Stalin Shifts the Helm

Captain Lenin, Captain Trotsky and today Captain Stalin have never been afraid to alter Russia's course--the course of over one-seventh of the world--by a sudden titan's tug at the helm. Last week Captain Stalin tugged.

He issued no decree. He permitted the Press of Russia to disclose a speech he had made June 23 to a group of Soviet industrial executives. So awful is Comrade Stalin's power that not one of his many hearers had publicly breathed a syllable. His words, according to Moscow correspondents, will soon be law:

P: "We have not yet reached our Communist goal," said Stalin with devastating simplicity. "Meanwhile emergency measures are necessary. ... It is unbearable to see a locomotive driver receiving the same wages as a bookkeeper!"

The wages of Soviet locomotive drivers and other skilled proletarians will be raised, Stalin indicated, above the wage level of unskilled proletarians and despised white collar yes-men. Up to last week the theory of Soviet wage scales (varied some-what in practice) was approximate wage equality between the skilled and the unskilled. With a mighty tug Stalin seemed to shift the whole Soviet wage structure --in a direction seemingly opposite to Communism.

P:"Break up the family!" was one of Russia's bywords when she went on the Five-Day Week (TIME, Oct. 7,1929). Factories began to run every day of the week with four-fifths of their personnel, the other one-fifth resting. Thus each man or woman has, under the present Five-Day week, one day of rest after each four of work; but the "rest day" of husband and wife may not be the same, thus tending to disrupt the family.

J. Stalin, happy family man, now said that factories in which the Five-Day Week does not seem to work well should return to the old system of five days' work and the same rest day for everyone at once.

P:. Still more striking was the Dictator's word that management of factories a la Soviet by voting councils of the workers must in some degree give way to management by a manager with power to manage and responsibility to show a profit. Obviously this is "State Capitalism." The State being the owner for whom the manager must earn a profit.

P:. Abruptly J. Stalin demanded more tolerance for Russia's pariah class, her "bourgeois intellectuals," the professors, industrial technicians & such left over from tsarist days, some of whom have been shot after "propaganda trials" (TIME, Dec. 8, 15; March 16).

If Stalin did not guarantee safety for exiled "bourgeois intellectuals" who may now dare to return to Russia, he hinted it. But resoundingly he declared that Russia, with Communism still her goal, must produce as fast as possible "proletarian intellectuals ... a new working class intelligentsia."

P: Flaying "endless writing of papers and discussion," Dictator Stalin ultimatumed: "Comrades, we cannot govern this way any longer!"

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