Soviet Russia celebrates its 17th birthday

GEORGE E. SOKOLSKY

At the turn of its seventeenth birthday, Soviet Russia faces its neighbors with many projects started and with very few completed; but it faces its neighbors internally united with a people nationalistically, almost chauvinistically, loyal to the State. Only two other countries have in this decade developed such fierce nationalism, Japan and Italy.

Soviet Russia has not led the proletariat to democracy, nor could it have accomplished that in a generation. But it has achieved this: it has substituted, for fealty to the Czar, the ideal of complete service to the State. And although the State is theoretically a dictatorship of the proletariat on the basis of Marxian Communism, it is actually tending in the direction of State capitalism under the autocratic control of its dictator, Joseph Stalin.

When Lenin and Trotzky seized the power in Kerensky's Petrograd in 1917, they realized that their task was more psychological than economic. All Power, they announced, must go to the workers, peasants, and soldiers.

But there were hardly any others than

workers, soldiers, and peasants in Russia in those days. The aristocracy had run away, most of it. The debacle at the front, the poverty in the rear, the attempt at democracy at the capital, had driven them out of Russia. The intelligentzia held on a bit longer; but there were as many intellectuals among the Bolsheviks as among their opponents. After all, Lenin, Trotzky, Lunacharsky, Kolontai—all the names we used to talk about in Petrograd and Moscow, were intellectual. The workers, and peasants and soldiers produced no leaders out of their own classes who counted during what John Reed liked to call the ten days that shook the world.

The task, in fact, was to make something of the soldier, the peasant and the worker. The task was to break down memories of serfdom, to annihilate the fear of freedom, to achieve faith in some power outside themselves, other than that "Little Father," the Czar, who had so often in Russian history forgotten the welfare of his people. And that task was not easy, for the generation of Russians, alive and adult in 1917, were not so willing to be transformed. They lived in their huts on Russian farms, in squalor and poverty, taking life with oriental stoicism, relieved occasionally by fearful outbursts of emotion when the vodka proved potent. It was

difficult to educate more than 160,000,000 men and women who could not read and write, who had never listened to propaganda on the radio and in the movies, who had never travelled beyond their village confines.

The soldiers had been to the front and had learned of war and death. And they

had learned that such a government as Germany and Austria cares for the soldiers, tries to give them decent food and uniforms and looks after them when they are wounded. The comparisons which they made between their officers and those of the enemy encouraged them to shoot their own officers in the back. In fact, the Russian soldier, a travelled and open-eyed peasant, made the Revolution. It was the Petrograd garrison and not the workers who seized the Winter Palace and sent Kerensky on his wanderings. It was the soldier in Moscow who took the Kremlin. It was the Kronstadt sailors who made the position of Lenin and Trotzky secure.

In fact, what we so often forget is that in most of Russia there were no workers. Most of Russia was in a pre-capitalist stage; most of the industries were hardly advanced beyond the handicraft stage. There was an oil industry in Baku and a coal industry in the Don; but, by and large, it may be stated that, industrially, Soviet Russia started at scratch. They had little to tear down and make-over. They had nothing to amalgamate and reorganize. They had no blue-prints to revise. There were no workers who aspired to be capitalists, for under the Czarist regime, what hope was held out to the workers?

The peasants were a frightened, leaderless mass, who during the war had seen their sons go off to the front, never to return. The primitive railroad system of the country had become disorganized so that the peasant had no market for his crops. Years seemed to pass without manufactured goods coming to his village. His leaders, the old aristocrats and intellectuals, had either gone to the front or the capital. The peasant was prepared to accept any form of leadership, any help, any assistance that would guarantee him that the land on which he lived would remain his home, that he would be able to exchange farm products for manufactured goods, and that his sons would not be forced to go to war.

One word about the land: up to 1861, the Russian peasant was a serf. In that year he was freed and some peasants got land. But in due course, the land worked itself back to the original landlords, by mortgage foreclosures, tax-foreclosures, and other processes. The peasant then never really owned his land. But he could live and work on a particular parcel of land that he called his home. With him, it was never a question of being guaranteed ownership in a capitalistic sense; but he did want a guarantee that he would not be driven off the land by some irate and drunken landlord or his agent. He wanted security. This the Bolsheviks promised him.

Current Soviet Russia chooses to advertise itself in kilowatt hours and machine output. But really, the plants that American and German engineers erected for them, and the products of those plants, are in themselves superficialities which could have been erected under capitalism—as they were in Germany—if the more energetic, but hitherto submerged, intellectual classes of Russia had an opportunity to work without aristocratic interference and corruption. Technologically, the Russians have achieved nothing and that, too, is of no significance. They have at their disposal the full product of western civilization since the Industrial Revolution. If they require a dam—true, they want the biggest they can get—then Col. Cooper builds a dam for them as he would for any South American country. If they require a tractor factory, Mr. Ford sends some Detroit blueprints. The only important engineering enterprise which was not a direct product of American, British, or German supervision and blue-printing, was the Turksib Railroad built by Bill Shatoff, the Chicago anarchist.

Nor is this an antagonistic criticism of Soviet achievement over a period of seventeen years. When the Communists try to start a revolution in some country other than Soviet Russia, they quite naturally advocate internationalism with Moscow as the center of the universe. But at home, they have been as economically nationalistic as an American brain-truster. In a word, realizing that a country cannot defend itself in time of war or peace—and the peace at times is a worse period than the War—unless it is in a measure independent of imports from abroad of basic manufactured goods, Soviet Russia sacrificed everything for possession of the machine. A couple of Five Year Plans have now gone into machinery, and it will lake a great many more to develop the total units of energy equal to that generated by a little country like Japan or a state like Pennsylvania.

All this, I say, is trivial, compared with the vast psychological experiment tried with apparent success by Soviet Russia. The object of this experiment was to lift the population out of Asiatic despair and hopelessness. The object was to give youth an ideal, an aim, and a bright glitter in the eye.

In the beginning of the Soviet, the world revolution was the ideal. But the world revolution is a costly business. Millions were spent in many parts of the world, but the revolution did not come. Besides, the governments of other countries were always on the watch for Russia's participation in the world revolution so that there might in time be an excuse for a war against the Communist state.

Most of the Communists, when they ceased to be revolutionary agitators and settled down to the very sober job of being commissaries, found the world revolution a nuisance. The commissaries soon discovered that running a government and making provision for the economic life of 160,000,000 people is enough of a job without taking on other people's revolutions. For instance, the commissary who was trying to build a factory stopped agitating for a world revolution, but agitated that the government should sell more butter and caviar, so that it might establish a decent balance in a London or New York bank to pay for required goods.

Continued on page 74

Continued from page 59

So, Trotzky, who believed that communism in one country will inevitably fail unless all the world becomes communistic by revolution, was exiled, and Stalin entered upon a period of silent but resolute dictatorship. Soviet Russia thereupon emerged upon a period of nationalistic, industrial development, with all the appliances of capitalism, but with the motive of private profit removed, to a very great extent. Private profit still exists, but the citizens cannot export their profits nor can they be inherited. But they can be spent. And the profits do not come from preferred and common stocks, but from government bonds and special services to the state.

The above paragraph started to say that when the Communists started, the world revolution was an ideal. That had to be given up. Extirpating God was once an ideal, but God somehow persisted and Easter and Passover

managed to continue, so that Godlessness was a less effective opiate for the masses than religion had been. Finally, the ideal of youth was made a bigger and more efficient Russia. The machine became God, the tractor, the skyscraper, the airplane.

And all that is a stupendous achievement. For what made Russia, and what makes China and Turkey and Persia, for instance, backward countries, is that capitalism inadequately served them in the matter of production of goods. A capitalist country like the United States or Great Britain sees that its production is efficient and plentiful until it gets overdone and a Depression appears; the pre-capitalist country produces inefficiently and insufficiently, and thereby becomes dependent upon capitalist countries for loans and credits. Soviet Russia made its people nationalistically conscious of the necessity of being independent of all the world in production, of utilizing land, mineral wealth, and the waterways for production. In a word, it has sought, by the capitalistic process of the exploitation of labor and resources, to arouse a lethargic people to the ideal of national self-sufficiency.