Ruhl's Report

Last week Arthur Ruhl,* famed European correspondent, cabled to The New York Herald Tribune a series of significant despatches from Riga, Latvia. Carefully Correspondent Ruhl made clear that his intention was to provide a general picture of Soviet Russia uncluttered by statistics. In a word, he found business and industrial conditions reviving on an apparently firm basis; social and religious affairs functioning with but little friction in new channels; and Governmental dictatorship still absolute.

A perusal of his account gives the following impressions:

Travel. The tea-drenched atmosphere of Russian stations is back to pre-War humidity. Newsstands are well filled. As the bell rings, comfortable dining and sleeping cars are thrown open to travelers, who need not struggle for a place. Through regions once stricken with famine, the traveler speeds past fields luxuriant with a ripening harvest. At the great Kursk Station in Moscow he finds piles of perishable foodstuffs, which are being rushed to customers able to pay for them, from a distance of 1000 miles or more.

Cities. Descending from his train, the traveler finds that the stucco-plastered brick buildings of Russia have been smartly replastered; and have lost the ragged-wallpaper air of early Communist days. Many new buildings are going up: two and three story structures, laboriously raised bit by bit by clever workmen, as in the days of Peter the Great. The Orthodox Churches, generally seem well cared for by their parishioners, despite Government opposition.

Prices. Proceeding to a bank, the U. S. traveler finds that he can get a shade less than two rubles for a dollar. For one ruble he can get a passable table d'hote dinner. For eight kopecks (four cents), he can ride on a new or renovated tram. If his tastes lean to motoring, British-made busses and an occasional taxi are to be had.

Purses and stomachs seem to be well lined. People trample under foot what four years ago they would have scrambled for like starving street cats. Barrels of caviar are visible.

Industry. Many Soviet industries still maintain a vague air of being on parade. Generally, however, manufacturers seem to lack capital and raw materials rather than customers. A visit to the offices of the All Russian Textile Syndicate gives the impression that that industry, at least, is being run at a profit along U. S. lines. Typewriters bang, executives hold conferences, work moves forward with all the earmarks of babbittry.

The President of the Textile Syndicate, Tovarish Kilewicz, is a square-jawed bullet-headed onetime workman. As might many another self-made man, he admits that his subordinates have a monopoly of whatever technical training there is in the establishment. On the basis of their technical training, many pre-revolution bourgeosie, or even nobles, receive good salaries*--if they are adaptable and pliant to the Soviet.

Profits are divided as follows: 30% to the State; 30% to improve working conditions; 20% to the reserve fund; 20% to the capital fund. Workers get a bonus for more than normal production. The salaries of executives are "according to ability" and are fixed. A house, carriage, automobile and what not are often thrown in to invisibly raise a salary that "looks better" in low figures.

Politics must either not detain the traveler long or absorb his whole attention. Dictatorship is absolute. There is no freedom of speech, political assembly, or from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Deportations to Siberia still occur. People are still shot because an aristocratic emigre in Paris drunkenly mumbled sounds which resembled their name. Suspicion and espionage are rife. But the people seem happy, in the main.

Education, under the direction of Soviet Commisar Lunacharsky, is proceeding with a heavy emphasis upon Marxian doctrines. An attempt to bring students face to face with "reality" is hailed by the Bolsheviki as tending to fit pupils for the rugged highway of life. The former propertied class who have young children in school, complain that the seeds of a godless irresponsibility are being sown.

This much is certain. Instruction, such as it may be, is now made easy of attainment by the new ruling class and difficult of access for the old one. Commissar Lunacharsky himself has admitted: "There are no rules against anyone being admitted [to the schools] but when the applicants are genuine proletarians the examiners are a little easier with their questions."

Sport like Education has become the privilege of proletarians, as it was once of the bourgeoisie and the artistocracy. Rowing has attained great popularity for both sexes. The observant traveler is apt to be particularly struck by young Amazonian working girls, who slather up and down the Moscow River, with nothing on but a red kerchief, a rowing shirt, and a pair of blue trunks.-

Regular football matches are played off between Finnish and Russian teams. Otherwise, Russians must find competition, like capital, at home. The mass of the population seems to be undergoing "a psychological change very like that through which the luckier sort of European immigrants pass during their first five or ten years in America."

Religious conditions in Russia are the best example of the impotency of an absolute dictatorship to strike at the root-feelings of humanity. The heads of the Soviet Government, admitted atheists, have made a determined assault upon the Orthodox Church by suppressive measures and by launching the rival "laving Church." The great mass of the peasantry have quietly gone on worshipping in the same way as before. Now the Government has surrendered to the ex tent of adopting a laissez-faire policy toward religion. In this, as in countless other ways, the stabilizing weight of the great mass of the people is felt.

*Collier's sent him to France and Belgium in 1914, to Central Europe in 1915, to Russia in 1916-17, to France in 1918, to the Baltic in 1919. More recently he visited the Baltic States and Poland for The New York Evening Post, and went to Russia two years ago for the New York Herald Tribune.

*As high as 500 rubles a month ($250).