1928.
In September 1927 I returned to England full of enthusiasm and prepared to tell the world of the wonders of the socialist fatherland. I left the L.L.P., joined the Communist party, and addressed meetings all over England. I admitted that the standard of life in Russia was still lower than in the Western capitalist countries; but I explained the need to accumulate capital for industrialization and demonstrated how, because there was no capitalist class to exploit the workers, the burden of saving was borne equally by all. I said that there was therefore no such acute misery as in the era of Britain’s industrialization in the early nineteenth century, and that all Russians were enthu- siastically collaborating in constructing socialism. And I really believed it. I felt that the gates opening upon the road to Paradise had been unlocked to mankind, and all one had to do was to convince the workers of one’s own country of the need to overthrow the capitalist class and join up with the U.S.S.R. Looking back on that distant time, distant not so much on account of the years between then and now, as on account of my bitter experience later, I wonder, did I really believe it. I suppose I did, or I should never have thrown up my job in the capitalist world and gone off with my husband to take our part, as we thought, in the construction of socialism.
Arcadi Berdichevsky, who became my husband in 1928, had worked from 1920 until 1927 at Arcos (Arcos was the Russian trading organization established in London before diplomatic) or at the Soviet Trade Representation in London. He was a Russian Jew, who had studied at Zurich Uni- versity and emigrated to the United States in 1914. In 1920 he had thrown up a very good job in New York to work for the Soviet government in London. He was not a Bolshevik, but had been a member of the Jewish Social Democratic party in Poland (the Bund), where he had lived until he went to study in Switzerland about 1910. He knew less about Soviet Russia than I did, since he had spent his whole time in England since 1920. He was a sincere Socialist, and although he was too much of a Jew and knew the old Russia too well not to Perceive the naivete of the picture I painted of the U.S.S.R., he believed as I did that a new and better world was being created in Russia. He, like me, wanted to take part in the building of that new socialist world. We knew that material conditions of life would be hard, that “living space” was difficult to obtain, and that the conveniences of life, the comforts and the pleasures, which he had for many years enjoyed abroad, were not obtainable in Russia. We also recognition of the Soviet Government enabled a Trade Representation to be established. knew that, since he was not a member of the Communist party, he could never rise to the higher positions in the Soviet state.
In 1923 Arcadi had been asked to join the Party, but he had the typical intellectual’s feeling that as he had played no part in the Revolution, he could not join now that the fighting was over, and being a member of the Party meant merely rising in the world. Also, he had something of my brother’s feeling about adherence to a creed or dogma. He worked with and for the Bolsheviks, but he was not prepared to subscribe entirely to their philosophy. He was as con- vinced as I was, however, that a new and more satisfying life awaited us in “socialist” Russia than in the “decaying” and “degenerate” bourgeois world.
At the time I met Arcadi he had reached a stage in which neither his personal life nor his comfortable “bourgeois” existence in London as a well-paid Soviet “specialist” satisfied him. He had a wife and a young son, having years before in New York married the daughter of a well-to-do Jewish family of Russian extraction. They had first become estranged when he gave up an income of $600 a month in the United States to work at Arcos for $150. By the time I knew him his salary had been increased to $500;but his wife, Anna Abramovna, had neither understanding nor sympathy for his political views and could not see why he was not satisfied by a comfortable home, a pretty wife, and a secure job. To the last she never understood why he had left her for me since, as she told her friends, I was not pretty and would never make him comfortable.
Arcadi and I knew that we loved each other after only a few meetings, but his separation from Anna Abramovna was a long and painful business. In January 1927 he asked her to divorce him, but she begged him to wait until she could join either her brother in New York or her sister in Paris. She said she could not bear the thought of their friends in London .knowing he had left her. Subsequently it became clear that she hoped all along that his feeling for me was a temporary infatuation and that if they continued to live in the same house he would return to her. Arcadi tried without success to obtain a visa for her to go to the United States but eventually secured a French one for her. However, by that time he himself was being expelled from England, and unfortunately for her own future she insisted on following him to Moscow. Since I had remained in England to finish my work, she continued to hope he would change his mind. When I finally came to Moscow they were divorced.
I had been too inexperienced fully to appreciate Arcadi’s dificulties. At times I had rebelled at his long delay in freeing himself to be with me. I had felt that he should either leave her at once or give up the idea of living with me. I knew that leaving his son was very difficult for him, but I had failed to understand that the ties between a man and a woman who have loved each other are hard for a sensitive man to break when the woman tries with every means at her disposal to maintain the old relationship. Moreover, in leaving his wife Arcadi was making a break with the “bourgeois” life he had lived since finishing his studies in Switzerland. For him I was a symbol as well as the companion in the new life in socialist society which we both expected to lead. Nearly ten years later the O.G.P.U. was to deprive me of all the letters Arcadi had written to me. But by some strange chance one he wrote to me during this difficult period of our relationship remained hidden within the pages of a book. I quote from it here as revealing a little not only of Arcadi’s state of mind at the time, but also as showing his attitude toward the Communists with whom he had decided to throw in his lot:
DARLING FREDOCHKA,
I suppose you are right in your own way, your “brutal” way, and that I shall never be able to satisfy you as to the validity of my reason for acting in the way 1 do.
I shall not pick a quarrel on what you say about my “playing about with the idea of living a different sort of life”; “desiring to go on the same way as before” and a number of other things “read at the bottom of my heart.” There is no use to argue about things on which we can never agree, and I shall not appeal to you to re- verse your decision until I can tell you that the way is clear for my giving you as much of myself as you can desire. I love you and I cannot and shall not believe that everything is over until you refuse to come to me when I shall ask you to do so on the strength of changes in my family life. There are for me two possibilities only in tbe future: either I shall embrace fully to the extent of 100 per cent the creed which will keep me going and make me forget you, or I shall accept it partially as I have done until now and you will be my beloved comrade in fighting all doubts which will arise. Nothing else is possible and the “desire to go on the same way as before” is death, which I do not feel I am ready to accept.
In September 1927, while I was still in the U.S.S.R., Arcadi had been suddenly told by the British Home Office that he must leave England at once. He thought his expulsion was due to the indiscreet and fervent letters I had sent to him from Russia, but it may have been due to the fact that, as a trusted “specialist,” the chairman of Amos had detailed him to be one of the few Soviet employees allowed to remain on the premises when the British Home Secretary, Joynson Hicks, raided the Arcos offices in June 1927.
Although at the time I was flattered to think that I was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by the British Home Office, it was a great blow to have Arcadi expelled. I was very much in love, but I never for a moment thought of giving up my work in England to go with him to Berlin where he was stationed for the next nine months. I visited him there in the 1927 Christmas vacation but, so seriously did I take my political work that when, in February 1928, he was allowed to come to London for ten days to represent Arcos in a lawsuit, I did not give up one single evening to him. As it happened, I was then standing as the Communist party’s candidate in the London County Council Elections and was speaking either to indoor meetings or at street corners every afternoon and evening.
Meanwhile I was earning a living, with the indulgence of C. M. Lloyd, my Director of Studies, as the holder of the Ratan Tata Re- search Fellowship at the London School of Economics. I also took Workers’ Educational Association Classes, reviewed books, and wrote articles. I was by now makin, v a good living, and my mother had inherited a small income from her father. We were better off than we had been for many years, and a successful academic career was open to me. Although being a Communist in those days was a handicap, my academic distinctions and the tolerance which distinguishes most English universities ensured me a secure and pleasant career. But by this time I scorned the fruits of past years of hard study and never paused to regret the life I was leaving. The study of history could not satisfy. I yearned to take part in making it.
My Fellowship came to an end in June 1928; and, since Arcadi was by that time in the U.S.S.R. but expecting to be sent to Japan, I joined him in Moscow. Japan was the one country I particularly wished to visit, since my research work at the London School of Economics had concerned Eastern competition and the Lancashire cotton industry. This may sound a dull subject, but for me it meant a study in modern imperialism. I had chosen the subject immediately after having written a M.A. thesis on the trade guilds of the later Roman Empire, because I thought there was a parallel between the effects of slave labor on the conditions of free labor in the ancient world and the effect of colonial labor on Western labor standards in the modern world. In the course of my studies I had become interested in Japan and wished to see that strange semifeudal, semimodern imperialist state. If we could not yet live in Moscow, I was glad to get a chance to go to the Far East.
This time no smiling delegation met me at the Moscow station, and no luxurious quarters at the New Moscow Hotel awaited me. Arcadi took me to a tiny room, not more than fifteen feet by twelve feet, with a single bed, a chest of drawers, and two straight chairs. We had not even a table, and I used to cook and iron and write on the window sill. But the flat was clean, and there was only one family in each of the four rooms. For Moscow that was not too bad. Unfortunately the room was not ours, but only lent to my husband for a few weeks. During the three months we lived in Moscow we moved twice.
Arcadi’s salary was only 300 rubles a month; and, since we were ex- pecting to leave for Japan, I could not take a job. We just managed to live. Our rent was 50 rubles, meals at a cheap restaurant cost a ruble each. But bread was still cheap; and butter, when obtainable, about the same price as in England, with the ruble stabilized at 2s. Cigarettes were our greatest extravagance and difficulty. At the end of the month I used to cart bottles out to sell, or rake through our pockets for forgotten kopeks, to raise the price of a meal. We were very happy. Discomfort and comparative poverty do not matter much so long as one has faith. And we both still had faith. Arcadi never regretted his house in London, and I had been poor most of the years since 1914 I wrote to my mother:
I feel sometimes that having found Arcadi is too good to be true.
. . . I feel that the fact that we have been able to be happy together in these conditions argues well for the future. We have begun life together in the worst material conditions instead of the best. . . . All the same, we both look forward to the day when we have a bed each and spoons and knives, and a bath and toilet of our own.
I was kept busy for a time finishing a translation from the German, begun in England, of the Illustrated History of the Russian Revolution, but I found it very hard to work that summer.
I attended the sixth Congress of the Cornintern as a translator; listened to Bucharin from the visitors’ gallery; saw Borodin walking in the corridors, already disgraced but still a romantic figure; thrilled at the sight of delegates, white, black, brown and yellow, from every corner of the world assembled in the socialist capital, visible witnesses of the “Unity of the Workers of the World.”
Even in those days I had some slight deviations. I thought of Trotsky as the greatest leader, and my communism was essentially internationalist. But I never dreamed that Stalin would have the power to destroy all that Lenin and Trotsky and the other old Bolsheviks had created. Nor had I any inkling of the fundamental canker at the root of the Marxian doctrine. One believes what one wishes to believe, until experience bangs one’s head against the wall and awakens one from dreams founded on hope, a misreading of history, and ignorance both of human psychology and science.
At last, after the O.G.P.U. had fully satisfied itself concerning my husband, he obtained his passport to go to Japan for the Commissariat of Foreign Trade. We left early in October, in the chill wet Russian autumn, with the first signs of coming hardships already visible in Moscow. For some weeks I had been spending more and more time chasing after food supplies from one shop to another. Rationing had not yet been enforced, but the peasants were already refusing to sell their produce in return for money which could not buy them the clothing and other manufactures they required. Russia was on the eve of the Calvary of forced collectivization.
At Chita, in Siberia, I left my husband-he to proceed alone to Japan, I to China. To my great delight the Comintern in Moscow had entrusted me with secret papers to take to China. I was to travel across the Russian border into Manchuria and on to Shanghai alone, so that I should not be suspect. For a day before I left Moscow I had hunted in the shops for a corset so that I could hide the papers in approved Secret Service style, I was extremely uncomfortable all through that journey, but the thrill of conceiving of myself as a real revolutionary, helping to fan the flames of the world revolution and liberate the “oppressed colonial workers” sustained me even through the ordeal of being corsetted for the first time in my life.
All I remember of Chita is the intense cold, and the memorials of the Decembrists, the 150 exiled revolutionaries of 1825 who had dreamed of liberty, equality, and fraternity under the Iron Tsar, Nicholas I. Only later was it to be borne in on me how mild had been the tyranny of the Tsars compared to that of Stalin. All those nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revolutionaries whose lives were spared and who were allowed to live in Siberia with their families were in exile, it is true; but for the most part not in chains nor herded in concentration camps, and able to escape with ease if they were so minded. Today such humane and civilized treatment of political opponents is unheard of.
I was looked after in Chita by a little O.G.P.U. man who had formerly been a sailor on American boats, and whom I was to meet years later in Moscow at the Comintern. He was the sort of man who loves being conspiratorial for its own sake, and his manner of putting me on the train two days later, from the tracks instead of the platform, into a specially reserved compartment, should have aroused the suspicion of the Japanese or Chinese spies, if there had been any.
I went through a bad half-hour at the Manchurian border. A German with whom I had got friendly on the train remarked to me at the passport and customs-control oflice, that the system was to watch the faces of the travelers rather than to search their baggage carefully. A row of huge White Russian guards stood behind the Chinese customs officials watching the passengers. I have an innocent face and a British passport, and they would need to have been very suspicious to search the person of a British subject. My papers remained safe “in my bosom,” as the old novels would have said.
The Comintern, with the inefficiency characteristic of all Russian institutions, had been unaware that the fighting going on in North China had stopped all passenger traffic on the railway to Peking, and that I would therefore have to get to Shanghai by sea from Dairen. The money I had been provided with for my journey was insufficient to meet the extra expense of waiting in the hotel at Dairen for passage on the crowded boats, and I had hardly a cent of my own. So in order to preserve enough to exist on in Shanghai for the ten days I planned to stay there, I economized in Dairen by eating only one meal a day. I took the table d’hôte midday dinner at the Yamamoto Hotel and ate all through every one of its six or seven courses under the as- tonished and amused eyes of the Japanese waiters.
Eventually I got a ship to Shanghai and delivered my documents. To do this I had to go to the Palace Hotel and telephone to a certain business office, ask for a gentleman with a German name, and tell him I had brought the samples of silk hosiery. I enjoyed it all immensely, especially as I was allowed two days later to come and meet some of the Cornintern agents in Shanghai, who plied me with questions about happenings in Moscow which, in my innocence, I was unable to answer. Probably the men I met, Americans and Germans, were, if not Trotskyists, at least extremely unhappy revolutionaries, who had witnessed Stalin’s callous and cynical sacrifice of the Chinese Communists, and were watching with dismay the beginnings of his transformation of the Comintern into a mere sub-office of the Russian National State.
For a couple of weeks I lived a double, or rather a treble, life in Shanghai, spending part of my time as a serious academic investigator of conditions in the cotton industry, other hours as the guest of “British Imperialists” at luxurious dinner parties and dancing or going to theaters with them, and yet other hours in the secret meeting places of the Comintern’s agents. It was part of the game that I should mix with the “bourgeoisie,” and appear quite innocent of revolutionary activity; and my cotton industry investigations were in any case absolutely genuine. However, I am afraid I should not have been much good as a conspirator if any hard task had been assigned to me, for I was too anxious to testify to the “capitalists” concerning the rottenness of their system and the wickedness of their exploitation of the colonial workers. Thinking on one occasion to kill any doubts they might have about me, I told a Shanghai dinner party that I was doing some correspond- ence for the Manchester Guardian. This was true, and I thought it should establish my bona fides in the capitalist world. However, all values are relative. To my mind the Manchester Guardian signified the capitalist Press, but to my compatriots in Shanghai it was “that Red rag,” the paper for which “that awful fellow Arthur Ransome” wrote.
This book is not one about my adventures in the Far East, so I will pass over the year I spent in Japan with my husband. It was the happiest year of my life. We were in love; we had no money worries, for my husband was earning the to my mind princely salary of £1OO a month; and I was investigating labor conditions, calculating costs of production in the cotton industry, studying Japanese economics and politics, doing a series of well-paid articles for the Manchester Guardian Commercial, and writing my first book, Lancashire and the Far East.
Japan, however, gave me my first experience of a police state. Happy as I was under its blue skies, enjoying for the first time in my life a harmonious companionship with a man I loved, the shadow of the tyranny under which the Japanese lived kept my revolutionary fervor alive. Moreover, what my brother used to call my Puritan conscience soon made me restless. I had a deep conviction that it was wrong to be living comfortably and enjoying the greatest happiness which life can give, life with someone one loves more and more dearly as the days pass.
My letters to my mother from Japan are full of these inner misgivings :
I am living in the present for the first time in my life and I know it is dangerous . . . that I am becoming “decomposed.“4
In January 1929 I wrote:
Life now is altogether a different thing, more complete and wonderful than I ever imagined it could be. Even the love I felt for Arcadi a year ago seems a small thing now I love him so much more. There really is complete understanding between us and some- times I feel my happiness is too great to last. You know I have always felt, like the Greeks, that the Gods are jealous of human happiness. But anyhow life is worth having lived for this alone. So you see how I feel, dear, in answer to your birthday letter and whether I am glad I was born. Life seems a wonderful thing now and also I can see that my childhood made this happiness possible. That in me which made me so unhappy five or six years ago is what has given me such great happiness in the end. The memories I have always had of you and Dada which made the substitutes, the second-bests, of no use to me and kept me lonely for so long, have now given me Arcadi and our happiness together. So I love you, Mother dearest, more and more for the happiness you have given me.
On June 25,1929, I wrote:
Ten years ago I could not have believed that life would give so much. Only sometimes I know this happiness is too great to last, especially if I cease to do anything to deserve it. I must come home and do some work for what I believe.
Of course, no one knows his real motive. Perhaps it was not really my feeling that no one has any right to great personal happiness so long as the majority of mankind starve and toil without joy. It may have been love of power or the desire to make one’s mark on the world, which is the same thing as love of power, which impelled me to leave Arcadi and return to work in the Communist party in England. Also, it may have been the feeling I expressed in another letter to my mother, the feeling that Arcadi’s love for me was founded upon his conception of me as a revolutionary, an intellectual, an independent woman, not a “mere wife.” I felt that if I lost myself in his love I might lose it, that I must somehow continue being what I had been when he began to love me. The extent to which it was ambition which impelled me to leave him is suggested in the following letter I wrote my mother soon after my arrival in Japan.
I wish I could go yachting with Temple . . . perhaps some day. But of course I don’t know how to sail a boat properly, I have just a rudimentary idea from the fishing boats in Devonshire. As regards what he says about my being turned into a “bloody intel- ligent,” God forbid-yet already I feel “decomposed” in many ways. I am less inclined to strive and sometimes I feel that the days of my achievements, such as they were, are past. On the whole I am taking life much less strenuously, though I am trying now to work hard on my book. Somehow I don’t get quite so agitated and worried as I used to about the things I do. You and Temple may say this is good but I don’t think so. Perhaps I shall never do any- thing worth while again. I have also discovered about myself that beautiful things, especially beautiful colors, appeal to me much more than in the past. I can sit and look at a beautiful design on silk and just enjoying looking at it. Thus I can waste time instead of sitting down to write articles, etc.
The spirit to sit up all night and work at top pitch to finish a piece of work and do it well somehow, the spirit which used to carry me through the hardest tasks, was lacking last summer in Moscow and may be gone forever. Only I hope that my languidness was due to conditions in Moscow, not getting enough food and the new way of living, which is possibly exhausting at first. But things in Russia won’t be so difficult in a year’s time. I must have got pretty run down because this vaccination business would not have developed such complications otherwise. It is 7 weeks since it was done and the ulcers have only now begun to heal. Also I have had a lot of toothache. This is not to worry you, dear, it is only my feeble way of trying to console myself for having become lazy. . . .
I have begun to think that in the end Temple will go much further than me. He has gone on steadily doing better and better in his line instead of frittering himself away on a multitude of activities as I have. I feel I have attempted too many things in the past instead of doing one thing really well. And now, at 30, I have really got to begin all over again in a new world where my past academic attainments count for little. Even this cotton business is difficult for me because, of course, my background should be economics, not ancient history! Temple will be a famous scientist one day and I shall be nothing at all. You remember too that Arcadi said Temple would never be “decomposed.”
Looking back on things I realize that my unhappy love for Walter made me put all my energies into work whereas now . . . I have just received a letter from Walter, by the way. You might tell him what I say. If he admires my brain and capabilities as he says, tell him that he helped me to achieve things by refusing to love me. I can look back on it all very casually now and genuinely say to Walter, “Peace be with you.” Tell him there is something in Russell Green’s favorite saying: “The hobbyhorse of one’s discontent becomes the Pegasus of one’s ambition.” And yet I am still ambitious only not so vividly so. I enjoy the present too much.
I begin to understand why Christian priests had to be celibate, why Venus was banished to a cave. And yet I hope that in union I may in the end achieve more than alone. Or is this also only an illusion? I seem to have rattled on for a long time. I wish I could talk to you and Temple tonight. Should like to be sitting with you over a bottle of wine at Bertorelli’s.
Today I regret nothing more in my life than not having savored my happiness to the full and lived out the brief period Arcadi and I might have had together before we were engulfed in that hell of disillusionment and suffering in Soviet Russia. Today, I not only know that the gods are jealous gods, but that the way to cheat them is not to be afraid of them. Euripides was right in those choruses in the Bacchae which I knew so well by heart in my youth, but whose meaning and truth only loss and unhappiness could teach me:
What of Man’s endeavorz
Or God’s high grace
So lovely and so great.
To stand from fear set free
To hold a hand uplifted over hate
For shall not loveliness be loved forever?
No grudge hath he of the great,
No scorn of the mean estate,
But to all that liveth
His wine he giveth;
Griefless, immaculate.
Only on them who spurn joy
Does his anger burn.
Happy he on the weary sea
Who has fled the tempest
And found his haven,
But who’er shall know
As the long days go
That to live is happy
Has found his heaven.
To be alive at all is wonderful, and to have known, even for only a short while, the greatest happiness which life can give-to love and be loved utterly-gives life a savor even after it has all vanished with the snows of yesteryear.
Although he knew he would be terribly lonely when I had gone, Arcadi encouraged me to go. For he, even as I, believed in those days in what the Webbs call the Vocation of Leadershipi.e., the duty of the Communist to sacrifice personal happiness to political work. And yet we had already learned something in Japan of what Soviet society is really like. The intrigues, the calumnies, and the factional struggles which went on in the small Russian colony of employees at the Trade Representation and the Embassy should have taught us what to expect in the U.S.S.R. But we thought this was because the Russian colony was composed of “intellectuals” and that in Russia the proletarians ensured a cleaner atmosphere. Moreover, both the Ambassador,\ Tryanovsky, and the Trade Representative, Anikeev, were decent men and the same could be said of Maisky, later to become Ambassador to Britain but then only Counselor of the Embassy in Tokio. True that his wife and Madame Anikeev were at daggers drawn, and a telegram once had to be sent to Moscow to settle the delicate question of precedence at Embassy dinner parties and Japanese state functions: who came first-the wife of Maisky, the Embassy Counselor, or the wife of Anikeev, the Trade Representative. As far as I remember, the question was settled in Madame Anikeev’s favor, but the whole Russian colony was split into factions by the antagonism between these two women. They were fairly evenly matched, because although Maiskaya was a member of the Party and Anikeeva was not, Maisky had not joined the Bolsheviks until 1924, whereas Anikeev was not only an old Bolshevik but also of proletarian origin, having once been a factory worker. Anikeeva being both a beautiful woman and an intelligent one, became a sort of First Lady, in spite of Maiskaya’s qualifications. Tryanovsky’s wife, an unassuming lady, played no part in the faction fights of “Red” society. Tryanovsky’s first wife had been a Bolshevik when he was a Menshevik, and the story told was that during the civil wars she had condemned her husband to death when he was brought before her as a prisoner. Lenin himself had talked Tryanovsky over into joining the Bolsheviks and saved him from the death sentence imposed by his wife. I cannot vouch for the truth of this story, as whispered to me in Tokio; but at least it explained Tryanovsky’s choice of a nonpolitical, rather colorless lady as his second wife. It is more pleasant to have a wife not liable to shoot one on account of one’s political beliefs.
These dissertations are not entirely frivolous, for Soviet society as it really is could not properly be described without some account of the human factors. Russian women are just as prone to social discrimination, pride in their social status, love of fine clothes and admiration, as women in “bourgeois” society. Soviet society has its hierarchies and its jealousies and is not composed of simple-minded, ardent revolutionaries with red cotton handkerchiefs on their heads, intent on constructing socialism regardless of personal advancement and the material comforts such advancement brings. The simply dressed men and women who march in the demonstrations of the proletariat, to the admiration of foreign tourists, are most of them longing to change places with the “boyars of the bureaucracy” who watch them from the reserved seats in the Red Square.
Back in England I threw myself into the work of the British Communist party, and tried to bury in my subconscious the suspicions concerning Soviet “socialist” society which had been engendered by the year I had spent in Tokio and by the fortnight I had spent in Moscow on my way home at the end of 1929. I campaigned for the British Communist party among the textile workers in Lancashire. I campaigned for the Communist candidate at the bye-election in Sheffield. I became a member of the Industrial Committee of the Party in London. I wrote articles for the Communist publications, and I did a pamphlet for the Party on “What’s Wrong with the Cotton Trade!” My husband sent me money to live on, and I never took a penny from the Communist party, even for my articles and pamphlets. I read the works of Marx and Lenin, conscientiously and thoroughly, and tried to explain in simple language the basic tenets of Marxism, which, if one could make them clear to the workers, must make them see that only through the unity of the workers of the world could living standards be improved and unemployment eliminated.
In speaking to the Lancashire cotton operatives and writing for them, I first came up against the basic dilemma of the Marxist revolution, and also against the obstacle of the Comintern’s indifference to the troubles of the working class, or its fate outside Russia.
How could one convince the Lancashire cotton operatives that they should refuse to allow the cotton industry to be rationalized, refuse to work more looms, and go on strike for higher wages, when they knew as well as I did that the immediate result of such action would be more unemployment through the loss of more markets to Japan and other competing countries ? To my mind it seemed clear that the basic need was to explain Marxist theory to them, to make them understand the meaning of “workers of the world, unite” by showing that if all textile workers in all countries got together in one organization they could establish higher wages for all; to make them understand that the capitalist system based on production for profit inevitably doomed them to increasing poverty now that other countries besides England were industrialized, and workers in the Eastwith lower standards of life competed against them.
But now I came up against the Comintern, which was then pursuing an ultra-Left policy and insisting that agitation, agitation alone, was the task of the Communist. No theoretical explanations, no waste of time or energy in exposing the dynamics of capitalism; just tell the workers to strike and strike whatever the consequences. The Comintern, in fact, was not concerned with the livelihood of the workers; it wished only to weaken the capitalist states by continual strikes and the dislocation of economic life. Its only objective was the safety of the U.S.S.R., and it recked nothing of the interests or sufferings of the workers.
One day in Blackburn, the great weaving center of Lancashire, an elderly textile worker complained bitterly to me of the fact that it was all very well for the paid officials of the Communist party to get themselves arrested for deliberately and unnecessarily holding meetings where they obstructed the traffic, but how could we expect men with families to do so, especially since it was an utterly useless performance? Of course, he did not know how proud Communist party members were if, when they went to Moscow, they could boast that they had gone to jail in the class struggle. Such an accomplishment might be held to wipe out the stigma of their nonproletarian origin.
Finally I got myself into trouble with the Politbureau of the Party in London on account of an article of mine which the editor of the Communist Review had inadvertently allowed to be published. I had been reading Lenin’s writings of the “Iskra period” and had discovered that he had condemned the “economists” who maintained that the intellectual has no role to play in the Party and that the socialist idea can spring “spontaneously” out of the experience of the working class. Lenin had insisted that the ordinary worker, by the experience of his daily life, develops not a full revolutionary class consciousness but only that of “a trade-unionist.” Clearly, to my mind, in this period of declining markets for Britain, the workers’ trade-union consciousness was likely to impel him to accept wage reductions and join with the bosses in attempting to recapture their markets, I did not, of course, foresee that this would lead Europe to a fascist development, but I dimly perceived that, unless the Marxist conception of international working-class unity could be put across to the workers, they would unite with their employers against other countries. Today we see how Hitler and Mussolini can rouse their people to fight under the slogan of the proletarian nations against the pluto-democracies.
Although my article was buttressed by quotations from Lenin, I was held to have deviated seriously from the Party line by maintaining that theory was of primary importance and that the intellectual, accordingly, need not play at being a proletarian, since he had an important part to perform in bringing knowledge of socialism to the working class. I was not directly accused of Trotskyism, but I was held to be slightly tainted with heresy.
Even at this stage of my communist experience I had not the sense to see that nothing good would come out of the U.S.S.R. and that the foreign Communist parties were already corrupted and impotent. I had a great respect and liking for Harry Pollitt, Secretary of the British Communist party, who had encouraged me and backed me up, and prevented the little bureaucrats in the Agitprop department from sabotaging my pamphlet and my Party work. To this day I find it difficult to understand how this British working-class leader of Non- conformist traditions came to subordinate his conscience and sacrifice his personal integrity to become a stooge of the Stalinists. The fact that Pollitt led the British Communist party deluded me into thinking that it was still a revolutionary working-class party.
Late in September I left for Moscow, expecting that my husband would join me there that month from Japan. Before leaving England I had spent a few days with my brother on the yacht in which he was preparing to sail across the Atlantic and on to the South Seas. He wanted me to come with him, at least as far as Spain; but I was, as usual, driven by that sense of urgency which has so often made me miss the greatest pleasures in life. I expected Arcadi soon to reach Moscow from Japan; and, much as I loved sailing, I felt one could not just dash off like that to no purpose. My brother and I were more intimate those last days, sailing down the English coast to Cornwall, than since our childhood. His skeptical outlook on life, his avowed lack of any exalted motives, and his insistence on both the joyousness and futility of life, now seemed to me less reprehensible than a few years back. The Norse sagas and Greek legends which had inspired me to dreams of human liberty through the economic reorganization of society, had led him to throw up his job in London to sail to the South Sea Islands, of which he had dreamed since childhood. Perhaps his dream was as worthy and no more futile than mine. This I could not yet acknowledge, but at least I had grown tolerant enough not to reproach him.
In the night watches, sitting together on deck under the stars, Temple warned me of the certain disappointments which awaited me. He knew the motive forces of my life better than I knew them myself. For me, as he realized, the concept of human freedom formed the axis of my socialist beliefs. I was in revolt against tyranny and oppression-not, as in the case of so many of those who have accepted Stalin’s tyranny, a craving to lose myself and my reason in a universal brotherhood. In my mind Pericles’ funeral speech, Shelley’s and Swinburne’s poems, Marx’s and Lenin’s writings, were all part and parcel of the same striving for the emancipation of mankind from oppression.
Temple foresaw that I would not be able to accept and condone a new kind of oppression, even if tyranny wore the mask of socialism. “You will probably end up in a Siberian prison, my dear,” he said. “But so long as you don’t deceive yourself, they will not break you. Only don’t ever be a hyprocite to yourself; that is the only real sin against the Holy Ghost.”
These words stuck in my mind. One can preserve one’s inner integrity anywhere, even in the U.S.S.R., if one does not deceive oneself in order to be comforted.
Temple sailed away from Newlyn Harbor toward the setting sun one golden September evening. He waved to me from the deck of the Inyala;, steering with the other hand. We never saw each other again, for he died five years later in Fiji, During those five years we were about as far away from each other as one can be on this earth.
Two weeks later I was on the boat going to Leningrad. I wrote from Hamburg to my mother:
I am beginning dimly to realize how blind and how much in a rut most people are. You see even people like Henry [a friend in the Party who knew a little of my doubts about the Cornintern] do not want to see everything-it is too dangerous and too windswept and too awful. One must have courage, above all one must have courage, mentally as well as physically.
How much courage I was to require in the future was unknown to me, but I was to learn that it is not courage, but love, which can enable one to endure even the death of one’s hopes and the loss of love itself.
LENIN IN HIS youth was perhaps clearer sighted than when, in 1917, the opportunity to establish the dictatorship of his party proved too great a temptation to the great revolutionary strategist. In 1905 he said:
Anyone who attempts to achieve socialism by any other route than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at the most absurd reactionary deductions, both political and economic.
Lenin, “sleeping by Scamander’s river,” is luckier than Trotsky, who lived to witness the truth of this prophecy fulfilled; but who, even today, refuses to see the development of the U.S.S.R. under Stalin as inevitable from the premises on which it started out.
When, following the Revolution of 1917, Lenin perforce abolished Soviet democracy and established the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party, he thought that the “reactionary deductions” could be avoided. Perhaps if he had lived they might have been. But to think that one man could affect the course of history to the extent of changing its direction is un-Marxist. The Marxist must perforce believe that his- tory, in broad outline, would have taken the same course had Lenin lived. If he had lived he might have shared Trotsky’s fate. But if he had lived it is unlikely that Stalin would have been able to carry out the counter-revolution so unobtrusively. There would have been a split in the Bolshevik party and Stalin’s victory would not have been won without an armed clash. It would then have been obvious to the whole world that the Bolsheviks had been defeated, and Stalin would not have been able to win influence over the radical movements of the West. The revolution would have been buried instead of its corpse poisoning the air of a whole generation of progressives in Europe and America.
As it was, Stalin was able to camouflage his counter-revolution, to accomplish it piecemeal, and to confuse socialists all over the world by his zigzags from Right to Left and back to Right until these terms have lost their meaning. He has divested socialism of its humanitarian content and its original nobility and strength, and left only a whited sepulcher to warn the world against all hope of a juster social order than the capitalist.
To understand the miscarriage of Bolshevism, one must summarize the views expressed by Lenin and Trotsky both in 1917 and when the New Economic Policy was introduced in 1921. One must also glance back at the profound and contradictory changes in the policy of the Soviet Government over the past two decades.
In the summer and autumn following the February Revolution of 1917, Lenin saw with that political clear-sightedness which was his peculiar genius, that in Russia the choice was one between a return to reaction or an advance to social revolution. Kerensky’s government was powerless to solve the agrarian problem, to reorganize the collapsing national economy, to wage war or to make peace. Either Russia would lapse into anarchy or the old ruling class would return to power. There was no strong middle class capable of leading the “bourgeois democratic revolution”; i.e., solving the agrarian problem and estab- lishing a democratic capitalist social and political order. Therefore, as Lenin saw it, “the proletariat” must take the lead. It would be “a crime” if the only new class capable of seizing power on the collapse of the old social order failed to do so.
“We must perish or go forward,” was Lenin’s constant refrain. Kerensky’s government had begun to crush the peasant rebellion; and this meant “to lose the whole revolution forever and beyond recall.” The proletariat alone could accomplish nothing; the peasants must be the motive force of the revolution. If their insurrection were once crushed, the motive force would be destroyed. Hence, as Lenin re- iterated over and over again in October 1917, “waiting becomes a crime.” He was also convinced that the world revolution was at hand, so that to wait was to betray not only the Russian Revolution but that of the workers of the world.
In his “Letter to the Petrograd and Moscow Committees of the Bolshevik Party”5 in October 1917, he writes:
The agrarian movement is developing, and the government is repressing it more and more savagely. . . . In February, the beginning of the revolution is doubtless at hand. The elections at Moscow have given 47% of the votes to the Bolsheviks. With the Left Social Revolutionaries we have obviously a majority in the country.
The railwaymen and postal workers are in conflict with the government.. . . In these conditions, to wait is a crime.
The Bolsheviks must take power immediately. In so doing they will save the world revolution (for it is to be feared, especially after the executions in Germany, that the capitalists of all countries will compose their differences and unite against us). They will also save the Russian revolution (for if we delay, perhaps the rising wave of real anarchy will be too strong for us) and they will save the lives of hundreds of thousands of men at the front.
“To wait is a crime . . . . It is to betray the revolution.”
In Lenin’s mind it was absolutely clear that Russia faced either a return to reaction or anarchy. The tide was at the flood; the Bolsheviks must ride out upon it before it ebbed.
From all his writings at this period it is clear that he was certain of the coming world revolution. “Doubt is no longer permissible,” he says over and over again, “We are on the eve of the world proletarian revolution.”
Thus, at the decisive moment, Lenin gave no thought to what would happen in Russia should the Bolsheviks, having seized power, find that the world revolution was delayed. He gave no thought to this problem in 1917 because he was quite certain that it would not arise.
When he found out his mistake, he retreated and instituted the New Economic Policy, but where this was to lead he never clearly stated.
It has been truly said that all Lenin’s activities were stretched be- tween two extremes: Russia and his political instinct on the one hand, the West and his theoretical convictions on the other. In the endeavor to reconcile the two, he twisted Marxist doctrine out of all recognition and outraged the convictions of the Social Democrats. For in the con- flict between theory and instinct it was always theory which went to the wall. An opportunist of genius for whom the revolution was the primary objective, and what was to come afterwards dependent upon circumstances and opportunity, Lenin appears to have originally believed, like the Mensheviks, that the overthrow of the Tsar’s autocracy must be succeeded by a “bourgeois democratic republic”; but to have shared Trotsky’s belief that the proletariat alone was capable of leading such a revolution. Realizing to the full that in a predominantly peasant country such as Russia only an alliance with the peasantry could give victory to the proletariat, he had not hesitated to enlist that support by telling the peasants to take the land, knowing that by so doing he was laying the foundations for a capitalist, not a socialist, society. It would be more correct to say that he decided to go with the tide and proclaim as Bolshevik policy what was occurring spontaneously: the seizure of the estates of the landowners and church by the peasants. This inevitably meant either the creation of a satisfied peasantry, surest bulwark of a capitalist state, or deceiving the peasants as to their future under the Soviet regime. The Bolsheviks could in fact only ensure the victory of the revolution at the cost of the future certain and final de- feat of their attempt to set up a socialist state, since either they must abandon the attempt to create a socialist state, or do it by force against the wishes of the majority of the population. In either case, their course could not lead to socialism within the original meaning of the term: communal ownership and direction of the productive forces.
In thus sacrificing ends to means, Lenin laid the foundation of the economic and social problem which wrecked the Bolshevik party after his death, and eventually led to the establishment of Stalin’s totalitarian tyranny. Stalin cut the Gordian knot of the insoluble problem of the contradiction between the desires and interests of peasantry and prole- tariat by enslaving both alike to his personal despotism.
Trotsky, who was Lenin’s inferior as a practical revolutionist, was perhaps his superior as a theoretician. Whereas Lenin subordinated everything to his immediate aim and twisted the theory to fit his actions, Trotsky insisted that action conform to theory. To the Social Democratic argument that socialism could nor be constructed in a backward country, and that Russia must therefore pass through a stage of capitalist development, Lenin replied that the Bolsheviks would establish a smytchka (“alliance”) of proletariat and peasantry, presumably with the conviction in his mind that with himself to guide them the seemingly irreconcilable interests of workers and peasants could be harmonized. Lenin thus took refuge in what one can con- sider either a typical Russian and mystically vague conception of what was to follow the Bolshevik seizure of power, or a sublime belief in his power to defeat the materialistic interpretation of history. But Trotsky took the bull by the horns and proclaimed that the problem of the Russian Revolution was in fact insoluble so long as the revolution did not spread to other, more advanced, countries, in particular to Germany. If Germany joined up with Russia, the problem of Russian industrialization could be solved, the conflict of interests between workers and peasants resolved, and socialism made possible in Russia.
Both he and Lenin were at first convinced that their revolution would spread from country to country and that this would relieve the beleaguered fortress held by the small Russian proletariat. This was Trotsky’s famous theory of “permanent revolution.” From this theory it followed logically that the main energies of the Russian Bolsheviks should be devoted to inciting and assisting revolutionary movements in other countries, since alone they could not construct socialism in Russia.
Lenin, intent on the practical problem of getting an economy of any kind to function after the disorganization and destruction which was the legacy of the World War, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War and intervention, left much of the theorizing to Trotsky. But it was Lenin who stated that he would willingly sacrifice all the gains of the Russian Revolution for the hope of revolution in Germany. In 1918he stated at the First Congress of the Supreme Economic Council that: “We must not forget that we alone cannot achieve a socialist revolution in one country only, even if it were a less backward country than Russia.”
The partnership of Lenin and Trotsky can be said to have been based largely upon Lenin’s leaving points of theory to Trotsky and upon Trotsky’s submitting to Lenin on all organizational questions, and when immediate courses of action had to be decided upon. The dif- ference between the two men can in some sort be compared to the difference between those Englishmen who are now (1940) busy discussing war aims, and those who, like Churchill, insist that winning the war is what matters at present. Since Lenin was a great statesman, and states can be run best without a logical theory, he could do without Trotsky; but Trotsky, the schematic thinker, could neither retain power nor form a party without Lenin.
Marx, although rather vague concerning the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” had had no doubt that it was to be absolutely democratic, for in his view socialism was to come after capitalism had reduced all but a small minority to the condition of “proletarians.” For him, seizure of power by the proletariat meant the overthrow of a small group of capitalist exploiters by the overwhelming majority of the people. Socialist society was to be the only truly democratic society since socialism alone could deprive an exploiting class of its economic and political power. Engels, commenting upon Marx’s vindication of the Paris Commune of 1871,had proclaimed that absolute democracy was the natural form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As we have seen, Lenin himself in 1905 had declared that without democracy there could be no socialism.
Nevertheless, Lenin, in his insistence from 1907 onwards that the Social Democratic party should be composed of professional revolutionaries, was denying the democratic basis of Marxian socialism. This was realized by the minority of the Russian Social Democratic party (the Mensheviks) and also by Trotsky, who did not join the Bolsheviks (the majority party) until 1917. In effect, Lenin saw what the Social Democrats failed to see, that the working class did not naturally desire socialism, and that if one waited for it to become revolutionary by itself, one might wait until the Greek Kalends. Marx had believed that the course of capitalist development would of itself turn the working class into revolutionaries. Lenin saw before 1914 that it wouldn't, and after 1914 that the workers were patriots first and a class-conscious proletariat second. He did not on that account reject Marxism, but carried Engels’ thesis of the corruption of the British working class through imperialism, to the further hypothesis that the working class in all European countries had been corrupted. His solution was a revolution, led by professional revolutionaries who knew better than the workers what the latter needed for their own good-viz., socialism. All along he distrusted “the masses” and saw “the Party” as necessary to prevent their falling away from the revolutionary path.
This transmutation of Marxism was the easier for Lenin because he was a Russian. The belief in democracy was inherent and deep-rooted in the minds of the Marxists of western Europe; and it was the rational side of Marx, not his mystical belief in the inevitability of progress, which appealed to them. But Lenin was a Russian, and his ideas were unconsciously affected by the fanaticism and naivete of his country and his people. For him what one may term the religious side of Marx, the bedrock belief that history was “inevitably” leading mankind to a better social system, was fundamental. To him Marxism was a creed and a body of dogma which he could interpret according to the practical needs of the moment. This made him far more resolute and immediately successful than the hesitant, tolerant, and essentially humanitarian leaders of the western Social Democratic parties; but it also made possible the later grotesque distortions of the aims of the revolution under Stalin.
Marx had deliberately refused to consider “utopian schemes.” He had stated that the workers had “no ideals to realize” but needed only “to set free the elements of the new society which the old society carries in its womb.” So Lenin had little to go upon when once the revolution had been accomplished. This was his strength and his successors’ weakness. He approached the problem of how to organize the new society realistically and disinterestedly as regards immediate policy, but with vagueness as to the future. Did Lenin consider the distant future at all in 1917 Did he imagine that the “reactionary deductions” which he himself had said must follow from the attempt to achieve socialism by tyranny could be avoided? He may have believed it because he thought he himself and his comrades in the Bolshevik party would be strong enough and incorruptible enough to steer Russia against all the contrary winds of its internal contradictions. This belief was founded on faith, not upon political philosophy. It was in fact in direct contravention of the Marxist philosophy, and showed the tremendous power of ideas over the material world, to have even attempted to establish a socialist economy in Russia.
As Franz Borkenau has expressed it:6
On his native Russian soil his naivete and fanaticism hampered Lenin as little as it had hampered Mohammed to be, at the same time, a visionary and the shrewdest politician. On the contrary, inconsistencies and adaptations which would have broken the resolution of any less deeply convinced man did not distress Lenin: he could take every liberty with the principles he confessed because something deeper than intellectual formulae guaranteed him against becoming what he called a “traitor,” against losing sight of the ultimate aim, “the revolution.”
As a politician and a practical revolutionary, Lenin was bound to recognize in 1917 that democracy, as ordinarily understood, doomed the Russian proletariat and its “vanguard,” the Bolshevik party, to impotence. Following the February Revolution, all organized parties in Russia were for continuing the “war of defense” against Germany, although it was clear that the mass of the people had no interest in the war and that the peasant soldiers wished only to get home and get their share of the landowners’ estates. Until Lenin’s return from exile, even the Bolshevik party in Petrograd, led by Kameniev and Stalin, supported the war. The Constituent Assembly, which up to then the Bolsheviks had demanded equally with the Mensheviks and the liberals, if elected would probably have given the Bolsheviks only a few seats. So Lenin abruptly switched over to championship of the Soviets, which he had rejected in 1905 and which up to 1917 Trotsky alone had viewed as the organ of the new political order. Lenin now perceived that the Soviets (the elected representatives of the workers in each factory and of the regiments and villages) which had come into being more or less spontaneously, could be utilized to overthrow bourgeois democracy, or, as Lenin saw it, to establish the democratic dictatorship of the workers, peasants, and soldiers. Since the Soviets were directly elected by the “toilers” and excluded the “exploiters,” the establishment of a Soviet state should ensure the victory of the proletariat and yet preserve democracy. But when it was found after the experiences of war communism that not even a majority of the workers were Bolshevik in sympathy and aim, Lenin’s conception of “democracy” had to be narrowed yet further: the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party was established over the Soviets. This was done by the simple method of proscribing all other parties, and so preventing the Soviets from expressing any opinions but those of the one legal party-the Communist party.
Thus was Soviet democracy abolished and the Soviets converted into mere administrative organs and rubber stamps for the ukases of the Party.
The Cheka, inheritor of the powers and methods of the Tsarist Okrana, was created in the days of the Civil War to discover and stamp out the counter-revolutionaries. It was converted into an instrument for terrorizing not merely the old bourgeoisie but all workers and peasants who expressed opinions unfavorable to the Bolshevik regime. In Lenin’s day its powers were kept within bounds and exercised mainly against the remnants of the “exploiting classes,” though also against the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, i.e., against the now proscribed parties of the peasants and working class. Under Stalin, its successor, the O.G.P.U., became an instrument of terror exercised not only against the proletariat in whose name the dictatorship was exercised, not only against the peasants without whose support the Bolsheviks could never have won power, but also against those members of the Party who disagreed with Stalin.
In 1920 the dissatisfied workers were still permitted to voice their opinions although already excluded from the Press. The following statement made to the visiting delegation of the British Trade-Union Congress and Labour party by the Russian Printers’ Trade-Union, is amazingly prescient of what was to come. Although the statement is so sharply critical of the Bolshevik dictatorship, it is important to note the immense change in the status and rights of the workers then and ten years later. Under Lenin the workers could still dare to make such protests; under Stalin they were deprived of even that privilege:
All Russian socialists are convinced that the triumph of Socialism in Russia is possible only if there is a socialist revolution in the West. All endeavors to force Socialism upon one backward country alone will give no positive results. They will only lead to endless sufier- ings of the working population. That is why the Russian working class insists on the independent fight against its class enemies and on the independence of the labor organizations contrary to the wishes of the present ruling power.
Our present government is not only a workers’ government; it is a worker-peasant government. The interests of workers and peasants are not always identical. The Russian working class must therefore be on its guard against any attempt of the present government to go beyond necessary concessions to the peasantry and in any way to harm labor interests.
Utopian endeavors, on the other hand, to enforce the immediate introduction of Socialism in Russia, meet with desperate opposition from the peasantry; they increase civil war and deepen the chronic disorganization of the country resulting from four years of civil war. The economic policy of the Soviet Government in introducing all-round nationalization leads to a further disorganization of the whole economic life of Russia.
The national economy of Russia cannot be improved by methods of violence against workers, by the militarization of labor, by miserable rates of pay and long hours of work. . . . It can only be saved by the free and independent labor organizations. The heroic efforts of the working population will be crowned with success if the Government itself adopts a rational economic policy at home and abroad.
A system of reconstruction based on the compulsory labor of hungry and enslaved workers and on the destructive policy of the Government with its grotesque, parasitic, administrative machine kept going out of the earnings of the working masses, will lead to further economic decay and the breakdown of the Revolution and of Socialism.
The system of reconstruction brings into opposition to the Government not only the peasantry but the workers themselves. The working class in Russia is decaying and losing its power and influence: it is dying out physically through hunger and ill-health; it is degenerating morally and politically, for the worker is on the one hand being converted into a bureaucrat in the factory, and on the other being subject to constant supervision exercised through the communist “cells” and commissars.
The Communist party has set itself up as the dictator not only to the enemies of the working class, but to the working class itself. The Communist party, which embraces only a small part of the working population and makes use of the state machinery and the country’s resources, is imposing its will on the majority of the population and depriving the working masses of the right to have independent free organizations.
Freedom of the press and of election do not exist even for the workers themselves. The Communist party alone may issue daily papers, journals, print pamphlets and books, giving no chance for the opposition to let itself be heard. All the socialist parties work underground, in constant fear of being arrested, sent into exile, or deprived of their right of citizenship. Many workers have been shot for their political views and for criticizing the Communist party. . . .
There are only a few trade-unions left whose council or Praesidium has been properly elected; and those trade-unions whose officers have managed to keep in touch with the working masses are under constant watch and suspicion.. . .
The Soviets in Russia represent only to a small extent the views of the workers and peasants. All non-Communist Soviets are usually dissolved. . . .
In spite of all this we are against foreign intervention or the in- tervention of the old Russian bourgeoisie in our quarrel with the Communist party. We admit only the intervention of the international proletariat in our affairs. We hope that the working class of other countries will bring moral pressure to bear on the Communist party to give a chance to the Russian working class to fight for the economic regeneration of Russia, for their rights, for their liberation, and for Socialism.7
During the years of civil war and foreign intervention which soon followed the October Revolution, the consequences of Lenin’s abandonment of democracy were still hidden. In those years of confusion, war, and pestilence, discussions as to future Bolshevik policy were largely academic. The all-absorbing problem of the Bolsheviks was how to save the revolution in face of the Allied intervention, and how to keep the Red armies supplied when the whole economic mechanism of the country was breaking down. This was the period of military communism when the war industries were the only ones to which any attention could be paid. The original conception of workers’ management of the factories inevitably gave place to rigorous state control.
In 1919, at the second Trade-Union Congress, Lenin declared: “It is inevitable to give a state character to the trade-unions, inevitable to merge them with the organs of state power.”
The question of peasant ownership or state ownership of the land became a question of little moment when the exigencies of war forced the state to requisition grain from the peasantry to feed the army and the towns. War drove the Bolsheviks to apply their theories in an extreme form, not because it was considered theoretically the best policy to abolish the market and for the state to undertake the collection and distribution of food, but because there was no other way. Industrial production of consumers’ goods sank almost to zero, and the peasants were hiding their grain because there were no goods to exchange it for. At least so the war communist period was represented later by Lenin and by Trotsky, who called it “the systematic regimentation of consumption in a besieged fortress.” Nevertheless, in those years of starvation, degradation, suffering, and terror, it was believed by many of the Bolsheviks that “socialism” could spring full-grown from their minds like Athena from the head of Zeus.
The retreat from war communism in 1921 was therefore regarded by many, not as a return to normal after the cessation of civil war and intervention, but as the abandonment of the attempt to set up a socialist economy.
Nineteen twenty-one was the year of the great famine, more terrible than any Russia had known. The Soviet Government was forced to retreat or to collapse. Russia had sunk down almost into that savage state when every man’s hand is against his fellow. There were reports of cannibalism in some villages, and the whole population starved. There could be no hope of instituting a “planned economy” by the methods of forced collections with industry almost at a standstill and agricultural production lower than ever before in Russia’s history. Nor was there any longer any expectation of the proletarian revolution in Germany, which, until 1921,had been expected to solve Russia’s problems. A Soviet Germany would have enabled the U.S.S.R. to obtain German machinery and manufactures, skilled workers and engineers to build up Russia’s shattered productive forces. But without an alliance with an advanced industrialized country, socialism in Russia could not be.
The Bolsheviks had triumphed, but Russia was becoming a desert. The protests of the Kronstadt sailors, although drowned in blood, showed that both workers and peasants could stand no more.
Lenin did not hesitate. He introduced the New Economic Policy. The peasants were no longer forced to give up their produce to the state. The market was reconstituted in place of state distribution of goods. By heroic efforts industry began to produce manufactures for sale to the village in exchange for bread.8 Private trading was again permitted and even industrial production on a small scale for private profit. The “commanding heights,” as Lenin called them: large-scale industry, transport, communications, power stations, banking, and foreign trade, remained state monopolies; but outside these, private enterprise was permitted and encouraged. Freed of the strait jacket of enforced communism, the almost defunct national economy was set functioning. The machine which had slowed down almost to a stand still began to gather momentum. Shakily and uncertainly at first, the wheels of industry and trade began once more to revolve. Industrial production doubled in 1922 and 1923, and by 1926 had reached its prewar level. Meanwhile, the harvests were increasing now that the peasant had not only got the land but had been given an assurance that he could work it for his own profit; he brought production of grain up to and beyond the prewar level. For a few years the Russian peasant enjoyed a prosperity he had never known before; he no longer paid rent, his taxes were comparatively light, and he was encouraged to produce for profit and told to “get rich.” Manufactured goods being very scarce, and the seizure of the great estates having increased the number of peasant landholders from sixteen to twenty-five million, the peasants did not bring the same proportion of the harvest to market as in the past. The peasant ate more himself and brought less to market. For the first and last time in Russian history the peasants had enough to eat and were not forced to starve to support either an aristocracy or a bureaucracy.
This fact was the great obstacle to industrialization. The peasant could not be induced to sell more so long as industry could not produce more goods for him to buy. But industries could not be expanded and new ones developed unless more produce could be obtained from the peasants to feed the workers engaged on new construction, and to export in exchange for machinery. In other words, the only source of capital accumulation in the U.S.S.R. was the peasantry; yet, unless the peasants were coerced, they would not finance industrialization. If they were coerced, as the years 1918-21 had proved, they would sit back and produce no more than they themselves consumed.
Lenin was an opportunist, but he was not prepared consciously to sacrifice end to means. The idea of deliberately starving some millions of peasants to death to teach them a lesson, and transforming the whole peasantry into serfs of the state, was not one which Lenin could for a moment have envisaged. In his mind the problem was to be solved by controlling the country’s economy, not by war upon the village by the state.
Other undeveloped countries could borrow from the advanced capitalist countries; could, that is to say, get machinery and construction goods on credit and pay for them when they began to produce goods. This had been the method of industrialization of the United States, Canada, Australia. But the U.S.S.R., which had expropriated the former capitalists and refused compensation to foreign bond-holders, could not get loans abroad. It is probable that in the course of time she would have been able to, if she had finally repudiated the world revolutionary aim of the Bolsheviks and liquidated the Comintern. At this stage such an idea was inconceivable; Lenin had introduced the N.E.P. in Russia as the policy to be pursued while awaiting the communist revolution in other countries, which alone could solve the problems of the U.S.S.R.
N.E.P., then, for Lenin, constituted a strategic retreat while await- ing reinforcements-not the abdication of power by the proletariat but concessions to capitalist tendencies. But he apparently relied as much upon the gradual development of Russia’s productive forces as upon reinforcements from abroad. His idea was for the proletariat to hold the fort-state power-either until revolution occurred in Germany or until Russia herself was sufficiently industrialized to make socialism possible. In answer to the Social Democratic argument that Russia lacked the objective economic premises for socialism, he said:9
If the creation of socialism demands a definite level of culture, then why cannot we begin by winning with a revolution the prem- ises for that definite level of culture, and then afterwards, on the basis of the workers’ and peasants’ power and the Soviet structure, set out to catch up to the other peoples?
Lenin died too soon to instruct the Party as to what should be done if reinforcements never came, if no other communist revolution occurred, and if Russian agriculture failed to provide the means to industrialize Russia. But we know that he envisaged state capitalism for Russia, not socialism, should the world revolution be indefinitely delayed. (See Chapter V.)
For the Right wing of the Party, for men like Bucharin, who had perhaps at heart always been Mensheviks, N.E.P. was a permanent change. For Trotsky it was a breathing space, a strategical retreat as the preliminary for another attempt to establish socialism.
To Stalin the whole discussion was purely of personal interest. He saw that by setting the Right wing of the Party against the Left he would be able to destroy both and obtain absolute power himself. SO all through those years 1921-26 he was busy in the background spin- ning the web in which both the Right and the Left oppositions were to find themselves helplessly enmeshed. Securing the key positions in the Party for his own men, getting control of the whole Party ap- paratus from local to regional party secretaries, he put himself in a position to destroy both the Left and the Right.
After Lenin’s death in 1924, the hope of revolution elsewhere grew ever fainter. The capitalist world which Lenin had believed to be breaking down was recovering from the war. In 1923, even before Lenin died, the revolutionary movement of the German proletariat had been defeated and the acceptance of the Dawes Plan had sounded the death knell of proletarian revolution in Germany. There was still prospect of revolution in the colonial and semicolonial countries some until Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat of the Cornintern in 1927. But even a victorious “socialist” revolution in another backward country such as China could not have helped to solve Russia’s problem. Only a proletarian revolution in an advanced, industrialized country, in particular Germany, could have enabled the Soviet Government to escape from the dilemma: how to acquire capital for industrialization without either oppressing and alienating the peasantry or permitting a restoration of capitalism.
Bucharin and the Right wing of the Bolshevik party said carry on with the N.E.P.; don’t expect we can industrialize the U.S.S.R. rapidly, but bit by bit industry can be expanded, can produce more and sell more to the peasants so that capital accumulation will be gradually accelerated. These Right wing Bolsheviks also undoubtedly hoped to get credits from the capitalist world. They were apparently prepared to abandon the aim of world revolution, and Bucharin went so far as to develop the thesis that capitalism would reorganize itself and not go smash as orthodox Communists insisted. Unfortunately for the Russian people, Bucharin, although a great theoretician, was completely deceived by Stalin, He could not from his very nature compete with Stalin’s gangster methods and was as putty in his hands. Stalin used him only so long as his arguments were needed to destroy Trotsky.
The Left opposition, headed by Trotsky, pointed to the widening of the scissors-i.e., the growing disparity between industrial and agricultural prices as industry failed to keep pace with mounting agricultural production. Handicraft industries, revived in the villages and financed by the richer peasants, threatened to create a self-sufficient village economy. If, said Trotsky, industry continues to lag, there will be a break between city and country. Already the free market has in tensified the differentiation of classes in the village, some peasants growing rich and others becoming landless laborers. The growth of the Kulak class, said Trotsky, is creating a new capitalist class in the village: the wealthy peasant who exploits the other peasants, While Bucharin told the peasantry to “get rich,” Trotsky insisted that this slogan meant the enrichment of a minority of the peasants at the expense of the great majority and the gradual emergence of a “bourgeoisie.” True that only thus could the surplus produce of the village be sold to the state in the Soviet condition of scarcity of manufactures; for if all were independent farmers, consumption of food in the village would be much higher than if a comparatively small number of peasants owned most of the land and many worked as their hired laborers for a low wage which did not permit of their eating as much as they needed.
In its desire to increase agricultural production and ensure the delivery of grain to the market, the Soviet Government in 1925 had legalized the hiring of labor power and the renting of land. Ah, said the Left opposition, here you are creating a new capitalist class; soon we shall be back in a capitalist state. As Trotsky expressed it:
The peasantry was becoming polarized between the small capitalist on one side and the hired hand on the other. At the same time, lacking industrial commodities, the State was crowded out of the rural market. Between the Kulak and the petty home crafts man there appeared, as though from under the earth, the middle-man. The State enterprises themselves, in search of raw material, were more and more compelled to deal with the private trader. The rising tide of capitalism was visible everywhere. Thinking people saw plainly that a Revolution in the forms of property does not solve the problem of Socialism, but only raises it.”10
Trotsky and his followers were absolutists. They were determined that the U.S.S.R. must become a completely socialist state, and that any small capitalist blossoms must at once be struck down. And yet they themselves held that “socialism in one country” was an impossibility. Preobrazhensky, the most honest of the Left opposition group, stated openly that only by treating the Russian countryside as a colonial area could the necessary super-profits be obtained to finance the industrialization of the U.S.S.R. Such plain speaking was too much even for the Left opposition and brought ruin to the author once Stalin was in control and busy carrying out Preobrazhensky’s policy in an extreme form.
By 1926, nearly 60 per cent of the grain on the market was being sold by a mere 6 per cent of the peasants, the Kulaks. These Kulaks were selling to middlemen; and a new “petty bourgeoisie” of shopkeepers, restaurant-keepers, and small industrialists had cropped up like mushrooms after the rain. The state could no longer lay its hands on enough grain to export even a small quantity for the import of machinery. Handicraft industries were reviving to serve the needs of the village. The peasants were creating their own self-subsistent economy outside the sphere of control of the Soviet state. The working class in the state industries suffered, and the Soviets came more and more to represent the interests of the peasants. Stalin went with the tide; and, anxious to secure his own power by enlisting the support of the Right wing of the Party against Trotsky, he contemplated in 1925 giving each peasant a forty-years tenure of his land. As against this “denationalization” of agriculture and stagnation of industry, which in truth must have led to the U.S.S.R. becoming a semicapitalist state, Trotsky proposed collectivization-not the collectivization at the point of the bayonet which Stalin was later to enforce, but gradual collectivization through the grant of state credits and the supply of machinery by the state to those poorer peasants who would voluntarily join a collective farm. This could, however, only be accomplished if the richer peasants were more heavily taxed to finance the collective farms and to allow the state to import machinery for industrialization and the production of tractors and other machinery, and for the erection of power stations. Heavier taxation of the Kulaks would not only stunt the growth of the new “capitalist” class, but would enable the state to produce more manufactured goods, lower prices, and break the “strike” of the peasants, who were replying to the shortage of industrial goods by working less, consuming more of their own produce, and disposing of the rest to the Kulak middle-men, who, instead of selling it to the government, used it to support local handicraft industries. But, said the Right opposition, if you bear too hardly on the Kulaks we shall have war between town and village.
Trotsky’s plans for collectivization and industrialization were called fantastic, and scorned as “industrial romanticism,” “poor peasant illusions,” and so forth. It would be sufficient, said the Right wing of the Party, if the growth of industrial production declined yearly from a 9 per cent increase to a bare 4 per cent increase.
The difference of opinion between the Right and Left wings of the Bolshevik party on the policy to be pursued was distorted by the struggle for power. The problem which faced the Soviet Government was never calmly considered and soberly discussed as it might have been if Lenin had been alive, or if Soviet democracy had been allowed to function. Polemics took the place of serious argument; the implications of both a continuance of N.E.P. and of the Left wing policy of pressure on the Kulaks and nascent capitalist class were never considered by the Bolshevik party as a whole, simply as an economic and political problem. Nor did the working class participate in the discussion of its fate. Stalin had little theoretical knowledge, and in any case was not in the least concerned with the rightness or wrongness of either policy. He wanted absolute power, and he saw his way to get it by crushing Trotsky and the Left by the aid of Bucharin and the Right, and then eliminating the Right opposition by pursuing a policy far more “Left” than Trotsky’s. The final result was that the worst features of the policy of both sides were adopted by Stalin as the “party line”: super-industrialization on a scale never dreamed of by the Left opposition, accompanied by the destruction of the elements in the Bolshevik party most capable of carrying out such a policy; accumulation of capital for industrial construction by robbing the peasants, accompanied by the liquidation of the technicians and administrative personnel who alone could have made the new industries function efficiently.
By the end of 1927 the truth of Trotsky’s arguments had become so obvious that he and his followers had to be eliminated if he were not to take Stalin’s place. The decreasing food supplies in the towns were convincing the proletariat that Trotsky was right in prophesying the return of capitalism. The workers of Leningrad appear to have been behind Trotsky almost to a man. The Kulaks were by now holding up tbe cities to ransom to force a rise in the price of grain. Trotsky and the Left opposition leaders were arrested by the O.G.P.U., which Stalin controlled, and imprisoned or exiled.
Stalin was able to do this because he had the support of Bucharin, Tomsky, Rykov, Kalinin, and the rest of the Right wing of the Party. These men had no conception of Stalin’s real intentions until it was too late. They were sincere, and none of them were anxious for personal power. They were probably right in thinking that Trotsky’s policies would have led to civil war between town and country and a revival of the horrors of the period of war communism. They did not dream that Stalin was planning a civil war far more bloody than any thing Trotsky had desired, and to be carried out in such a fashion as to destroy all hope of socialism in Russia. In July 1928, Stalin was still insisting that individual cultivation of the land must be supported, and collectivization would be a mistake. By October, Bucharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were being condemned as bourgeois liberals who desired the restoration of capitalism, and Stalin was preparing to sponsor an adventurist policy of super-industrialization, complete collectivization, “liquidation” of the Kulaks, and savage coercion of the peasantry. Trotsky’s prophecies were being fulfilled. The Kulaks were holding the government to ransom; less and less food was procurable in the towns, and the workers began to suffer. In 1927-28 grain stocks were seized from the Kulaks and even from the “middle peasants.” Those they had employed found themselves without work, since the Kulaks naturally saw no point in cultivating large farms if the produce was to be confiscated.
In 1928 the grain harvest had sunk to 73 million tons from the pre-war level of about 9o million. By December 1928 the food shortage was making itself felt even in Moscow, the most favored of the cities. Bread cards were introduced, unemployment increased, and real wages fell. Forced buying from the peasants at an unremunerative price and heavier taxes on the Kulaks could not solve the problem. The peasants hid their grain or refused to sow it. There were murders by the peasants of the Party functionaries who seized their grain. Military force could seize the food in the villages; but it could not, so long as individual farming persisted, coerce the whole peasant population to work for the benefit of the state. The expense of coercion and intimidation was too great unless and until the peasants could be herded together like the workers in the factories. Collective farming was therefore ordered by decree-not the voluntary pooling of resources by the poorer peasants, encouraged by state credits and able to produce more than individual farms by being supplied with machinery, which Trotsky had advocated-but collectivization by the knout. Not collectivization with the purpose of immediately increasing the productivity of the land by means of machinery and modern methods of production, which obviously could not be introduced on small individual holdings, but collectivization with equipment suitable only to smallscale farming, with the object of getting all the peasants together under the control of the O.G.P.U. so that they could be forced to labor.
In November 1929, Stalin announced the end of individual farming, ordered the “liquidation of the Kulaks as a class,” and the establishment of collective farms everywhere and for everyone. Stalin had decided to solve the agricultural problem “in a socialist sense” by violence and terror. If collectivization had been accompanied by a rapid increase in the supply of manufactured goods to the village the peasants might perhaps have been reconciled to the new system. But Stalin had simultaneously inaugurated the Five Year Plan for industrial development, which concentrated all the resources of the country on the production of capital goods and armaments. The peasants were expected to work practically for nothing since the state could not supply them with clothing and other manufactures of prime necessity.
There began that terrible murder of the Kulaks by the state, which is almost unparalleled in history for its cruelty. I use the word murder deliberately, for although the Kulaks were not lined up and shot, they were killed off in a manner far more cruel. Whole families, men, women, children, and babies, were thrown out of their homes, their personal possessions seized, even their warm clothing torn off them; then, packed into unheated cattle trucks in winter, they were sent off to Siberia or other waste parts of the Soviet Union. A few of the men survived to start life again and build farms in the waste lands into which they had been exiled. The women and children perished. Hundreds of thousands of other peasants were herded off to the timber prison camps in the Arctic regions, to die like flies from hunger and cold and exhausting labor, whipped by the O.G.P.U. guards and treated like the slaves of Pharaoh or some other Asiatic tyrant.11
When the father of the Kulak family alone was arrested, this was hardly more merciful, since all food in the house was confiscated, down to the last sack of flour. Wife and children were left to starve to death. Mothers sometimes killed their children to save them from the worse slow lingering death from famine. The story reported by Malcolm in the U.S.S.R. Muggeridge, correspondent of the Manchester Guardian at that time, is typical of many of the gruesome tragedies of that terrible time. A woman in a Cossack village in the Caucasus, whose husband had already been arrested and taken off to forced labor as a Kulak, had her last sack of flour confiscated by the O.G.P.U. officer, Comrade Babel. When he had left she looked at her three children fallen asleep by the stove. There was no food and no hope of securing food. She fetched an ax and killed the children as they slept. Then, after tying each one up in a flour sack, she went to the town and re- ported to Comrade Babel that she had decided she ought no longer to defy the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and confessed that she had three more sacks of flour hidden away. Comrade Babel went back to her house with her along the snowy road. She took him up to the loft and showed him the three bulging sacks. As he bent under the rafters to see, she killed him with the ax.
Of course the woman was shot, and Comrade Babel’s death “on the class-war front” was reported in Moscow. Pravda spoke of the “plots” of the class enemy, of the need to “root out mercilessly all hostile ele- ments in the villages,” and of the need for “increased severity on op- portunists” (i.e., on those whose humanity was not yet so dead as to allow them to murder women and children of the “class enemy”). The case was reported as one in which
a notorious counter-revolutionary, wife of an exiled kulak, lured Comrade Babel to her house with false promises and murdered him in the loft with an axe. Three soldiers downstairs suspected of com- plicity . . . symptomatic of new tactics of kulak elements. . . apparent submission used as a cloak for sabotage and other treasonable activities . . . work sometimes from within collective farms; sometimes even from within Party organizations. . . . New propagandist campaign and sterner measures against class enemies are needed to root out this evil.”12
Fear of reprisals by the desperate, starving, expropriated peasants drove the Party to attempt to exterminate all their victims. “We must destroy our enemies until not one is left,” was the cry. An orgy of cruelty raged in the countryside. One must go back to the days of the Mongol hordes who swept across Asia and eastern Europe in the thirteenth century, or to the massacres by the Assyrians in biblical times, for an historical parallel with the communist “class war” on the Russian peasants.
Many motives, fanatic faith, fear, sadism, revenge, played their role in this horrible massacre of the innocent by famine and the firing squad. Jews who remembered old pogroms in the Russian villages, workers who had suffered under the Cossack whips in Tsarist times, gave vent to dusty and dim hatreds sanctified under the banner of the class war. Earnest young men and women whose best instincts were perverted by the orders given them by the Party, convinced themselves that in depriving the peasants of their last stores of food they were helping to build a socialist society. O.G.P.U. and Red army officers sent to carry on the “war on the agrarian front” feared that if they were not absolutely merciless they would be stabbed in the back on dark nights by desperate peasants.
Who were the Kulaks now declared enemies of the state? In theory they were the exploiting peasants, those who rented extra land and employed hired labor, or who advanced money or seed at high rates of interest to the poorest peasants. Kulak means a fist, and the word meant an exploiter and a usurer. Under Stalin the word came to mean any peasant who dared to oppose collectivization.
Long before the period of forced collectivization, the Bolsheviks had endeavored to break the solid front which the villages presented to the towns and the Soviet state, by instituting a class war in the vil- lages. It was hoped that if some peasants could be set against others, it would be possible to break the solid opposition of the peasants to what they viewed as the exploitation of the agricultural population for the benefit of the working class and the furtherance of indus- trialization. So in the N.E.P. period the state, which was encouraging the Kulaks with one set of decrees to “get rich” by producing more, was discouraging them by treating every prosperous peasant as a social outcast and inciting the poorer peasants against them. It was little wonder that the peasants brought less and less grain to the market.
In order to stimulate class warfare, the peasants were registered in three classes: Kulaki, Seredniaki (“middle peasants”), and Bedniaki (“poor peasants”). In villages where there was a dead level of poverty, the Soviets were nevertheless ordered to find Kulaks even where none existed. Some families must be designated as such even if there were no exploiters or usurers. Dr. Calvin B. Hoover relates how, in one village which he visited, the local chairman of the Committee of the Poor exhibited to him a family of Kulaks quite in the manner of showing one a family of lepers on whom the judgment of God had fallen. “He regarded them,” relates Dr. Hoover, “with hopeless pity and said that all the troubles in the village dated from the time when the villagers had been compelled to divide themselves into the three classes.” When the query was put as to why the family was regarded as a Kulak one, he replied that someone had to be a Kulak, and that this family had many years before owned a village inn. They no longer did so, but there was apparently no hope of their ever losing their status as a Kulak family. If they did, there was no other family to take their place as Public Enemy, and for some reason unknown to anyone, the Soviet Government insisted that each village must produce at least one Kulak family to be oppressed. These Kulaki had no electoral rights, had to pay 40 per cent of their miserable income to the state, and their children were not allowed to go to school.
In practice, since in many parts of the country real Kulaks who “exploited” other peasants were hard to find, the designation was applied to every peasant who was a little better off than his neighbors, to anyone who owned two horses and two cows, or had managed in some way to lift himself a little above the miserably low general standard of life in the Russian village. It meant that hard work and enterprise were penalized wherever they were found. What Tartar invasions and long centuries of feudal oppression had begun, the Soviet Government consummated. The Russian peasant sank further into slothfulness and hopelessness. Since to raise himself above the level of his beasts of burden was now accounted a crime against the state, he worked as little as possible, and ate and drank whenever possible with- out thought of the morrow, which was almost certain to be worse than today. The fecklessness of the Russian character was the result of Russian history, but it was left to the Soviet Government to make laws penalizing all who worked hard and took thought for the morrow. Its treatment of the best and most progressive elements among the peasantry might have been expressly designed to prove the truth of the old arguments against socialism.
Precisely those peasants who had the knowledge, skill, and industry to raise Russian agriculture above its medieval level were liquidated. The collective farms were deprived of the men who could have made them function efficiently. And yet the army of city workers sent down to coerce the peasants and manage the collectives took far more from the villages in the shape of wages than the Kulaks had taken as profit. If, by allowing them a larger share of the produce than the other peasants, the Kulaks had been persuaded to run the new farms, instead of being killed off or imprisoned, the new system might have worked. It was, of course, argued that they were irreconcilably hostile to the Soviet state. But they had never been given a chance to be other than hostile. The government discriminated against them, reviled them, and instigated everyone to loathe them. Naturally they hated the Soviet Government. But to argue that they were irreconcilable enemies of the Soviet state is like saying that the Jews in Germany deserve what they get because they hate the Nazi Government which oppresses them.
It was not only the Kulaks who were expropriated, exiled, or imprisoned. Except for the minority of landless peasants, all regarded as expropriation. Ordered by the state to pool all collectivization their property-i.e., give everything up to the Kolkhoz (“collective farm”), and faced with exile or the concentration camp if they refused to join the Kolkhoz, the peasants naturally killed their pigs, their sheep, their cows, and their chickens, and ate them or sold the hide and the meat for money, which could be hidden. In 1934 the number of horses in Russia was half what it had been in 1929, and the sheep and pigs less than half.
Although Trotsky calls it “liberal twaddle” to assume that collectivization as a whole was accomplished by naked force, he himself has described it in the following words:
Twenty-five million isolated peasant egoisms which yesterday had been the sole motive force of agriculture-weak like an old farmer’s nag, but nevertheless forces-the bureaucracy tried to replace at one gesture by the commands of 2000 collective farm administrative offices, lacking technical equipment, agronomic knowledge, and the support of the peasants themselves.
Trotsky, with justice, called this a blind, violent gamble. The Left opposition had never advocated anything so drastic, so rapid, and so unprepared. It had envisaged gradual collectivization over a period of fifteen years. Stalin, having at last decided upon collectivization, thought he could force it through by a terror exercised against the whole peasant population. He did it, but in doing it he laid waste the countryside and caused the death of millions from starvation. The total grain harvest fell from 835 million centners in 1930 to 696 million in 1932, sugar production from 109 million pods to 48 million. Since even in 1930 there was hunger in the towns, this fall, combined with the previous slaughter of livestock, meant famine in many parts of the country and near-starvation for the workers in the towns. Between five and ten million peasants are estimated to have died of starvation.
Soviet morale has never recovered from those terrible years which were my first years of residence in the U.S.S.R. The Communist party and the Comsomols (“Young Communist League”) became the expropriators of the people, an army of occupation in the countryside. Decent young men and women sent down to the villages were persuaded that it was their duty as Socialists to stifle all humanitarian scruples while driving the bewildered, sullen, and resentful peasants into the collective farms, and levying grain, milk, and meat from men and women whose children were to starve to death in consequence. Those who could not perform the terrible deeds expected of them were expelled from the Party as “rotten liberals.” Both duty and hopes of a career compelled the Party member and the Comsomol to utter ruthlessness and inhumanity. Many of the young people became hardened and cynical careerists prepared to commit any atrocity commanded by Stalin. The war on the peasants was more brutalizing than war against another nation, for the peasants were unarmed and defenseless. Whereas in Germany only a minority of Nazis have tortured Jews and political prisoners, in Russia a whole new generation of the Communist party was degraded and brutalized in the war against 25 million peasant families.
Meanwhile the workers in the factories found themselves suffering almost as great a degree of privation as in the years of civil war. Not only was Stalin’s violent agrarian policy drastically reducing the amount of food produced in Russia; his equally senseless industrialization plans were causing food and manufactures to be exported from Russia to pay for machinery imports. Butter and eggs disappeared from the worker’s table and were dumped abroad. Meat and even herring became a rare luxury. The conditions of life in the towns are described in other chapters, as also the servitude of the working class, which soon became as absolute as the servitude of the peasants.
During my first winter in Russia (1930-31) it was believed that if once the peasants could be forced into the collective farms, the food problem would be solved. But, although by 1931 most of the land had been taken over by collectives, the peasants had not yet been forced to work for the profit of the state. Since they now no longer owned the land, since intensive industrialization and concentration on the production of capital goods meant that the state had even less to sell them than before in the way of manufactured goods, and since the state virtually confiscated the grain by taking it at nominal prices, the collectivized peasants worked less than ever before. They opposed to the government the same passive resistance as before the N.E.P. had been introduced, and sowed and reaped just enough to feed themselves. This fact, coupled with drought in the Black Soil region, reduced the harvest to a much smaller amount than in previous years. But the government nevertheless enforced its full demands, telling the peasants that it was their own fault if they were short of food, and leaving them to die of starvation. A terrible famine set in, especially severe in the rich corn-bearing lands of the Ukraine. This time there was no relief from abroad, since the Soviet Government denied that there was a famine and deliberately left the peasants to die of starvation.
Foreign journalists were not allowed to visit the South. All Russia knew what was happening; but the hacks of the foreign press, obedient to Stalin for fear of losing their jobs, sent out no word. Only a few brave and honest foreigners like Eugene Lyons of the United Press and Malcolm Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian told the truth and were expelled from Russia, or put in a position in which they were forced to leave. The others followed the lead of Duranty of the New York Times and denied the existence of a famine, until years afterwards.
Foreign visitors, carefully shepherded by Intourist, and given huge meals in the hotels of the starving land, went home to deny the rumors of famine. I well remember the delegation from England in 1932 which included Mrs. G. D. H. Cole and various professors from London University. One of them, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, told me as we ate a wonderful meal at the New Moscow Hotel (at his expense) that it was all nonsense about the famine, for at Kiev he had been given caviar, butter, eggs, and coffee for breakfast! I had to let him talk, for I knew if I told him the truth and he repeated it, my husband would be sent to prison.
Stalin’s utter ruthlessness won the day. The resistance of the peasants was broken. Since 1932 they have known that they will starve unless they produce the quota taken by the government and enough to feed themselves. They have been forced to work on the government’s terms. They have become serfs of the state whose labor on the collective farms is forced labor, and corresponds to the labor service rendered to his overlord by the serf in medieval times. Since 1935 the peasant has been allowed a small allotment of his own to grow vegetables and sometimes a little grain. On this allotment he works after hours for his own profit. His labor on the collective farm produces a minimum for subsistence in good years. But since he knows that the government will always cheat him if it can, he has no incentive to increase the productivity of the land. He knows that should the “communal” land be made to yield more, the state collections will be raised, or the amount set aside for capital improvements increased. Bitter experience has taught him that he cannot raise his standard of life, since a jealous government will in one way or another deprive him of the profit of his labors. Hence the veritable stagnation of Soviet agriculture over the past five or six years.
Collectivization has never surmounted the original scissors crisis of the twenties. The shortage of consumption goods remains acute, and has since 1936 been intensified by the diversion of industry to the supply of armaments. The disparity between the prices of industrial goods and the prices at which the agricultural population is forced to sell its produce to the state has grown much greater, not smaller, during the past decade. What collectivization has done is to make the collec- tion of the forced grain deliveries to the state much easier. A small detachment of O.G.P.U. soldiers in each district can terrify the collectives into giving up the greater part of the harvest, whereas an enormous number of troops would be required to terrorize each individual peasant cultivating his own farm.
All the much-vaunted use of modern farm machinery imported or produced at tremendous sacrifice in the U.S.S.R. has not increased the yield of the land or lowered the real cost of production. The tractors and other modern farm implements have not compensated either for the destruction of livestock in 1930 and 1931, or for the lost incentive of the peasant to labor. The machinery paid for by the blood and sweat of a whole generation of Russians is often entirely useless because it has broken down and cannot be repaired, or partly wasted because it is not used to its full capacity. Neither the peasant nor the state has reaped any real benefit from the modernization of agriculture concerning which the Soviet Union boasts so extravagantly. (A more detailed account of the agrarian system is given in Chapter VI.)
If the N.E.P. had been continued, the U.S.S.R. today might have been a prosperous country with the land yielding 50 per cent more than in Tsarist times, and the urban workers as well as the peasants enjoying a decent standard of life. All that the Five Year Plans have accomplished in agriculture is to enable the peasants to produce about as much as before the Revolution, while transforming them into bitter enemies of the Soviet Government.
WHEN I GOT to Moscow late in September, 1930, I found that my husband had been ordered to make a trip to China before coming to Russia, so that he did not join me until January 1931. I had three months alone in Moscow, three months during which I was at last made aware of what manner of society and government was being created under Stalin, but yet did not have the sense to dash off to China to stop my husband from entering the country. How often in future years was I to regret my stupidity! Or was it some last lingering hopes which led me to allow him to walk into the spider’s web from which he could never again be extricated? For it was soon made clear to me that if he once entered the Soviet Union he would never get out again. Already almost all the “non-Party specialists” had been recalled from abroad and no passports were any longer issued to go abroad except to those of unimpeachable proletarian origin or to Party members of long standing. The first great purge had begun, the purge which was to kill off so many of the old “intellectuals’‘-the engineers, technicians, scientists, and administrative personnel who had been educated under the Tsarist regime, but had not run away after the Revolution, and had been working loyally for the Soviet state ever since the introduction of the New Economic Policy.
The Commissariat of Foreign Trade, anxious to keep a few qualified men abroad, wanted my husband to go to the United States to work at Amtorg.13 They cabled him to proceed straight to America from Shanghai, and offered to pay my fare to join him in New York via Hamburg. He refused to obey their order and insisted upon coming to Moscow. As he wrote to me then, he was determined to settle down at last in Russia. He was sick of life abroad and wanted to play his part after his long exile in the great creative work going on in the U.S.S.R. I realized later that he wanted to drown his doubts in work and to merge himself in the collective human effort with a subconscious desire to atone for his long years of divorce from the socialist movement, and for the individualism of his nature. He was an acutely sensitive person, reserved and somewhat unsocial by nature. For him social contacts were always something of an effort; he concentrated his love and affection upon a very few individuals and rarely lowered the barriers of his reserve to any human being. For that reason perhaps he desired in a way which I often found difficult to understand to merge himself in the stream of humanity, and to share a fraternal passion with those who, as individuals, repelled his fastidious standards of behavior. A keen sense of humor and a quick wit saved him from being considered a misanthrope; he could always ward off threats to his privacy by a joke and, although his wit could be sharp and cutting, he directed it too frequently against himself for it to arouse rancor.
He had become convinced that he suffered a moral disadvantage as a privileged intellectual working in comfort abroad and ought to come back and suffer with the mass of the people. Although a Jew, he was also a Russian; and Russians more than other people appear to have a kind of mystical urge to immolate themselves, to castigate and humble themselves. They seem to be the least individualistic of peoples and the most prone to servility and a kind of mystical masochism. Arcadi was essentially Western in education and ideas, but even he suffered for a while from the Russian martyr complex. His tragedy was that, although he shared the Russian intellectual’s desire for self-immolation upon the altar of an ideal and the Russian desire to merge his individuality in a totality, he did not share the Russian aptitude for servility and sycophancy. He was unable to fawn upon the great or wheedle favors from the Party bosses. Thus he could never adapt himself completely to Soviet conditions of life; yet he would not, or could not, break away from Russia. He preferred working at a low salary without privileges to abasing himself sufficiently to obtain food supplies, a flat, and other perquisites. He was too much of a Westerner to fawn and beg; too much of a Russian to cut loose and escape.
Narcomveshtorg14 thought so highly of his capacities and knowledge, and was so certain that if he once came to Moscow they would never be able to send him abroad again, that they eventually offered me my full fare to China, and thence to the United States, if I would go and persuade him to sail for San Francisco. But by that time I had become convinced that it was hopeless to try to change his decision. No one, not even the woman a man loves, can persuade him to go against his convictions; and by now I knew that one can learn only through experience. Perhaps also my English capacity for straight thinking had been dulled by the gray and leaden Moscow atmosphere; and the terror, of which by now I was cognizant, prevented my
writing to him fully and frankly by post. Even if I could have got a letter out to be posted in England, I had no other address than the office address in Shanghai where my letters might be opened. If I told the truth as to conditions in Russia, he might not believe me; and to do so would endanger his life if after all he decided to come to Russia.
Although I was aware in my subconscious that the dream was already lost, I clung to my illusions. I could not as yet admit even to myself that the U.S.S.R. had no longer any resemblance to the socialist ideal which for so many years had ruled my life, and that Russia had already gone too far along the road to bureaucratic tyranny for there to be any hope of her turning back to the ideals of the October Revolution. Nor could I, being English, really accept the fact that if later we wished to leave Russia my husband would not be able to do so. I sent telegrams, but I did not go to China. I waited in Moscow hoping against hope that he would not come, yet not daring to admit, even to myself, how fearful I was of the future should he come.
During this period I wrote two letters to my mother in England. In the first, dated September 29, 1930, I wrote:
Even P- [an old Party member whom I had known in London] says it is just as well for Arcadi to spend the coming year in America. The fact of the matter is that the economic position is so strained that there is no confidence in anyone, and the conditions of work for all “intellectuals” are very difficult indeed. Arcadi is one of the very few competent people left in whom they still have confidence.
A month later I knew it was dangerous to give a hint of conditions in letters sent through the post, and I sent a letter through the hand of E. F. Wise, the English adviser of Centrosoyus.15 I was fairly confident he would not read my letter or show it to anyone, but I was not quite sure. So I wrote guardedly, but my words conveyed my state of mind :
Only workers from the factory or men of proletarian origin are now allowed to go abroad. Whether Arcadi realizes the position or not I do not know.. . . The way business is now being run is hopeless. They put absolutely useless people into leading positions just because they are of proletarian origin. I suppose it can’t go on and there will be a reaction soon, but in the meantime it means the most terrible waste and inefficiency. Things are very diflerent from two years ago. Perhaps, dear, in the end I shall go back to being a historian. Only now am I beginning to learn a bit about mankind and its queerness. To understand a little what one means by Menschenen sind Menschen. To understand that life is not so simple, so to speak. I am still pretty certain of my main ground but the carrying out of what is wanted is not so simple.
I added a postscript, whether to reassure myself or my mother I am not sure.
Dear, you know, apart from anything else it is the most interesting country in the world to be living in, and one must be philosophical enough to take the bad with the good, so long as one believes that in the end there will be far more of the latter.
Life in Russia consisted in learning the painful lesson that there was far more bad than good, and that the good was disappearing so rapidly that there was soon nothing but bad. Soon I was aware that the road to socialism, along which Lenin in 1917 thought he was leading the working class, had become the road to a totalitarian tyranny so cruel and destructive of human life and dignity that Nazi Germany appears in comparison an enlightened tyranny.
While awaiting Arcadi’s arrival from the Far East I lived with his sister and her two sons in their tiny two-roomed apartment in the Dom Politkatajan on Pokrovka. This was the House of the “Political of those who had done hard labor in Hard-Labor Prisoners”-i.e., Siberia under the Tsar. Vera, my sister-in-law, had been sent to a Siberian prison from Lodz in Poland while still in her teens. First, like Arcadi, a member of the Bund (Jewish Social Democrats) she had become a Social Revolutionary in Siberia but had joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, and had herself fought against the Japanese in the Intervention. She had been imprisoned by them but had escaped. Her whole life had been one of adventure, hardship, and sacrifice; but now she had a good job and was full of confidence in the future. She radiated happiness. Her first child had died as a baby on the long trek in the snow across Siberia to the prison camp. Trying to shield it from the cold, she had suffocated it in her arms. Her second son, Shura, had somehow survived the rigors of prison and exile, and was now a youth of eighteen studying engineering at the Moscow University. Vera also had an adopted son, Grischa, whom she had taken in infancy from a poor peasant family in Siberia which had so many children it could not feed Grischa. The two boys were devoted to each other and to their mother. Their relations were entirely comradely. They called her Vera and treated her as an elder sister. Vera’s husband had died fighting in the Red Army, but I gathered he had been a bit of a ne’er-do-well, and little love had been lost between them.
Vera and my husband had been very close to each other in their youth. They had had a stepmother who treated them cruelly, and they had both become revolutionaries at about the same time. Curiously enough, the cruel treatment they had experienced in childhood and which had made Arcadi so distrustful of individual human beings had not affected Vera. She was very sociable and trustful of others and almost childlike in her faith. Arcadi, being the elder, had taught Vera and instructed her. This she always remembered even though now she was a member of the Communist party and he had no such distinction, When they had met in Moscow in 1928 they had not seen each other for twenty-two years. It was typical of that meeting that, whereas Arcadi, when he saw Vera approach his office desk, merely said: “Hello Vera, how are you,” she had tears in her eyes and embraced him in front of everyone. During those twenty-two years Arcadi had studied in Zurich, worked in business in England and the United States, and acquired a Western manner and a truly English reserve. Vera’s life had been entirely different. She had had hardly any education, had participated in the revolutionary struggles of two decades, had known hunger and cold, and in general lived a life of great hardship. She had often been in danger, but she had always lived among “comrades,” never struggled on her own in an alien new world. They felt a great affection for each other, and Vera took me to her heart at once as his wife. Her attitude toward Arcadi retained something of the flavor of their youth; he was the educated clever elder brother who had instructed her in Marxist theory long ago in Poland. Although he was not a Party member and she was, she felt no superiority. Her fate and Arcadi’s were to be similar. She was arrested and disappeared in 1937, a year later than Arcadi, when most of the inhabitants of the Hard Labor House were purged because their revolutionary pasts made them suspect to Stalin.
Vera was very proud of Shura, who, in Siberia before they came to Moscow, had been elected representative of all the Comsomols of the Irkutsk region. But at the time I came to Moscow he was causing her much anxiety. He did not conform sufficiently at the university, was apt to ask awkward questions at Young Communist meetings, and was in danger of being expelled from the Comsomols. His mother’s reputation and influence had so far prevented this, but she was always begging Shura to hold his tongue. Shura once said to me: “How simple life was in Vera’s youth and how good it must have been. One was a revolutionary and one struggled against Tsarist tyranny. But now? . . .” What Shura meant was what I often felt myself. Those very impulses of generous youth which in the old days had led so many of the students to become revolutionaries, now impelled them to pro- test against Soviet tyranny and injustice; but this today meant accusa- tions of being counter-revolutionary. Vera still had absolute faith in the Revolution. She was a product of its romantic past; Shura was a product of its disillusioned present. And whereas Vera knew little of theory, Shura was being educated in it, and the writings of Marx and Lenin impelled him to see more clearly than his mother the difference between theory and practice in the Soviet Union. In those days the writings of Marx and Lenin were still available to all in unexpurgated editions. Later the government saw to it that the originals were hard to come by except for high Party members with a ticket to the Party Bookshop, and produced only extracts of Lenin for the “masses.”
Long before I left Russia Shura had ceased to take any interest in politics and, like so many of the best elements among the Soviet youth, had become a cynical young man philosophically accepting life as it came and no longer yearning for the fulfillment of the forgotten hopes of his early youth. Intent only upon earning enough to keep his young wife and child in reasonable comfort, he had gone as an engineer to the Far North where the pay was highest.
With her Jewish sense of family solidarity and her Siberian tradition of hospitality, Vera unquestioningly gave me shelter and shared her food with me in those days. Having no job, I had no bread card and nowhere to get a meal. A job was open to me at the Marx Engels Institute, but since I had to contract myself for three years’ work, and since I did not know whether or not we were going to America, I could not take it. I got translation and editing work to do and wrote some articles, but this did not produce a food card.
Those were cold and hungry days. In the morning we had a meal of potatoes, bread, and herring. Unable to swallow the raw salted herring which is the most nourishing food available to the poorer Russians, I subsisted on the bread and potatoes until 5 P.M. At that hour Vera and the boys returned from work, and we shared the dinner for three to which they were entitled from the communal kitchen of the apartment house. It cost 65 kopeks (32 cents) a head and consisted usually of cabbage soup and mince meat balls or pike, that heavy and unappetizing member of the shark family, which seems to have been the only fish to survive the revolution. We never tasted butter, but the two boys, who were classed as industrial workers, got a monthly allowance of a kilo of margarine. Twice a month Vera received the family’s meat ration. She would then telephone to her friends, tell them the joyful news, and invite them to come and eat it with us. She would make delicious Siberian meat dumplings in soup; and for one evening we would eat to repletion. She never thought of making the meat last several days; she had the old exile’s feeling that one shared all good things with one’s comrades, and like most Russians she was generous and had no disposition ever to save anything.
There would be vodka and sweet Crimean wine, boiled sweets, and tea to follow, and we would sit round the table for hours talking and singing songs. For a while I had a glimpse of the kind of people and the atmosphere of the old revolutionary days. These men and women, Communists but not high functionaries, all of them formerly exiles and not yet corrupted by the privileged position the revolution had given them, were the salt of the Party. They were simply people, hearty and jolly, and full of faith. Times were hard, but this was only a temporary phase; mistakes were perhaps being made, but they would be rectified and socialism would soon be created. How could it not be so since “The Revolution” had been victorious? In contrast to the Com- munists of higher rank, they were comradely in their personal rela- tions and were not acquisitive.
For all her revolutionary past, Vera was very house proud, orderly and feminine. Her little flat was as clean as a pin, she hung lace curtains at the windows, she looked pained if a single object were out of place, she dressed neatly, took great pains to arrange her flaming red hair becomingly, loved nice clothes although she had none, and told lies about her age. These lies were very naive. If she had been only as old as she said, she would have been a prisoner in Siberia and mother of a child at the age of fourteen.
She was the soul of hospitality, emotional and tender, always full of vitality, good-tempered and sensitive to human suffering. Later I was to meet the type of Communist who would roughly turn a starving child from the door and warn me that one must on no account give anything to these little beggars since they were probably the children of Kulaks. But Vera would always give a piece of bread or sugar to the destitute, although she knew that as a “good Bolshevik” she ought not to.
Besides Vera, Shura, Grischa, and myself there was usually at least one other visitor in our tiny rooms. Siberian friends passing through Moscow, or temporarily homeless in Moscow, came to sleep on the floor or in one of the boy’s camp beds. The boys then slept on the floor.
We ate in the kitchen, which was also the bathroom. Getting a bath was a matter of luck, since one never knew at what hour and on what days the water would be heated for the hundreds of flats in the building.
Vera and the boys spoke only Russian. Since I knew only a few words, we communicated at first largely by signs. I made more rapid progress in the language than at any later period and learned to make one word do the work of many. For instance, I can remember once wanting to convey to Shura the idea that I could see he was depressed. So I said to him “bad weather here” pointing to his head and heart. And he understood me and gave me the word nastrayenia for “mood.”
Vera’s greatest friend, Nina, was often with us, a woman of peasant origin, also a Party member but hard put to it to support her two little girls living with their grandmother in the village. Her husband had deserted her years before, and she received no alimony. Nina knew a few words of English to help out our conversation, and I got very friendly with h er and later visited her village with her. Very plain in appearance and dressed almost like a man, she was gay and kind, full of enthusiasm and vitality, and particularly interested in the communist movement abroad.
Our life in the flat was jolly and friendly and had for me a little of the adventure and that precious atmosphere of comradeship which was so rapidly fading elsewhere. Evenings at the flat kept my spirits up, but my days were dreary. I wished I had stayed in England until Arcadi arrived from the East, wished even that I had first sailed with my brother across the Atlantic as he had begged me to do. Since my association with Russia began, I had continually been hurrying off somewhere and then been forced to wait weeks and months with nothing to do. It had been so in 1928, and now it was so again. I had rushed away from England without even waiting to arrange publication of the book I had written for the School of Economics; I had refused the joy of sailing at least as far as Spain with Temple; and here I was pacing the streets of Moscow with nothing to do. Early in November I spent a few days in Leningrad where Dementiev, a friend of Arcadi’s just arrived from Japan, was working. From there I wrote to my mother: “Yesterday we went just outside the town to look at the sea-such a cold gray sea and such a flat shore-but the sea nonetheless I wished I were with Temple on the Atlantic; after all I could have gone with him instead of waiting here so long.”
Nothing is more depressing than autumn in Moscow. It rains and rains; the streets are half flooded, for the gutters don’t work properly; it is cold; and there is only occasional heating of the houses. One is expected to keep the windows shut all the time and preserve the warmth for three days until the house management puts the heating on for another twelve hours.
As I walked the streets the sadness of the atmosphere, the drab, sad-faced crowds, the miserable peasants selling a few rotten apples or gherkins at the street corners, the homeless children, wet and hungry, depressed my spirits. I spent a good deal of time going to offices inquiring about the flat which had been promised to us, and for which we had already paid £100 in valuta and far more in rubles, seeing about the Russian translation of my Lancashire and the Far East, getting translation and other work, seeing English comrades working at the Comintern, the Marx Engels Institute, and the Lenin School. But already the world of these English comrades seemed far from mine. Most of them lived in the Lux Hotel and had no worries about food or shelter. They knew nothing of the life of the ordinary Russians, and spent their time discussing theory, organization, and foreign affairs, or gossiping about each other within their own closed-off world. Already I felt a barrier between them and myself, a barrier caused by the constant need to put a half-hitch on one’s tongue, as they say in Devonshire. For them, all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, the U.S.S.R. To doubt it even when the evidence was all to the contrary was heresy. The only man at the Lenin School who dared to express some doubt to me was a Yorkshire miner whom I had known in England. There he had been unemployed but had lived in a three-roomed house with his wife and one child. In Moscow no employed worker dreamed of owning more than two rooms, and felt himself very lucky if he had one.
I had other friends, Russians whom I had known in London at Arcos and at the Russian Trade Representation, now occuping high positions in Moscow. The old friendliness persisted, but I thought they must feel that I was no longer the naive enthusiast of two years before. I even felt a certain embarrassment on their part at the difference between the idealized picture of the U.S.S.R. they had painted for me in London and the stark reality of the Soviet Byt (“way of life”). My conversation was guarded, but probably I failed to display the required enthusiasm when they held forth about the sacrifices “we are making” for the industrialization of the Soviet Union. They were not fools, nor was I; and they must have known that already I perceived that these high Party functionaries were getting the best of everything and that all the sacrificing was being done by the dumb crowds, the dragooned peasants and the helpless workers. The very first week I had discovered that my old friends the Plavniks had supplies of good food when they invited me to dinner. Plavnik and his wife were old Socialists, had spent a large part of their lives in exile in Germany, and were essentially Europeans with a civilized outlook and standard of personal behavior and honor. They were therefore ashamed of receiving more and better food than the workers. But others were not ashamed at all.
In fact, a year or so later one heard wives boasting of the “distributor” they enjoyed since this showed the high rank of their husbands. I learned first then, in 1930, of the existence of these “closed distributors” for high Party officials where foodstuffs and clothing were sold which were unobtainable at all elsewhere, or only to be purchased on the “free market” at exorbitant prices. Later, in 1931, other closed distributors were opened for other grades in the social hierarchy: for second-class Party functionaries and non-Party specialists and for the workers in heavy industry. There came to be, roughly speaking, the following grades: First the “Kremlovsky” people: Commissars, chairmen of big trusts, members of the Central Committee of the Soviets and of the Party-all the leading Party members. Next the O.G.P.U. shops which served food almost as good and as plentiful as the shops for the Kremlovsky people. Then, Gort A, for high officials-all Party men-and for a very few specially favored scientists and engineers. Next, Gort B, for the “middle class”-i.e., Party men of lower rank and highly qualified non-Party specialists. In addition there were the well- stocked shops for the Red army officers. There were also the various closed distributors for the factories producing capital goods. These varied greatly from place to place. In some the workers could obtain the official ration of butter and milk and meat; in others none of these “luxuries” were ever on sale. But the Kremlovsky shops, Gort A, and the Foreigners Store, Insnab, were always supplied with butter and meat whoever else went short. My husband eventually received a book for the Gort B shop, receiving a kilo of meat and a kilo of butter a month; but this was not until more than a year after his arrival. His rations from Gort B were about the same as Vera later received in her “Political Hard Labor Shop.” The kind of joke that went about Moscow in those days was the one about Vera’s shop where there was said to have been jam on sale one day, but a notice over it read: “For sale only to regicides.” As my husband once remarked, the Party people and the other ex-revolutionaries were now drawing their dividends on their investment in the revolution years before.
Gradations of social rank in those days went according to one’s food ration as in the ancient Byzantine Empire where the salaries of imperial officials and generals were reckoned in measures of corn, wine, and oil.
In those early months of my life in Moscow it was only the tip-top people who were favored by special food supplies. This device of Stalin’s, which ran directly counter to Lenin’s institution of the Party maximum, and Marx’s injunction that the official was to be paid no more than a worker, was designed to keep Party men loyal to him personally. Any deviation from the Party line involved expulsion from the Party and the loss of these precious food supplies. It meant as well the loss of many other privileges awarded in kind not in money: use of an automobile, the pick of the housing accommodation, special hospitals, and an excellent medical service reserved for the new aristocracy alone, and so forth. The closed distributors also enabled the government to reserve for the aristocracy the scarcest goods of all, such as fruits, fresh vegetables, cocoa, chocolate, as well as butter, eggs, and milk. It enabled the Soviet Government to tell the world that C. P. members never received salaries higher than the Party maximum of 300 rubles (later 350), while actually their salaries were worth ten or twenty times as much as those of the non-Party specialists, who in theory were supposed to be getting more, and than those of the workers, who in theory were supposed to be paid about the same as the Party functionaries.
I soon came up against the snobbishness of the Party members. Old friends from London who had known my husband there as well as myself would try to ask me to parties without him. Or if he were invited and went he was made to feel a social inferior. Although I had been very poor in England, I had never in my life before felt a social inferior, and although I myself was treated as an equal because I was a member of the British Communist party, I was infuriated at the attitude taken up toward my husband, who, as I knew, did work of far greater value than most of the Party functionaries and took far less than they did from the “Socialist” state for doing it.
Before Arcadi arrived, Mrs. Khinchuk, wife of the Soviet Trade Representative in Berlin, whom my friend Jane Tabrisky and I had known in London, asked her one day how I, a Party member, had come to marry beneath me. Not that she was a Party member herself, but any Soviet woman not too unattractive or of too bad social origins endeavored to secure herself a Party man for a husband. Just as a “bourgeois” woman in capitalist society is expected to marry into her class and not into the working class, so in Soviet Russia one was dèlassè if one married outside the Party. One was debarred from entry to the “best society” if one were not oneself a member of the Party or married to a member.
Mrs. Khinchuk was the perfect example of the Soviet snob and hypocrite, but she was only one of many. She did no work, she shopped and visited in an automobile which she did not “own,” but which was at her disposal day and night. And she loved to hold forth about the sacrifices “we” are making. Jane Tabrisky, who was staying at the Khinchuk’s flat while awaiting the room promised her by the Marx Engels Institute, got so disgusted that she often came to Vera’s in order to get away from the society of the privileged. Khinchuk himself was decent and hardworking, but as I had already perceived in Japan, it was the wives of the Bolsheviks who led the way in the degeneration of the Party and showed so obviously the characteristics of the nouveau riche society then coming into being.
Jane, who had been a member of the British Communist party since she was sixteen, who had been secretary of the London University Labour party when I was chairman, who had also been in the same Communist party local with me in North London, had arrived in November to take the job at the Marx Engels Institute which I had had to refuse. Her arrival in Moscow was my greatest joy in those days of waiting. She was an old and real friend to whom I could speak freely, and in Moscow this was a blessing above all others. We learned rapidly. Collectivization of agriculture, and the Five Year Plan in Four Years, were no longer matters of abstract theory to be discussed ad infinitum in Party meetings in the comfortable bourgeois world. They had become realities of our existence and of the existence of those around us. They meant, as we could not help seeing, starvation for many and near starvation for the majority; and they meant the formation of a privileged aristocracy as cut off from the masses of the people by the conditions of their lives as any noble of the ancien règime in France. Our lives were spent mainly with ordinary “middle class” Russians and what was going on could never again be for us just a remote social experiment. It was a terrible and moving reality involving untold suffering for millions of human beings of flesh and blood like ourselves. We could not regard them as rabbits in a laboratory, as did the “Friends of the Soviet Union” abroad.
Nor were we long in Moscow without sensing the terror then in full operation against the non-Party intellectuals. This terror was not nearly so all-pervading and inclusive as the terror of a few years later. Party members still felt themselves comparatively safe; they were not likely to hear the fatal knock at the door in the night which meant that the O.G.P.U. had come to claim a victim. But I heard of some of the victims from an old non-Party friend of my husband’s whom I will call E, since he may still be alive. Every “specialist,” however loyal and long his service had been, feared arrest, for the government was attempting to lay the blame for the food shortage brought about by its agrarian policy upon the wretched non-Party engineers, agronomists, technicians and administrators, scientists and professors. A scapegoat must be found for the masses, so that they would not blame the Bolsheviks for the shortage of food and clothing and houses to live in, for the universal misery and disorganization of life. They must be made to believe that “wreckers” were responsible, and lay the blame for their ever-increasing misery upon agents of the “foreign bourgeoisie” and Tsarist elements inimical to the proletariat and to the construction of socialism. Hence the continual arrests of the non-Party “specialists,” a term which included not only engineers, professors, and scientists, but all the educated: accountants, technicians, teachers, doctors, and those with administrative experience, or experience in trade and finance. Stalin, whose pathological hatred for the educated was as yet restricted in its operation to those outside the Party, was doing his best to “liquidate the intellectuals as a class.” This senseless terror, which struck down or demoralized the men essential to any successful industrialization of the country, was perhaps as fundamental a cause for the failure of the Five Year Plan to raise the standard of life of the Russian people, as the forced collectivization of agriculture.
I remember the case of an old man called Kipman, which illustrates both the cruelty and stupidity of the O.G.P.U. He was arrested that winter of 1930-31 on his return with his wife from London, where he had worked for several years at the Soviet Trade Representation, and was accused of having embezzled £1O,OOO. My friends who knew him were certain that he was absolutely honest, and it was moreover obvious that if he had taken the money, he and his wife, who were both over sixty years old, would have stayed in London and lived on it for the rest of their lives. However, he “confessed” to the crime and was sent to a Siberian prison for five years. His wife, in spite of her age and failin, u health, struggled valiantly for years to get him out of prison. She appealed, she made representations, she produced proofs of the falseness of the charge. At the end of three years she succeeded in getting his case reexamined; and it was then found that the money had, in fact, never been lost, but there had been a mistake made in the accounts for which Kipman was in no way responsible. He was brought back to Moscow and set free, but a few days before he arrived his wife died, worn out by anxiety, poverty and her efforts to secure his release. I remember seeing Kipman in the Narcomveshtorg Stolovaya16 one day, white-haired, stooped, with lifeless eyes. When his friends asked him why he had confessed to a crime he had never committed, he said it was because the O.G.P.U. had threatened to imprison his wife as well if he didn’t, and had promised him to leave her free if he confessed.
The ruin of the lives of these two innocent old people was but one of countless minor tragedies occurring at the time.
The prison house was already closing in upon me. As it appeared more and more certain that Arcadi would come to Moscow my spirits sank. Whereas in 1927 and even in 1928 I had longed to live in the U.S.S.R., now I dreaded it. I was as yet not fully conscious of the deep shadows; but I was being rapidly initiated into the terror and the ghastly suffering and muddle of Soviet life. It was not my own material conditions of life, which were not so much worse than in 1928 before we went to Japan; it was the atmosphere of fear and the misery of the people.
Finally, one cold December evening P brought me the news that Arcadi was already on his way and would be in Moscow by the end of the year. My heart sank; for a moment I had a vision of the future, saw us both caught in the trap. But I had to keep up appearances even before P in spite of his being an old friend and a most decent person. I already knew that in the U.S.S.R. one must never let even the best friends know one’s real thoughts. So I smiled and said how pleased I was, offered P a drink, and together we “celebrated” Arcadi’s approaching return. Shura could see I was unhappy and tried to cheer me up, but Vera rejoiced.
Early on New Year’s Day, 1931, I met my husband at the station. Coming from the Far East he was numbed by the bitter cold of that snowy and windy January day. We met, not quite as strangers, but as two people who had to get to know each other again after nearly a year and a half.
I was already on the road to utter disillusionment; he was determined to believe. We began life together, as before in one small room, as before loving each other, but now invisibly separated by my lost hopes and the hopes he was determined not to lose.
I had begun working at the Comintern before he arrived; he took up work at Promexport. Each evening I cut him with my cynical comments upon my futile work in the Comintern, and gibed at the marvels of Soviet construction, which could better be called the construction of conditions for famine. He immersed himself in his work and closed his ears to my bitter criticism. Our love was not dead, but the old intimacy had gone for the time being. We had come together largely as the result of shared beliefs, and both of us had all along put political duty before the pleasure of being together. Now we had no longer the beliefs to share, and were not yet drawn to one another as the only refuge in a purgatory of our own blind choosing. The gaiety had gone out of our relationship, although later it was to return as refuge from sorrow.
Meanwhile the Terror struck closer and closer home, carrying off to the concentration camps men with whom Arcadi had worked abroad, men whom he knew as loyal and selfless “specialists.” He could not believe them guilty of counter-revolutionary activity and sabotage, but he would not believe that their arrest was other than accidental, a mistake which would be rectified.
The daily struggle for food and the recurring search for a room to live in soon absorbed all my energies outside my office work. I was brought down to the plane on which life was lived by most Russians, the plane of a bitter primitive struggle for the primary necessities of life: food and shelter. In that first year before either of us had access to a closed distributor, I learned what the life of the masses was really like. I learned also to be a wife in its primal sense. It was my job to keep my man alive by seeing that he was fed and had a shelter. He worked so hard and so late at the office that I, with my regular seven hours of useless labor at the Comintern, naturally took over the job of shopping, cooking, cleaning, washing. Of these domestic tasks it was the shopping which exhausted me, the search from shop to shop for food, the long standing in line to obtain our bread ration every evening, the bargaining with the peasants at the street corner in exchanging bread for milk. The peasants, deprived of all their grain and fodder by a merciless government, wanted bread to feed their cows. There had developed a “new and higher form of economy” under the Soviets whereby the peasants produced milk for the townspeople in exchange for bread to produce that milk. Whereby also hundreds of thousands of peasants near the towns of Russia spent at least half a day traveling to and from the towns and standing in the market or at street corners selling milk or a few miserable vegetables. To arrange that one of their number should do the selling while the others worked on the land was forbidden; the seller would have been punished as a middleman, a speculator. Stalin had found a novel way to banish unemployment by forcing each peasant with milk or other produce to sell to spent the greater part of the day selling it.
Shortly before my husband’s arrival from the East, I had managed to rent a room in a new flat on Novinsky Boulevard. The owner of the flat, once a sailor on the famous ship Potemkin, whose crew had mutinied in 1905, was working at the Soviet Consulate in London. His two daughters let me a room at the “commercial price”-i.e., I paid for the one room more than they paid for the whole flat. This was usual in Moscow at the time, although the subletting of rooms and country houses by the Party members had not yet become the source of rentier income it later became. Subletting was also done by non- Party people; but, since it was the Party members who secured most of the new flats, they were predominantly the landlord class.
Jania, the elder daughter, was a nice girl. Very unpolitical, she was typical of the daughters of the new aristocracy. She dressed well, she enjoyed life, and she had a job. The job, however, did not provide her with half her income. She not only let a room, but she sold at commercial prices the very large ration of eggs, butter, and other “luxuries” which it was her father’s privilege to receive as a member of the Moscow Soviet. The fact that he was working abroad and had Jania’s stepmother with him in London, did not mean that his ration was cut off. Jania drew five kilos of butter and a large number of eggs every ten days. Sold at commercial prices (about five times as high as the price she paid) these supplies produced an income equal to more than half her monthly salary as a clerk in an oflice.
The flat was always full of young men in the evenings, and when I once remarked to her how popular she was, she replied seriously, “Oh, no, it isn’t that; they just all want to marry me because we have a flat.”
Jania was a decent sort and honest. She made no pretense of admiring or believing in Soviet policies and eventually married beneath her. She was then already in love with a young engineering student who was not a Comsomol and could never be a member of the Party, since his father was a highly qualified engineer. Years later I met Jania for the last time before leaving Russia. She was working in the Intourist office in Moscow where I bought my ticket to England. Very pale, very thin, all the gaiety and youth gone from her face, she was dying of consumption and knew it. Because she had married outside her class, her father no longer had anything to do with her; and she and her husband and child all lived in one room. She had, of course, no hope of getting to a sanatorium, since neither she nor her husband were members of the Party.
This flat, on Novinsky Boulevard, was one of an ultra-modern block completed in 1930. It was built on supporting pillars like a lake- dwelling, and a broad covered way ran along the front of each story. One side of the house was all glass, and no doubt it would have been very healthy and hygienic and comfortable if there had been sufficient heating, or if only one family had inhabited it. But to house several families, as most Russian flats do, it was most inconveniently built. There was a large room below, the second room consisted of a kind of balcony above, and only the third room had both a door and a ceiling, and so some privacy. At first I slept in the hall-like room be- low, overlooked by Jania’s sister above and unable to go to bed or to work when the latter entertained her boy friends. When Arcadi arrived, I persuaded Jania to let us have the enclosed room with the door. The floors were of stone and we had no carpet. The only furniture we had was a single bed I had brought from England, a small table I had managed to buy, and three hard chairs. We kept our clothes in our trunks and our books and toilet articles on the window ledge. Nevertheless, our conditions of life in Novinsky Boulevard were the best we were to know for many a year. There was a bathroom with a hot-water heater, and there was a gas stove in the kitchen. Also, this being a house occupied by important officials, there was a com- munal kitchen where one could buy much better dinners than at Vera’s.
Unhappily, Jania’s father returned to Moscow in the summer of 1931 and we had to move. I was at that time in England arranging the publication of my first book, Lancashire and the Far East, which, orig- inally accepted for publication by the School of Economics, had been turned down by Sir William Beveridge, the Director of the School, after my departure from England. C. M. Lloyd, Director of the Social Science Department, had written to me that it could only be published by the School if I would modify my chapters on India. Rather than abate by a jot my indictment of British imperialism, I had gone to England to arrange publication myself, with the assistance of C. M. Lloyd.
When I returned to Moscow in September, 1931, Arcadi had moved into a very small furnished room near the Sukharevsky Market. For this room and a share of the kitchen and bathroom, we paid 1OO rubles out of Arcadi’s salary of 300 and mine of 275, although the monthly rent for the whole three-roomed flat paid by our landlord was only 45 rubles. The room was cheap as rooms went; many people had to pay more for a room, It was a “co-operative” flat. This meant the landlord had acquired it by paying monthly into a co-operative building society for several years. When he finally secured his flat, he, like most other owners of flats, let out one of his three rooms and so secured a return on the capital he had invested for years past. Being non- Party, he had had to wait years and pay several thousand rubles before getting his flat. Party men, if not already in possession of a decent apartment built before the Revolution, and taken possession of during its early years, often secured a new flat without payment, or by only a year or so of membership payments to the Co-operative. In any case, the Party men always had priority in the allocation of flats, and so could secure the precious capital which a flat represented without previous investment or by only a small investment. All owners charged a super-profit on renting rooms, but whereas the Party member charged anything the market would bear, which often meant 200 rubles, the non-Party man was more afraid of doing this, for he might be accused of “speculating.”
It was here in our room on Trubnaya Ulitsa, near the Sukharevsky Market, that I first witnessed the terrible exploitation of servants. Jania had done the work of the flat herself, and so did I. But our land- lord and landlady here had a “domestic worker.” She was, like nearly all Moscow servants, a peasant girl. She worked from 7 A.M. until 11 or 12 P.M., cleaning, cooking, washing, and standing in line at the shops. The latter occupation was the most strenuous part of her labors and the most painful. For to stand in line in the cold Russian winter when you have neither proper footwear nor a really warm coat is agony, This girl had neither. Nor did she eat the good meat meals she prepared. She lived on soup, black bread, and cereals, with an occasional bit of herring. At night she slept on the floor of the kitchen. The Kazaika (“house mistress”) cowed her, bullied her, and drove her. The girl was often in tears and always sad and miserable. When we asked her why she did not leave, she said she would be treated just the same anywhere else, and she couldn’t go to work in a factory since she had no room to live in.
In other flats all through my stay in Moscow I found the same conditions for servants. In some of the old apartment houses one found as many as five or six families living, all sharing one kitchen. (One young Russian whom I had formerly known at the London School of Economics, and who lived in one room with his wife and child, shared a toilet and kitchen with 35 other people in the flat.) Several of the families would have a servant, and it was not uncommon for three or four servants to sleep together in the kitchen side by side on the floor or on the kitchen table. Bugs ran over them at night, and the atmosphere was so fetid and foul that one hesitated to go in and boil water at night for tea or to wash.
The employers of these girls were often little better off than they. A family of four to a room, feeding poorly themselves, would employ a servant mainly in order to have someone to stand in line at the shops for food. Even the limited rations obtainable on the food cards could not be obtained without a long wait; and this, together with foraging around for unrationed food occasionally obtainable in the shops, was almost a full-time occupation.
The waste of labor entailed in the “socialist fatherland” by the hope- lessly inefficient distribution system, and by the shortage of food and clothing, was such as to make it easy to believe that there could be no unemployment problem. If husband and wife both worked at a large enterprise and there were no children, a maid could be dispensed with since both could eat a dinner in the stolova~a of the factory or office. But if there were children, food must be procured for them somehow. Party men of high standing kept maids to spare their wives labor, but the great majority of the families who employed “domestic workers” did so in spite of their poverty, or because of their poverty. Enough food for the children could be bought only if both parents worked; but someone must do the shopping. Hence the servants.
The terrible exploitation of domestic labor was in part due to the poverty of the employers, and in part to the exodus of peasant girls from the hunger-stricken villages. To be allowed to live in the towns and get some sort of a meal every day was to be incomparably better off than in the village, even if they had to work sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. Work in the factories (even if obtainable without close probing into why they had left the village and as to whether their parents were “Kulaks”) could not secure them a shelter. So they went to work as servants.
Servants were consequently easy to get and, being entirely unprotected by law or custom, could be exploited mercilessly. There was no alternative for them except starvation, and they were practically slaves. On the other hand, they naturally had no moral sense. Their village world had been destroyed, they or their neighbors had been expropriated and robbed by the state, and their religion vilified and reviled. To be religious was tantamount to being counter-revolutionary. So they stole whatever they could lay their hands on, and all Russian housewives locked up every bit of food and kept a strict watch upon their scanty wardrobes.
It was typical of the relation between mistress and maid in the U.S.S.R. that the German Communists who wanted their servants to sit and eat together with them found the servants took this as a proof of their meanness. “The Kazaika,” they said, “is so afraid of our eating too much that she forces us to sit with her at table to keep an eye on how much food we consume.”
Servants were still treated like serfs by the Russians even when their conditions of life allowed of their giving some elementary comforts to their dependents. Party men who secured large flats very rarely gave their domestic workers a room of their own to sleep in. Even a family with four or five rooms at its disposal made the servant sleep in the kitchen, or at best in a kind of open cupboard constructed in the modern flats over the front door especially for servants to sleep in.
For me the servant problem was at first insoluble. I could not drive people to work, and, being what the Russians called a “petty bourgeois idealist,” I felt it was indecent to lock up our bread, sugar, and butter in a cupboard, and periodically to search through the domestic worker’s basket or suitcase for stolen goods. So after a couple of months during which a large part of my precious foreign clothing was stolen and our food supplies mysteriously disappeared, I went back to doing the work myself. The difficulty was that we could never be sure whether the servant or the landlady had stolen the stuff. Each accused the other. I thought it was quite likely to have been the landlady, but, since she was already eager to turn us out of our room and we had nowhere to go, I could do nothing.
We were paying “only” 100 rubles for our room, and by this time it was becoming easy to let rooms for 150 or 200, so we were no longer welcome. Arcadi was making only the 300 Party maximum, but had no Party privileges; I also was now earning 300, having become a “textile specialist” at Promexport. Out of this sum we had to support Arcadi’s divorced wife and his son, so there was little left to feed ourselves after IOO rubles for rent. As yet we neither of us had a “closed distributor” but we had first category food cards like industrial workers. So we got two pounds of bread each a day, half of which we exchanged for milk from the peasants on the street corner. We also got enough sugar and a kilo of meat a month each. Everything else had to be bought on the free market at high prices. The only solution was extra work. Editing and translation work was easy to come by, but Arcadi worked late at the office every evening, and I couldn’t do Russian translations without him. Luckily, I got an advance of 2500 rubles for the Russian translation of Lancashire and the Far East, but we paid 1600 rubles of this into the Housing Co-operative I had joined in 1928.
In October we had managed to buy putofkas in a Rest House at Gagri in the Caucasus. Here in the Land of the Golden Fleece, where Jason found Medea, we enjoyed our first restful time together since Japan. Gagri is one of the loveliest places in the world and by its blue sea with the Caucasian mountains rising behind us we could almost forget the pushing crowded petty life of Moscow. Here there were few signs of the construction of “socialism.” There were the ruins of a castle of Mithradates whom Great Pompey conquered and who had fled from the Roman legions to die in the Armenian mountains to the south. Here also was a small Byzantine church of the fifth century which had withstood the ravages of all the many races which had passed to and fro along this land bridge between Europe and Asia.
It was a hungry holiday but a very happy one. We used to supplement the meager food supplied by the Rest Home by eating large quantities of walnuts, the only reasonably cheap food obtainable in the few shops of the small town. Occasionally we bought grapes but they were very expensive. The sea was still warm enough to swim in and the mountain walks were very beautiful and gave us a feeling of release.
Back in Moscow securing a flat was again our main preoccupation. Since Arcadi’s hopes of getting the one long since promised, and long since paid for, were fading, we began to concentrate on one in my name instead. Since I was a Party member, I had a better chance of securing one. Unfortunately, however, I had joined the Railway Worker’s Housing Co-operative up in Grusynski Val near the Alexandrovsky Station, and railway workers at that time were not a favored category. I had joined it originally in 1928, through M.O.P.R. (International Class War Prisoners Aid) with which it was affiliated. The apartment house this co-operative was building progressed very slowly on account of lack of materials, labor, and money. I had a friend on the board of the cooperative, a certain Polish Party member called Lofsky, whom I had made friends with when a delegate to Russia in 1927, and who had since been off on secret Comintern work in South America. He advised me to present the Chairman of the Co-operative with an English woolen cardigan and promised to keep an eye open in my interest. The art of securing the flat to which one’s payments entitled one consisted in haunting the premises of the co-operative at the time when a certain number of flats were being completed and about to be allocated. If around and about at the time, one might get one. Otherwise, one was always left out, whatever one’s rights or one’s membership stage, unless one were a high Party official.
Unfortunately, Arcadi was always working so hard at the office that he couldn’t hang around his co-operative and kept on being missed out. My own hopes faded when Lofsky was again sent abroad. I never got my flat through all the succeeding years, nor was I able, when at last Arcadi got his, to secure the repayment of the 4500 rubles I had paid up years before.
Every letter I wrote to my mother in 1930, 1931, and 1932 refers to the flat problem-the hope for it in the spring, then in the autumn, then for the following spring. At first I believed the promises; but by November 1932 I was writing that I had given up having any confidence in promises.
The first lesson the Soviet citizen has to learn is that promises and contracts mean nothing at all. The government cheats its citizens all the time in big things and little, and every official behaves in the same way. Only the foolish foreigners think that the letter of the law, or the written contract, or the spoken promise have any meaning.
There stands out in my memories of life in the winter of 1931-32 a picture of the snowy street outside our apartment house along which I went to work. Some construction work was going on near by, and every morning I saw carts full of bricks or wooden planks drawn by thin, miserable horses. Often the carts got stuck in the ruts in the thick snow, and the drivers dressed in rags of sacking whipped the horses mercilessly. The breath of the struggling horses and men was a thick steam in the cold air. I used to hurry along trying not to see the sores on the horses nor to hear their panting. Horses and men were alike starved, and the sufferings of the animals were only one degree worse than those of the wrecks of human beings who drove them. It was said that on the collective farms the peasants deliberately drove the horses to death so that they might get meat to eat. An inhuman system made men treat their beasts as cruelly as the government treated them, and with as little thought of preserving life. Cold, snow, misery, and want were the background of one’s life in Russia. At the beginning of 1932 I had my first intimate experience of the free medical service and the hospitals which foreign visitors to the U.S.S.R. describe in such glowing terms.
I was pregnant, and was foolish enough, on New Year’s Eve, to carry home ten kilos of potatoes which I had miraculously secured. The tram, as usual, was chock full and in the scuffle to get through it and out at the front I got my glasses knocked off. In my efforts to retrieve them, I got rather badly knocked about. I reached home exhausted and trembling but did not know I had injured myself. That evening we went over to a New Year’s Eve party at Jane’s. By midnight I was feeling rather ill, so we stayed the night in Jane’s large room with her and Michael, another old friend, who had come out from England early in 1931.
Next morning, alone with Michael after Jane had gone to work, I had the miscarriage. Michael could not get Arcadi by phone, for there was only one line at his office and it was out of order. So he fetched Jane home and went off in a droshki for Arcadi. Arcadi tried for two hours to get a doctor and finally came with one he had secured “commercially.” (The doctor to whose services my trade-union membership entitled me arrived about six hours later and was obviously not a doctor at all but a bedraggled, dirty, haggard young woman whom I would not have allowed to touch me. Her only use to me was to sign a certificate for my office that I was ill.)
By this time the pain had lessened and the real doctor said if it did not get worse again I need only lie still. If the pain returned, I must go to the nearest “abortion house” and be scraped.
Next day at noon I was in agony. Michael, having telephoned to Arcadi, sat beside me trying to soothe me until Arcadi managed at last to secure a taxi to move me to the hospital. There he had to leave me. I was strapped down upon an operating table and scraped by a “surgeon” who did not even wash her hands before operating, and whose whole painted appearance suggested a prostitute rather than a doctor. I was given no chloroform and the pain was excruciating. Then I was taken upstairs to a small room about twelve by twelve feet, with five beds in it. I was given an ice pack and left. No one came near me, no one washed me; there was no nurse or attendant of any kind. The other patients next day begged me for the loan of the piece of soap I had brought with me; I was the only one of the five patients who had any and none was provided.
At about eleven o’clock the following morning, after a breakfast of thin gruel, I was ordered to get up and come downstairs. I protested that I was bleeding and should not walk. No one paid any attention. Downstairs I was again put on the operating table, held down by four attendants, and scraped again. I yelled, “Why twice?” But no one paid any attention. After this I broke down and found myself weep- ing. I had been suffering for forty-eight hours, the pain was agonizing, the place was filthy, and I felt I was in a nightmare. When I asked for something to wipe away the blood, the “nurse” picked a dirty piece of wool off the floor and handed it to me.
I determined to get out of this terrible “hospital” before I caught some awful disease, and sent a note to Arcadi telling him he must get me out somehow. At first they wouldn’t allow me to go, but after he had told them I was an English journalist, they got frightened. A doctor speaking French came up to see me. It then came out that the first “doctor” had forgotten to write down on my case sheet that I had already been operated upon; hence the second ordeal.
Jane offered to nurse me, and I got back to her room that evening. I remember very vividly the joy of being back with her and Michael and Arcadi in her clean room after that terrible hospital. For a week I lay there in bed, Arcadi coming in the evenings for the dinner which Jane cooked for us all, Poor Arcadi never got away from the office for dinner till eight or nine in the evening, and afterwards still had to get home by tram. He looked far more ill and exhausted than I did, and my experience had upset him very badly.
It was as well I did not have that baby, although I was very disappointed at the time. We did not secure a room of our own until 1933, and what we should have done with a baby on our constant removals from room to room I do not know.
The companionship of Jane and Michael that winter of 1931-32 lightened our hearts. Arcadi did not easily make friends or give his confidence to anyone, but Michael and he liked each other immensely. Michael, like Arcadi, had had an unhappy childhood, and like him had learned at an early age to hide his feelings from a hostile world, and to take refuge in humor for the hurts which his sensitiveness would otherwise have found intolerable. Where I would boil with rage and indignation at the divergence between Soviet professions and Soviet practice, Michael and Arcadi would make a joke of it. Whereas I hated Stalin as the brutal and callous oppressor, Michael and Arcadi saw him not as the bloodthirsty despot, but as an historic phenomenon. If there had been no Stalin, there would have been someone else like him. I had leanings toward Trotskyism and was at that stage convinced that if he had led the Bolshevik party instead of Stalin there would have been no famine, and no perversion of the revolutionary movement. They assured me that Trotskyism was sheer romanticism, and that the course which history was taking in the U.S.S.R. followed logically from Lenin’s foundations. Since this was so, it had to be accepted as socialism; and one could only hope, and work, to make it a little more tolerable. Life might be a tragedy to those who felt, but one must keep sane by seeing it as a comedy.
Michael had gone into the army in the World War at the age of sixteen and nearly died afterwards of consumption. He had something of my brother’s cheerful skepticism and good humor, and like Arcadi had no great hopes that the world was at all likely to be run rationally and intelligently or justly. To Michael Marxism was a tool not a dogma; an aid to the understanding of history, past and present, not a revelation. What was happening in Russia must be accepted as the consequence of the socialization of the means of production and distribution by a minority in a backward country. Here was no society of the free and equal, nor was it likely to become so; but it was no use getting indignant because the new society was so very different from what men had hoped for.
His view of the U.S.S.R. was very close to that expressed years later by Max Eastman in Stalin’s Socialism. Since this was the society which had come out of the socialization of land and capital it was socialism. The fact that it bore no resemblance to the society which socialists had envisioned and that there was even greater social and material inequality than under capitalism did not prove that it was not socialism. Michael and Arcadi were extraordinarily impersonal in their judgments. They saw men as moved by forces they themselves could not understand, and the ills of the Soviet world as due more to the stupidity of its rulers than to their malignancy or wickedness. I could not for a long time accept their view that under Lenin or Trotsky it would have been essentially the same. But because they taught me not to view Stalin as a personal devil but rather to see him as the result of Russia’s past history and of the Bolshevik Revolution, not as a cause in himself but as a result, I have similarly understood that Hitler is no personal devil, but the product of historical circumstances.
Friendship is a very precious thing in an uncertain, savage, and strange world, where everyone’s hand is against his neighbor, and fear and the struggle for bare subsistence drive even decent men and women to spy upon one another and denounce one another. Life is endurable only if one has at least one human being to whom one can speak one’s mind freely and without fear. To come home, close the door, and shut out the world in which life is one continual pretense, a perpetual licking of the hand which smites. A little freedom of expression, honesty of thought and speech, are as necessary as air. Without them one would suffocate in the foul Moscow air. The glaring contradictions between theory and practice, between what was supposed to be and what was, and the constant effort to say and look the opposite of what one thought, were by no means the least strain in Soviet life. One understood why so many men sought escape in drink, why the vodka shops were never empty, and why men lay drunk in the snow by the roadside.
Such conditions draw one ever closer to the few people one loves and trusts. Like primitive man sheltering with his mate in a cave against the violence of the elements and the fear of wild beasts, so in Soviet Russia one shelters with one’s family in one’s room or corner from the storm of terror, hate, regimented sadism, hunger, cold, and wretchedness and the nauseating cant and hypocrisy of Soviet life.
Arcadi is lost to me, but to this day Jane in England and Michael in America remain friends with whom the ties forged in that period of disillusionment and horror are stronger than the ties of friendship with anyone else in my life.
We three were together most evenings, and this saved me from what would otherwise have been intolerable loneliness and long hours of brooding. For Arcadi was working literally twelve or thirteen hours a day. He came back late at night so tired out after a day at the office practically without food, that my one care and interest was to feed him and get him to bed. Breakfast was the only meal at which we had much chance to talk. He often worked even on his free day.
When I had returned in September 1931,after my three months in England arranging publication of Lancashire and the Far East, I had found him so thin and pale and worn out I was frightened. It was almost as if he wished to kill himself with work. On the other hand, conditions of work for the non-Party men were such that most of his time and energy were wasted. Whatever he did to improve efficiency would be undone by someone else; and he, like the other specialists, was in constant danger of being arrested as the scapegoat for the mistakes of his Party supervisors.
Toward the end of the year we received a visit from C. M. Lloyd, head of the Social Science Department of the London School of economics, who had directed my research there. He was also Foreign Editor of the New Statesman. Lloyd was a friend, and discreet; and I talked to him freely. Arcadi denied the truth of what I said, or modified it. He convinced, or almost convinced, Lloyd that a socialist society was being created in the U.S.S.R. The privileges of the Party members, the suffering of the people, would pass, were not important, or were inevitable. Since Arcadi cared very little whether or not he shared those privileges, he dismissed them as unimportant; whereas I was convinced they were the basis for all the corruption and distortion of the socialist idea. Lloyd went home and wrote a series of articles in the New Statesman which, although cautious in their optimism, showed his confidence in the Soviet system.
After Lloyd had gone Arcadi and I had our first, and I think our last, real quarrel. For weeks we were estranged. Arcadi, in fighting me, as he later acknowledged, was fighting his own doubts. He almost hated me for a while. I was miserable, but I could not recant. I still saw the English papers and the trickle of information there about the ghastly conditions in the timber prison camps, and about the famine in the Ukraine, was confirmed not only by rumors in the capital, but by the sight of the starving peasants. Our friend G, who was working on timber export and often went to Archangel, described the merciless driving of the prisoners hewing the timber in the Far North. (See Chapter IX.)
The food position in Moscow that winter of 1931-y was far worse than the winter before. By this time Arcadi had Gort B and I had Insnab, which meant we were infinitely better off than most people. Many of our acquaintances were half starving and were grateful for the gift of a pound of cereal from my rations.
My visits to the textile districts in the course of my work had shown me the condition of the working class which was supposed to be the ruler of the country. At Ivanovo Vosnysensk I had seen wretched men and women striving to “fulfill the plan” on a diet of black bread and mush. In the textile factory stolovayas the dinner consisted of millet with a little sunflower-seed oil. There was no herring even to be had in the shops. True that a meat dish of sorts could be had for 2 Rt. 50 in a restaurant, but the average monthly wage was only 70 or 80 rubles.
I was receiving two kilos of butter, six kilos of meat, and thirty eggs a month, besides cheese, flour, millet, buckwheat, semolina, and even one pound of rice-most precious cereal in Russia. I could buy milk if I arrived at the Insnab store at the right time, and quite often I could obtain sour cream (smetuna) and sour milk. Arcadi’s ration was a good deal smaller, but compared to that of the workers, and that of the office clerks, we were rich. We could also buy cigarettes and soap, which had become almost as great a luxury as butter.
Arcadi finally broke down when he went on a Komanderofka to Odessa in April 1932. He came back white and miserable and shaken. Down there he had seen the starving and the dead in the streets. At each railway station en route there had been hundreds and hundreds of starving wretches, emaciated women with dying babies at their milkless breasts, children with the swollen stomachs of the starving, all begging, begging for bread. In station waiting rooms he had seen hundreds of peasant families herded together waiting transportation to the concentration camps. Children dying of starvation and typhus, scarecrows of men and women pushed and kicked by the O.G.P.U. guards. It sickened even those who were hardened to the sight of suffering in the Far East.
Arcadi had relatives in Odessa. From them he heard the facts of the Ukrainian famine. The picture he painted for me, a picture which had seared him to the soul and shattered the optimistic view he had until then insisted upon preserving, bore out all the rumors we had heard- was in fact worse. What perhaps shocked Arcadi most of all was to find that the train guards, conductors, and attendants were all specu- lators. They were buying food in Moscow, always better provided for than other cities, and selling it at fantastic prices down in the stricken southern land.
Starving children are the most pitiful sight on earth. There were enough of them in Moscow to make one’s heart ache, but in the Ukraine they were legion.
Bodies of the starving lay in the streets, and pitiful wrecks of humanity, with great watery blisters and boils on their feet, legs, and arms, dragged themselves from place to place till they died in the vain quest for work and food.
In the summer of 19x2 we went on a holiday to the Crimea, taking with us my mother, who had just come from England. We left Moscow well provided with food for the long journey. But by the end of the first day my mother had given it all away to the starving wretches at the country stations. With tears streaming down her face she called my attention to one wretched beggar after another, especially to the pitiful children. That journey was an ordeal I shall never forget. It was a sea of misery which the few bits of food we had could do nothing to assuage.
Totia dai Kleb, Totia dai Kleb (“Auntie, give bread”), will always ring in my ears as the national song of “socialist” Russia.
As in China, so in Russia, one hardened oneself to the sight of suffering in order to live. But at least in China the government does not hold it a crime to give aid to the starving. In Russia it tells you that the starving are Kulaks or counter-revolutionaries not to be aided, whereas in reality they are bewildered, ignorant, powerless wretches sacrificed to the insensate ambitions and fanaticism of a man and a party.
It was the contrasts which were always so appalling. The fat officials in the dining car, the well-fed callous O.G.P.U. guards, and the starv- ing people. We and they, we and they, rulers and ruled, oppressors and oppressed.
In the Rest Home in the Crimea, where we had got places, there was abundant food. So abundant that bread and fruit, ices and cake were thrown away when left on the plates of the guest, or when too much had been provided. This place belonged to the Central Committee of the Soviets of the Crimean Republic, and we were there by the grace of Berkinghof, whom we had known in London and who was a prominent Bolshevik who belonged to this part of Russia. It was so very “upper class” that we really had no business there, but it gave us an insight into the life of the Party aristocracy. The sight and sound of the starving was shut out from these former palaces and country houses of the Russian nobility, now as in the past. Only now there was a new aristocracy. That seemed to be the main difference.
This new aristocracy and its hangers-on were even more grasping, cruel, and ruthless than the old aristocracy which had lived in conditions of less general want and misery. The bureaucracy and their employees felt themselves like those in a shipwreck who have managed to get into the few lifeboats not smashed to pieces. If one helped the drowning wretches in the sea into the boats, all would drown; so the lucky ones beat back the masses of the unfortunate with their oars. The few who did not starve in the U.S.S.R. thus aided the government in repressing the masses who did, and denounced as counter-revolutionaries starving wretches who had once followed the Bolsheviks as their leaders, believing the latter would establish a just social order and a prosperous economy.
There was, of course, a convenient theory to justify the terrible social and material gulf between the rulers and the ruled. The rulers were “indispensable” as the “builders of socialism.” They were so important that they must always be well fed and enjoy comfortable holidays in luxurious sanatoria and rest homes, else they would be unable to bear the great burden of their responsibilities. The wretches dying of starva- tion and the ill-fed workers and peasants were just cannon fodder in the battle for socialism; if there were not enough food to go around, the officers of the socialist army must have enough even if everyone else went short. In the future everyone would have plenty if the rulers were ruthless enough now to see millions die in the cause of industrialization.
This theory did not explain why the survival and comfort of the wives and children and mistresses of the Party bureaucracy were also essential to the Revolution, but I suppose it could be argued that the peace of mind of the rulers must also be preserved.
Thus have aristocracies in all historical periods justified their privileges. The Soviet aristocracy was no exception.
Life in the U.S.S.R. might be uncomfortable and saddening, tragic and repulsive; but it educated one politically as no other experience could have done. Michael, Jane, and I felt this even when the process of being educated was most painful. We learned to recognize reality under appearances and were cured of political illusions; or at least cured of the propensity to fall for slogans, facile panaceas, and hypocritical pretenses. Ever since I lived in Russia it has been almost impossible for me to accept professions and declared aims at their face value anywhere. Perhaps I have gone too far to the other extreme, being now inclined to think that those who profess least virtue are likely to have most. In any case I am, I believe, forever cured of the Western intellectual’s preoccupation with forms and labels.
Life in the U.S.S.R. also made one realize that some absolute standards of behavior are essential to mankind if we are not to return to the life of the brute. Voltaire’s saying that if God did not exist, He would have to be invented, needs restating in new terms. Even if one does not believe in God one must have a moral code, must accept certain social values as absolutes, and allow some freedom to the individual conscience. How can a just and humane social order be created if we root out our own humanity in the process of destroying the old society? After long years of bitter experience I have come to accept Bertrand Russell’s social philosophy. I have learned that absolute power will corrupt any minority, that more evil is caused by fanatics than by wicked men, that no movement or individual can be certain enough of the effect their actions will have to subordinate means entirely to ends, and that democracy for all its inefficiency is likely to secure more justice than any despot, however benevolent he may be or may profess himself to be.
The coalescing of political and economic power which is taking place everywhere and has reached its consummation in the totalitarian states, confronts mankind with new problems in urgent need of solution. A new set of principles and a new morality are needed to secure order, social unity, liberty, and the rational use of the vast productive forces science and technology have created. Yet instead of seeking for a way to combine order and control with individual liberty, most of our “progressive” intellectuals of recent years have taken refuge under the mantle of Stalin’s cruel despotism. Their critical faculties have become atrophied together with their liberalism; and, while barricading the front door against Brown National Socialism, they have opened wide the back door to the Red variety.
Whether or not we can ever deepen and widen our democracy to control economic as well as political power, and thus cope with the problem of an over-ripe capitalism without destroying the liberties to which capitalism gave birth, is perhaps doubtful. But there would be a little more hope of our doing so if our one-time liberals had not been lured along the totalitarian path by the blood-red light of Stalin’s “socialism.”
One also learned in the U.S.S.R. how slight are the differences between men, between the “good” and the “bad.” I remember one evening how Michael said to Jane and me: “Can’t you realize now that you and I, all of us, everyone we know, is capable of deeds at which we now shudder?” What seems to differentiate men most is their greater or lesser degree of courage-in particular the moral courage to face the fact that they have been mistaken in their beliefs. This was particularly obvious in Russia where the decent and humane and altruistic types of Communist too often recoiled before the realization that they had wasted their lives, sacrificed their personal happiness, and endured prison and exile to accomplish the opposite of what they desired. Rather than face up to so terrible a realization they buried their heads in the sand and drowned their doubts in work or even in excessive cruelty to others.
But even men of high courage and integrity can be broken by an inhuman system. Men who can face hunger and prison and even torture for themselves cannot endure starvation for their children. That breaks the hardiest spirit and enslaves the boldest. The workman who goes on strike can endure to see his children starve if there is some hope of victory. But few men can face the prospect of their wives and children being thrown out into the snow to die of starvation and cold, when they know there is no hope of winning out against the state which is employer, policeman, and judge.
Often in Russia I used to remember the words which Euripides put into the mouth of Andromache when, after the fall of Troy, they take her little son away to be killed: “Oh, ye have found an anguish to outstrip all tortures of the East, ye gentle Greeks.” The Soviet state had found a better method of breaking human beings than the crude physical tortures inflicted by the Nazis on their victims. It had learned that the surest way to break resistance to tyranny was by getting at men through their wives and children. How can the Russian worker strike when he knows that not only will he be imprisoned but that his family will be thrown into the street immediately, and his wife refused employment? How can the intellectual refuse to write or speak the lies demanded of him, when the O.G.P.U. tells him that if he will not his wife will also be imprisoned and his children left to become homeless waifs? Only the peasants, too brutish and too tough, still sometimes defy the Soviet Government by passive resistance.
The Soviet Government had also learned that, whereas some men can face torture and death and even the reprisals inflicted on those they love, provided their sacrifice will inspire others to revolt, few men can bear to die behind closed doors without the opportunity to testify to the world what they are dying for. When Christian martyrs faced the lions in the arena, or when in the religious wars Protestants were burned at the stake, they could face death knowing that they had lighted a torch which others would carry on; they could endure tor- tures because they were convinced the sacrifice would not be in vain. But would they have endured to the end unflinchingly if they had been shot without trial in some dark cellar, knowing that they would be accused, not only of crimes they had never committed, but at having aimed at the overthrow of what they were trying to save?
An open counter-revolution in Russia might have left Communists and Socialists believing in their cause and prepared to start the struggle for social justice and liberty over again. But Stalin’s counter-revolution had been a long, secret, and disguised process. Men were not expected to repudiate the old aims; they were instead expected to mouth the old slogans and to testify to their belief in the old faith while the meaning of the old slogans, theories, and words had been completely changed. The result necessarily was a mental, moral, and political confusion in which men could no longer see the road clear before them. Even when most revolted by the cruelty of the Party and its perversion of the Revolution, there remained a doubt as to whether there was any alternative to Stalin’s “socialism.” Those who were convinced that the gravest mistakes had been made were unsure how they could ever now be remedied.
Deprived of faith and of hope, the Russians sank into apathy and skepticism, or made up their minds to do the best they could for themselves in this new anarchic, cruel world in which pity was a crime and fraud and hypocrisy the qualities needed for survival. The struggle for bare existence absorbed the minds and energies of the masses, while the struggle for position and affluence absorbed those who were fortunate enough to belong to the Party.
The best way, in fact the only way, to preserve your integrity and your life if you were an intellectual in Soviet Russia was to give up all expectation or desire for advancement and honor, and never to talk about anything but trivialities even to your closest friends. There were men of education who took jobs selling newspapers and books or cigarettes at street kiosks, happy to have found a niche where they were likely to be let alone; where no one would envy them or suspect them and they could call their souls their own. Specialists known to have high qualifications could not thus hide themselves. The state insisted upon their working in factories, mines, and offices, on the railways and communications. Here they were always in danger or being made into scapegoats, but if they could secure a Party patron likely to be “permanent” (the Soviet expression for a Party bureaucrat so well connected as to be unlikely to fall from favor), and work loyally and unselfishly for him, letting him take the credit for their cleverness and hard work, they could hope to survive. It was rather like the old Roman system of senators and clients. The word “protection” was openly used in the U.S.S.R. “So and so,” it would be said, “has a powerful ‘protection’; he’s likely to be all right.” If a non-Party man could marry his daughter to a high Party official he felt very secure, but this was difIicult unless she were particularly attractive, for Party men naturally wished to ally themselves to those who could be of use to them, not to non-Party specialists. Of course, in the holocaust of Party members from 1936 to 1938, the protection of the highest often came to mean disaster to his clients. When a powerful man was purged, a whole row of small skittles was knocked down with him. It was a storm in which the highest trees as well as the lowest were struck by the lightning, and no one felt safe.
Sometimes I am asked about the Soviet educational system; questioned as whether at least a great deal has not been done for the children. And I remember the homeless kids who slept in the loft above our flat in Ordinka and begged for crusts and hot water. I remember the pale children of the textile workers at IvanovoVosnysensk, living crowded together in the tenements without beds to sleep upon. I remember the charwoman at Promexport who lived in a corridor with her two young children and considered that a soup made of bones was a great luxury. I remember the babies at the Consultazia for mothers, where in 1934 I took my son each week to be weighed. The mothers could get free medical advice, but they could not afford milk, and had to feed their babies on black bread soaked in water. They took a photograph there one day of my son to exhibit because he was almost the only baby who did not have rickets.
And I remember the children in the queues at the prison where I went with food after my husband’s arrest. There was a boy there one morning with a sack of food for his mother, who could not have been more than nine or ten years old. When I showed my ignorance of the procedure he asked me with astonishment: “Is this the first time you have been here.?” There are brave children in Russia inured to “eating bitterness,” as the Chinese say; children sometimes left alone in an empty room when their parents are both arrested, and who sell up all the small possessions of the family to take food to their parents. If there is no relative to shelter them and neither parent comes home, they join the hordes of homeless children and learn to beg, to thieve, and to live like little wild animals in the savage world. That is one kind of Soviet education.
Of all the cruel acts of Stalin the most horrible is the provision for the liquidation of the older homeless children. In 1935, when by decree the death penalty for theft was made applicable to children from the age of twelve, the police were given the power to rid Soviet society of the unwanted children of the unfortunate.
If your mother and father are docile, careful never to breathe a word of criticism of the government, and work hard, you can get a different sort of education. You can learn how wonderful socialism is, how many tons of iron and steel the Soviets can produce, and how many more they hope to produce; and how terrible is the life of the working class in the capitalist world. You will be taught to sing patriotic songs and do military exercises and to worship the great Stalin. You may even get the chance later to study to be an engineer or a pilot, or be trained for some other profession if your social origins are all right and if you have carefully conformed throughout your school life.
If you are the son or daughter of a prominent Party member, the way will be made smooth for you all along, as it is made smooth for the children of the rich under capitalism. You will go to a select school with airy classrooms and the best teachers. At home you will have a room of your own to study in and plenty of books instead of trying, like the children of the workers, to do your homework in a small room occupied by your father and mother, brothers and sisters. You will sleep in a good bed, not on the floor or in the same bed as your brother and sister, you will eat the best food and have long holidays in the country instead of feeding on black bread, cabbage soup, and gherkins and spending the hot summer in the city. You will have servants to wait upon you instead of having to stand in line yourself at the shops when you come home from school.
Equality of opportunity in the Soviet Union is a myth. There are different schools for the masses and for the aristocracy, and in any case there can be no equality in educational opportunity where some children are undernourished and housed little better than pigs, while others live in comparative luxury.
MY SEARCH for some useful function to perform in Soviet society had caused me to change my job almost as frequently as we had changed rooms. My first work, that of a “referent” in the Anglo- American section of the Comintern, had been utterly futile and nauseating. True that part of my job was to read and mark the newspapers, and this at least kept me in touch with foreign affairs. But for the rest, I spent my time participating in futile post mortems on the work of the British and American Communist parties, and in assisting to draw up memoranda and “directives” which were supposed to tell the English comrades what they ought to do. The “directives” were drawn up mainly with an eye to self-insurance, so that whatever happened the blame would not be placed on us; and for the rest consisted mainly of a lot of Party platitudes and abstract principles. Consequently, these “directives” were worse than useless as guidance to the British party and were probably never read. Instructions as to the “party line” at any given moment came from much higher sources, and they were all the foreign parties had to pay keen attention to.
Fed up with the futility of my work, and fearing also that if I remained in so-called political work, I should soon be discovered to be a heretic, I took advantage of an offer to work as a “specialist” on textiles upon my return to the U.S.S.R. after a visit to England in the spring and summer of 1931.
After six months work at Promexport (see Chapter IX) I had accepted an offer to work at the newly created Commissariat of Light Industry. In the summer of 1932 I was invited to work at the Institute of World Economy and Politics at the Communist Academy. Here at last I found more satisfying work, and I remained there until I left the U.S.S.R.
All through 1932 our struggles to secure our flat, or at the least a room of our own, had continued. For some weeks in the spring we lived at the New Moscow Hotel, our room paid for by Lecterserio, the export organization of which Arcadi had been made vice-chairman. This room cost 25 rubles a day, which we could not, of course, have paid ourselves. The manner in which it was secured for us revealed to me something of the corruption now rife in Soviet life. Being without a room of any kind, Arcadi was living with Jane and Michael in Jane’s room at the Marx Engels Institute, while the Anikeevs were kindly putting me up. Anikeeva (see Chapter I) was a dear, and never be- came a Soviet snob. In spite of her husband’s high position, they both remained our friends. However, this situation was impossible. So Arcadi and I more or less camped down in the office of the man at Narcomveshtorg who was supposed to secure rooms for employees of this Commissariat. We spent a whole day there, from IO A.M. to 7 P.M., refusing to budge until something was done for us. By now we understood a little of the Soviet way of life and only a kind of sitdown strike of this kind was likely to secure to Arcadi his rights. For Narcomveshtorg had promised him a room many weeks before if he would take the chairmanship of Lecterserio, and in so doing give up the room he would have received from Promexport in February. The Party member in charge of rooms had over and over again promised Arcadi this room or that, only to give it to someone else. Arcadi had been absorbed in his work and was always passed over. Now we were determined to force the Commissariat to honor its contract.
Finally, in the late afternoon, Comrade X got on the phone to the manager of the New Moscow Hotel. A long conversation ensued. The manager of the hotel wanted a quid pro quo. He had been trying to get a Gort A book for one of his assistants not really entitled to it. If Comrade X would secure this for him, he would let us have a room at the hotel. But Comrade X only had a limited number of Gort A books to give away, and he wanted them for his own cronies. Getting a room for a non-Party man was a small return for the Gort A book, since a non-Party man had no patronage with which to pay for a room to live in. Arcadi went off to Rabinovitch, ex-chief of Arcos in London, now almost a Vice-Commissar. Rabinovitch phoned Comrade X and told him to come up and talk to him. Finally we were saved. Reluctantly, Comrade X agreed to give the precious Gort A book to the Intourist manager’s assistant in return for a room for our humble selves. Triumphantly, we presented ourselves at the New Moscow Hotel.
Food was now our greatest problem. I had Insnab and Arcadi had Gort B, but how could we cook? In the hotel dining room a dinner cost about 20-25 rubles, and was accordingly out of the question. However, Arcadi had brought a little electric saucepan and an electric kettle from Berlin in 1928, and with these I managed to make meals of a sort. Disposal of the rubbish was the greatest problem, since cook- ing in our room was forbidden. We solved this problem by carrying out potato peelings and other refuse in neat brown paper parcels which we disposed of in the street dustbins on the way to work.
We were better off than many other people in the hotel. A few doors away lived Soermus, the well-known Finnish violinist who had played in the streets in England to collect money for the miners in 1926. His wife, an Irishwoman, had nothing to cook on except an electric iron. Ingeniously, she turned this upside down, put a saucepan on it full of vegetables and meat, and left it to cook all day.
Once or twice a month we treated ourselves to a real dinner in the hotel dining room, and very occasionally a friend or acquaintance from England out on a trip to Russia would give us some of his Intourist meal tickets entitling us to a free breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
The manager of the restaurant, a Caucasian, spoke perfect English and said he had been the headwaiter at the Ritz in London. I discovered this through a casual reference to horse racing as the “opium of the people” in England. This man remembered the name of every Derby winner for goodness knows how many years, and he was so delighted to find someone who at least knew what horse racing meant, that he treated me to real coffee several times.
Coffee-even now, years afterwards, I remember the delight with which one drank coffee in Moscow. Rarest of luxuries, greatest of joys. Whenever anyone one knew came out to Russia, one asked them to bring coffee, coffee above all else, and secondly, toilet paper.
Even in this Intourist Hotel toilet paper was unknown for a long time. Then one afternoon, returning from work, the floor manageress took me by the arm, marched me triumphantly into our douche room and toilet, and, pointing towards a few sheets of thin gray paper, exclaimed, “Look--Kultur!” However, this concrete evidence of Soviet “Kultur” was a fleeting phenomenon. The gesture made, the supply soon gave out.
In this hotel I also got an inkling of the luxurious lives lived by the O.G.P.U. oflicers who occupied many of the rooms in the hotel. Enormous meals were sent up to the next room to ours, and the sounds of drinking and song and laughter came through the wall late at night, when our O.G.P.U. neighbor entertained his friends. The diners in the restaurant were either foreigners or O.G.P.U. officers, with a very occasional couple of ordinary citizens blowing a quarter or half a month’s salary on a “bust.”
wrote to my mother in February 1932:
I leave the office usually at about 4:45 or 5 o’clock, and rush up to the Insnab shop to buy bread, etc., and milk if there is any-which is very seldom now. I get home about seven o’clock and have some kind of a meal. Then I try to do some work-translation or editing. Or Jane and Michael come around and we talk or play cut-throat bridge. Then Arcadi comes home much later and I make tea for him and something to eat. You can have no conception how complicated life is and how much time one wastes over simple things like buying bread . . . . I am sorry if I sound depressed, dear, I am not unhappy only I have never before in my life had work to do which was rather dull, and did not have to exercise my faculties to the full and felt that I was making no progress of any kind. . . . I suppose that most of all I miss the very full political life I had in England: speaking, writing, and so forth. I feel I am rusticating and losing all my mental faculties.
Our semiluxurious existence in the New Moscow Hotel came to an end late in April. May Day was approaching, and we were told that all Russians (except, of course, the O.G.P.U.) must clear out to make way for the valuta-paying foreigners.
Again we were homeless. This time we both went over to Jane’s room. For a few days we lived four together. Eventually we secured, temporarily, the use of two rooms on Ostojenka Street in the flat of Gavrilov, an old Party member, whom we had known in England and who was again working abroad. For the first time since we came to Moscow we had two rooms in a modern flat. I at once brought my mother out of England. I could not send her any money, owing to the impossibility of exchanging rubies into foreign currency, and her own income was very small indeed. So the only solution was to have her out to live with us for a time. Her coming was in any case a great pleasure. At sixty-two she was still young, and the novelty of life in Russia pleased her. She loved the Russians, who are, in fact, a kindly people when not driven to be brutal by the government and economic difficulties. Our Russian friends, for their part, thought Mother a wonderful woman, for her vitality, youthful appearance, and zest for living were unknown among old people in Russia.
I got a servant, a nice clean German girl from the Volga. Her village had been devastated-no other word can convey one’s meaning- by the liquidation of the “Kulaks.” In the German Volga Republic the peasants, who had been settled there two hundred years before to set an example to the Russians, had been better farmers and so enjoyed a higher standard of life than most peasants in Russia. Consequently, the greater part of them were classified as “Kulaks” and liquidated. What had been a region of model farming became almost a desert, for more than half the population was exiled or sent to con- centration camps. The young people left the villages if they could, the boys to go to the factories if they could get jobs, or to become vagabonds if they couldn’t. The girls came to the towns to work as servants, and were highly prized, since they were more competent, cleaner, more honest and self-respecting than the Russian peasants. Curiously, they were the most purely Teutonic Germans I had ever seen; Germans like the pictures in Hans Andersen fairy tales: blue-eyed, with long golden plaits and lovely, fair skins. Being Protestants, and regarding the Russians around them as little better than barbarians, they had intermarried little and retained a racial purity which would no doubt have delighted Hitler.
An echo of the tragic fate of Russia’s German population reached the world when the “Mennonites” flocked to Moscow and sought permission to leave the country. Some of these Germans had tried to obey the government and had formed collective farms, only to have them liquidated as Kulak collectives. Being first-class farmers, they had committed the crime of making even a Kolkhoz productive and prosperous. Others had been quite simply expropriated from their individual holdings. All were in despair. Few were allowed to leave Russia. They were sent to Siberia to die, or herded into the concentration camps. The crime of being good farmers was an unforgivable one, and they must suffer for this sin.
My Hilda seemed a treasure. She could cook, she could read and write, she kept herself and the rooms clean and looked like a pink and flaxen doll. I could treat her as an equal without finding this led to her stealing my clothes and doing no work.
The servant problem in the U.S.S.R. for me and Jane consisted in our inability to bully and curse and drive, which was the only treat- ment the Russian servant understood. It was quite natural that this should be so, since Soviet society, like Tsarist society but to a far higher degree, was based on force and cheating. Cheat or be cheated, bully or be bullied, was the law of life. Only the Germans, with their strong religious and moral sense-the individual morality of the Protestant as opposed to the mass subservience demanded by the Orthodox Church and the Soviet Government-retained their culture and even some courage under Stalin’s Terror. I used to be amazed at the outspoken way in which Hilda and Sophie (another German girl who worked for Jane) voiced their hatred and contempt of the Soviet Government. Sophie, one of thirteen children of a bednaik (poor peasant) would shake her fist and say: “Kulaks! The Kulaks are up there in the Kremlin, not in the village.” The word “Kulak” originally signifying an exploiter and usurer, her meaning was quite plain.
After a few months of civilized existence on Ostojenka Street, the Gavrilovs returned, and we were once more homeless. I sent my mother back to England with Jane, who was about to leave for a holiday. Michael had left the U.S.S.R. for good a short while before. Arcadi and I once again got a room at the New Moscow Hotel. This time we had Hilda also in the room with us, and Hilda had to manage the secret cooking on the electric stove.
There was a young American called Clark Foreman living in the New Moscow Hotel who, years before, had been a friend of Jane’s when they were both students at the London School of Economics. He was in the U.S.S.R. studying the social services for the Julius Rosenwald Foundation. Thanks largely to Jane and myself and to a Russian friend of ours I will call M, he was one of the very few foreign visitors to learn something of the realities of Soviet life. A cheerful and intelligent young man with progressive views and few prejudices, he did not take the socialist tragedy as seriously as we did, but neither did he fail to see it. His American lightheartedness relieved the atmosphere in which we lived, and through him we were brought into somewhat unwilling contact with other foreigners. We met Bernal, the Cambridge scientist who was to become an ardent Stalinist, and others like him in whose presence we had the greatest dificulty in keeping our mouths shut. Clark was very loyal to us all, both at this time and later.
Occasionally we went to those parties of the foreign colony in Moscow which Malcolm Muggeridge has described with such biting irony in his Winter in Moscow. At these parties one found foreigners trying to recreate the London and New York Left Bohemian atmosphere of hard drinking and easy loving. But it was no longer youthful and harmless; it had been poisoned and become rather loathsome against the starvation and misery of the Russian background, and by the cant and hypocrisy of the Communists and the fellow travelers. Moscow's Bohemia was not that of struggling, writers, journalists, poets, artists, and students, but consisted of the fortunate, the doctrinaire, and hardboiled foreign Communists and those foreigners of various kinds working in Moscow because they were failures at home, and enjoyed favors as foreigners which their own merits could never have secured to them. They dined and wined on the produce bought at Insnab, while most Russians were starving. Michael professed to find it all a huge joke, but he did not relish this society any more than Jane and I. Arcadi was far too busy for such parties, and anyhow had no liking for drink or salacious stories and songs.
An English newspaperman who in his youthful revolutionary days had been a member of the I.W.W., now a debauched, fat little man, would lead in the singing of songs which might sometimes be funny but were usually just nasty. He was known to be a homosexualist, and was later expelled from the Soviet Union for corrupting young men. His immorality was, however, more honest than that of many who, under the guise of being Marxists, had come to the Soviet Union in order to find a society without restraints. In this they were mistaken, for Russian society was not for the most part sexually licentious except perhaps in its upper ranks. Most Russians were far too busy struggling to live at all, to have time or energy to imitate the vices of Western “progressives,” and marriage was usually a serious partnership, not a light liaison.
I remember leaving a party at the Foxes17 in the early hours of a spring morning with Jane and Michael, and Temple’s friend Rab, who had come out to visit us. They walked home with me up Kropotkin Street. Outside one of the stores a long queue of weary men and women had already formed waiting for it to open at g A.M. These people were waiting to receive a small ration of food, but we had left a party where caviar, hors d’oeuvres, ham, wine, vodka, chocolates, and fruit had been consumed in abundance, and where as we left they had been singing revolutionary songs in drunken voices. They may of course have been forgetting their carefully hidden disillusionment in this way.
Clark studied it all with admirable objectivity. When he went back to the United States and later became an important New Deal official in Washington, he was never tempted to join the Communist fellow travelers. He had stanch views concerning the need for a planned society, but no illusions concerning the Soviet Union or the foreign Communists.
All this time, in spite of our housing difficulties, our standard of life was far above that of the majority of workers and employees. We did not rank with the aristocracy, but we were upper middle class. I myself, with my Insnab food book, could in fact be counted as an aristocrat insofar as food was concerned. But, although our conditions were far better than a year or two before, life for most people, that winter of 1931-33, was more miserable than ever before. The scanty meat and butter rations which the industrial workers were supposed to be able to buy were usually unobtainable. Most if them subsisted on black bread, millet, and buckwheat.
That winter “commercial shops” began to be in evidence in Mos- cow-i.e., state shops where meat, butter, eggs, vegetables, and clothing could be bought by anyone at prices ten times or more higher than those paid for the rations available for the privileged. Butter, which cost us Rs.3.50 a kilo could be bought in the commercial shops for 40 rubles; meat for IO rubles a kilo against the ration price of 2 rubles; sugar at 15 rubles a kilo instead of the I ruble we paid. Gradually the commercial prices were lowered to nearer five times the ration prices as a preliminary step to the derationing of food and clothing in 1935.
These “commercial shops” benefited the “middle classes” most, those specialists and employees who had no closed distributor, but whose salaries of 400-600 rubles enabled them to buy some food at commercial prices. They also benefited the small and select group of writers, dramatists, actors, and musicians, some of whom earned very large sums of money and could now buy as much as they needed of all essential foods. Previously they had bought on the restricted free market direct from the peasants, at prices higher than those in the new “commercial shops.” Those who, like ourselves, could earn extra money by translation work or writing, could enjoy more food than allowed on our ration books. Money again came to have some value, and men often took on two jobs to earn enough to buy at the new shops.
There was a story told that winter of a Russian who returned from several years’ work abroad and went around seeing his friends. Each in turn told him of his difficulties. One had a salary of 600 rubles, but since he got only bread and sugar on his food card and had to buy everything else at commercial prices, life was very difficult. Another with a salary of 500 had the same tale to tell: only bread and sugar on the food card, and everything else to be bought at commercial prices. “We hardly ever taste meat, and butter is our greatest luxury.” After questioning many people and always receiving the same answer, he met a girl who used to be his secretary.
“And how are you ?” he said. “You must be finding life very hard.” “Oh, no,” she replied, “I’m doing fine. My salary is only 120 rubles, but that provides me with a food card and so with bread and sugar; for the rest I undress at commercial prices.”
Incidentally, this story illustrates a fact ignored by the tourist, who believed what he was told about the disappearance of prostitution in the U.S.S.R. It had only disappeared in the sense that every prostitute needed some kind of a job to ensure possession of a food card; the job need not be the main source of income.
There was also a joke in those days about giving to Mikoyan, the Commissar of Internal Trade, the task of liquidating prostitution. “Why Mikoyan ?” “Well, because everything else he controls disappears!”
Even the commercial shops were not supplied with abundant quan- tities of essential foods. Queues formed there to secure milk, butter, eggs, and meat, even at the fantastically high prices at which they were sold.
The other new shops which now opened up in one district after another were the Torgsin shops. Here one could buy better and more abundant supplies than anywhere else except in the Kremlovsky distributors-if one had gold or foreign currency. Prices for food at Torgsin were not much higher than world prices, and less than double prewar Russian prices. Everyone who had the tiniest bit of gold-a ring, a bracelet, or jewels-could exchange them for Torgsin tokens and secure food. The only snag was that the O.G.P.U. was also on the lookout for possessors of gold, and might at any moment arrest you and force you by torture to disgorge any hidden wealth you had for nothing. So people went in fear and trepidation to Torgsin, driven by hunger but fearful of the O.G.P.U. Torgsin was, in fact, an outstanding example of the mixed system of terror and reward by which the government was by now seeking to increase its revenues.
The greatest source of revenue of the Torgsin shops was remittances from abroad. Jews, in particular, often had relatives abroad-in Poland, in Germany, and above all in the United States-who would send them a few dollars a month to save them from starvation. The percentage of Jewish people standing in the Torgsin queues-there were queues even at these shops since there were never enough shop assistants-was very high. Anti-Semitism, although officially condemned, took a new lease on life when the Russians saw their Jewish neighbors in the apartment kitchens cooking good food which they never had a chance to buy. A few years later, in the great purge, countless Jewish families sufIered for their past enjoyment of a little food bought with money sent from abroad. By 1936 it was held a crime to have relatives abroad; the Torgsin shops had been closed down, and many Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps for the “crime” of having corresponded with relatives abroad. But from 1932-1935, the Soviet state was anxious to secure valuta at any cost and Torgsin served to produce a large vuluta revenue.
There was a story told in those years of two Jewish women friends who met after many years. One asked the other, a widow, how she was managing to live. “Oh, I’m all right,” she said. “My son provides for me.”
“Oh,” said the other, “is that your eldest son Boris, whom I re- member as a lad?”
“No, not Boris; he’s an engineer in Sverdlovsk earning 500 rubles, and since he has a wife and child he can’t, of course, spare me a kopek.”
“Is it your son Ivan, then?”
“No, Ivan is chief accountant at an Export organization, and of course he can’t allow me anything out of his salary of 400 rubles.”
“How, then, do you live?”
“I’m all right because my youngest son, Grischa, is unemployed in America!”
It was in fact the case that even two or three dollars a month could ward off starvation; could enable the recipient to buy a little flour and fat at prices one-fifteenth or one-tenth below the prices paid for the same foods in Russian currency.
Life that winter of 1932-33 became almost as hard for the majority of the people as in the famine year of 1920. As the Plans became more and more grandiose, and as the plaudits for the “gigantic successes of Soviet industrialization” of the tourists and Communist parties swelled into a paean of praise, so did the conditions of life for workers, peasants, and employees become more and more terrible. One came to dread reading in the newspapers of great “successes” or of the “approach of socialism” because such announcements almost always heralded some new measure of oppression, some new sacrifice.
A little Italian Communist from Trieste, who worked with Michael at the State Publishing Office, one day graphically expressed what we all felt. At 11 or 12 o’clock one had a glass of “tea” at the office, and a piece of bread and cheese if one could afford it. (Dinner in Russia is eaten in the late afternoon.) One morning the “tea” was not even faintly yellow; it was just plain water. Michael looked at it in disgust, and the Italian grinned.
When I first came to the U.S.S.R., he said, we were served with real tea with lemon and sugar in a glass on a saucer with a spoon. A year or so later there was no more lemon. The following year they started to give us Ersatz tea made of dried carrots. Next there was no more sugar. Then there were no more spoons. Now, apparently they have run short of the Ersatz tea. But, Michael, cheer up, it’s still hot. We haven’t got socialism yet!
Since the worker could not be induced to welcome Stalin’s brand of “socialism”; since the peasant fled his village and the worker migrated from village to town in the search for a job with sufficient food, or a room to live in, the state began to exercise a greater and greater degree of compulsion. Early in 1933 the passport system was introduced to rivet the worker to the factory and to force the peasants back to the desolate countryside. There was also the Work Certificate, a sort of criminal dossier of each worker and employee, wherein was written down his social origins, any fines he had paid, any “crimes” he had committed, and the reasons for his dismissal or for his leaving the factory. If he could not show good cause for having lost his job, he was not to be allowed work elsewhere. The workers were now reduced to the same serfdom as the peasantry.
The introduction of the passport system caused terrible suffering. One of the objects of the system was to clear out of the towns all the unemployed and those whose “social origins” rendered them unfit to enjoy the privilege of living in Moscow and Leningrad, where the food position was a little better than elsewhere. Among the unemployed were the hundreds of thousands of peasants who had come to the large towns from the starving villages in hope of work.
Passportization brought governmental repression close home to us. Both Jane and I had Volga German girls working for us, and it was specially decreed that all the German peasants should return home. My Hilda had no parents and Jane’s Sophie was one of thirteen children of a poor peasant. We both moved heaven and earth to keep them from the death by starvation which they assured us awaited them at home. In Hilda’s case the decree was particularly brutal since the spring floods had cut off her village from the nearest railway station forty miles away. Hilda wept and wept, and each day we tried to get her a permit to stay in Moscow. I spent hours at the Militia station, and hours at the Public Prosecutor’s, pleading, begging that at least she be allowed to stay with me until the spring floods subsided. All ordinary avenues of appeal proved useless.
Hilda’s aunt worked for Max Hoelz, the famous German Spartacist leader. One morning we went to him to ask his help. Although I did not then know it, Max Hoelz was already bitterly disillusioned with the U.S.S.R. and early that year he tried to return to Germany, after he had perceived that the Cornintern had deliberately sacrificed the German Communists in the hope of an understanding with Hitler. He was then murdered by the O.G.P.U. That morning, in his room at the Metropole Hotel, I talked to him at some length. He told me he was quite helpless; that he had no influence at all, having tried in other cases. A tall, handsome man, a former hero of the German working class, he sat disconsolate, sad and suffering at the universal misery, not attempting even to pretend that there was any justification for the cruelty of the Soviet Government.
Finally, I went to a friend of ours, a certain Z, who had been and probably still was, in the O.G.P.U. He was a decent little man, very fond of a good joke and relishing my husband’s wit. Completely cynical, a bon vivant, a beautiful singer and a strong drinker, he was also kindhearted and he had heaps of friends. He gave me a note to a friend of his, a high Militia official. At last I had secured the right patronage. Hilda was saved.
The sad end to the story of Hilda is that she was demoralized by fear and idleness. During the month I had struggled to save her life, she had done no work; she had wept and stood in queues and wept again. Slowly she degenerated in the atmosphere of the New Moscow Hotel, and I am afraid eventually became “one of those of whom we know there are none,” as E. M. Delafield describes the prostitute she saw in the Metropole Hotel in Moscow.
Jane left Moscow for good early in 1933and I took over her Sophie, for whom she had finally also won the passport battle. Sophie was a treasure; but 1 lost her, too. She went home to her village a year later for a holiday, and being cleaner, better dressed, and generally far more “cultured” than the peasant girls, succeeded in marrying the catch of the village, the tractor driver Party member. Presumably by now having joined the village squirearchy, Sophie has forgotten her former hatred of the Soviet Government.
We also had an anxious time securing a passport for Arcadi’s former wife and her son. She had a job by this time, but her social origins were exceedingly bad. Her father had been a merchant and her brother was an engineer with the General Electric Company in New York, where Arcadi had met and married her. Partly out of fear that his son would be sent away from Moscow, and partly because they had no room of their own but were sharing one with relatives, Arcadi and I gave them one of the two rooms which we at last secured in February 1933. Her passport was secured as Arcadi’s dependent living under his roof.
The position of ex-wives and mistresses under Soviet law as interpreted by the courts was very peculiar, for although it was expressly stated that bigamy was illegal, it was also forbidden to a man to turn out of his apartment or to refuse to support any woman by whom he had had a child, whether the child had been born to married people or was born to a man who already had a wife. A case referred to by N. V. Krilenko when Commissar of Justice, in an article written in the Bolshevik in September 1936, illustrates the position. He wrote:
We shall give below several examples showing the influence of the old social order on Soviet family relationships, and the revolutionary effect of Soviet law as it protects the family and teaches those who still follow the old customs.
Here is the case of Citizen and Citizeness Gentschke, who dis- missed their servant Lebedeva and ordered her to leave their flat. Lebedeva had worked for Gentschke as a servant from 1927 to 1929. In 1929 Lebedeva ceased to be a servant and became a housewife in other words, she ceased to receive payment for her work, for Citizen Gentschke started to have sexual intercourse with her. In the year 1935 the Gentschkes terminated the labor contract with Lebedeva and told her to clear out. Lebedeva appealed to the Court and said she was not a servant but in fact the wife of Gentschke. In her passport, which had been obtained for her by Gentschke, she was shown as his dependent, and this is why she had a right to live in his flat. Lebedeva, an illiterate young woman, proved that she had been violated by Gentschke and had lived with him from 1929 to 1935. The higher court to which the case was eventually transferred, did not recognize her as Gentschke’s wife because Soviet law only recognizes a marriage if a common life together has been declared, differing only from a registered marriage by the fact that no registration has been made. If the Court had recognized Lebedeva as a legal wife it would have meant recognizing a double marriage, which is not permissible in our law. Gentschke’s behavior from the point of view of civil rights deserved criminal punishment for deceit and exploitation. 18
It is nevertheless implied that Citizen and Citizeness Gentschke had to allow Lebedeva to continue living in their flat. In another case of which details were given in this article, a servant called Rakitnikova, who had been the servant of a Dr. Levinson and had had two children by him, won her case in the Courts when the doctor wanted to turn her out. It was decided that he must give up to her a third of his flat. In the case of a mistress who has had children by a man, he must allow them all to live in his flat and must help to support them, or support them entirely if the woman is not working.
Anna Abramovna, having been Arcadi’s wife before he divorced her in 1928 and having in addition had a son by him, had a legal right to obtain a passport as his dependent.
Marriage and divorce prior to the tightening up of the laws in 1936 entailed merely a visit to Zaks for registration, or, in the case of marriages, it was enough to register with the House Committee of the apartments as husband and wife jointly occupying a room or flat. This constituted a common law marriage, and by it the wife secured the same rights as if the marriage had been registered at the Zaks. Arcadi and I were thus married in common law, but we had never registered at the Zaks because I was afraid of losing my British citizenship if I did. Originally I had wished to retain my British passport in order to return home when I wished and in order to be able to travel freely abroad, for Russian citizens had the greatest difficulty in obtaining visas to enter foreign countries. Later it became a question, not of the value of my British passport in entering other countries, but of its value in permitting me to get out of the Soviet Union.
Divorce in the U.S.S.R. until 1935 required only a statement at Zaks by either husband or wife that the marriage was annulled. Today it is harder for one of the parties to obtain a divorce without the consent of the other, and the cost of divorce has been made almost prohibitive for the mass of the population. It used to cost only a ruble or two; now it costs very much more and rises to 4oo or 500 rubles for the third divorce.
Most of the cases brought before the courts arise from the difficulties caused by the housing problem. Even when both husband and wife wish to separate, it is almost impossible for them to do so because neither can find a room to move into. One couple of our acquaintance who had twice divorced each other always got together again because they had to go on living in the same flat. Since most families have only one room to live in it is almost impossible to separate, just as young people are often unable to get married and therefore have “light affairs” instead because they cannot get a room to live in away from their parents. Often again married couples have to share the one room occupied by mother and father and brothers and sisters. A girl I had known in London lived with her mother and husband (who was also her uncle) in one very small room for years. The Soviet Government, however, ascribes all the misdemeanors of its citizens as due to the “remnants of bourgeois ideology,” and to the “rottenness of the old world, which still continues to poison the Soviet atmosphere.” Krilenko cites a number of cases in which men had tried to turn their former wives, or even their children by a former wife, out onto the street in order to make room for a new one. He gives the following example of a wicked worker whom bourgeois ideology had caused to behave in a most shameless way:
To illustrate the influence of old traditions, even among working class people, we will cite the case of Alexander Maloletkin, a worker in a machine tool factory in Moscow. He looked on woman as a chattel. He showed an unbounded cynicism in his sexual intercourse. Maloletkin met a woman working in the same factory. He swore that he loved her and promised to marry her. Two days later he told her that he did not intend to marry her and did not want to see her again. He did the same thing to another woman in the same factory, and to another woman in a different factory. He had sexual intercourse with all these women and then mocked them and abandoned them. These women took the matter to Court.. . . Unfortunately the judge then officiating had the same conceptions as Maloletkin. Maloletkin explained that he could not have married any of these women because in the first place they were “light” women, and in the second place because he had no room of his own. In the third place he said that he was married already and had a wife in the village. All these excuses were due to the strong influence on his mind of capitalist conceptions of woman and the family.
In the sentence of the Court it was written:
“O, knew perfectly well that Maloletkin had no room and could not get married. Therefore if he made a promise of marriage, the woman should have understood that a man may promise a lot of things at a moment of sexual excitement and should not have taken the promise seriously.”
This Court decision, which is impregnated with conceptions and a morality alien to us, was quashed in the Higher Court and the judge was dismissed.
As Marx had said, the cultural level cannot be higher than the material conditions on which it is based, and the Soviet theoretical conception of marriage has no reality in the absence of the material conditions-in particular housing accommodation-which would make a “new and higher morality” possible.
The abolition of legal abortions since 1935 has, of course, made conditions for Russian women very much harder, and intensified the housing shortage. The upper classes, as elsewhere, are little affected by the change; they can buy contraceptives or they have a high enough “cultural level” to avoid excessive childbearing. But the women of the working class and the peasants now either have to resort secretly to unqualified abortionists, or maintain families of five, six, seven or more children in one room. Contraceptives are very rarely available for sale to the majority of the population.
For five months we lived under conditions unbelievable except in MOSCOW. We shared kitchen and bathroom with Arcadi’s divorced wife and child, and with another family of three persons (mother, father and boy of fourteen) occupying the third room in the flat. Anna Abramovna hated me so much that she always left the kitchen when I entered, and she forbade Arcadi’s son to come into our room. If he wanted to talk to his father, he had to stand on the threshold. Her hatred did not prevent her accepting the share of my munificent Insnab rations which I regularly sent in to her; but never once in those five months did we speak to each other, although inevitably we saw each other every day. I was quite willing to be friendly, but she nursed her hatred and sought to make Arcadi’s son hate him as well as me. In her indeed what the Soviet Press termed “the remnants of bourgeois ideology” were very strong.
At last she secured a room elsewhere and for a few weeks we had our two rooms to ourselves. Then I went to England to fetch my mother.
My most lasting memories of life in Moscow concern the three years we spent in our two rooms on Ordinka near the Moscow River. They were our first home together and our last, for we did not secure our long-promised flat until three months before Arcadi’s arrest in April, 1936. Badly built, with doors and windows of unseasoned wood which would not shut properly, unpapered and thinly whitewashed, they were home. They were ours, not a temporarily secured shelter out of which we must move when the owners returned. The Barskis in the third room were pleasant “cultured” people who had lived for some years in South America. Sharing the small kitchen and the bathroom and toilet, we rarely quarreled and could keep things decently clean co-operatively. We even managed to get the flat clear of the bugs which haunt most apartment houses in Moscow. This can only be done by scrupulous cleanliness and constant paraffining of floors and woodwork. In the flats where we had occupied only one room the bug plague could not be coped with since one’s neighbors’ bugs could always invade one. Even in Ordinka we could not avoid occasionally bringing home bugs on our clothing after standing in the crowded street cars. I considered myself an expert bug-catcher. They bite you at night in bed and the art of catching them consists in switching on the light and turning down the bedclothes all in a second. You then catch the bug in the act of retreating at top speed into the darkness under the mattress.
At the beginning we had a geyser to heat water for the bath, and this in itself was a rare luxury in Moscow. Unfortunately, one morning a month or so before my son was born, the geyser blew up while I was waiting for my bath. A shower of bricks fell around me? and Mrs. Barski rushed off for smelling salts, expecting at least a premature birth. We could never get the geyser repaired, so in future baths could only be taken by boiling kettles of water.
One of the minor annoyances of Soviet life was the impossibility of getting repairs done, The state provided none, and any individual who set himself up as a tinker, tailor, or whatnot, was classed as a capitalist and an enemy of the state. So naturally there was never any way of getting things mended.
This flat was one in two new stories built on top of an old house. We were on the top floor and above was a great loft with beams which barely kept out the rain and snow. Up in that freezing cold loft at night, there would be dozens of starving peasants or beggars- mostly children. These wretched little waifs, the bezprizounii, came daily to plead for crusts. Shivering with cold, they held out conserve tins for hot water. If one gave a piece of sugar to these poor children, an ecstatic smile would break over their pale faces. Periodically the militia would hound them out of their wretched shelter into the street, but after a few days there would be others.
The most terrible and pitiful sight I saw was one late afternoon in November 1933. Looking out of the window I saw militia men driving some wrecks of humanity down into one of the cellars. More and more people were brought $ as the evening fell. Going down into the courtyard I was told by other occupants of the apartment house what was happening. The militia were rounding up all the beggars and the homeless in the city prior to the November Revolution celebrations. The foreigners must not see the starving, homeless hordes, so they were all to be dumped outside Moscow. Our cellar was one of the depots. Late in the evening lorries arrived, and the beggars were pushed into them. Some were sick, others lame; many were children. They were to be taken 40 or 50 miles outside Moscow and dumped on the road to die. If the stronger ones managed to straggle back to Moscow the celebrations would be over by the time they got there. We all watched that pitiful exodus from our windows. A thin rain was falling and the air was damp and chilly. Although by that time I should have been conditioned to brutality, I was pregnant and it made me feel sick. Those mothers down there with their cold and hungry children being driven out into the desolate countryside must be suffering unbearable anguish. It would have been more merciful to shoot them outright.
I thought with icy foreboding of the world into which I should soon bring a child. But I am blessed, or cursed, with a sanguine temperament; and, although I knew with my mind that one could not escape from the U.S.S.R., I still went on believing in my heart of hearts that some day, somehow, we might get out. In my daydreamings I imagined Temple, back from the South Seas, sailing his yacht to the Black Sea and rescuing us. My mind played around with the idea; could one pretend only to be going for a sail, or could I teach Arcadi to swim well enough to reach the yacht at night through the warm Crimean Sea? Fantastic dreams which I never told Arcadi about. He would have laughed at such romantic fantasy, and we hardly ever spoke of the desire to get out of the Soviet prison house. It was too painful and too dangerous to think of. Arcadi had resigned himself to life in Russia, and still got some satisfaction and comfort out of doing his job. He still worked very long hours and came home too tired to think very much. I had less strenuous work and too much time for thinking. Since Jane’s and Michael’s departure I had felt myself cut off entirely from my old life in England, and had felt keenly the loss of the two friends with whom I could talk freely in the long evening hours when Arcadi was still at work and I sat at home waiting for him. In those first years in Moscow I had still believed that one day we should all get out into the free world again; now I knew that the past was utterly past and the long vista of years in Russia stretched ahead of me.
I wrote to my mother at this time:
A baby will perhaps stifle my recurring regrets at the loss of all the things-career and work and politics-which I have, I now realize, lost and got to lose. Arcadi makes up for 80% and perhaps the babv will make up for the rest.. . . On the whole I am happy. Happy ‘in my personal life-that should be a great deal and is. I have found such a deep love. Only I have had to tear myself away from all the other things which used to fill so large a part of my life. I suppose one cannot have everything.
Arcadi and I loved each other dearly and were together and soon we should have a child. After all, that was more than most people ever got out of life even in the free world outside. Our love knew neither jealousy nor antagonism. We were comrades in a real sense, helping each other, considering each other, and so close in thought and feeling that we had little need of words to reassure each other of the depth of the affection between us. Arcadi had a boyish playfulness which sweetened our relationship and kept him young, although he worked so hard. Illusions and false political beliefs had originally brought us together; disillusionment, trouble, and hardship, the need each of us had of the other, and an attraction which the years had welded into a oneness of body and spirit, had firmly united US. We had lived so long in one small room, adapting ourselves the one to the other and never quarreling over small things as so many people with whole flats to live in do. I still felt, and I know Arcadi felt it too, that to be in the U.S.S.R. together was infinitely better than not being together in the free world. He would every now and again tell me to save myself, leave him and go back to England. But he knew I never would. 1 had wept when I left England after the few months I spent there in the summer of 1933; I would have given up almost anything in the world, except Arcadi, to get out of the U.S.S.R.; but I had at long last adapted myself, learned to hide my thoughts and feelings in public, learned to avoid any political subjects in conversation, and to talk only about food or rooms or scandal, except to one or two intimate friends.
In March 1934 my son was born, and I began the happiest period of my life in Moscow. In any society at any historical period men and women have the same fundamental needs and satisfactions, and perhaps children are the greatest of these. With my son’s birth I began to accept life, to be more restful and more calm. I could forget even politics for long periods and become absorbed in his needs and his development. In fact, I became far too absorbed and was abruptly awakened one day by M saying to me that it would matter far more to Jon in the future what his mother was and had done than the fact that I myself had attended to all his wants. M, an “intellectual” of the type one rarely finds outside Russia, considered me far too much “of the earth earthy” and resented both my love for my husband and the fact that I had been so human as to have a child at all. But he was good for me both as stimulant and irritant. Without his suggestion and encouragement I should probably never have written Japan’s Feet of Clay and thus failed to keep my link with the Western world outside. It may even have been the case that this book saved me from being arrested with my husband two years after my baby was born.
Jon’s birth was a long and painful business. I was thirty-six and he weighed nine pounds. I spent two days and nights in a ward with nine other women screaming most of the time. I had arrived about 4 A.M. after waiting two hours for Arcadi to find a taxi to get me to the birth house. The doctors and nurses, working 12-hour shifts, had no time to pay any attention to us except at the actual moment of birth. Three times in the second night I was brought into the delivery room, only to be taken back to the ward when I failed to give birth. No one gave me any advice or help, and no relief was given for the pain. Narcotics of any kind were ruled out, since the birth house had none. During the time I spent in the delivery room I saw many children born, for there were no screens and one just lay in pain watching the babies of others being born.
Finally at about 9 o’clock on the second morning at the changing of the shifts a doctor examined me and decided that my baby’s heart might soon cease to beat. He gave me an injection to revive my strength, and he and another doctor threw themselves in turn upon my chest and abdomen. Meanwhile another doctor cut me a little, and at last my son was born. I lay and watched my screaming baby being cleaned and dressed, and then a ticket with his number was tied around my wrist. 1 was given a bowl of soup where I lay flat on my back on the padded table, and I wrote a note to my husband waiting anxiously downstairs. I was then left where I was until 3 P.M. before anyone had time to stitch me up. This was finally done without an anesthetic. After that I was moved into a comfortable bed in a ward for eight persons, clean, but with windows tight shut. There I remained eight days without seeing Arcadi or my mother, since no visitors were allowed into the hospital for fear of infection. I was in one of the best birth houses in the U.S.S.R., the Clara Zetkin, having secured a place there months beforehand by a combination of wangling and money. It was clean, and the food was ample; but I nearly suffocated for lack of fresh air. Our babies were brought to us to be fed ail swaddled up, but my son was allowed to have his head uncovered because he had so much hair. I longed to relieve him from the weight and discomfort of his swaddling clothes, and did so at once when I got him home.
A few days after I came home Arcadi got terribly ill; they feared he had typhus, but in the end he hadn’t and recovered. The Russian servant I had then, Masha, left us abruptly when Arcadi got ill, and with my mother nursing him I had to get up. However, having a child agreed with me. I felt well, I looked years younger, and I had plenty of milk. Soon I acquired Emma, the last and best of the Volga German girls I employed. She became a devoted friend, who was the one human being besides Arcadi’s sister who still dared to correspond with me after he was arrested. Emma had red hair and a quick temper, and she horrified our Russian friends by thouing Arcadi and me and in general behaving like one of the family. She loved my son and she loved us, and, although I had to teach her everything, she was intelligent and quick to learn. I myself had to bring my boy up on a book and with my mother’s help, for Russian ideas about babies were almost medieval. Babies were all swaddled both when they went out and in their cradles, windows were never opened, and the doctors at the Consultazia said one must on no account hold them out till they were six months old. It was taken as normal that a baby should either be constipated or have diarrhoea. I had to trust to the advice in the Truby King book I had and to such advice as I could get by air mail from a friend in England.
However, since I was able to nurse Jon entirely for six months and partly for nine, he was a healthy, happy baby and nothing ever went seriously wrong. There were, of course, no baby foods to be had in Russia; if one could not nurse one had to give plain cow’s milk and water. Luckily some Australian Communist friends of ours, the Barac- this, were then living on valuta at the New Moscow Hotel, but had an Insnab food book as he was working in Moscow. They gave me their rations for four months, and this enabled us to live so well that I kept up my strength even when I went back to work and had to rush home at twelve and climb five flights of stairs to feed Jon. We had plenty of money, for my Lancashire and the Far East had at last, after many delays, been published in Moscow.19 I had received several thousand rubles in royalties, and it lasted a long time.
Since the autumn of 1932 I had been working at the Institute of World Economy and Politics, and my work there demanded no regu- lar hours of attendance, although I had to spend a good deal of time away from home in the library.
When my son was nine months old I paid a flying visit to England to make a contract for my projected book on Japan.
Soon after my return, in March 1935, my mother left us. She had been with us a year and a half, and now that we had Jon, life in Moscow in two rooms for us all had become very difficult. I was trying to provide English hygienic conditions for Jon, which meant his sleeping with the transept open in winter in a dark room. So in the evenings we all had to share the other room. The evening my mother left I got a cable from Temple’s friend, Rab, in London that Temple had got blood poisoning in Fiji and might die. My mother was already on her way to England, and there was no way of stopping her. She had to face the news of his death alone ten days later. That was in April, just a year before I was to lose Arcadi as well.
Temple’s death brought home to me the passing of the years and of the hopes which had gone with them. I remembered our happy childhood together, our college days after the war when the world had seemed to me a place of infinite promise, a progressive world on the way to the establishment of a just society. Temple had never believed this. Romance for him had not lain in politics but in the South Seas, in getting away from civilization, not in remolding it nearer to the heart’s desire. He had died in the warmth and beauty of the tropics, but for him too the dream world in which he sailed freely for a while had become, after his second marriage, the humdrum provincial world of Suva where he had settled down as a general practitioner. In one of the last letters he ever wrote he said to my mother: “Freda’s letter to me was in tone and spirit very sweet. We neither of us quite seem to have found our new world. Moral-do not read your children romantic tales in their infancy. However hard-boiled they may become afterwards, the original taint remains. Tell Freda to teach Jon to list the maxims of La Rochefoucauld as his first primer. Freda, at 11, and I, at 14, learned them too late.”
That last summer we took a datcha in the hot summer months because of Jon. Life at the datcha was wearing because in these wooden houses in the villages outside the city everything was primitive. Cooking had all to be done on oilstoves, water had to be fetched in buckets, and food obtained mainly from town and carried the long distance from the local station. One servant could not possibly do everything and look after a young child. So I had to do a great deal myself as well as traveling to Moscow once or twice a week to the Institute and back and endeavoring to write Japan’s Feet of Clay. Arcadi could not get to the datcha every evening, as he worked too late and an hour standing in a railway carriage packed to capacity was too exhausting after at least ten hours of office work. But he was always with us at the week end, and I sometimes stayed a night in town.
The datcha we lived in was a large house which the Chairman of Promexport got from the Soviet for the summer for about 600 rubles and let out in separate rooms at 500 apiece, This was the normal practice. We had two rooms and a terrace. The other three families living in it had only one and Kalmanofsky kept two for himself, his beautiful wife, a well-known actress, and his brother, who was a non-party engineer whom I happened to have met in the Caucasus in 1927.
The other women in the datcha thought me very bold because I dared to walk alone in the dusk from the station along the narrow path through the forest. It was true that murders were reported with disquieting frequency, murders committed merely for the purpose of securing the victim’s clothing. But, as I wore only a sarufan (cotton dress cut like an evening dress at the neck) in the hot summer, I felt pretty safe. Russian women are usually very timid, as I had learned long before in Tokio, where they had been afraid to go alone down the lonely lane behind the Trade Representation building, Emma feared neither men nor governments. Superbly built, with arms strong enough to knock a man down, she had a scornful contempt for the pretty delicate Kazaikas who neither toiled nor spun, but even when their husbands earned little spent their time in idleness.
In late August and September when the weather was really chilly, we longed for wood to make a fire. But one could not buy wood in the village, although there was forest all around. One day there was a mighty thunderstorm, one of the most magnificent I have ever seen. Three trees in the datcha garden were struck by lightning, one falling over the terrace and just missing the house. We were delighted. Here was some wood at last. It was forbidden to cut trees-they belonged to the village Soviet-but one might take the branches. So we started to work, and Emma and I filled our terrace with enough wood to burn for many days. The other wives sent their servants and looked upon me with disapproval because I demeaned myself by such physical labor. Surely, one of them said, you, a writer, shouldn’t go out with the servants to cut wood! Five years before, no such remark could have been made; but already the Soviet upper classes had developed their caste theories. Moreover, since Russian men for the most part preferred ultra-feminine women, all who could lived up to this ideal. They prinked and painted, wore the highest heeled shoes they could buy, would go without food to buy the fantastically expensive materials now on sale at a few shops, and considered me a hopeless blue-stocking and far too democratic in my behavior. The fact that Emma called me and Arcadi by our Christian names quite shocked them, and they really objected to Emma’s status in my household because it made their own servants discontented.
Russian summers are usually lovely and warm and fine, but that summer on the datcha it was rainy and cold. Having spent so much money on the datcha so that Jon might have air and sunshine, we found it very disappointing. I was working hard and getting very little sleep as I used to get up at 6 o’clock with Jon, and we were now much shorter of nourishing food than at any time since 1931. Bread had been derationed and doubled in price in January 1935; then Insnab was closed down in the early summer. Gort closed at the end of the summer. Everything had to be bought in the commercial shops or on the peasant markets at high prices. Arcadi’s salary remained at the same level of 6oo rubles which he had been earning for two years past, and while working on my book I was earning only my minimum salary of 300 rubles. We sold some old clothes, and Arcadi got one month’s extra salary as a premium. I had a few English pounds’ advance on my book, which we spent gingerly at Torgsin. We managed to feed Jon well and to live, but we went rather short and I twice went down with ‘flu. Temple’s death had saddened me, and I felt ill and old and depressed. I wrote to my mother that I realized that the best of life is over before one knows it has begun.
Finally after we returned to Moscow, I had a breakdown which the doctor called a heart neurosis or something like that. The Institute sent me to a very good sanatorium for five weeks-a sanatorium reserved for “scientific workers” of high qualifications-where the food was excellent and I had a beautiful room to myself. From there I wrote to my mother on November 11 :
The life I am leading reminds me of the past-skating and talk- ing French most of the time. I have memories of La Combe. How life has flown on and here I am 37-nearly 38---and no longer a jeune fille, and somehow it has all happened so rapidly. I suppose that is the way life takes everyone. I am reading Anatole France again and enjoying it much more than when I was young. . . .
When I returned to Moscow I felt well again and the depression had lifted from my spirits. I settled down to intensive work on my book. This work and the previous work I had done at the Institute of World Economy and Politics had given me a good deal of satisfaction. The Institute was about the best place I could have found in the U.S.S.R. to work in. As a “senior scientific worker” in the Pacific Ocean Cabinet, I had for three years past done research work on Japan in particular and the Far East in general. I got a regular salary and was paid in addition for every article or report I wrote. We “scientific workers” had our own individual plan to fulfill and worked very much as we liked. One had to attend meetings of various kinds, but otherwise one spent just about as much time at the Institute as one pleased, or as one’s work required. The head of the Institute, the well-known Hungarian Marxist, E. Varga, was a very decent, kindly, and intelligent old man. He always toed the Party line and has, I be- lieve, survived all the purges; but he was a real worker and tried to keep out of his Institute unqualified Party men looking for a cushy job. Some attention was paid to scientific exactitude; figures might be twisted to have various meanings, but the figures were accurate. The Institute contained many sections, a statistical section producing a Konjunktur journal; and various other sections dealing with economic conditions in every part of the world. Since my work concerned Japan, and since, luckily for me, Japan remained unfriendly to the U.S.S.R. all the time I worked at the Institute, I could do honest research and honest writing. We had a wonderful library containing practically every book, old or new, one needed or desired to read. We had the newspapers from all countries and an excellent press-cutting department for reference purposes. It was, in fact, a first-class research institute, which, because it was occupied in making reports on economic and political conditions and developments abroad, did real work. The Cornintern, the Central Committee of the Party, and the Commissariat of Foreign Trade, which all used the material we produced, might make some queer uses of it; but that did not directly concern us nor greatly affect the quality of our work.
There was a good story told about Varga which illustrates the little value the political side of our work had. While in Berlin Varga received a telegram from the Central Committee of the Party in Moscow demanding that he should at once prepare a report on economic conditions in Europe. A few days later he wired back, “Analysis ready, telegraph at once what perspectives should be given.” In plain English Varga was asking for instructions as to what he was required to prove by his figures. The story was perhaps an invention, but it illustrated perfectly the fact that nowadays Communists use economic facts to prove a political thesis decreed from above, instead of deducing the political developments from the economic conditions, as Marxists are supposed to do.
I imagine the Institute must have greatly changed since my day. For already in 1936 the great purge was seriously affecting our work. When the great fell they dragged down many lesser men with them. For instance, when Madyar, who had been the chief theoretician of the Chinese revolution, was disgraced and imprisoned after Kirov’s murder at the end of 1935, there began a strenuous heresy hunt. The “Red professors” and “scientific workers” all started thumbing through each other’s old books and articles to discover Trotskyist deviations or signs of Madyar’s influence. Since Madyar‘s word had been law to us, this was not difficult. Everyone in the Pacific Ocean Cabinet felt im- periled and everyone tried to denounce his neighbor to show his loyalty to Stalin and escape being denounced. The situation was rendered all the worse because Voitinsky, the chief of our department, had played a prominent role in the Comintern in 1927 and had then been made a scapegoat together with Borodin for the tragic fiasco of the Chinese revolution. He had only a few years before come back into favor, and it was always those who had “deviated” and been disgraced in the past but had been reinstated who were most unscrupulous to others. He started accusing almost everyone who worked under him and those who worked on China all feared for their lives or their jobs.
Soon the whole Institute was affected by the purge. Varga had to dismiss his brilliant Vice-Director, Melnitskaya, a woman of great in- telligence and force of character and a real scholar. She managed to survive by taking an obscure position helping to produce the Encyclopaedia then being completed, but she has probably been liquidated by now. The other women Party members were very jealous of her. She had been a Trotskyist many years before; and her husband, who worked at the Marx Engels Institute, was already under suspicion.
I left the U.S.S.R. before the storm had reached its height, so the fate of most of the men and women I worked with for three and a half years is unknown to me. But by noting the names of those who still write for the publications of the Institute I perceive that the non- Party men have fared best.
At the Institute I knew many decent and intelligent men and women, and there was a somewhat cleaner and less hypocritical atmosphere than in most other places; a little less frantic pushing and denunciation in the careerist battle; a little more interest in work and knowledge; generally a “higher level of culture,” as the Russians would describe it. One never discussed things openly, but one felt with many of one’s co-workers that they knew that one knew that they knew what was the real state of the U.S.S.R. and of research work under Stalin’s tyranny.
I was in and yet not of the life of the Institute. I was a foreigner and English. English and Americans were the most favored foreigners in Moscow, since this was the period of the Popular Front line in Comintern policy, and every effort was being made to conciliate British and American public opinion. I spoke Russian very badly, and this saved me from the necessity of making speeches at meetings-saved me, that is, from the necessity of lying and being a hypocrite. I did my work well; I had some sort of a reputation as an author, and I am naturally of a friendly disposition so that people did not dislike me and were in fact very nice to me. I never sought to acquire a higher position by calumniating others, and I suppose that most of my fellow scientific workers felt I was harmless and might as well be left unmolested.
Upon one occasion when it was reported to me that I had been criticized behind my back, I took the bull by the horns, marched in to Voitinsky, and demanded, in what Jane used to call my best British imperialist manner, for an investigation of the accusation. This reaction was so unexpected and unusual that it took Voitinsky aback, and the attack on me was quashed. One of my friends at the Institute was highly amused. He said that the normal Russian way of dealing with the kind of accusation leveled at me behind my back, would have been to start a counter whispering campaign against the man who had accused me. But my English lack of finesse and method of direct attack was so unexpected as to have disarmed my enemies. However, I fully recognized the fact that only my British passport had enabled me to act in this way; no Russian could have risked it.
The Germans at our Institute, and at the Marx Engels Institute near by where Jane had worked, were in the most unhappy situation. Their very zeal and sincerity got them into trouble. They worked hard to learn the language and to become an integral part of Soviet society. They religiously studied their Pravda and Izvestia and all the Party resolutions. They took the “Party line” seriously, and tried to understand it; and in consequence they often rushed in where angels feared to tread. They were happy and proud to be able to make speeches and to show how thoroughly they understood Party “doctrine.” Since the “Party line” and the interpretation of the sacred texts varied from season to season, this was a very dangerous way to behave. My complete withdrawal from politics, my indifference to the whole sorry game, and my poor knowledge of the Russian language enabled me to sit or stand through the meetings in safety, my thoughts miles away. But the Germans wanted to testify, and this often brought them to disaster. The poor devils still believed and were bewildered, con- fused, and undone when the “Party line” changed overnight, or a new interpretation was given to last month’s Party resolution which they had so carefully studied.
Also the Germans, many of them refugees from fascism, some of them escaped prisoners from German concentration camps, were utterly honest and painfully sincere. Nor had they lost their personal in- tegrity; it was difficult, almost impossible, for them to lie and cheat. I remember the case of one German couple at the Institute. The hus- band was condemned to prison as a Trotskyist. The wife was told she could keep her job if she would publicly denounce him as a Trot- skyist spy, etc., and repudiate him. She protested his innocence and refused to do so. So she was thrown out, to starve. However, there was a rumor that Varga, who was a very humane man, later secured her a job as a factory worker in a remote provincial town.
The spirit of many of the German Communists who had taken refuge in the Soviet Union was broken in time. Looked upon always as potential fascist spies, disliked or envied for their superior knowledge or intelligence or diligence, with no government to protect them, and persuaded or forced to become Russian citizens, they were completely at the mercy of the Soviet Government. Those who had been active revolutionaries in Germany were most suspect, and thousands disappeared during the great purge. Others became as shameless as the Russians in calumniating their comrades and saving themselves by lying, hypocrisy, and false accusations.
It is a singular proof of the comparative humanity of the Nazi government that of the two most prominent leaders of the Communist party in 1933, the one who stayed in Germany is alive although in prison, but the one who escaped to Russia was shot in 1937. I refer here to Thaelmann and to Neumann. Thaelmann may be dead by now, but the Nazis did not shoot him out of hand as the O.G.P.U. shot Neumann and countless other Germans in the great purge.
My work at the Communist Academy kept me in touch with the outside world, kept my intelligence alive, and enabled me to earn a living without selling my soul. It also gave me the opportunity to write lapan’s Feet of Clay, which in the future was to save me and my son from destitution in England. The fact that I was writing a book for publication in England rendered me almost immune from attack, and the writing of it gave me immense satisfaction. My detestation of Japanese tyranny and hypocrisy was second only to my hatred of Soviet tyranny and hypocrisy, and it seemed to me that the world had almost as many illusions about Japan as about Russia. I could not do anything about the Russian illusions, but at least I could tear the veil from the face of the Japanese tyranny. At the Institute I had access to an immense quantity of material and time to do real research work, while the year I had spent in Japan gave me the necessary background. The fact that I had managed to make a contract for the book with Faber and Faber in England before I wrote it, so impressed the Institute that I was allowed to spend a year writing it without interference or supervision. I remember, though, that when it was finished and I had given some chapters to read to one of my few trusted friends, he advised me to take out what I had written concerning out-ward conformity to the state creed and expressions of enthusiastic loyalty under a tyrannical government. It was too obvious, he said, that I really meant the U.S.S.R. when writing about Japan!
THE COMMUNISTS AND their sympathizers, when faced with the disagreeable realities of life in the Soviet Union, have one defense and only one. Since there are no capitalists in the U.S.S.R., and since all land and productive capital is state-owned, Russia is a socialist state. Capitalism equals private ownership of the means of production and distribution; socialism equals state ownership of these things. So if you object to anything in Russia, or to anything which Russia does, you are opposing “socialism.” It is very simple, as simple as the view of the Catholic who may not have relished the Inquisition but condoned and made possible the infliction of tortures by the Roman Church because it was the “Christian” church. To object was not to be a Christian.
If state ownership of land is all one cares about, it would be easy to argue that Egypt under the Pharaohs, or the Congo under Ring Leopold II of the Belgians, was a “socialist” or near socialist state. If one is indifferent to the question, “Who owns the state?” one can count some of the most horrible forms of exploitation of man by man as socialist.
The apologists for the Soviet Union entirely ignore the basic question: who controls, or owns, the state? For them the question of political power apparently ceases to have any importance once the “capitalist system” has been destroyed. This attitude is largely the re- sult of their lack of historical knowledge, and of their having for so long taken for granted the liberties won by their forefathers that they have forgotten what is the basis of liberty. They see no further back than the nineteenth century, and are therefore blinded by their obsession with economic power. They fail to understand that such power is derivative, not primary. The power of the Nomad hordes, who in the past periodically destroyed the river valley civilizations or settled down as conquerors to enjoy the fruits of the labor of the people they had subjected, was clearly not economic but military.
The feudal aristocracy which owned the land in medieval times had taken the land by the sword; and the state, in so far as it existed, was their state by virtue of their military power. Only in the nineteenth century, and then only in western Europe and the United States, can power be said to have been derived from ownership of land and productive capital. Even so, the ownership could not have been maintained if the mass of the people had not consented to the virtual monopoly of the state power by the capitalists and the landowners. Democracy and the capitalist system were compatible because the large majority of citizens consented to the private ownership of the means of production and distribution.
This blindness of the latterday Communists to the all-important question, “Who has the power?” in the U.S.S.R., is all the more remarkable because no one was more vividly aware than Lenin that the question of political power was the primary one. In his State and Revolution, Lenin clearly defines political power as the basis of economic power. Hence, he demonstrates, the necessity for revolution to win control of the state and thereafter set about controlling economic power.
In the writings of Marx and Engels two conditions are held to be essential as the basis for socialist society: public ownership of land and productive capital, and political democracy. The Stalinists have no warrant at all in the doctrine to which they still pay lip service to regard the first condition as the only essential.
In Marx’s and Engels’ view, and in Lenin’s theory, socialism was to be an extension of democracy; it was to make possible real democracy for the first time in history. They never defined “state ownership of the means of production and distribution” as socialism, as do their latter-day “disciples.” For them communal ownership would be socialism; and communal ownership was impossible without political democracy. Socialism was to be a society of the free and equal because in establishing it the proletariat was to emancipate all mankind, not merely itself. Democracy in capitalist society could never, in their view, be real democracy because the bourgeoisie monopolized economic power. Substitute collective for individual ownership of land and productive capital, and democracy would become a reality. Socialism was to be an extension of civilized values, not a denial of them.
The transformation of capitalist into socialist society, according to Marx, was to come about as the consequence of the ever-increasing concentration of capital ownership and the consequent ruin of the middle classes, that is to say their “proletarianization.” The working class would come to include the great majority of mankind; and its seizure of political power and establishment of its dictatorship was to mean the dictatorship of the great majority over the small minority of “exploiters.” This “dictatorship” would need to be exercised only for a short time, since the process of suppressing the small minority of capitalists would be quick and easy. This once accomplished, the whole people would collectively own the land and capital, and collectively administer their property. The state as an instrument of coercion would cease to be necessary and would “wither away.”
Lenin expressed this concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat simply and unequivocally in the following passage in his State and Revolution:
In capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretchedly false: a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will, for the first time, create democracy for the people, for the majority, in addition to the necessary suppression of the minority-the exploiters. . . .
Under capitalism we have a state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another, and of the majority by the minority, at that. Naturally the successful discharge of such a task as the systematic suppression of the ex- ploited majority by the exploiting minority calls for the greatest ferocity and savagery in the work of suppression, it calls for seas of blood through which mankind has to wade in slavery, serfdom and wage labor.
Furthermore during the transition from capitalism to communism, suppression is still necessary; but it is suppression of the exploiting minority by the exploited majority. A special apparatus, a special machine for suppression, the State, is still necessary, but this is now a transitory state; it is no longer a state in the proper sense; for the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy, simple, natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage laborers, and it will cost mankind far less. This is compatible with the diflusion of demomacy among szich an overwhelming majority of the population that the need for a special machine of suppression will begin to disappear.
It is abundantly clear from all their writings that Marx and Engels never for a moment conceived of the future socialist society as other than a democracy, and would have recoiled in horror at the travesty of socialism in the U.S.S.R. today. Lenin, himself, when faced with the problem of what to do in a country like Russia where the proletariat was only a small minority, and the peasantry constituted the huge majority, preferred to call the new system in the U.S.S.R. state capitalism, not socialism. Stalin, who, to judge from his words and actions, must consider Marx and Engels as “rotten Western liberals,” has not scrupled to call the U.S.S.R. a socialist state since 1935, although it is the most perfect example of a state in which an “ex- ploiting minority” uses the “greatest ferocity and savagery in suppressing the exploited majority.”
Since, according to Marx and Engels, socialism meant public own- ership of land and capital phs political democracy, they specified that the people’s control of the state was not to mean merely the right to elect representatives to govern them, but also the right themselves to share in the administration of industry, agriculture, and trade. The workers, they wrote, once having won the political power, would smash the old bureaucratic apparatus and put in its place a new one consisting of workers and employees. The measures to be taken to prevent the degeneration of the new officials into a bureaucracy were to be the following:
- Election and recall at any time.
- Payment no higher than that of the workers.
- Control and superintendence by all so that all shall become bureaucrats for a time and therefore no one can become a bureaucrat.
Marx and Engels were, in fact, not so blind to future dangers as one would suppose in listening to the Stalinists. They clearly appreciated the fact that unless the workers had the power to deprive the oflicials of their jobs (the recall) the latter might have little concern for the interests of the people.
Lenin’s device of the Party maximum, abolished by Stalin, was meant to ensure that at least the second of Marx’s premises should be adhered to. At the beginning he also tried to institute workers’ control in industry, but when it was found that this produced anarchy he abandoned it, for he never let theory stand in the way of practical politics.
In general it is obvious that the whole Marxist conception of socialism was unrealizable in Russia from the beginning, since it was a backward agrarian country, since the proletariat was the minority, not the majority, and since even that minority were not unanimously in favor of socialism. As Marx had stated, “law can never be higher than the economic structure and the cultural level conditioned by it.”
It is curious today to read what Lenin wrote in 1918 of the transformation of monopoly capitalism into state capitalism, and of the degeneration of Marxism. His words are so closely applicable to what has occurred in the U.S.S.R. under Stalin’s leadership that they sound almost prophetic. Yet Lenin could not see that he was himself laying the foundation of the “monstrous oppression of the masses of the toilers by the State” which he saw developing in other countries during the World War. “The advanced countries,” he wrote, “are being converted into military convict prisons for the workers.” . . . The trend to socialism in words, and chauvinism in deeds. . . is distinguished by the base, servile adaptation of the “leaders” of “socialism” to the in- terests of “their state.” What he writes of Marxism as interpreted by the Social Democrats, whom he scorned, was to prove far more true of the Bolshevik party which he was leading:
What is now happening to Marx’s doctrine has in the course of history often happened to the doctrines of other revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation -. . . After the death [of great revolutionaries] attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to speak, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating the revolutionary doctrine of its content, vulgarizing it and blunting its revolutionary edge.
“The revolutionary soul of Marxist doctrine,” he writes further on, “is obliterated and distorted.” (State and Revohtion, 1918.)
Yet Lenin never dreamed that this is precisely what would happen to himself. He has been canonized, and his embalmed body lying in the Red Square in Moscow is an icon for the duping of the oppressed masses in the cause of whose emancipation and enlightenment Lenin gave his life. Such are the ironies of history.
According to Engels, the state is a product of irreconcilable class antagonisms. In order that the classes with conflicting economic interests “might not consume themselves and society in sterile struggle, a power apparently above society became necessary for the purpose of moderating the conflict. . . and this power, arising out of society, but placing itself above it, and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state.” The existence of the state, says Lenin (following Marx and Engels) proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.
Yet Stalin, twisting Marxist doctrine out of all recognition, insists that the U.S.S.R. is already a classless society although the state has by no means “withered away” but become stronger than in any country at any time in history.
If one treats the writings of Marx and Engels, and particularly those of Engels, not as revealing absolute truths for all time, as the “Marxists” do, but as penetrating analyses of developments in the world of their time, much truth is to be found in them. Their method of analysis retains value and can be used as a tool to dig out the truth of our own times. Economic and political developments since the nineteenth century render their conclusions inadequate or incorrect, but the bases of their analysis are often correct.
Engels, writing at the end of the century, could prescribe that “periods occur when the warring classes are so nearly balanced that the state power ostensibly appearing as a mediator, acquires, for the moment, a certain independence in relation to both.” Such, he per- ceived, were the absolute monarchies of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Bismarck regime in Germany.
But Marx and Engels lived too soon to foresee the growth of the great new middle class of executives, professional men, technicians, etc., and the consequent shrinkage in the relative numbers of the proletariat in capitalist society. Postwar Europe, in particular Germany, saw the development of society into a stage where “the warring classes” became nearly balanced, and where the state power therefore could acquire independence in relation to all classes. Absolute monarchy has returned to the world once more, only now the monarch is called a Fuehrer or a Vozhd or a Duce. What again Marx and Engels could not know was that modern science would give to the absolute rulers of the twentieth century coercive powers beyond the dreams of the old absolute monarchs. The machine gun and the airplane, the radio and the automobile, knowledge of psychology in breaking the human spirit and annihilating courage, make it possible for Stalin to maintain his power even when all classes are opposed to his rule. The same is true to a lesser degree in the case of Hitler. The German Fuehrer, enjoying more popular support, does not have to resort to the use of terror to the same extent as Stalin; but both their governments are based on force, not on consent and law.
As the quotation given above shows, Engels did perceive that the government of a country (the state power) might acquire independence of all the classes. He qualified this by inserting “for the moment”; but Engels could not know what great power science was soon to put into the hands of a minority. Most of our present-day Communists have, of course, never read Marx and Engels, although they may have learned a few quotations from the selected and expurgated versions of their works which the Great Father in the Kremlin provides for his obedient children. Thus they are blind to possibilities which Marx and Engels had in fact dimly perceived. Stalinists will insist that Stalin’s dictatorship must be one of the proletariat because it ob- viously isn’t one of any other class. They think that no government can be other than a class government. They think there have been in the past only two kinds of society: the feudal and the capitalist. They know nothing of the ancient civilizations of Egypt and China, of that “Asiatic system” to which Marx directed passing attention: the system whereby a priesthood or a bureaucracy owned the state and took a profit from the labor of the people, not as a landowning military aristocracy, not as a “capitalist class,” but as the administrators -i.e., as the government. The parallel with Soviet Russia is obvious, and it is not surprising that when a bright young man working at the Marx Engels Institute in Moscow proposed doing a thesis on Marx’s writings concerning “The Asiatic System” he was stopped by the authorities.
The ownership, or control, of all means of subsistence by the state enables the dictator to wield a power over the lives of men undreamed of in past history and unforeseeable by Marx and Engels. Moreover, they and Lenin himself were essentially humanitarian, and their age was an age when moral values were held even by those who decried them, or questioned their validity, or showed up their inadequacy. An amoral world, in which no kind of humanitarian or moral scruple held the hand of the ruler, was something beyond their ken. Lenin was so blind to the consequences of his own action in overthrowing the rule of law and smashing “bourgeois” standards of conduct, that hc could confidently write as follows:
Freed from capitalist slavery . . . people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social life that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copybook maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without compulsion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for compulsion which is called the State.
In this passage Lenin reveals himself almost as naive an idealist as Rousseau, and entirely imperceptive of the fact that his party was throwing out not only the flower of bourgeois civilization but also the root of all civilization. He himself was so thoroughly civilized, SO imbued with the Western world’s ideals of personal integrity, honesty, tolerance of opposition, and regard for truth, that he never realized that the majority of his compatriots were not thus conditioned to observation of the “elementary rules of social life.” He was aware before his death that Stalin was not to be trusted to observe these elementary rules, but he did not realize that Stalin mirrored in grossest form the barbaric nature of the Russian people and would therefore be the man most likely to succeed him.
It is, however, not only in the U.S.S.R. that the foundations of civilization have been weakened if not destroyed. The World War dealt a mortal blow to the moral standards which, although often sinned against and never fully lived up to, had not before been denied in toto even by the “intellectuals” who should have been their stanchest defenders.
An immense change has come over Europe since the World War, The origins of that change lie not in the war itself but in the conditions which led to the war. The denial by the European peoples of their own accepted ethical standards in their dealings with the colored people of Asia and Africa, combined with their failure to institute social control of production and distribution, led to imperialist expansion by the strong powers in the search for markets, raw materials, and secure fields for foreign investment. Imperialist rivalry led to the first World War, which gave the “barbarians in our midst” their chance to overthrow the civilized values of Western civilization in Europe itself. As Leonard Woolf has expressed it in his Barbarians at the Gate:
All the life and energy which might have gone to developing civilisation and to making it, spiritually and materially, deep-rooted in society, were diverted into a civil war within the heart of European civilisation. This was the opportunity for which all the barbarians in our midst, unconsciously and instinctively, had been waiting. They flung themselves joyfully into the class war on one side or the other. They made the Boer War and Mafeking day. They sent Dreyfuss to Devil’s Island and determined to keep him there, even though the heavens fall, for that is the justice of barbarism. They put on shining armour in Germany and sent the Panther to Agadir, and beat the cobbler in Alsace. They hanged the inhabitants of Devshane. They depopulated a considerable area of the Congo. They burnt the Winter Palace in Peking. They massacred the workmen before the Winter Palace in Petersburg. And then at last they made the World War.
Up to the World War the moral standards of civilization-standards which have come down to us from the City States of Greece and Rome, standards which have at times been denied in part and at times applied more fully, standards which the Christian Church for all its shortcomings preserved as an ideal in the anarchic world of the Dark Ages, standards which are in fact the basis of our civilization-were not completely overthrown.
They were preserved, because the acts of aggression committed against weaker peoples were committed far away, and because the nations whose governments perpetrated them upon Africans and Asiatics neither saw nor heard what was being done. Those directly responsible evolved a theory that they were civilizing savages, and “bearing the white man’s burden” when they founded colonial empires for the profit and glory of the motherland. As yet the methods tried out upon savages by the savages in our midst who thought themselves civilizers were not applied to Europeans except to some extent in eastern Europe. But from 1914 onwards, the standards formerly held in abeyance only in Africa and Asia, were thrown over in Europe as well. The World War brutalized us all, drove those who had suffered most back to the law of the jungle, and conditioned everyone to atrocities. Today methods of government tried out upon the Negro and the Indian are being used by Hitler upon the weaker peoples of Europe, and by Stalin upon his own people.
It is perhaps not so much in the greater amount of cruelty, persecution, savagery, and suffering in the postwar and prewar worlds, as in the attitude of many Europeans and Americans to these phenomena that the advance of barbarism is to be measured. Before the war, cases of persecution, massacre, cruelty, and violence aroused great protest when exposed in the Press or in parliaments. Even the treatment of, and attitude toward, non-white peoples was diminishing in ruthlessness. Today little protest is made except when such acts are perpetrated by those we dislike or fear. Nazi persecution of the Jews arouses great excitement and is condemned by the outside world because Germany is feared. But Stalin’s massacre of Kulaks, intellectuals, socialists, and of all who challenge his supreme power, has been condoned and excused, even praised, by men who call themselves liberals, socialists, progressives. Absolute standards of behavior by governments and people have been thrown over. Ends justify means, however vague and uncertain the ends and however terrible the means. If you have a religious faith in the end, all means are held to be justified. There is no longer any standard of absolute values because life itself has taught the people to think either that the old standards are a sham or that they are no longer valid in the present state of the world.
Both Stalin and Hitler have thrown out root and branch those ideals of liberty, justice, and humanity and those standards of honest and decent behavior between man and man which are the basis of civilized life-the life of the citizen as opposed to the savage. Stalin has done it in the name of a class, Hitler in the name of a race-that is the only difference. Hatred, fear, self-preservation, the lust for power, have become the rule of life in the Soviet Union far more completely than in Nazi Germany. But Stalin’s Russia, at least until 1939, did not menace the security of the Western world, whereas Hitler’s aim being a German empire, which would threaten Britain, France, and even the United States, the persecution of Jews was condemned. The fact that it is fear, not sympathy for the oppressed, which rules us, is proved by both the British Empire and the United States having refused to allow the persecuted Jews to enter their vast territories in anything but insignificant numbers.
Stalin, up to 1939, menaced no one but his own subjects. Therefore the “liquidation of the Kulaks,” the condemnation of the intellectuals to concentration camps, the purge of rg$-$3 which delivered fresh millions of victims to the prison camps, were regarded either with indifference, or with positive approval.
The difference was strikingly illustrated for me by a conversation I had in New York early in 1939 with Robert Dell, the well-known “liberal” English journalist. He is violently anti-Nazi, and also anti- German. After a long dissertation he had made about the Nazi persecutions and the iniquity of the Munich settlement, I asked him whether he felt the same way about the Soviet Government. “The Soviet Government!” he exclaimed. “Of course not!”
“Well,” I said, “what about Stalin’s liquidation of the Kulaks? That was a massacre on a far larger scale than anything which has occurred in Germany.”
“Oh,” he said, “that. You mean the peasants who resisted collectivization. How can you make such a comparison?”
It is this lack of any moral standard which must lead the world to barbarism unless we can adapt and revitalize the old civilized values to fit the changed condition of the world.
For many “liberals” of the Robert Dell, New Republic, Nation type, Stalin’s massacres were excusable, because they believed Soviet Russia to be a socialist state. Only fascist massacres were wicked.
The result of the Bolshevik exposure of the shams of capitalist society, of the sham of “bourgeois democracy,” and of the iniquities perpetrated against the colonial peoples has not been to substitute the reality of liberty and civilized values for the sham, but to destroy those values altogether. Tell the ordinary man and woman that capitalist justice is a mockery, that representative government cloaks merely a capitalist dictatorship, that social services are mere sops to the dispossessed to ward off revolution, that the so-called Christian standards of personal behavior are merely devices to keep the oppressed submissive and teach them that in the class war lies, cheating, and cruelty are not only permissible but necessary if freedom is to be won; and the result must be barbarism and the death of freedom.
It is fruitless to argue that all that has occurred in Russia since 1917 was due to historical backwardness. It is no doubt true, as Corki said, that a people “tutored for centuries with blows of the fists, with rods and whips, cannot have a tender heart,” and that “you cannot expect justice from those who have never known it.” But it may also be true that only such a people will have the necessary contempt for civilized values to carry through a violent class war of the Bolshevik type. The tragedy of the Social Democrats, as distinct from that of the Communists, was that they waited for the day prophesied by Marx, which could never dawn: the day when the working class would have the conviction, the will, the numbers, and the strength to overthrow capitalism peacefully, and establish the socialist commonwealth.
Lenin was determined upon social revolution whether or not the people wanted it; determined that the Bolshevik party should dictate to the Russian working class what it should have, because he was convinced of the infallibility of his own doctrine. Only in Russia were the people barbarous enough and ignorant enough to be thus driven; only in Russia of the countries of Europe were there sufficient socialist intellectuals prepared to lead a ruthless, intolerant, cruel, and liberty- destroying revolution in the name of liberty, humanity, tolerance, and social justice; prepared to deny democratic rights even to those in whose name the dictatorship was established and to sacrifice the content of socialism for its outward appearance.
It may be true that it was Russian “barbarism,” not Bolshevik theory, which transformed the Soviet state into the antithesis of what socialists the world over had meant by socialism; but it is no less true that Russian “barbarism” alone made the Bolshevik Revolution possible.
A revolution is of necessity brutal, cruel, violent, and indiscriminating as between the just and the unjust; it causes for a long time far more misery and injustice than the system it destroys. It suspends the rule of law and the standards of civilized behavior far more completely than wars between nations, though perhaps not more completely than religious wars. Prisoners are not taken, the wounded are not succored, reprisals are inflicted on the wives and children of the class enemy, men fight each other to the death in the belief that the enemy is altogether vile. As Lenin expressed it, “barbarism must be combated by barbarism.”
So long as a revolution is quick, and the forces it releases strong enough to overcome the old state power and destroy the old economic and social system without much difficulty, civilized values can survive. The ideals of social justice, liberty, and humanitarian behavior need not then be overthrown, but only temporarily disregarded. The “easy suppression” of the “exploiting minority” was what Marx and Engels had envisaged by the “proletarian revolution” of the future.
But in Russia the social forces released by the Bolshevik Revolution were too weak to conquer, and the revolutionary party had too little social support to rule by consent. Russia was a peasant country, and the working class in whose name the dictatorship was established had many ties with the village, and in general, except for a small minority, was uncultured, uneducated, unaccustomed to responsibility. The Bolshevik party did not trust even the working class, and it therefore began at once to take all real power away from those organs of popular rule, the Soviets. Similarly it deprived the trade-unions of all power. The workers were treated as children who could not know what was best for them and must be led, disciplined, and cheated. Lenin, the wise and humane father, reasoned with them, and led them. Stalin, the Caucasian stepfather of the Russian proletariat, used force naked and unashamed to make them obey his will. Not even Lenin’s genius could for long have persuaded the Russian people to follow a path not of their own choosing. Lenin had not envisaged the terror as a permanent instrument of government, but even he had found it expedient to prolong its use after the cessation of civil war.
Government by coercion was in fact essential if the U.S.S.R. were to be kept on the straight road to “socialism” and not wander off along the primrose path of free enterprise, peasant proprietorship, and enjoyment of the fruits of their toil by workers and peasants alike. If, in a word, Russia were not to follow the natural line of development to capitalism once feudalism had been liquidated. Since the peasants wanted only to possess the land in peace and work for their own profit, and since the workers were apt to inquire, “What did we fight for?” when told they must pull their belts even tighter and forego the necessities of life to finance industrialization, peasants and workers alike had continually to be coerced, threatened, terrorized into submitting to the burdens imposed upon them by the Party dictatorship. Conditions for government by consent continued to be absent. The rule of violence temporarily necessary during the revolution became permanent since the Bolsheviks were not “going along with” the tide of popular desires but against it, not releasing productive forces from the bonds of an outworn social economic system, but attempting to prove the incorrectness of Marx’s materialist interpretation of history. They were seeking in effect to prove that an idea can force the material world to take its image, and to conjure into existence an economic and social system which, according to Marxist theory, could only exist in an advanced industrialized country. Since such a country did not exist in Russia, the Bolsheviks would create it even if they had to kill, imprison, and starve millions of workers and peasants in order to do so.
Thus the barbarous, repressive, cruel, and undemocratic methods of ensuring order and obedience, which can be held justified during the seizure of power by revolutionary means, were continued and from year to year intensified. The Soviet regime was stabilized as an authoritarian dictatorship, first of the party, then of one man. The mass of the people were deprived of all rights, judicial, political, eco- nomic. There is no social or political restraint of any kind upon the dictator and his party. He holds power by armed force, and can be deprived of it only by an insurrection. Lenin had set the goal of a “democratic” dictatorship of the workers and peasants, believing that he would be able to persuade the people to go in the direction he considered desirable. Under Stalin there was no longer even an attempt at persuasion; coercion became the systematized method of government.
In a fine passage Boris Souvarine 20 has shown the consequences of the denial of democracy in Russia:
Bolshevism could not escape the psychosis of systematised murder. At the end of the Civil War it was soaked in it. Its principles, prac- tise, institutions, and customs had been turned into new channels by the weight of the calamities it had endured. It was its misfortune rather than its fault. There is a remarkable disparity between Bolshevism conservative and Bolshevism triumphant. But in passing from “war communism” to communism in peace, the chosen few owed it to their doctrine, their culture, their socialist past and their revolutionary present, to move into the “more humane path” of which Lenin spoke. To renounce that path by adopting the dictatorship in opposition to democracy, instead of raising themselves to the height of a synthesis, was to compromise the future irremediably and to make the boldest effort abortive. But by following out their own programme the Bolsheviks with the aid of the workers of other countries, could have made a reality of this Socialist Federal Republic of Soviets, which was neither republican, nor socialist, nor federal, and could have revived the Soviets which had virtually ceased to exist. Their impotence to attune speech and action, theory and practise, confirmed the truth of a prophetic saying of Rosa Luxemburg’s :
“In Russia the problem may be posed: it cannot be resolved.”
The Bolshevik argument is that if they had allowed the Soviets to function as the government of the country, if, that is to say, they had made a reality of Soviet democracy, the “bourgeois elements” would have won control, In other words, that, since the country was predominantly agricultural, its natural path, once the peasants had got the land, was toward capitalism. The party dictatorship was established to break the waves of historical necessity. Yet, since the state controlled the “commanding heights,” banking and large-scale industry, and since the Soviet election system gave weight to the industrial workers far greater than their actual numbers, there was no very real danger of such a development. Never in history have scattered peasant households been a match for the towns. What the Bolshevik leaders were really afraid of was not a return to capitalism but their own loss of power. A democratic Soviet Russia would have had no need of them except insofar as they were intelligent and able beyond other Russians. Their privileged positions would have depended on merit, not upon their past investment in the revolution.
In fact the best revolutionary elements inside and outside the Communist party, those who had knowledge and ability and were prepared to work, not merely talk, for their living, were absorbed into the minor administrative posts and as engineers, technicians, etc. Unfortunately it was the incompetent, the “uncultured,” who became the high Party bureaucrats and thus controlled state policy; and for them it was vital to preserve the Party dictatorship. Again, had the Bolshevik leaders not been doctrinaires, had they shared Lenin’s common sense and his practical genius, they might have realized that a semi- socialist Russia governed by consent was infinitely more progressive and would offer a far more attractive example to the workers of the world, than a Russia outwardly completely socialist, and inwardly rotted to the core by the denial of political liberty and the poison of terrorism. “What we gain in a free way is better than twice so much in a forced, and will be more truly ours and our posterities’.” Cromwell’s dictum, reflecting as it does the whole Protestant tradition of the supremacy of the individual conscience, was the antithesis of the Catholic authoritarianism which Communists and Nazis alike have adapted to their own ends.
“Socialism” without political democracy is a tragic caricature of the society which Socialists have striven to create for a century. Stalin’s “socialist state” merely intensifies and carries to hitherto unheardof lengths the evils of capitalism, without its compensations: wage slavery, economic anarchy in spite of the pretense of planning, poverty in the midst of plenty, extreme social inequalities, even imperialist war. And to set against these neither political nor judicial liberty, nor the rule of law, nor the humanitarianism which to some extent modifies the “weak to the wall” theory of capitalist society.
Soviet democracy did not perish without a struggle. There was a minority of “class-conscious workers” who were not prepared to see the workers’ power become a sham, and the working class reduced to the state of helots of the communist bureaucracy.
In 1920 there were many strikes in Leningrad, and workers’ meetings demanded that they be given the “bread and liberty” which the Bolsheviks had promised. The revolt of the workers and peasants against the Communist party reached its height and was then extinguished when the Kronstadt sailors rebelled. This was the last occasion upon which those who had given power to the Bolsheviks dared to insist that the latter should implement their own October program, and put the Soviet Constitution into operation. After Kronstadt the O.G.P.U. prevented any repetition of such an occurrence. In the spring of 1921the sailors of Kronstadt passed a resolution demanding: free election to the Soviets; liberty of speech; liberty of the press for workers and peasants, Left Socialists, anarchists, and trade-unionists; liberation of workers and peasants held as political prisoners; abolition of the privileges of the Communist party; equal rations for all workers; the right of non-profiteering peasants and artisans to sell their products.
Communists like to tell the story about the American who was jailed during the World War for reciting the Declaration of Independ- ence, yet when Zinoviev imprisoned the leaders of the Kronstadt sailors and Trotsky bombarded the sailors themselves, they were treat- ing as “counter-revolutionaries” those who repeated the Bolshevik pro- gram of October. However, neither Lenin nor Trotsky enjoyed what they had felt themselves forced to do. They did not glory in it as Stalin was to glory ten years later when he crushed the peasants, who, like the Kronstadt sailors, had made the mistake of thinking that the Bolshevik program of October 1917 was sincerely meant. Whereas Stalin in the future would simply liquidate popular opposition, Lenin bowed to it. The red light of warning from Kronstadt caused him to make a complete volte face. Rather than again turn the guns of the Revolution upon its sons, he instituted the New Economic Policy.
The trouble for Lenin’s successors was that he had said such different and even contradictory things at different times. This meant that he learned from experience and never held himself bound by a rigid theory; but in the struggle for the succession after his death, his various pronouncements were quoted as holy writ, and both the Left and Right could with some justification claim that tlzeir policy was “Leninism.” At one moment Lenin represented the N.E.P. as a strategic retreat, at another as a permanent retreat. He maintained in one place that war communism was an aberration imposed by the Civil War and the breakdown of production; at another he stated that it was a mistake.
Our attempt to attain communism straightway has cost us a more serious defeat than all those inflicted upon us by Kolchak, Deniken and Pilsudski. . . . We have been defeated in our attempt to attain socialism by assault.
Most of the evidence goes to show that Lenin viewed N.E.P. as a “retreat toward state capitalism”; not a breathing space before the renewed “assault” to attain socialism, but the only possible line of policy to be pursued if the world revolution were indefinitely delayed. “If,” he wrote, “revolution is delayed in Germany, we shall have to study German state capitalism, to imitate it as best we can, not to be afraid of dictatorial measures to hasten the assimilation by barbaric Russia of Western civilization and not shrink from barbarous methods to fight barbarism.” Stalin could find much comfort and support in these words, although he, unlike Lenin, was not honest enough to call the system “state capitalism” but preferred to debase the word socialism by applying it to his totalitarian tyranny.
The fact of the matter was that Lenin never conceived of the Bolshevik party’s becoming an instrument of a savage and barbarous Asiatic despotism. He did not envisage what “barbarous methods” could mean in the mind of a Stalin. Lenin thought in western and northern European terms, and with western European precepts in his mind. But giving such political precepts to the Russians was as destructive of civilization as giving modern arms to savages and teaching them how to use them. Only those for whom the rule of law is instinctive can afford to discredit the rule of law, not nations long ruled by force. State capitalism for Lenin meant, as he clearly stated, an advance over feudalism, and a capitalism which could and should be admitted because it was indispensable for the peasants. His argument ran: An economic alliance with the peasantry is necessary in Russia unless there is revolution in other countries, because only agreement with the peasants can maintain the socialist revolution. The only way to accomplish this alliance is to allow freedom of trade. This means giving rights and liberties to capitalism. But there is nothing else to be done. If we keep the party pure, develop electricity and hold the commanding heights, we shall be ready to switch over to socialism if and when the “world revolution” occurs, and to aid that revolution at the outset.
Before his death Lenin was probably aware that the aim of his whole life, the Bolshevik party and its socialist ideal, were being drowned in Russian barbarism. In 1922, when he temporarily recovered from his paralytic stroke, he exclaimed, “We are living in a sea of illegality.” The general culture of the Russian middle classes, he said, was “inconsiderable and wretched,” but in any case “greater than that of our responsible Communists.” The Russians use the word culture in a far wider sense than we do. It means education, civilized behavior, and scientific knowledge. Lenin perceived that Russia was reverting to type, and referred to the state machine as “borrowed from Tsarism and barely touched by the Soviet world.” He even foresaw Stalin’s later “great Russion chauvinism” and castigated him for his treatment of the Georgians. On that occasion he said that he was disgusted by Stalin’s brutality and remarked that “Russians by adoption are worse than native Russians when they become chauvinists.” Lenin’s last efforts to stem the tide which was sweeping the Russian workers toward a tyranny far more oppressive than that of the Tsars were unavailing. He could not command the waves to retire. He died with some fore- knowledge of what was to come, but still hoping that Trotsky would be able to curb Stalin and remedy the abuses which he spent his last breath in denouncing.
When I saw Lenin’s embalmed body in the Red Square it seemed to me that his lips were set in a sardonic and bitter smile. In his last hours he had no God to whom to cry, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” but his expression suggests the realization that his life’s work had borne a bitter and unwholesome fruit.
Long before the Bolshevik Revolution, the issue of democratic versus authoritarian socialism had been fought out. The Mensheviks (minority) in the Social Democratic party had opposed Lenin’s conception of a party of professional revolutionaries linked with the working class, not part of it. The Mensheviks in Russia and the Social Democratic par- ties in other countries being essentially European in thought and be- havior, had conceived of the social revolution, as Marx and Engels had conceived of it-as coming when the working class perceived its necessity and desirability. They saw no value in a movement of professional revolutionaries who would impose socialism whether the working class wanted it or not. Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin’s most brilliant opponent, wrote from her German prison in 1919 that the proletariat must learn by its own experience, and that the mistakes committed by a revolutionary working-class movement were historically more valuable than the infallibility of any “Central Committee of the Party” or of one man. Hers was the Protestant tradition of the northern European, and her words echo those of Cromwell’s, which I have already cited: “What we gain in a free way is better than twice so much in a forced, and will be more truly ours and our posterities’.”
Trotsky in the early years had, like Rosa Luxemburg, opposed Lenin’s conception of a party of professional revolutionaries linked with the organizations of the working class. He had said that Lenin’s conception of the Social Democratic party as the vanguard of the working class would lead not to a dictatorship of the proletariat, but to one otter the proletariat. He had even foreseen that “the apparatus of the party substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the apparatus and finally the dictator substitutes himself for the central committee.” But Trotsky, who before 1917 had endeavored to bring about unity between the two wings of Social Democracy, the Bolshevik authoritarians and the Menshevik democrats, joined Lenin after the February Revolution and accepted Lenin’s views on the organization of the Party. Tragically enough for the future of socialism, Trotsky ceased to believe in Trotskyism at the critical historical moment, and even after Lenin’s death refused to recognize that he had been right in his youth and Lenin wrong. True that he had fought against Stalin for inter-Party democracy; but he refused to save himself, and perhaps also to save socialism, by not appealing to the working class over the head of the Party. He stubbornly adhered to Lenin’s conception of the Party as the vanguard of the working class even when the Party apparatus had been captured by Stalin, and the Party was becoming one of counter-revolutionary bureaucrats. He would not trust the revolution to the mass of the workers by putting himself at their head to destroy the corrupted and tyrannical Party bureaucracy. 21
It was Plekhanov, the father of Russian social democracy, and the man whom Lenin himself had reverenced next to Marx and Engels, who back in 1907prophesied most exactly what Lenin’s policy would lead to :
At the bitter end, everything will revolve around one man, who will ex providentia unite all powers in himself.
This is precisely what happened in the U.S.S.R., and Lenin must be adjudged responsible before the bar of history equally with Stalin. He sought to challenge the laws of his own god, historical materialism; he thought he would be able to make men behave like demigods and thus create a world in the image of his ideal. Socialism was his aim, and he was determined to achieve it by any means-suiting his political theory to circumstances, dropping one method to adopt another as each in turn proved impracticable.
Having declared first for a “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” exercised through the Soviets, he abandoned this for the dictatorship of the proletariat when the peasants proved recalcitrant to the Bolshevik will. Later he frankly declared, “Yes, dictatorship of a single party, and we will not yield an inch.” His fundamental thesis of 1917 was abandoned-Soviet democracy, abolition of the secret police, freedom of the press. Being honest, Lenin did not camouflage what he was doing. He admitted the existence of the dictatorship of the Party when he stated that the proletariat was organized in the Soviets directed by the Bolshevik party. He frankly acknowledged that “all the committees of the great majority of the trade-unions are composed of Communists and merely carry out Party instructions,” and did not pretend that these committees had been freely elected by the workers. He even admitted that the Party itself did not dictate, but was dictated to by its Central Committee of 19, and more precisely, by its smaller committee, the Politbureau. 22 He admitted that the U.S.S.R. was ruled by an “oligarchy” and he would probably have been prepared to admit that “everything revolved around one man.”
Lenin himself was never corrupted by power. He preferred to be primus inter pares and to persuade, not to coerce by violence. Again and again, at the most critical moments, he would stop to argue and persuade his followers, and he never thought of expelling and shooting the Communists who opposed him. But the fact that Lenin himself was perhaps a little more than human does not excuse him for ignoring the nature of human beings. Everything was prepared for the tyrant when he died; he himself (or the force of circumstances which drove him once he had chosen his path) had laid the foundations for Stalin’s one-man despotism.
It is indeed astonishing that Lenin, who so clearly analyzed the workings of history as regards the outside world, failed to perceive that they must also apply to Soviet Russia. It may be thought that, having seen the drift toward oligarchy, he was preparing to stem it, and would have done so had he not died. But Lenin could no more hold back the tides which were engulfing his doctrines and his purpose than Prometheus could withstand Zeus. Chained to the rock of men’s weaknesses, fears, greed, and ambition, humanity still suffers the tortures imposed by those who have power.
Dictatorial government means a government based on force, and unrestricted by law in its dealings with the people. It is essentially the same type of government as an absolute monarchy, whatever its origins and its professions. The Party dictatorship which was originally conceived of as the dictatorship of the “vanguard of the proletariat,” formed to destroy capitalism, has become a personal despotism, unrestricted by law in its relations with the working class as in its relations with the peasantry. But no despot of old could dream of wielding such absolute power over the lives and thoughts of men as Stalin, for he is not only head of the State and of the “Church,” but also the super trust magnate, owner of all land and capital, able by a nod to deprive men not only of the right to live, but also of the right to work. The feudal overlord had similar power, but in the Middle Ages no one had such weapons of coercion and oppression at his disposal as those wielded by Stalin and those whom Souvarine terms the “boyars of the bureaucracy.” The efficiency of the means of destruction and the impossibility of producing modern armaments except in large factories and with access to the raw materials which the state owns, plus the rapidity of communication and transport, give the dictator of the twentieth century powers undreamed of by the absolute monarchs of the past, or by the feudal aristocracy of the Middle Ages.
There is a close analogy between medieval feudalism and the modern industrial feudalism of Russia and Germany. The power of the feudal aristocracy depended on its monopoly of armed force. So long as the knight in armor could lord it over everyone else-i.e., so long as arms were too expensive for the majority of the population to own them- the landed aristocracy had the power. With the development of archery, and the victory at Crècy and Agincourt of English yeomen armed with bows over France’s mail-clad chivalry, the “bourgeoisie” began to challenge the feudal aristocracy. With the invention of firearms the feudal aristocracy was doomed. The era of democracy was dawning. But with the advance of science and the development of the gigantic, expensive, and complicated armaments of our age, the democratic sun is sinking. It is no longer possible for “the people” to overthrow the tyrant with rifles and pistols, or for the workers to defend themselves behind street barricades. Governments now dispose of means of coercion which cannot be withstood by the people, even if a large majority wish to destroy the government. Airplanes, machine guns, tanks, cannot be manufactured in secret, nor used by untrained men. Moreover, since the state owns all the means of subsistence, there is no economic basis from which to prepare an insurrection. Dissident members of the ruling group who in past ages assisted or even led the forces opposed to the old order, are today as helpless as the majority of the people.
It would seem that today a small group can keep a whole people in subjection if it is ruthless enough, in much the same way as the imperialist powers have been able to keep the millions of Africa and Asia in subjection. Only an external force or the army and secret police can overthrow the dictator. Hence the special privileges given by the dictator to these forces upon whom the maintenance of his power depends. A new aristocracy, part military, part “clerical” (the “theoreticians” and administrators who are Party members), is being created in Russia in this age of totalitarianism.
As regards the “withering away of the state,” one might argue that, in a sense quite contrary to what Marx and Engels imagined, the state has disappeared in Russia. In place of the state power founded on law, there is a government of gangsters who rule and oppress the whole people. There is no law, for the government arbitrarily decides what “the law” is to be; there is no sanctity of contract, for the people have learned from bitter experience that the Soviet Government’s promises are worthless as the paper they are written on-good paper being a scarcity commodity in Russia. There is no security, for the peasant can be thrown out of his house and sent to a concentration camp, and the worker deprived of his job, his room, and his food, at three days’ notice, ali without “due process of law.” In fact, none of the functions of the state are performed in the U.S.S.R. except the function of repression, and this repression is arbitrary, not according to law. There is no more state, in the original Greek sense, than in a jungle. All that is left of it is the “apparatus of suppression” of the majority by a small minority.
WHEN THE CARNAGE and wreckage of forced collectivization had been cleared away, there developed in the U.S.S.R. an agrarian system similar in many respects to that of the Middle Ages in western Europe. The great majority of the peasants are perforce members of the collective farms, but since 1935 they have been allowed to cultivate small plots or gardens for their own profit, and to own a cow and some pigs and chickens as private property. They have to labor a part of their time on the collective farm, just as the medieval serf had to labor so many days a week on his lord’s land. But their real interest is in their own small plots and livestock. To these they have devoted real care and willing labor; whereas on the collective farm they are forced to work for a small return. Even if the collective farm produces a fair quantity of grain over and above that which the state takes as tax, or as payment to the machine tractor station, this does not help the peasant much. For it also must be sold to the state at a price only a little higher than the obligatory quota.
Moreover, the money income which it produces is of little use to the peasant. The shelves of the village shop rarely contain the salt, textiles, boots, and other manufactures which he needs. If he lives near a town, there is a little more incentive to work harder and make the collective farm yield more, for in the towns the shops are somewhat better supplied. The prices in all the shops are very high, but in the town there is a market where the collectivized peasants can sell their produce direct to the consumer at a far higher price than the state pays even for voluntary sales. This, however, does not apply to grain, since it is useless to the consumer unmilled, and of course the state owns all the mills. In the towns the peasants can, however, sell other produce at the “cost of production” plus a profit for themselves, where- as the peasants in distant regions can find only one buyer, the state, which itself takes a huge profit when it resells to the urban population.
Agrarian economy has gone through several phases since 1932, with slight relaxation of pressure on the peasant since 1934, but little general increase in prosperity.
Up to the end of the First Five Year Plan, the peasants, collectivized or not, were compelled to sell the whole of their “surplus” to the government at prices arbitrarily fixed. When the farms had no “surplus,” they had to sell the food they needed to live on. The government’s collections were theoretically based on contracts with the peasants for the delivery of a certain quantity of grain, but the contract was entirely one-sided, since the government decreed how much was to be sold and collected it by force if the peasants resisted. Naturally the peasants resisted these forced collections, paid for at the excessively low government prices, as they had resisted similar collections in the period of war communism. They refused to sow more grain than they needed for their own subsistence. But this time there was no Lenin at the helm of the “socialist state” to bow before the stubborn fact of the popular will. Stalin had no humanitarian scruples; and, in spite of the fall in the harvest in 1932, the government enforced its full demands upon the peasants, depriving them of their food and seed, and telling them it was their own fault if they starved to death. The resistance of the peasants to what they regarded as confiscation of their land and livestock, and then the confiscation of the produce of the collective farms by the government, was broken by the “artificially created famine” of 1932-33. The peasants henceforth knew that resistance was futile since the government would again calmly let them die of starvation.
However, the famine which killed off five to ten million peasants also affected the towns. Unless the workers were to become as bitterly hostile to the Soviet Government as the peasants, the harvest had to be increased. If repression alone were employed against the peasants-if, that is to say, the government were to rely entirely upon compulsory deliveries at nominal prices which gave the peasant no inducement at all to produce-there would be famine every year, and soon there would be no one left for the government to exploit. So a new system was introduced in January 1933 whereby the compulsory deliveries were reduced to a fixed quantity per hectare sown, and the collectivized peasants informed that they could henceforth dispose “freely” of the rest of their produce. This system, inaugurated in 1933, has continued until now, with certain modifications to be dealt with later in this chapter. An examination of that system in some detail is necessary, since Stalin’s “socialism” is based upon the bread tax-i.e., upon the exploitation of the peasants as producers and that of the workers and employees as consumers.
By the end of the year 1934, the collective farms were cultivating three-quarters of the arable land. By 1939 93.5 per cent of the peasants were collective farmers, and hardly any land was left in the hands of individual peasant cultivators. Theoretically the Kolkhozi hold the land in perpetuity (according to the Collective Farm Charter of 1935) and enjoy its fruits free of rent. But in fact they pay a rent in kind to the state. This rent consists of a fixed quantity of grain per unit of land, not a percentage of the actual crop. The state is assured of the same quantity of grain whether the harvest is good or bad. The amount taken by the state varies from one part of the country to another, being highest in the most fertile regions, but taking no account of the amount of land and the number of cultivators in the individual Kolkhoz. These compulsory grain deliveries-one can call them either a rent in kind or a tax in kind-now amount to nearly 40 per cent of the gross harvest, according to a statement made by Molotov to the Communist Party Congress in 1939.
The government’s quota up to 1940 was calculated on the planned area to be sown. When a Kolkhoz failed to fulfill the plan allotted to it, the government did not abate its demands, but when land in excess of the plan was sown, the government took its quota. The government therefore made the peasant bear the loss in years of bad harvest, but took more from him when he cultivated more land than was compulsory.
In December 1939 the burden on the peasants was increased by the state’s shifting its tax in kind from the planned area sown to the total land owned by the collective farms. The Kolkhozi are now left to make their own grain-sowing plans, but have to produce a fixed amount of grain. This change was no doubt designed to force the peasants to clear and cultivate waste lands, but it would appear from foreign Press reports that in many cases wooded lands and other uncultivatable lands have been included in the government’s assessment, thus rendering the tax burden on the acreage actually cultivatable impossibly high. The result, as might have been expected, has been passive resistance on the part of the peasants. This in large part explains the threat of a new famine in Russia in 1940.
When a Kolkhoz fails to fulfill its obligations, the case is referred to the Public Prosecutor. If the charge is proved, the penalty is a money fine equal to the value of the grain in dispute, at the higher “voluntary” purchase price, plus delivery of the deficit grain. Even if it is drought which has made the Kolkhoz fail to deliver its compulsory quota, this is not accepted as an excuse, although occasionally prosecutions are subsequently withdrawn when drought has been severe. The law of May 1937, which laid down the quotas and penalties, makes no mention of any excuse considered valid for nondelivery of the compulsory quota.
The compulsory grain deliveries, although they account for a third or more of the harvest, are not the end of the state’s demands. There are in addition “voluntary” sales to the state of “surplus” produce. “Voluntary” as they are supposed to be, there is a plan for these, too, and the state has its organs of compulsion always at hand to force the peasants to fulfill this plan, too. In any case, there is no one except the state to whom the peasant can sell his grain; and, as regards other produce, it is only in the districts near the towns that the collective farmers have an opportunity to sell direct to the consumer in the free market.
The “conventional prices” paid by the state for the “voluntary” sales of the Kolkhoz (over and above the compulsory quota per hectare) are usually about 25 per cent higher than the compulsory delivery prices. This is, of course, several times less than the peasant would obtain on a free market in which the price of grain bore a normal relation to the price of bread. In 1935 “voluntary” sales, according to the calculation of Mr. L. E. Hubbard, who has done the most careful research work on Soviet economy, 23 amounted to only 3.6 million tons against 30.5 million tons compulsorily delivered.
The government being in a position of absolute monopoly as regards grain and industrial crops, and having a quasi-monopoly as regards other foods, the prices it fixes for purchases from the peasants are arbitrary. The only check on the government is the need to keep the peasantry alive and to give them some slight incentive to work. However, even this check does not always operate, since the birth rate is high and Russia has agrarian overpopulation, and since the soldiers and spies of the O.G.P.U. are always at hand to force the peasant to work.
Mr. Hubbard gives the average prices obtained by the Russian peasants in 1913, in 1927-28, and in the famine year, 1932-33, which show that they received only 75 per cent more for their grain in the latter year than in Tsarist times, although the retail price of manufac- tured goods in 1932 was five times higher.
Although the prices for compulsory and “voluntary” grain deliveries have been raised by 25 per cent-or possibly 50 per cent-since 1932-33, 24 the price of manufactured goods has risen by several hundred per cent (see page 193).
In addition to the compulsory and “voluntary” sales, the collective farms served by the Machine Tractor Stations have to pay “rent” in kind for the use of the machinery. This rent amounts to 7 per cent or g per cent of the grain for threshing, and to a fixed number of kilograms per hectare for plowing and sowing.
According to Mr. Hubbard’s reckoning upon the basis of the payments to be made to the Machine Tractor Stations by decree of 1937, the Kolkhoz has to give about 12 per cent of a light crop to the M.T.S., 18 per cent of a heavy crop, and about 16 per cent from an average crop.
The peasants have no choice in the matter. They must “accept” the services of the M.T.S. whether or not they would prefer to do the work with their own hands or by animal power. Moreover, the Kolk- hozi which are not served by an M.T.S. have to deliver about 45 per cent more grain to the state than those cultivated by machinery-viz., 30 per cent instead of 20 per cent of the gross crop. The higher taxa- tion of nonmechanized farming than of the “modern” farms in itself constitutes an admission that mechanized farming, Soviet style, is more expensive than the old primitive methods of cultivation.
Hubbard calculated that in 1935, 30.5 per cent of the total grain harvest had been sold or delivered to the government, but at the March 1939 Congress of the Russian Communist party Stalin actually boasted of the fact that in 1938 about 40 per cent of the grain harvest had been “released” for the market, as against only 26 per cent in Tsarist times. Since the total harvest in 1938 was barely above the 1913 figure, 25 this constitutes an open admission of the fact that the peasants now have less to eat than before the Revolution.
Further proof of the lesser amount of food allowed the peasant for the nourishment of himself and his family since the collectivization of agriculture can be obtained from a statement made by Molotov in 1938. According to Pravda of January 16, 1938, Molotov stated that the state’s grain procurements had increased 150 per cent over the 1928 figure. Since, according to the official figures, the 1937 grain crop was only 50 per cent higher than in 1928, it can be estimated that the pro- portion of the harvest taken by the state has increased 66 per cent. Of course, in 1928, under N.E.P., the peasants could and did sell to “speculators” as well as to the state; but, since they then got some- thing in exchange-either locally produced manufactures or a higher money price than the state paid-it is true to say that the peasants as a whole are now very much worse off than in 1928. This is obvious to anyone who has seen a typical Russian village then and now, but it is important that the official figures bear out the impression of one’s eyes. It has, moreover, been calculated that in Tsarist times the average peasant household sold only between a quarter and a third of the gross production of grain. This indicates that the Soviet state takes more in taxes than the Tsarist landowners and usurers took in rent and interest.
It must also be borne in mind that the nonmarketed produce retained by the peasants has today to provide for the support of the small army of managers, accountants, agronomists, and clerks who run the collective farms.
It is in considering the value of the peasant’s money income that his worsened standard of life becomes most obvious. Mr. Hubbard has worked out a most enlightening comparison of the real income of the peasant in 1913 and in 1936 in terms of the quantity of indispensible manufactures:
| One pood of Rye Flour would purchase | 1913 | One pood of Rye Flour would purchase | 1936 |
| Sugar | 4.1 kilo | Sugar | 0.5 kilo |
| HouseHold Soap | 3.3 kilo | Soap | 1.3 kilo |
| Cotton print | 6.4 meters | Cotton print | 0.5 meters |
| Kerosene | 27.0 liters | Kerosene | 4.2 liters |
| And 7 poods would purchase a pair of ordinary leather boots. | And about 80 poods would purchase a pair of leather boots. | ||
(The further rise in prices of manufactured goods since 1936 has yet further worsened the condition of the peasants.)
Moreover, in the old days the peasants derived a considerable subsidiary money income from the sale of goods produced by handicraft cottage industries, which are now practically extinct; for, from 1930 onwards, peasants who indulged in such labor were accounted “capitalists” and became liable to liquidation.
According to prewar estimates, the average net money income for a peasant household was between Rs. 130and Rs. 150,and Rs. 180-Rs.mo per annum. If a household consisted of three adult workers, the average money income was around 6o or 70 rubles. Today it varies enormously from farm to farm, but appears to average between 120 and 300 rubles per adult collective farmer, according to such official figures as are available concerning total money income of the Kolkhozi. (No average figures of farm income for the whole of Russsia are published by the Soviet Statistical Bureau, and most of the information published in the Press concerns the Kolkhozi which are particularly prosperous.) According to figures available up to 1935 in the Soviet Union’s Statistical Year Book, the value of the agricultural output of the whole country was 16 billion rubles. Of this sum 3½ billion represents the value (at state prices) of the produce left to the peasants for their own consumption. Hence the gross money income of the peasants in that year was 12½ billion rubies. However, the peasantry is reckoned in that year to have spent only 7 billion on manufactured goods supplied to the rural areas. Allowance must be made both for the compulsory capital improvements, for the salaries of the directors, specialists, etc., of the collective farms, for payment of the milling charges of the government, and for loss of grain in transit. Some peasants also will have spent their money income in the towns, and others will have had to buy bread back from the state. All in all, the peasants’ money income cannot have amounted to more than 9 or at most 1O billion rubles. This income divided among 26 million peasant families com- prising on an average three adults, means between 116 and 130 rubles per head. Whereas under the Tsar the peasant with 60 to 70 rubles a year money income could purchase each year, if he wished, two pairs of boots, eight meters of woolen dress cloth. and a pair of galoshes, and still have a few rubles over, in 1938 even the lucky collective farmer with an income of 200 rubles had to spend nearly half his yearly income to secure one pair of boots of inferior quality. 26
Even if the peasants’ money income has been trebled since 1913, as he official figures make out, the purchasing power of the ruble is about one-twentieth. In 1935, when a larger proportion than before of the manufactured goods produced was made available in the village shops, less than 35 per cent of the total of manufactured goods was supposed to have been allotted to rural trade. But in that year the peasants spent 7 billion rubles on merchandise, which is only one- twelfth of the total of about 56 billion rubles of manufactured goods sold by the state to the whole population.27
All the evidence goes to prove, as shown above, that as regards both food and manufactures, most of the peasants are worse off than before the Revolution. The Soviet apologists will, of course, argue that the peasant now enjoys “social services” unknown before the Revolution. It is true that creches for a very few children, a clubroom, and in some places primitive medical services, are now available to the peasants. But these have all to be paid for out of the Kolkhoz income as calculated above. The peasant even has to pay in additional money taxes for the education of his children where there are schools.
Nor is grain the only produce which the peasant is forced to deliver to the government, at nominal prices. A fixed quantity of milk per cow, a certain quantity of meat, of potatoes, of anything and everything which the collective farm, or individual peasant, produces, is demanded by the state and paid for at prices about go per cent less than the free market prices in the towns. A fixed quantity of milk is demanded from each cow, whether owned collectively by the Kolkhoz, or individually by the Kolkhozniki. This compulsory milk sale amounts to between IO per cent and 25 per cent of the total milk produced according to the yield of the cow. The same applies to meat.
Lastly, the peasant has to pay to get the grain for his own consump- tion ground into flour at the state mill. This payment amounts tcJ IO per cent of the grain milled.
In 1936 the government, in an effort to stimulate, as well as force, the collectivized peasants to work harder, introduced a system of premiums on the “voluntary” grain and other sales. The larger the quantity sold to the state, the higher the price. These premiums favor the larger and more prosperous collective farms over the smaller, and have helped to produce that differentiation in the income and prosperity of the Kolkhozi, which is now a marked feature of Soviet agriculture. Whereas the Kolkhoz “voluntarily” selling between 10 and 50 quintals receives only IO per cent above the basic price, the large Kolkhoz able to produce a surplus of 1,000 quintals gets double the basic price.
All the measures of compulsion and stimulation have, however, failed to induce the great bulk of the peasants in the collective farms to produce more. The harvests remain very low. Although of course higher than in the terrible famine years, the average is little if at all higher than in the days before the Revolution. The peasant is even more severely exploited by the state than he was by the landlord and the usurer under the Tsar, and he has less incentive to work, since, even when he gets money, there is so little he can buy. He has less personal liberty, hates the government more, and feels himself worse treated. For the Soviet Government in its early years gave him the land and gave him hope, only to deprive him of both after a few years. Nothing the peasants suffered under the Tsar is comparable to what they suffered from 1930-33,and under the Tsar the peasant might starve but he was not continually watched, spied upon, disciplined, and threatened with exile or prison. Although from 1935 to 1939 the pressure on the peasants was slightly relaxed and that on the workers increased, the standard of life of the peasantry is certainly well below that of Tsarist times.
Working on the collective farm, the peasants are at the mercy of the chairman and the committee, who, although in theory his elected representatives, are in reality state officials. The chairman is almost always a Party member and is frequently a man appointed from outside with little or no knowledge of farming. Even if he is of peasant origin, his function is to ensure the fulfillment of the state’s plan, and the delivery of the state’s quota. Each peasant has to perform whatever task is allotted to him, and his individual share in what is left to the farm after deliveries to the state have been fulfilled, depends upon the number of days’ work performed. But one day’s work at some kinds of labor is reckoned as worth two days of other, simpler kinds of labor. Thus the farm, like the factory, has its aristocracy of labor in the person of the tractor driver, the plowman, etc. Obviously, also, the value of a man’s labor on a farm cannot be so exactly estimated as in a factory, so that the number of “work days” credited to a peasant in the division of the farm income depends largely on the good or ill will of the chairman. On the land as in the factories, toadying, fawning, flattery, and slavish repetition of Party slogans are more likely to secure you enough to eat and clothes to your back than conscientious work.
The Machine Tractor Station serves also as an O.G.P.U. headquarters, and in every district soldiers of the “internal army” of the 0.G.P.U. are at hand to quell peasant revolt and to arrest grumblers.
Legislation medieval in its ferocity punishes the peasant for the slightest misdemeanor. The death sentence is applied for small thefts, even to children. A hungry child who has stolen a few vegetables from the Kolkhoz, if twelve years of age or older, is shot “by due process of law.”
Calculations as to peasant income cannot be made, because no one knows how large a share of the Kolkhoz’s divisible fund is taken by the agrarian bureaucracy. In 1931the number of officials in the villages was reckoned to be two million. Now that the peasants’ resistance has been broken, the number is probably a good deal lower, but the cultivators still have to supporr a small army of managers, controllers, brigadiers, accountants, and other employees. Only the armed guards who prevent their “stealing” the produce of their own labor are paid by the state. Since the yield per hectare is at most only about 5 per cent above the prewar figure, there is no doubt that, taken as a whole, the costs of production (which must include the salaries of the parasitic farm bureaucracy) are far higher than before the Revolution.
Since collectivization, the grain harvests have been as follows:
| IN MILLION TONS | ||
| 1913 | 94.128 | |
| 1928 | 73.3 | |
| 1932 | 69.6 | |
| 1933 | 89.8 | |
| 1934 | 89.4 | |
| 1935 | 92.0 | |
| 1936 | 82.7 | |
| 1937 | 120.3 | |
| 1938 | 95.0 | |
| 1939 | No definite information but estimated to have been at about the 1938 level. | |
In 1939 Stalin reported to the eighteenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party that the total yield of grain in 1938 was 18.6 per cent higher than in 1913, while the area under grain had increased 8.5 per cent. This is not true if the same reckoning of “biological crops” is used for 1913 as for 1938. Even if it were true, since the population has also increased, or is supposed to have done, on the official Soviet figures the peasants are producing certainly no more, and probably less, per capita than before agriculture was “socialized.” Thus the heavy sacrifices made to produce tractors and other machinery, the whole capital investment in agriculture over the past decade, has not increased the yield of the land. The sacrifices, the labor, the blood and tears of the expropriated peasant population have gone for nothing except to substantiate a barren claim on the part of their rulers to have “socialized” agrarian economy.
The national economy has been weakened, not strengthened, by collectivization and the boasted “mechanization of agriculture.” Workers who might have been producing consumption goods to raise the general standard of living have produced tractors and other agricultural machinery which, owing either to its poor quality or to the lack of trained mechanics, has failed to increase the yield of the land. It would even seem from the statistics available that a larger number of peasants with tractors is producing less food per head of the population that a smaller number of peasants without machinery managed to produce before collectivization.
As we have seen, the Soviet Government in 1934-35 was forced by the incurable mismanagement of the collective farms, and by its failure to provide enough of the machinery upon which the success of large- scale agriculture depends, to make concessions to the peasants in an effort to increase the yield of agriculture. These concessions were given grudgingly; and the peasant, knowing they might be withdrawn at any moment, had not the necessary confidence to make him work harder and better. He is primarily a serf and he knows it too well to have the heart to make an effort to raise his standard of life. At any moment the state may raise the compulsory quota or decrease the price of grain; and bitter experience has taught the peasant that this is most likely to happen if he works harder and produces more. Hence the almost stagnant yield of basic crops.
On the other hand, even the minor concessions made have diminished the “socialized sector” of agriculture. This is true in particular of the concession of an individual plot and the right to private ownership of some livestock. This was a concession which, even if later annulled, cannot place the peasant who takes advantage of it in a worse position than before. He can eat the potatoes or vegetables or fruit which he grows with loving care on his own little plot, and the government can’t take it back out of his stomach next year. Also, he can sell this privately produced produce to the urban consumer for cash which he can spend at once on a pair of boots, or trousers, or other clothing for his family. True that these manufactured goods are still scarce and very dear, but the prices he obtains for his produce on the free market are also high.
Naturally the peasant has spent as much time as he possibly could attending to his own plot, to his pigs, chickens, and cow, if he has risen that high. The return on the produce from these is sure, whereas the results of his labor in the Kolkhoz vanish into the clutches of the government or are allocated for capital improvements on the farm which hardly benefit him. In general, the distribution of the Kolkhoz income is designed to give the working peasant just enough bread to live on at a bare subsistence level. When the farm produces more, some means is found to cheat the members out of the increased income. It can always be decreed that the excess income shall be utilized for “capital improvements” on the farm, and the peasants often have grounds for the suspicion that the chairman and other officials put the increased income into their own pockets. No peasant is willing to risk his neck by demanding an inquiry into the doings of the all- powerful Party bureaucrats who administer the farm.
In short, the peasant gets a very small return for all his “work days” on the Kolkhoz, but he gets quite a lot in return for his labor on his own allotment. The analogy with medieval serfdom is obvious. The serf worked 3s lazily as he dared on the lord’s manor, but with all his vigor on his own land.
The consequences in the Soviet Union have been far-reaching. The peasant is not allowed to own much land privately; but, intensively and carefully cultivated, this land yields far more per acre than the “collectively owned’ farms. Similarly, the individual care given by the peasant to his privately owned livestock and chickens has increased their importance in the national economy. In 1936 about 40 per cent of the total area producing vegetables in the U.S.S.R. consisted of private allotments, gardens and individual farms. Chickens and eggs are supplied almost exclusively by private enterprise. In 1938-39 the percentage of the total livestock in the country owned by the collective farms was found to be as low as 20.6 per cent in the case of cattle, 26.5 per cent in the case of sheep and goats, and 21.4 per cent in the case of pigs.
The household allotment varied from region to region, but until 1940 was between 1½ and 2¼ acres exclusive of the garden around the peasant’s house. This was about the same amount of land as most Japanese peasant households have to cultivate; but, of course, not being irrigated, it could not be made to grow crops like rice, of which the yield per acre is very high. Nor can the Russian peasant secure chemical fertilizers for his personal use. Nevertheless, he has of recent years been driven by the fearful mismanagement of the collective farms and by the small return he received for his labor on the communal lands, to subsist more and more off the produce of his individual allotment and that of his cow, pig, or sheep. Moreover, larger plots than those allowed under the law had been secured by many of the peasants. This was made clear in the preamble to a decree of May 28, 1939, which, taken in conjunction with a second decree issued in July of that year, virtually annuls the Collective Farm Charter of 1935, and severely curtails the amount of land privately cultivated and the number of livestock privately owned.
According to the decree and to articles in the Soviet Press, the right to private ownership of a plot of land and some cows, pigs, and chickens had come to be exercised to such an extent that many of the collective farmers had “virtually withdrawn from the Koikhoz, and were spending all their time working on their own land.” Not only this, but “in some cases they are even renting out a part of their illegally acquired holdings to others and becoming landlords.” These “illegally acquired holdings” are shown to have been obtained by the Kolkhoz administrations’ allowing members to take over a part of the land supposed to be cultivated collectively. Some of the fields and meadows belonging to the Kolkhoz had been turned over to the personal exploitation of individual peasant households. It seems probable that some of the harassed Kolkhoz chairmen had allowed this as the surest way to get enough grain or other crops produced to meet th e government’s compulsory collections. Individual farming is so much more productive than socialist production a la Stalin that this letting out of Kolkhoz land paid the peasant even if he had to pay the Kolkhoz chairman for the privilege as well as meet the government quota. The quota is high, and bribery charges might also be high, but at least he did not have to pay the Machine Tractor Station for use of its too often broken down machinery. Nor was he then subject to the arbitrary orders of an overseer, or forced to pay out a large part of the produce to support the whole administrative personnel of the farm, or to finance “capital improvements” which do not benefit him at all.
In fact, something of the same thing appears to have happened in the state feudal agrarian system in the U.S.S.R. as happened toward the end of the Middle Ages in Europe. The bailiff, finding it very difficult to force the serfs to work well on the lord’s land, let out parcels of the manorial domain to the peasants for a fixed rent. Thereby he ensured to his lord a certain definite income. Similarly, from 1935 to 1939 the Kolkhoz manager who let the peasants take over a part of the Kolkhoz lands for private cultivation in return for a fixed rent in kind, was ensuring for his master, the Soviet Government, a definite quantity of produce.
Thus the failure of collectivization and mechanization to increase the yield of the land, or to raise the standard of life of the cultivators, caused a “relapse” to private cultivation. The economic forces pulling Russia back to individual farming have been too strong for even a government maintained by naked force.
The decree of May 1939 complains of a serious deterioration in the work of the collective farms due to shortage of labor. Pravda reported that at a certain collective farm the shortage of labor caused by so many of the members’ being engaged in individual enterprise, had resulted in failure to erect barns, and in mown hay being left to rot in the fields. This farm had consequently been forced to spend 12,000 rubles to buy cattle feed for the winter. The result was that the “honest” collective farm members had received only 90 rubles each for a year’s work, In contrast to this, one “pseudo collective farmer” earned more than this by a day’s work “repairing someone’s porch.” Pravda does not mention the fact that this implies connivance on the part of some high officia1, but it is obvious that it does since no one but a well-paid Party bureaucrat could afford to pay 90 rubles to have his porch mended.
The May 1939 decree inaugurated a new drive against the peasants to deprive them both of the extra land they had acquired and of most of their privately owned livestock. It refers to the “illegal extension” of the norms of privately held garden plots “through the squandering and embezzlement of common collective farm land in favor of the personal enterprise of the collective farmers.” This had occurred, it is stated, “either through fictitious division of families, when a collective farm household fraudulently acquires an additional parcel of private apportionment to members of the family, or by means of a direct allotment of individual plots to collective farmers at the expense of the common field area of the collective farm.” This is held to constitute an “anti-Kolkhoz and anti-state practice” and the sacrifice of the interests of the Kolkhoz to “elements of private ownership and graft, who make use of the collective farm for purposes of speculative and personal profit.” (It should be noted here that “speculator” in the U.S.S.R. is a term applied to anyone selling direct to the consumer instead of to the state-i.e., to any producer who tries to get a full return for his labor. The duty of the loyal Soviet peasant is to sell his produce to the state at about 1 one hundreth of its market price.) The private plot, continues the decree, has been losing its subsidiary character and is sometimes turned into the main source of income of the collective farmer. Consequently there are a lot of “fictitious collective farmers” who either do no work at all on the Kolkhoz lands, or “only work for show, devoting the greater part of their time to their per- sonal homestead.” This has led to an “artificial shortage of labor” in the collective farms, although in most regions of the U.S.S.R. there is “a large surplus of labor” which ought to be “made available for the settlement of those parts of the U.S.S.R. where land is plentiful and there is an actual shortage of labor.” Blame is placed upon the local Party and Soviet organizations for not having safeguarded the collective farms from “the attacks of private ownership elements” and to their having “left important decisions to chance and to grafters among the collective farmers.” This clearly implies that many collective farms had been allowed to manage their own affairs, provided only that they paid up the compulsory deliveries to the state. What had occurred is designated as a “most outrageous violation” of the law, and is, of course, ascribed not to the natural working of economic forces, but to “the bourgeois tendencies of private ownership introduced by the remnants of the defeated Kulaks.” (Since all the so-called Kulaks were liquidated long ago it must be concluded that it was their ghosts which had haunted and perverted the Russian villages.)
All these wicked and “anti-Bolshevik” “opportunistic” practices are put an end to by the decree. The Kolkhoz lands are declared “inviolable”; they are never to be decreased, only increased. Continuation of the old practices becomes a criminal offense. The penalty for subletting garden plots is to be expulsion from the collective farm and loss of the individual holding-i.e. complete pauperization.
The decree specifically forbids chairmen of collective farms to lease the hayfields and meadows for mowing by individual collective farmers or to individual peasants. This proviso is designed to force the collective farmers to sell their beasts to the Kolkhoz because they will no longer be able to feed them. (See below, page 163.)
A complete survey of all communal and private land had to be made by August 15, and all personal plots lying in the collective farm fields or in forest pastures are to be assessed to the common land. When the individual garden plot around the collective farmer’s house is below the norm permitted, the amount is to be made up out of the land set aside for plots to new collective farm households-i.e., newly married couples wishing to set up a household of their own will often no longer be able to secure garden plots.
The maximum size of individual plots is to be limited henceforth to one tenth of a hectare in irrigated cotton-growing districts; to l/a hectare in fruit, vegetable, and beet-growing regions; and to one hectare in all other parts of the U.S.S.R. The maximum amount of land to be allowed anywhere to individual peasants who are not members of a collective farm is to be only one fifth of a hectare.
New officials, called Inspector-Surveyors, are appointed for the periodic checking up of the size of individually owned plots and to see that the Kolkhoz has not alienated any of its lands.
The decree lays down a minimum of work days to be spent by each collective farm member on the collective farm lands, as against the days allowed for private work. In most parts of the country this minimum is set at eighty days per year.29
This decree reveals how far the reversion to individual cultivation has already gone. Even as decreed, only a quarter to a fifth of the days of the year are now to be given to work in the “socialized sector” of agriculture. If free days are allowed for (1 in 6), the peasants are being forced to labor less than a quarter of their working days on the collective farms.
Expulsion from the collective farms is decreed as the penalty for per- forming less than the required amount of labor on the Kolkhoz. The government is threatening something in the nature of a repetition of the horrors of 1930-33, for it is stated in the Press, “This decree will fit in with the program that the government has already launched for transporting peasants to sparsely populated regions, especially the Volga and the Far East.”
If “transporting peasants to sparsely populated regions” meant moving them from overpopulated regions with due provision for their settlement elsewhere, it would be a legitimate and wise method to solve the problem of rural overpopulation which the ambitious industrialization program has failed to solve, or to ameliorate. But in the U.S.S.R. such a measure is always brutally accomplished as a punishment and without provision of food, housing, and farm equipment to clear the waste lands and keep the peasants alive until the new land yields crops. It means, as in 1930-32, the death of the weak, in particular of the women and children of the expelled peasants sent off without food and water in unheated cattle trucks.
The May 1939 decree was only the first of the measures to curtail the little scope previously allowed the peasantry to exercise its “bourgeois instinct” to labor for its own profit instead of for that of the Soviet bureaucracy. A decree of July 1939 alters the method of computing the amount of meat demanded by the government from each collective farm and from each individual collective farmer in possession of livestock, in a manner calculated to force the latter to hand over their cows, pigs, sheep, or goats to the Kolkhoz. As from January I, 1940, deliveries of meat are to be calculated, not as before on the basis of the number of animals actually in the possession of the collective farms, but upon its area of arable land. In other words, the collective farms which possess few or no cattle, sheep, or pigs have got to get them and to feed them. The only way they can get them is, of course, to confiscate those belonging to their members. To facilitate this, the decree doubles the amount of meat which every collective farmer individually has to “sell” to the government each year. The amount used to vary from 15 to 32 kilos live weight; by 1942 it is to amount to between 32 and 45 kilograms. (The great variation in the amount demanded in different parts of the U.S.S.R. is due to the greater quantity of meat which has to be supplied by the predominantly pastoral regions.) By the end of 1940 the amount demanded is already to be increased, although not to the full amount. Obviously many peasants will be unable to retain any livestock, while others will have to diminish the number of their privately owned livestock. Since the state had deprived them in May of the opportunity to feed their beasts on fodder obtained from the collective farm meadows and forests, few are likely to be able to keep a cow or more than one or two pigs.
The collective farms are instructed to buy the individually owned livestock at the state price-i.e., at about on tenth of the market price. A very small consolation prize is given to the collective farmers by the provision that they are to be credited with from 10 to 20 work days for each animal thus “sold” to the Kolkhoz.
On the basis of the figures given in the decree it can be calculated that by the end of 1942 the collective farms on an average will be required to own one cow for every 25 hectares of arable land, one ewe for every 34, and one pig for every 61. This works out for the whole of the U.S.S.R. to at least 30 million cows-and presumably 60 million cattle30---as compared with the total of only 12.9 million cattle which they possessed in 1939. They will further be required to possess 22 million ewes as against the total of 27.2 million sheep and goats possessed in 1939. The number of pigs is to be increased from 6.6 to 12 million. Sixty per cent of these figures have to be owned by the end of 1940.
Thus, although it has been amply proved that the only way to ensure a steady increase in the number of livestock in the U.S.S.R. is to allow the private ownership which induces the peasant to take real care of the livestock, Stalin has decreed that this is not to be permitted. He would rather the Russian people continued to go short of meat, milk, and butter than have them eat enough by means of “capitalist” methods of production. They are, in fact, almost certain to have even less dairy products to consume than during the past few years. Already in the winter of 1939-40 and in the spring of 1940 the scanty consumption of the working class has been reduced. The shortage of meat, vegetables, and dairy products in the towns led the government to raise prices 35 per cent in January 1940, and a further 25 to 75 percent in April 1940.
The ever-increasing reliance of the Soviet Government upon the bureaucracy to ensure fulfillment of its plans, and the abandonment even of a pretense of relying upon the willingness of the peasants to work “collectively” is shown by the kind of people who are exempted from the compulsory meat deliveries, and by the new system of bonuses introduced in 1939. The following are exempted from delivery of the compulsory meat quota per household: directors of state farms, live- stock experts, directors of the M.T.S., agronomists, technicians, and engineers, teachers, doctors, and veterinarians. (Office employees, and old peasants who have no able-bodied member of their family working, and the parents of soldiers who have left behind wives and children below the age of seven, are also exempt.) These exemptions indicate increasing privileges for the ruling strata in the countryside. The same applies to the system of bonuses. An article by the Commissar of Agriculture published in Pravda on March 7, 1939, refers to bonuses equal to from one to three months’ salary to be paid to directors and assistant directors of Machine Tractor Stations, and to chief agronomists, head mechanics, and chief accountants for “exemplary fulfillment and overfulfillment of the annual agricultural plans, for those who have increased the yields in the collective farms which fall within the scope of their work, as well as for ensuring the delivery of payment of agricultural produce due from the collective farms.”
It is abundantly clear from every measure taken by the Soviet Government that it is the managers and administrative personnel in general who are relied upon to drive the peasants, and that the latter are unwilling workers who loathe the whole collective farm system. The above article by the Commissar of Agriculture is also of interest as showing the failure of even the proletarians on the farms; i.e., the tractor drivers, mechanics, etc., to perform the work assigned to them, and the need felt to punish them for scamping their work. He writes: “Tractor drivers who violate the rules regulating the depth of plowing are to be fined up to 50 per cent, and chiefs of tractor brigades up to 10 per cent, of the cost of the fuel used for this work.” The same article specifies the detailed regulations made with regard to depth of plowing, number of harrowed furrows, dates at which sowing is to be begun, and other operations on the farm begun or completed, and so forth. It is further insisted upon that all aggregates are to work in two shifts with the tractors doing 20 hours of “smart, highly productive field work.”
Whereas the Third Five Year Plan provides for only a small capital investment in agriculture, emphasis is laid upon forcing the collective farmers to work harder. Those who don’t are to be expropriated and forced to become unskilled laborers in industry, or exiled to sparsely populated regions. In his speech to the Communist Party Congress in 1939, Molotov laid down as the main task in agriculture “intensification of the struggle against violations of the constitution of the agricultural artel” and “not to allow unlawful extension of the personal holdings, personal plots of land, title of individual collective farmers, which leads to a violation of the interests of the collective farm and hinders the strengthening of collective farm discipline.” He also spoke of the need “systematically to release members for work in industrial enterprises, primarily those who are little employed upon work on the collective farm, have few days to their credit, and are therefore a burden to the collective farm.” It is to be presumed that the type of labor for which the peasants are required is timber cutting, road and railway building, canal digging-the kind of work which is performed in the main by the victims of the O.G.P.U. in the concentration camps. It is to be surmised that the O.G.P.U. has been running short of labor for its vast enterprises, since the term of life in the concentration camps is short, and most of the so-called Kulaks must by now have died off.
Thus once again the peasants have been cheated by the Soviet Government, being now deprived even of the slight concessions made to them in the Charter of 1935. The consequent further disheartening of the peasants is bound to decrease the amount of food produced in the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Government refuses to learn the lesson that forced labor-virtually slave or serf labor-cannot be made as productive as free labor. The peasants are too cowed and their spirit too broken for open revolt, but their passive resistance makes it impossible to increase agricultural productivity except at a prohibitive cost. It would require almost as many guards as there are peasants to force them all to labor as hard and as conscientiously as is necessary to increase the yield of the land and of the livestock.
The growing shortage of foodstuffs and increased prices of all except bread in 1940 are to be ascribed to the renewed drive against the peasants rather than to the Finnish campaign and war preparations. For it is to be surmised that the peasants faced with a survey of their possessions in 1939, to be followed by virtual confiscation of their live- stock, or on account of the impossibility of feeding them any longer, preferred to kill and eat them rather than sell them to the Kolkhoz at a price only a tenth of the market price. Where this seemed too dangerous an act to perform under the eyes of the O.G.P.U., they may have preferred to wait until the increased meat deliveries to the state gave them the right to kill their beasts. It is unlikely that many of the peasants would “sell” their animals to the Kolkhoz if there remained any way of killing and eating them which did not render them liable to imprisonment.
These latest measures taken to blast the revival of individual husbandry in Russia are but the latest example of the manner in which Stalin clamps down his iron heel to crush the first buds of prosperity whenever a slight revival in some form of private enterprise has produced some small increase in the well-being of the Russian people. It would seem that the more absolutely Stalin departs from the democratic and equalitarian concepts which were an integral part of the Marxist theory, the more rigidly does he adhere to the dogma that all means of production and distribution must be state-owned. The more unsocial the content of Stalin’s Russia, the more socialistic are its economic forms.
The food shortage in 1940 has apparently not led to any modifica- tion of the 1939 decrees. On April 25, 1940, the newspaper, Socialist Agriculture, was complaining of the “criminal practice” of squandering the common lands of the collective farms not yet having been checked. Instances are cited of wicked peasants who have planted vegetables on plots previously taken away from them, and of cases such as that of two collective farmers at Krasnodar who dared to plant a tenth of an acre with potatoes. It is stated that the survey of private plots carried out in 1939 had shown that more than 6 million acres too much land had been found to be in the private possession of collective farmers. 31 Orders are given once again to “exclude hostile elements” from the collective farms. This indicates that many thousands of peasants are being herded off to the concentration camps.
The dissatisfaction of the peasantry is likely to have been one of the main causes for the extremely unsatisfactory accomplishment of the spring sowing plans in 1940. Izvestia on April 16 reported that the total acreage sown by April 10 was a mere 4.2 million hectares, only 5 per cent of the plan, and compared this with 12½ million hectares sown by that date last year when 15 per cent of the plan had already been fulfilled.
The breakdown of a large number of tractors and the failure to repair them, combined with a shortage of tractor drivers due to the Finnish war and a shortage of gasoline due to the same cause and to the poor showing of the Baku oilfields since 1939, have all contributed to the critical state of Russian agriculture in 1940. Pravda on December 12, 1939, reported that the plan for tractor repairs was being fulfilled only 30 per cent in the last quarter of the year. The industry reported on December II, organ of the machine-building 1939, that there was an acute shortage of tractor parts, and that half of all the pistons manufactured at the Stalingrad plant had had to be scrapped. In January the same journal reported that only 63.5 per cent of the plan for production of tractor parts had been fulfilled in the last quarter of 1939.
On December 10, 1939, Socialisticheskoe Zemledelie (“Socialist Agriculture”) carried an article by the Commissar of Agriculture referring to the slowness in the execution of the plan which called for the training of 100,000 women tractor operators by the end of 1939, and said: “We must successfully train an enormous number of women capable of operating various machines by the spring of 1940, in order that no complications in the international situation may disturb the normal course of the development of our socialist agriculture.”
It is obvious that Soviet agriculture, both in respect of its mechanical equipment and skilled labor force, and the “morale” of the peasants, is in no condition to face the strain of war. It is even feared that a famine on something like the 1932-33 scale may threaten the U.S.S.R. in 1940.
In spite of its poor yield, Russian agriculture remains now, as before, the main source of capital accumulation in Russia. The Soviet Government’s principal source of revenue is not nationalized industry, nor the oil wells and mines, nor the great forests, but the bread tax. Most of the “Giants of the Five Year Plan” remain expensive toys which have not yet even today paid the high cost of their construction. The Soviet Government relies still upon the heavy toil of the millions of peasants for its existence. Industrialization, insofar as it has pro- gressed, has done so at the cost of excessive exploitation of the peasants and heavy taxation of the workers’ food.
The buying of grain cheap from the peasants, and the selling of it dear to the urban population, constitutes the state’s major source of revenue. This revenue is collected in the form of a “turnover tax” which amounts to several hundred per cent on sales of bread and flour. In 1936 the “turnover tax” on the sale of agricultural foodstuffs by the state amounted to the colossal sum of 32 milliard rubles out of a total budget revenue of 71 milliard. The state made a profit of 32 milliard since the turnover tax consists of the difference between the cost to the state and the selling price.
In 1937 the state’s profit from the sale of bread and other foodstuffs came to an even larger figure: 44.5 milliard rubles, of which about half consisted of the profit on bread alone. If one adds the 6.2 milliard profit obtained from the sale of vodka and other liquor, one gets a total of over 50 milliard as the revenue of the state from the taxation of the people’s food. This 50 milliard constituted two-thirds of the total turnover tax, and half of the total budget revenue. The tax on the sale of consumers’ goods produced only 11.4 milliard in spite of the high prices at which such goods were sold. As against the colossal figures for indirect taxation, direct taxation (income tax) produced a mere 21½ milliard, and taxes on enterprises less than 1 milliard. Thus, at the end of the Second Five Year Plan, Russia’s much- vaunted industrialization had produced so little result that the peasants were still bearing the brunt of state taxation, were in fact still the sole source for any considerable accumulation of “capital.” Or, put another way round, the bread of the people was still the main source of revenue of the “socialist fatherland.”
As an illustration of the colossal ignorance of the Webbs concerning even the admitted facts of Soviet economy, one must cite their observation that indirect taxation centers on “undesirable luxuries and upon expenditures not much incurred by the masses of the people.” In fact, peasants, workers, employees, the whole population, pay enormous indirect taxes. The following “turnover taxes” were levied in 1937:32
| Sugar | 85% |
| Salt | 66-83% |
| Cigarettes | 75-90% |
| Makhorka (low-grade tobacco) | 68-75% |
| Cotton textiles | 44-65% |
| Hoisery | 15-65% |
| Knitted underwear | 25-55% |
| Rubber overshoes | 33% |
| Sewing machines | 39% |
| Boots and shoes | 17-35% |
| Soap | 34-59% |
| Shaving cream, toothpaste | 68% |
It will be noted that “luxuries” such as sewing machines were taxed less, not more, than necessities such as sugar, for the simple reason that the high cost of production of sewing machines made their selling price, even without the turnover tax, so high as to render them in- accessible to all but the top social stratum of the population. The turn- over tax has been increased since 1937 (see Chapter VIII).
The state acquires from the peasants food supplies for the towns, and agricultural raw materials for industry, at arbitrary prices; and as a monopolist middleman sells food to the town population at any price it likes. It can do this, not only because it monopolizes trade, but because it has the power to force the peasants to produce. At one time it may slightly relax its pressure on the peasants and increase its pressure on the workers by raising the price of grain and increasing the price of bread; at another time it reverses the process. The decision is made according to whether peasant or working-class discontent is considered most dangerous at the moment.
For instance, in rgs, following on the famine of the winter and spring of 1932-33, it was so obvious that the peasants had no incentive to work, and agriculture was in such a desperate condition, that the prices paid for grain were raised 20 per cent, while the price of bread was doubled. This doubling of the price to the urban consumers, while increasing the price paid to the peasant by only 20 per cent, gave the state a much larger revenue. The measure was mainly due to the derationing of bread, which made it essential to increase its price unless the workers were to be allowed to eat more. The abolition of bread cards was quite definitely a measure designed to reduce the privileges of the workin g class and improve the relative position of the peasants, for the doubling of bread prices assured the inability of the workers to buy as many other goods as before, and so set free a larger quantity of manufactured goods for village consumption.
When bread was derationed in 1935, its price was again doubled; but the price paid to the peasants for their grain is now not more than 50 per cent higher than in 1933. That is to say, a 200 per cent increase in the selling price of bread has been accompanied by an increase of 50 per cent or less in the purchase price of grain.
There has been some increase in the amount spent by the rural population on industrial consumers’ goods, but their share in the national money income has not risen, but steadily declined. In rg3o the contribution of agriculture to the national income was reckoned at a quarter of the total, in 1933 at one-fifth, and in 1935 at less than one-sixth. Later figures (except for the planned ones, which are prac- tically valueless) are not available.
The collective farms receive between 1.10 and 1.50 rubles for a pood of rye from the state. At the higher figure, this equals g kopeks per kilogram. The state sells black (rye) bread to the people in its shops at 85 kopeks a kilo. Since it takes approximately one kilogram of unmilled rye to make one kilogram of bread, the profit taken by the state is colossal even if a liberal allowance is made for milling, transport, and distribution costs.
In the case of tea, the exploitation of producer and consumer by the government is even more glaring. Collective farms in Georgia receive IO to 12 rubles per kilo of tea, and the state sells this tea at about 75 rubles a kilo.
In spite of the boasted industrialization of the U.S.S.R. over the past decade it is still the hard physical labor of the peasantry-not the new factories and blast furnaces-which forms the main economic support of the Soviet state. As in colonial countries the exploited and oppressed cultivators of the land toil for the profit of a small ruling group, except that in Russia the majority of the exploited and exploiters are of the same race.
THE HISTORY OF the U.S.S.R. has proved to the hilt Trotsky’s contention, expressed in 1905, that Lenin’s conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat would in effect mean a dictatorship over the proletariat. Under Stalin the working class has finally lost all the gains of the Revolution. Their trade-unions have been transformed into state instruments of pure compulsion; they have no longer the right to strike, which workers in the Western capitalist countries enjoy; there is no habeas corpus to protect them against summary imprisonment or execution without trial; and there is no longer even a pretense of workers’ management or control of industrial enterprise. The “labor book”33 and the passport system chain them to their jobs and place them at the mercy of the factory manager. Whereas they are not allowed to leave one job to seek a better one elsewhere, the factory manager can dismiss them at three days’ notice without appeal, and write adverse reports upon them in their labor book, which makes it difficult or impossible for them to secure other jobs.
The same applies to office employees and “specialists,” but in the case of the highly qualified specialists it is mitigated by the nature of their work. The chairman of an enterprise cannot force a man to use his brains in quite the same crude way as he can force a man to use his muscles. (The manner in which the technicians are exploited by the political power is reserved for treatment in Chapter IX.)
For a few months, in 1917, the workers did control, through their shop committees, the working of the factories and mines and other enterprises. According to a decree of November 14, 19x7, signed by Lenin and the People’s Commissar of Labor:
The workers’ control organs have the right to supervise production, establish the minimum output of the undertaking, and take measures to ascertain the cost of production of goods. . . . They have the right to control all the business correspondence of the undertaking, and supervise accounts. The decisions of the workers’ control organs are binding upon the owners.
This was an attempt to practice the dictatorship of the proletariat according to Marx. But Marx had somehow never realized that the owners and a large number of the engineers and technicians would prefer exile to submission to the proletarian dictatorship, or that they would refuse to work for the new state power. In Russia the factory committees were almost at once obliged to deal with the problem of actual factory management, as the majority of employers with their staffs, and often even with their foreman, left the factories.
If the Russian working class had been as well educated, cultured, and technically qualified as the British, German, or French, it might have been able to grapple with the problem of production and man- agement with the help of the few engineers who remained and were willing to work for the Soviet state. Moreover, such a working class would probably have been on terms with the clerical and technical staff allowing of co-operation; there is no such wide social gulf between operatives and the rest of the factory staff in advanced capitalist countries as there was in Tsarist Russia.
A further difficulty, which finally wrecked the attempt at workers’ control, was the tendency of each factory committee to be concerned only with the interests of its own undertaking. They raised prices irrespective of the consumer’s needs and irrespective of the prices charged by other undertakings. The workers began to consider themselves as the owners of the enterprise, and a condition closely approaching anarchy developed.
In many enterprises the workers had taken control even before the November Revolution. The attempts made by the Menshevik-led trade-unions to regain control of the workers in the factories were unsuccessful and were opposed by the Bolsheviks because they did not, as yet, have a majority in the trade-unions. When, at the Trade-Union Congress of January rgr8, they had acquired a majority, they amalgamated the Central Association of Factory Committees with the Central Trade-Union organization.
At the Second Trade-Union Congress in 1919, Lenin was already declaring that “today it is insufficient for us to limit ourselves to pro- claiming the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is inevitable to give a certain state character to the trade-unions, inevitable to merge them with the organs of state power, inevitable that the building of large- scale industry should pass completely into their hands.”
In 1920 at the Third Congress of Trade-Unions, the Factory Committees were deprived of any share in factory management. The loss of privilege for the workers contained in the abolition of the Factory Committees was supposed to be compensated for by increased unionization of the workers. They were, as so often in the future, given the shadow for the substance; trade-union membership instead of real workers’ control through the Factory Committees.
In 1920 also, the Menshevik opposition was suppressed. This op position may be called the democratic opposition, and consisted of those who maintained that the Revolution was a bourgeoisdemocratic one, not a socialist one, and that the trade-unions should protect and fight for the workers, not be subordinated to the state.
In 1917, at the All-Russian Conference of Trade-Unions, the Mensheviks had expressed their conception of the Revolution and of the function of the trade-unions as follows:
The Revolution must make of Russia, politically and economically, a European country. Our backward labor movement must become a European one. It must acquire the same forms of organization as those in the highly developed capitalist countries of Europe. This applies to our political life as well as to the Trade-Union Movement.
The Bolsheviks, on the contrary, declared in 1920 that the trade- unions ought to become “organs subordinated to the socialist power.”
In effect, all this meant that the workers themselves could not be trusted with the power; they must be “guided’‘-or coerced-by their organized vanguard, the Communist party. The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries having by this time been proscribed, all the high trade-union officials were Bolsheviks. Nevertheless, Lenin still thought that the workers needed protection against “their own” government, and envisaged the trade-unions as affording them that protection. Even before the introduction of the N.E.P. he had declared: “Our present government is such that the proletariat, organized to the last man, must protect itself against it. And we must use the workers’ organizations for the protection of the workers against their government.”34
This statement was hardly consistent with the policy of making the trade-unions “organs subordinated to the socialist power.” But Lenin wanted to camouflage the complete subordination of the workers to the state. In place of the former Factory Committee, which had meant real workers’ control of industrial enterprises, he instituted the Troika (triangle, or g-horse carriage). The Troika consisted of the factory manager, the secretary of the communist cell, and the’representative of the trade-union in the factory. It was supposed to run the enterprise. Obviously, even if the trade-union representative had been freely elected and not a Party member, he would have had little power against the other two members of the Troika. But in any case, all three were usually Party members; and, if it happened that one of them was not, he was all the more powerless against the other two. For the non- Party man was “outside the law” and subject to arbitrary dismissal, arrest, or even execution, should he do anything so “counter-revolutionary” as to oppose the interests of the workers to those of the state, or voice the grievances of those he was supposed to represent against a Party decision. Thus, although in theory the “workers’ representatives” in the Troika had the right to discuss hours and wages, in practice they dared not do so. Fear was reinforced by ambition: the way to a “cushy job” or social advancement was through applauding the decisions of the Party, not through representing the interests of the workers.
Wages and hours in the U.S.S.R. are fixed by the Commissariat of Labor, so the factory workers’ representative had not even the nominal right to discuss the questions most vital to the workers. About all he could do was to suggest minor reforms such as that drinking water be made available in the factory, or baths installed at the mines. Even such amenities were, however, subject to the availability of funds over which he had no control.
There has, in fact, never since 1920 been any organized workers’ control over factory managers; but, prior to the First Five Year Plan, the free market and the comparatively personal freedom of the workers acted as a check against abuses. Since Igag the managers have been driven by “the Plan” to disregard even the State Labor Code and to ignore the actual hours and wages decreed by the Commissariat of Labor. “The Plan” comes before aught else, and the manager knows that if he fails to fulfill it he is “for it”; whereas, if he works his men harder, they dare not complain and have no redress.
The trade-unions, so long as Tomsky lived, made feeble efforts to protect the standards of the working class. Trud, the official organ of the Soviet trade-unions, used occasionally to expose the breaking of the Labor Code. In April 1934 it stated that instead of the official seven- hour day “overtime is practiced on a large scale, especially in the heavy industries. Cancellation of the prescribed holiday, every sixth day, has become a common occurrence.” In 1934 a special investigation by the all-Ukrainian Committee of the Machinists’ Union reported: “In the factories of the Machine Trust the employees usually work from 14 to 16 hours a day-without being paid overtime.“35 Similarly, it was reported that in the Dan Basin mines the night-shift worked 9 or 10 hours instead of the 6 prescribed by law. At one steel plant near Moscow the operatives had worked an average of 15 hours a day for three months.
Of course, the Communist argues that the workers had “volun- teered” to work overtime without wages to speed industrialization. In fact, they had no choice. If a Party man got upon orders from the center-to propose more work, speeding up, overtime, anyone who ob jetted was at once brought to the attention of the O.G.P.U. and, if not liquidated, terrorized into keeping his mouth shut, Russia is the one country where the workers are expected not only to submit but to cheer when their wages are reduced or their hours increased.
Although the facts behind the facade are for the most part carefully hidden in the U.S.S.R., they are upon occasion revealed in the Press at the preliminary to a little blood-letting to relieve the pressure. When the workers’ discontent, as reported to the Kremlin by the ever-present O.G.P.U., becomes so acute that there is danger of an outburst, a few Party and trade-union officials are sacrificed to appease the proletariat. The workers’ grievances are aired for a few days or weeks in the Press; specific instances of abuses, “malpractices,” etc., in various enterprises are published. The blame is then laid on individual factory managers, trade-union bureaucrats, or technicians; and these are dismissed, expelled from the Party, sometimes shot. Since it would be wasteful to sacrifice those Party members in whose complete subservience to the Staiinist machine there is the greatest confidence, it is usual to pick on those of whose “loyalty” there is some doubt. Often, therefore, the best men in an enterprise are chosen as the victims. Sometimes, however, popular discontents require victims of high rank, as for instance in 1937, when all the members of the secretariat of the Central Trade- Union Council were branded as “enemies of the people,” and four of them arrested and charged with Trotskyist sabotage. Prior to this, in March, the Central Trade-Union Council had publicly deplored the flagrant violations of the rights of the trade-unions and said neglect of the needs and demands of the union members was the chief characteristic of the entire trade-union system in the U.S.S.R. Trud in April stated: “In all the unions, from the central boards to the craft committees, the undemocratic system is in use. General meetings are practically nonexistent. For years there have been no elections to the Central Unions.” All this did not mean that anything was changed thereafter. The Soviet Government plays with the workers like a cat with a mouse, continually raising their hopes and continually dashing those hopes.
The abuses are, of course, caused not by individuals, but by the Soviet system of exploitation which exacts them in contravention of the paper laws and decrees of the Soviet Government. The factory administration, being told it must produce a certain quantity of goods according to the Plan, is forced to throw overboard all standards of working conditions. Each manager is between Scylla and Charybdis; he may be accused of sabotage if he does not fulfill the plan, and he may be accused of it if he does, if scapegoats are required. Since the state puts production first, the welfare of the workers last, it is safest to neglect the latter. Moreover, the trade-union officials or the engineers can be held responsible for the bad labor conditions. Non-Party men, even when administrative posts are open to them, dare not take them. For they are far more likely to be made scapegoats than Party men, and conditions of work make either breaking of the laws or non- fulfillment of the Plan unavoidable. The Soviet Government attempts to disown responsibility for the disgraceful working conditions by placing responsibility for factory inspection, sanitation, insurance, and general welfare on the trade- unions, which are powerless to improve matters.
In March 1937 Stalin abolished the Troika. Although it had never been of the least use to the workers as a means of defense against excessive exploitation, it had hampered efficient management. Obviously, three men, all Party members and all ambitious, quarreled, and had at times different views as to the best way to make the operatives work harder.
By abolishing the Troika, Stalin was destroying the last feeble remnant of workers’ rights, for it would upon rare occasions happen that the workers’ representative was stronger-i.e., had more backing in the local Party Committee-than the factory manager. Moreover, so long as in theory the workers had the right to question the ukases of the manager, it was always conceivable that the pressure of working- class discontent would one day find means to express itself.
Since the abolition of the Troika, says the Soviet Press, the factory manager has been “relieved of endless worry and given freedom to do u/hat is necessary.” Of course, Stalin always makes a display of giving the people something when he is in fact depriving them of even the little they have. So Zhdanov, the Leningrad Party boss, announced that the workers would be in a position to state their grievances more freely now that the trade-unions had no longer any part in the administration of the factory. When, however, some trade-union leaders were so foolish as to take this pronouncement seriously and began to discuss the terrible plight of the workers, they were at once arrested as counter-revolutionaries.
Examination of the “laws” of the Soviet Union is really a waste of time, for the secret police are always above all the laws, and literally any expressions of dissatisfaction are dubbed “counter-revolutionary” and the people punished accordingly. The only value of the laws, labor codes, and regulations consists in their duping of foreign tourists and “friends of the Soviet Union.” They are like a fine silk dress covering the filth, the sores, and the deformities of a beggar. As the Abbe Custine remarked a century ago of Tsarist Russia, “After a few months’ stay in Russia, you no longer believe in laws.”
Trade-unions have, in fact, ceased to exist in Russia as completely as in Nazi Germany. The Nazis have been honest enough to admit it, and the Bolsheviks haven’t. There is practically no difference between the German Labor Front and the Russian trade-unions. Membership is compulsory in both cases-proving their value to the government; and they possess neither the functions nor the authority of trade-unions in the Western sense of the word. Strikes are forbidden, and when intolerable misery causes them to break out, the strikers are shot down by the O.G.P.U. troops. The function of the trade-unions in Soviet Russia is that of slave drivers, and that of a government employment bureau. They also act as the collectors of the forced loans, which amount on an average to one month’s wage a year deducted from each worker.
Kleber Legay, the French miners’ delegate who visited the U.S.S.R. in 1936, was astounded to find armed guards everywhere in the Donetz coal fields, not only at the entrance to the mines, but also down below in the workings, in the offices, even in the eating houses. The explanation given him was that these soldiers were there to prevent any counter-revolutionary acts. How comes it, M. Legay remarks, that the miners themselves down in the pits should be suspected of being counter-revolutionaries when they are supposed to be the proud and happy owners of their means of production? If, he asks, the working- class unanimity which the Soviet Government boasts of is a reality, why give visitors the impression that the regime survives only because it has guns to sustain it?
He also notes the fact that these guards all have to be fed and supported by the workers, and that they are mostly young men; whereas he saw many old men of sixty working in the mines while the young soldiers stood by watching them.
This French miner was also horrified at the lack of provisions for safety in the mines. Everything, he says, is apparently done on the principle of producing as much as possible as cheaply as possible, so that even elementary precautions to save life are not taken. He gives in his book36 a detailed account of the failure to ensure safe workings, and is appalled that thousands and thousands of miners, including the women who also work underground, should be exposed to the constant risk of death or mutilation for the sake of cheap production.
When accidents occur, the blame is placed on the engineers and technicians, as in the famous Schakti trial, which condemned eight of the accused to death. As M. Legay remarks, either the factory inspectors don’t exist or don’t do their job, or it would have been quite impossible for the “wreckers” to have deliberately prepared and caused explosions. Not only this, but the miners themselves would have been aware of any such plot. In other words, unless there were general assent, it would have been impossible to prepare an explosion in a mine by the accumulation of dust.
Accidents occur frequently because precautions against them would be expensive, and the state is more interested in paying armed guards to prevent strikes or acts of sabotage by the miners than in saving the miners’ lives.
The veritable enslavement of the working class to the parasitic state began in 1930. In that year Stalin started to “rivet” the workers to their jobs. They were forbidden to leave the work they were engaged on without permission of the management. In January 1931 it was decreed that former railway workers were compelled to return to work on the railways, and ten years’ imprisonment or the death penalty was pre- scribed for “lack of discipline” among the transport workers.
In February 1931 came the device subsequently copied by Hitler, the work certificate, containing details of the workers’ social origins, his- tory, training, type of employment, past sins of omission and commission, fines, reasons for dismissal.37 The whole working population was docketed, and each individual’s record written down, as in the case” of convicts in other countries. Whereas the workers were forbidden to leave their jobs, however bad their conditions of work, the various trusts were given the right to transfer them at will from one town or province to another, regardless of their consent. This was all the more terrible in Russia than in Germany, where a similar, though less far-reaching, “mobility of labor” was later instituted; because in Russia the shortage of housing was such that being sent to a new town meant having no room to house oneself or one’s family.
In spite of the decrees, the misery of the workers was so great that they continued to wander from place to place seeking more tolerable conditions of work, seeking a town or a district where they could buy sufficient food with their wages not to starve, or where a room might be available to house their families.
In April 1931Stalin added rewards to punishments in the endeavor to keep the workers at their jobs and make them work harder. Henceforth preferential rations were decreed for the shock brigades and also priority in the allocation of rooms to live in and fuel to warm their “living space.” Starvation everywhere made the amount of wages received a minor question; so, like slaves, the workers were rewarded with a little more to eat if they worked harder.
Next came a decree making the workers responsible for damages to material. The man or woman put to work on a defective machine had henceforth to pay out of his or her wages the decreased value of the finished product caused by neglected machinery or ignorance.
By the following year (November 1932) the worker was punished by dismissal if absent a single day from work. In the case of illness he must send a doctor’s certificate showing that he had a temperature of at least 100°. Illnesses without temperatures were not admitted as an excuse for remaining away from work.
When in the same year the Co-operatives were placed under the direction of the factories, it meant that the dismissed worker immediately lost his bread card and also his wife’s and children’s bread ration. The workers were truly enslaved by this time. Anyone who incurred the factory manager’s displeasure could be immediately thrown out of his job and his room if, as was frequently the case, the house in which he lived belonged to the factory; and at the same time be deprived of his right to buy bread for himself and his family. The astonishing thing was that so many men preferred vagabondage to this slavery. This applied in particular to the young single men. Those with families were restrained by the certainty of starvation for their children; nevertheless some went off and left their families, continually adding to the numbers of the homeless children in Russia, who were still officially supposed to be the orphans of the civil war period.
Stalin’s remedy for evils due to the intolerable misery he had caused was, as ever, repression. In a final attempt to tie the half-starved workers to their jobs and the famine-stricken peasants to their farms, he resorted to an old Tsarist police measure, the obligatory interior passport; but in a more universal and rigorous form. The whole urban population, and all the peasants living near the large towns, had to secure a passport in which it was written down what were the social origins of the bearer, the members of his family, and his occupation. No one was henceforth allowed to move from the town in which he lived to another, or even leave his house for a single night, without permission of the police. This measure was designed to prevent migra- tion of labor and to stop the starving peasants from flocking to the towns in search of work. Residence in Moscow became a much-prized privilege because of the better food provisioning of the capital. But all the important towns were a little better off than the small towns and villages in respect of food supplies; so that urban residence in general became a privilege.
A Byzantine immobility was imposed by law. Henceforth each worker and peasant was to be tied down to the job to which Providence had called him. The only historical parallel is the edicts issued by the decaying Roman Empire from Diocletian to Theodosius, whereby perpetual and hereditary membership of trade guilds was decreed for the industrial workers, and attachment to the soil for the cultivators. Productive labor had then, as in Russia under Stalin, become so onerous and so poorly rewarded that the state tried to enforce by decree that each man should follow his hereditary craft.
As early as November 1930, the Labor Exchanges were closed down and the unemployed told they were to go without question where they were sent and to whatever kind of job the state decreed. At the same time, unemployment relief was abolished, since in theory there was no more unemployment. In reality, unemployment never disappeared; but the state washed its hands of responsibility for it and took the line that if you were unemployed it was your own fault and you should starve.
Actually, as anyone living in Russia knows, there has always continued to be unemployment. Official proof of this fact was given in 1933, when, with the introduction of the passport system, tens or hundreds of thousands of persons “not performing work of national importance” were expelled from the towns.
Even the official Soviet statistics have revealed unemployment. The Soviet Union Year Book gives the following figures of total numbers of workers and employees in different years:
| Number of Workers | ||
| and Employees in | ||
| Year | State Industry | |
| 1928 | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 3,096 |
| 1932 | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 6,481 |
| 1933 | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 6,229 |
| 1934 | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 6,531 |
| 1935 | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 7,066 |
| 1936 | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 7,675 |
In large-scale industry and construction, the decline in 1933 was over a million, against which there was a rise of 200,000 in the number of wage-earners on the land. Many urban workers had been forced back to the villages whence they originally came. The great capital investments in industry under the Five Year Plan had failed to relieve the population pressure in the villages, which is Russia’s age-old problem.
The Soviet Government has “liquidated” not unemployment, but the unemployed. It starves them to death or rounds them up and sends them to forced labor in the concentration camps, where they die off in a few years.
I myself saw one of the round-ups of the “beggars” in Moscow (see Chapter IV). Fred Beale, the Gastonia striker who preferred to risk jail by returning to the United States to life as one of the privileged in U.S.S.R., has given in Proletarian lourney a heart-rending account of the hordes of starving workers in the Ukraine in 1932:
At the Kharkov Tractor Plant there was not a day that I did not see large groups of people waiting outside of the gates looking for work.. . . Most of them were turned away, particularly those who came from collectives. I remember one old man, ragged and freezing, begging for a job. Being hungry, he was ready to do anything. He pestered the young official who did the hiring. “Go away, old man,” said our young Communist bureaucrat. “GO to the field and die.”
As the old man silently and quiveringly turned away and walked down the ice-covered road, the young man’s eyes followed him with contempt. “It’s time we put these old people out of the way,” he remarked.
The crowds of roving peasants were augmented by discharged workers from factories, workers who couldn’t keep up with the Stalin pace, or who had grumbled, protested, or fallen into disfavor with their overseers. For a worker to get fired in Soviet Russia means death by starvation, unless he can learn the art of begging, or is fortunate enough to have some kind relative in the capitalist countries . . . . So the Tractor Plant and our foreign colony there was besieged by droves of begging and pleading people, seeking a few crumbs of bread, some potato peelings, or some fish bones. Not a day passed without groups of these disinherited workers and peasants, young and old, men and women, knocking at our doors. They would dig into the garbage boxes and fight like packs of wild dogs for food remains.
The Stalin clique positively hated these intruders. The hungry folk stood in the way of the bureaucrats anxious to make a good showing before the visiting delegations and tourists. Indeed, of what use was the propaganda put out in America, claiming that the Soviet worker was prosperous and always employed, if these hungry, shel- terless, jobless “beggars” were permitted to expose the truth? The Soviet authorities, with the aid of the Communist Party members of the factory, who were eager to win favors from the high officials, would round up the starving people in the streets, collect them in great herds, and turn them over to the G.P.U. It was a weekly oc- currence. Sometimes a raid would be improvised a few hours before the arrival of a foreign delegation. I confess that I even took part to some extent in these human dragnets.
In spite of all the Draconian legislation, the Russian workers have continued to struggle against their enslavement. That struggle cannot be carried on in the open. Outwardly the workers must continue to shout that “life has become joyous” and that their conditions of life are wonderful. They cannot organize or strike, for the O.G.P.U. is always at hand to carry away to the concentration camps all who murmur a complaint. But all the repression has failed to prevent many thousands of workers from leaving their jobs and seeking better wages in some other town or place. Most serious of all for the Soviet state has been their refusal to work harder, the unwillingness or the physical incapacity of the ill-fed, ill-housed, dragooned working class to produce more. The productivity of labor in the U.S.S.R. remains far below that of labor in capitalist Europe, and even further below that of American labor. The Russian standard of life remains an Asiatic, or colonial, standard; and the productivity of Russian labor cannot be increased until the workers are given sufIicient nourishment, decent housing, and some hope of amelioration in living standards in general.
The introduction first of so-called socialist competition, and then in 1935 of Stakhanovism, has succeeded in producing pacemakers who earn 10 or even zo times as much as the ordinary workers, but it has not succeeded in stepping up the general level of labor productivity to any considerable extent. When one reads Soviet boasts of record- breaking in the mines or industries by Stakhanovists, it must be borne in mind that these men or women usually have other workers under them to perform the subsidiary tasks, or to work under their direction. The Stakhanovists have come to perform the function of foremen, or gang leaders, and are hated by the ordinary workers whom they drive, and whose piece-rate wages are reduced when some new record has been set. There have even been murders of Stakhanovists by desperate workers who could not keep up the pace and feared dismissal.
In the period of the First Five Year Plan there was still enthusiasm, faith, and hope to spur a large number of the workers to a maximum effort. But the Plan not only failed to improve their condition; in the end they were worse off than at the beginning. When bread was derationed in 1934, its price was doubled and wages increased only by 10 per cent. Worst of all from the point of view of the feelings of the masses, was the ever greater differentiation in standards of life as between themselves and their rulers. A bitter saying began to be heard: “Yes, they have constructed socialism for themselves.” The workers became more and more conscious of the fact that a11 their privations and toil and misery had gone, not to make a better world for themselves and their children, but to provide luxuries for their rulers.
As more and more “commercial” shops were opened, and things they could never afford to buy were displayed in the windows, bitterness increased. Earlier, when the meat, butter, eggs, chocolates, fruit, clothing, etc., had been supplied to the ruling group in “closed distributors,” the masses were not fully aware of the great gulf between them and their rulers. Luxury then was not displayed, but hidden and un- avowed. But as the years went by it became obvious to the dullest in- telligence that the fruits of their labor were not for the working class, and never would be.
After the hellish years of semistarvation, 1934, 1935, and 1936 seemed better. There was enough bread, even if most workers and peasants rarely ate anything else. It became possible for some of them to buy sugar and herring, fats and vegetables, in small quantities. But by the end of 1936, with the ever-increasing military appropriations, the standard of life again began to deteriorate, and with it production figures fell. The old vicious circle began again : less food for the workers and therefore less production of goods to sell to the peasants to produce food. Moreover, the mad “record-breaking” of the Stakhanovists had caused machinery to deteriorate rapidly. Lathes and other machines were aged before their time, and new ones had to be imported from abroad. Butter and other necessities were again exported to pay for imports of machinery, as during the First Five Year Plan, and food queues again appeared in the streets.
In effect, the sacrifices imposed on the people from 1928-33 to pay for industrialization had been vain. For two or three years the imported machinery made it possible to produce a little more and to give the workers and peasants the minimum necessary to keep them above the starvation level. But the state’s policy of encouraging record-breaking without regard to deterioration of capital annulled the -brief gains. From 1936 onward, production in the basic industries fell. Worse still was the condition of the railways. The Press reported coal, steel, auto- mobiles, and grain left waiting at the depots in huge quantities.
Undoubtedly the economic crisis which set in in 1937 was one reason for the purge. Discontent was so general that a scapegoat had to be found. Since the workers and the peasants loathed the Communist ofIicials who dragooned them and who lived in comparative luxury, the execution or imprisonment of thousands of Party members was in one sense a human sacrifice to the outraged proletariat and peasants.
In March 1938 Pravda accused the “Trotskyist wreckers” of being responsible for the holding back of wages to the workers and manufactures to the peasants. “Today,” it wrote on March 6, “everyone can see for themselves just who is responsible for the unsatisfactory functioning of the rural co-operatives, just who held back supplying the toilers with such goods as sugar, salt, makhorka [low-grade tobacco], which are available in surplus quantities in our country.”
The workers were to understand that neither Stalin nor his system was responsible, but the “Trotskyists.” It is more than doubtful whether the workers at this stage of their experience were convinced, but the tumbling of so many heads, the fall of so many of the mighty “boyars of the bureaucracy” may have assuaged their discontents a little. Human nature is such that when people are very miserable, it is a comfort to them to know that others are suffering even more. Hitler’s persecution of the Jews offers the same kind of psychological comfort to the German people, or is at least intended to.
However, Stalin has played this game a little too often. The dis organization of the national economy was intensified by the mass arrests. Conditions went from bad to worse, and it was little consolation to the workers to know that if they were only serfs, those sent to the concentration camps during the purge were slaves. The difference between “free” labor and penal labor in the concentration camps is no longer very great.
In 1938 there were indications of widespread ca’canny, veritable strikes on the job, and even perhaps strikes of workers, who stayed away from the factories. In January 1939 it was publicly admitted that in 1938 the Plan had collapsed. Production at the end of that year had sunk to below the 1935 level. The very sharp fall during December in the production of coal, iron, steel, and rolled products is only to be explained by something in the nature of strikes.
| Daily Production in Thousands of Tons | |||||
| Official Figures of | |||||
| Planned | Actual Daily Production | ||||
| Figure | Dec. 14 | Dec. 15 | Dec. 17 | Dec. 19 | |
| Iron | 45.6 | 37.6 | 34.5 | 28 | 26 |
| Steel | 56.1 | 44.5 | 41.0 | 34.8 | 32.6 |
| Rolled Products | 43.6 | 39.1 | 36.8 | 28.5 | 25.2 |
| Coal | 390 | 356 | 347.6 | 294.7 | ? |
By January 1939 production had been pulled up to the early December figure, which was less than that for December 1935.
Car-loadings which had reached a daily total of IOO,OOO in the summer of 1938 dropped to 50,000 in mid-December, but part of the drop here may legitimately be claimed to have been due to snowstorms.
A hint of what had been happening is given in an article in Pravda (January 15, r93g), in which it thundered against “lax executives” who were “afraid to fire shirkers for fear of creating for themselves difficulties with labor supply.” The possibility of strikes is, of course, not admitted in the workers’ fatherland; so Pravda had to speak of shirkers when strikers was probably meant.
Although Stalin’s unprecedented severity and terrorism enable him to deal with “labor troubles” in a manner which must be the envy of a harassed capitalist, even he cannot always prevent strikes of a kind. When life offers no hope, when in very truth you have “nothing to lose but your chains,” you may let the O.G.P.U. do its worst. Death can sometimes be preferable to life as a starved and overdriven slave, even to the Russians so long inured to misery and oppression.
Again Stalin cannot afford to liquidate the workers as a class, as he liquidated the Kulaks. Their wholesale refusal to be bound to their jobs, whatever the conditions, forces the factory managers to be “lax” upon occasion if their whole labor force is not to be transferred to the O.G.P.U. concentration camps. Hence in 1939 the original regulation forbidding the reemployment of dismissed workers was modified to permit it after a six-months interval.
It is by now difficult for Stalin to think up any new decrees to bind down the working class. Their wages are so low and their housing so terribly bad, with the exception of the foremen and Stakhanovists, who act as slave drivers, that their standard of life cannot be further reduced without decreasing production. However, late in 1938, follow- ing the 50 per cent fall in production, Stalin thought of one last method of making the toilers toil harder and preventing their striking on the job. On December 29, 1939, immediately following an order to increase the productivity of labor by 25 per cent and a ctlt in piece-rate wuges of 14 per cent, Stalin issued a decree which annulled Article 119 of the much-advertised Constitution. According to the latter, “The right to rest and leisure” of the toilers is insured by the institution of annual vacations with pay for workers and employees, and by the provision of sanatoria, rest homes, and clubs serving the needs of the toilers. The right to go to the sanatoria and rest homes has for many years been restricted to managers, foremen, Stakhanovists, and the very few ordinary workers who were adept at licking the boots of the factory bosses. But there remained the holiday period with pay, and there are some elementary social services for all, in particular free medical service when sick, maternity benefits, some medical care for the workers’ children, and very small pensions for old workers. The new decree limits full “social security” to those who remain years at one job. The worker is henceforth only entitled to all the social services provided under law if he has remained at one and the same factory or institution for more than six years. If his labor book shows a record of from 3-6 years’ work at one and the same place, he gets 80 per cent social security; if 2-3 years, 60 per cent; if less than 2 years, only 50 per cent.
Justifying, with cruel irony, this deprivation of full social services under the law for the majority of the “toilers,” the organ of the Department of Justice stated: “All former theories of labor and labor laws in the U.S.S.R. have been permeated with capitalist counter- revolutionary spirit.”38
Free and guaranteed social services, and the humanitarian sentiment which inspires them, are thus now officially designated as capitalist; and Lenin and the old Bolsheviks are told off for their bourgeois way of thinking because they decreed annual vacations, medical attention, and unemployment benefits for the proletariat. Under Stalin’s “socialist” state, the workers must be deprived of any and every right they had won under the capitalist system.
The truly amazing aspect of this new decree is the virtual admission by Stalin, when he promulgated it, that he now considers the workers responsible for everything wrong with the state of Russia. He referred to the “disorganizers” among the workers, to the “individual, ignorant, backward, or unscrupulous people who cause industry, transport, and the whole national economy great damage.” Since a few wicked workers could hardly damage the whole national economy, it must be the majority of the working class which is wrecking it. In 1930-32 the Kulaks and the non-Party specialists were the scapegoats; from 1936- 38 it was the old Bolsheviks. The companions of Lenin having all been liquidated as Bucharinist-Trotskyist saboteurs, wreckers, and counterrevolutionaries, and as German-Japanese-British spies, there remains no one else but the workers to put the blame upon. So one cannot escape the conclusion that, by 1939 under “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” the proletariat had become counter-revolutionary and was wrecking its own heritage!
There is a terrible negatively progressive force inherent in the use of terror and repression as a means of government. Want begets inefficiency, and inefficiency repression and terror, which in turn begets more want and greater inefhciency-and so leads to more repression and more terror. This, in ever-accelerating tempo, has been the history of the U.S.S.R. In 1939 Stalin attempted to break the vicious circle by directing the terror against neighboring peoples, hoping that national “glory” would reconcile the Russian people to their lot and make it possible to secure their consent, as well as their subjection, to his rule. If he cannot succeed in doing this, it will not perhaps much longer be possible to clamp down the lid on the seething discontent of the Russian workers and prevent the explosion which would wreck the experiment in “socialism.”
The facts given in this chapter prove that the “social security” which is always cited by friends of the Soviet Union as compensation for the low wages earned by the Russian workers is only a myth. It is guaranteed in the Soviet Constitution; but this, like its other provisions, is mere eyewash for the foreigners. The Russian worker is unprotected either by the state or by a trade-union, and lives always on the brink of the abyss of unemployment, hunger, and homelessness. He can be dismissed by the manager without appeal, but he may not himself eave his job or go to a different town to seek work. He has no defense against wage reductions and no security in the miserable tenement room out of which he and his family can be turned into the street at three days’ notice. His work, his food, his roof, his liberty, are subject to the caprices of his overseer. The Webbs' statement that the Soviet worker knows that his old age is provided for and that his children “will at all times have the essentials of health” is but a cruel and shame- ful mockery of his insecurity. At any moment his children may be turned into the streets to starve, and in old age he must exist on the charity of his relatives or die of starvation. Even before Stalin’s latest decree reduced pensions for most old workers-for very few have worked consecutively without interruption at their jobs for six vears- pensions were so tiny that old men went on working after sixty’if they could keep up the pace. The pensions were calculated on the old un- inflated ruble, and are now sufficient to buy at most a few loaves of bread a week.
Since 1929 the Soviet Government has carefully veiled the real condition of the working class by ceasing to publish cost of living figures or indices of prices. This has made it impossible for foreigners to have any conception as to the decline or rise in real wages. The Russian citizen, of course, knows quite well that in such and such years his standard of life decreased because the price of all foods rose sharply; but the foreign tourist, told that the workers’ wages are double what they were five years ago, is suitably impressed.
The rise in the average nominal wage of all workers and employees is shown below:
| Rubles per Year | ||||||||||||
| 1924-5 | 1925-6 | 1926-7 | 1928 | 1930 | 1931 | 1932 | 1933 | 1934 | 1935 | 1936 | 1937 | 1938 |
| 450 | 571 | 624 | 703 | 936 | 1127 | 1427 | 1566 | 1858 | 2269 | 2776 | 2772 | 3447 |
In May 1937 the average monthly wage for workers in factory industry was Rs. 231 as against about 50 rubles in 1926-27.As against this fourfold increase in the average wage, however, the worker was paying five times as much for black bread and eight times as much for pota- toes, while meat cost him ten times more than in 1926, and sugar seven times as much. As regards clothing, all the “gigantic successes on the industrial front” meant to the Soviet worker was that he had to pay nine times more for a pair of boots than in the “bad old days” of 1926, and twenty-five times more for woolen cloth, and five times more for cotton cloth. Other prices had risen in proportion.
As was often impressed upon me while working on “capitalist” statistics at the Communist Academy, an “average” figure always conveys a false idea as to the actual earnings of the majority, and a Marxist must therefore never employ average figures as an index of labor conditions. In Soviet Russia the inclusion under the heading “workers and employees” of well-paid specialists and of Party officials paid enormous salaries, entirely invalidates the figure of 231 given as the average wage. The general level of earnings was well below 200 rubles. According to a report made to the “Party active? in Moscow in 1935, the usual wage for qualified workers was around 200 rubles, and that for laborers 100 rubles. 39
Nor do the above calculations take into account the great deterioration in quality of the manufactured goods, the prices of which had risen so steeply. The kind of shoes or boots the worker was able to buy in 1926would last him for several years, but the kind he bought in 1937 had soles little better than cardboard.
The workers’ standard of life did not improve after the First Five Year Plan. On the contrary, it deteriorated further in 1935, owing to derationing of bread and sugar and other foodstuffs. It then slightly improved in 1936, owing to small reductions in food prices other than bread. Since 1939 it has again deteriorated, owing to higher prices, reduced piece-rate wages, and the shortage of food in the shops.
In a country of very low living standards, such as Russia, the price of bread is all-important, since it is the staple diet of the great mass of the people. To the mass of Russian workers earning 100 to 200 rubles a month, the doubling of the price of bread which accompanied derationing was the heaviest blow yet struck at them by their government. Formerly the industrial workers had received a ration of 800 grams of bread a day. Most of them ate only the black (rye) bread, and it had only cost them 12½ kopeks a kilo in 1932 as against 85 kopeks in 1937. True that the price of bread had been increased more than once between 1932 and 1935; but the doubling of the price when it was derationed, counted as a “great triumph of socialism,” was one of those backhanded blows to which the worker had by now grown accustomed. As I have remarked in another chapter, when in the U.S.S.R. one read in the newspaper of some great socialist achievement, one’s heart always sank, since such an announcement inevitably heralded some fresh burden to be imposed. It was of little use to tell the worker he could now buy as much bread as he liked when his miserable wages no longer s&iced to purchase the minimum needed to feed his hungry children.
I remember hearing two women in our courtyard discussing the matter one evening as I returned from work. “Now,” said one of them, “we shan’t be able to afford a Kasha(hot mush of cereal) dinner any more.”
Such was “socialist progress.”
Barmine, the ex-Soviet diplomat,40 tells in his book of a conversation he had with the porter of his apartment house, whom he found mending shoes at midnight in his tiny little room:
“Why do you work so hard?” I asked him, knowing that his working day was not eight or ten hours long, but more or less endless.
“Why? Because we are hungry. I have five mouths to feed and they pay me 120 rubles.”
“But a general increase of 10 per cent has been made in all wages to compensate for the increased price of bread since derationing. Surely that has made things all right for you?”
“You think so? We are seven, counting my wife and the five kids. We need seven kilos of bread a day since bread is the only food we can afford to buy. The price of bread has been doubled and I have had my wages increased by only 8 rubles a month. Either I’ve got to work nights, or steal, or we shall all starve.”
This worker, whose case was normal, had to pay 178 rubles a month for bread if his wife and children were not to starve. Taking it that his wife earned another 90 rubles, they had about 218 rubles income, out of which 178 went for bread, leaving an insufficient amount to pay for lodging, heat, light, and forced loans and dues, even if they never tasted meat, or herring, or margarine, or even potatoes.
The textile workers whose conditions I have described elsewhere were even worse off than this porter, for they couldn’t earn extra money cobbling or performing other personal services for the wellpaid bureaucrats of Moscow.
The complete abolition of rationing meant in sum that the higher- income groups could henceforth freely purchase meat, butter, eggs, and other scarcity goods at “commercial prices” in any quantities they could afford. For the mass of the wage-earners, employees as well as workers, the change was one for the worse. Their real wages were lower, but they could now gaze through the shop windows at all manner of appetizing foodstuffs which they could not hope to buy. Since the Soviet Government publishes no cost of living statistics the only way to calculate the improvement or deterioration of the con- dition of the Russian working class since the Revolution is to compare wages and the prices of the necessities of life before the World War and now. Taking the year 1937, when the Russian workers’ real wages were higher than in the two previous years (and higher than in 1940), we get the following comparison:
Workers of average qualifications in constructional industry and of mechanics in large scale industry: Average monthly earnings:
| 191441 | (in rubles) | 1937 |
| 43.68 | 232.0 |
| RETAIL PRICES OF FOODSTUFFS IN 1914 AND 1937 | ||
| August | 1914 | 1937 |
| Black bread per kilo | 0.06 | 0.85 |
| White " " " | 0.12 | 1.70 |
| Beef " " | 0.54 | 9.60 |
| Veal " " | 0.63 | 10.60 |
| Pork " " | 0.59 | 11.00 |
| Herring " " | 0.15 | 6.00 |
| Cheese " " | 0.98 | 14.80 |
| Butter " " | 1.17 | 20.00 |
| Eggs, 10 | 0.25 | 6.50 |
| Milk per liter | 0.14 | 1.70 |
| _____ | _____ | |
| Total | 4.73 | 82.75 |
The above prices show that the cost of staple foods in 1937 was about 15 times higher than in 1914, as against only a little more than a fourfold increase in wages. Since the average wage figure for 1914 was calculated on those for workers only, while the 1937 figure includes also clerical workers, specialists, Party officials, and the highly paid shock workers, it is certain that the average wage of the majority of workers was below 232 rubles a month. Even at 232 rubles the de- cline in real wages has obviously been very great.
Whereas in 1914 a worker of average qualification could purchase 90 kilograms of beef or 38 kilograms of butter with his monthly wage, he could buy only 24 kilograms of beef and 11.5 kilos of butter in 1937. Since 1939 he has been able to buy even less than these quantities, and often had to stand hours in line to obtain the tiny quantity he could afford.
Expressed in terms of black bread, the staple diet of the working class today even more definitely than before the Revolution, the average daily wage now buys g kilograms as against the 24 kilograms it bought in 1914.
When it comes to computing the real wages of the Russian workers with regard to the purchase of manufactured goods, the decline in his standard of life is even more strikingly revealed.
Most articles of clothing now cost twenty times more than before the Revolution.
| COST OF MOST ESSENTIAL MANUFACTURES (IN RUBLES) | ||
| 1914 | 1938 | |
| Calico per meter | 0.15 | 3.50 |
| Woolen dress goods | 2.80 | 125 |
| Heavy woolen overcoating per meter | 8.40 | 250 |
| Men's shoes per pair | 12 | 250 |
| " " " | ||