U.S.S.R.

SOVIET COMMUNISM: A NEW CIVILISATION?

-- Sidney and Beatrice Webb

-- Scribner (Two vols.; $7.50).

No more than Berlin or Rome does Moscow set the World's style for what the well-dressed Government will wear. Yet Russia has caused more conflicting political-fashion reports than any other country in the world. Patterns brought back from the Red Style Centre by contemptuous or delighted buyers have differed hugely; most seemed to have been cut on the bias. Superimposed or pieced together, however ingeniously, they made little better than a crazy quilt. But last week appeared a pattern of the U.S.S.R. that was no piecemeal snippet but cut out of whole cloth. As all political tailors knew, it was the painstakingly honest work of an old reliable firm: Webb & Webb. Readers of Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? might not like the pattern it showed, but at last they could be sure they had at least seen the whole.

To say that the firm of Webb & Webb is old and reliable does not mean that it is also conservative. Longtime members of England's famed Fabian Society, Beatrice and Sidney Webb have grown old together in the Socialist faith. Their compendious, accurate, statistical books have been their well-brought-up children. As busy as ants', and no noisier, they have never mounted a soapbox nor slapped a policeman in their lives. Bernard Shaw was the wisecracking Fabian whip; the Webbs were the wheel horses. Climax to their plodding career came in 1929, when the Labor Government made Sidney Webb Lord Passfield, put him in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for the Colonies & Dominions. Though the Webbs are now in their seventies they cannot break the working habits of a lifetime. With aged humor they half apologize for still keeping at it: "The question will arise in some quarters: Why did two aged mortals, both nearing their ninth decade, undertake a work of such magnitude? We fear our presumption must be ascribed to the recklessness of old age ... a new subject to investigate; a fresh circle of stimulating acquaintances with whom to discuss entirely new topics, and above all a daily joint occupation, in intimate companionship, to interest, amuse and even excite us in the last stage of life's journey."

Readers who had already been subjected to the Webbs' dry objectivity rightly expected few traces of excitement in their latest work. Instead they found 1.143 pages of well-arranged, lucidly expressed information, bristling with footnotes, tables, charts. Their aim: "To present ... an objective view of the whole social order of the U.S.S.R. as it exists today . . . with an intelligent impression of the direction in which it is traveling."

Volume I sets forth the whole system of the U.S.S.R. -- what the Webbs call (in a British rather than a U. S. sense) the Constitution. Under this Soviet "constitution" they find the Russian voting and acting in three separate capacities: as citizen, producer, consumer. In each of these capacities he has a vote and a voice; in one of them he has a job. Except for the steadily dwindling minority (2.5% in 1934) of the disfranchised, every Russian acts in this triple role. Over & above this, if he wants to follow "the vocation of public leadership," and can stand the gaff, he may be a member of the Communist Party. Members are hardly admitted, easily expelled, must "walk a straight & narrow way. With a naughty old wink at the Kremlin and another at the Vatican, the Webbs liken the personnel of the Communist Party to the Society of Jesus, its supremacy in the U.S.S.R. to that of the Pope in his temporal glory. They quote Stalin: "We may say that the dictatorship of the proletariat is substantially the dictatorship of the Party, as the force which effectively guides the proletariat." The Webbs poke mild fun at the Bolshevik fondness for the word "dictatorship,'' think it a misnomer for the Party's "inspiration, evocation and formulation of a General Will'' among Russia's millions. The Party is outside the constitution; it broods over the body politic like the spirit over the waters. Its aim is, by precept and example, to leaven Russia's lump. To this end, half its membership is kept ''at the bench or in the mine;" the other half act as overseers to Russia's babeling pyramid of committees.

The Webbs do not like the term dictatorship as applied to Russia, consider the Soviet Government less autocratic than many a parliamentary cabinet. As indications that Russia is actually a "multiform democracy" they cite the widespread popular discussion of proposed laws. The marriage law of 1927 was thus argued over for a year before adoption; the 'liquidation of the kulaks" for more than two. To the reader's astonished question: Is Stalin, then, not a dictator? the Webbs return a firm No. "The Government of the U.S.S.R. during the past decade has been clearly no better than that of a committee. Our inference is that it has been, in fact, the very opposite of a dictatorship. It has been, as it still is, government by whole series of committees." They explain Stalin's prominence thus: Lenin's death left a fearful hole; "some new personality had to be produced for the hundred and sixty millions to revere." Trotsky was considered too dangerous, so Stalin was chosen, deliberately propagandized into the nation's hero. While they admit that Stalin's success has made him irremovable, they plainly infer that he is not also irreplaceable, that the U.S.S.R. would struggle on all right without him.

In Volume II the Webbs answer the question: Where is Russia's system heading? To those who still shudder over the barbarity with which the kulaks were "liquidated," and the secret terror of the Cheka, they reply that the facts cannot be blinked ("There is, we fear, no reason to doubt the reality of the 'Red Terror' any more than that of the 'White Terror' "), but that such grisly facts are a temporary phenomenon. They point out that Russia's social, political and religious revolutions were all concentrated in one swoop, whereas in England, for instance, they were separated, spread out over four centuries. Why has Russia's planned economy not yet succeeded in banishing scarcity? Say the Webbs: 1) because at first every productive resource had to be geared to the threat of war; 2) because Russia is waking up culturally faster than its demands can be supplied. "Paradoxically enough, this continued experience of a scarcity of commodities and services in general consumption or use is actually a triumph for planned economy."

Is Russia really building a new civilization? In answer, the Webbs adduce eight phenomena not at present observable in other countries: 1) the abolition of profitmaking; 2) abolition of involuntary unemployment, whether "technological" or "cyclical"; 3) social equality ("the Soviet

Union is the first to strive, without discrimination of sex or race, affluence or position, to produce not merely an intelligentsia but a cultivated nation"); 4) a bureaucracy manned largely by unpaid volunteers; 5) "the vocation of leadership" supplied by the Communist Party; 6) the cult of science (unlike those "in command of most other states, the administrators in the Moscow Kremlin genuinely believe in their professed faith. And their professed faith is in science"); 7) "anti-godism"; 8) the emergence of a new morality ("the recognition of a universal individual indebtedness" to society). These features, in the Webbs' opinion, add up to a synthesis that may properly be called a new civilization.

And will it last? Say the Webbs: It will.

To those who prophesied the U.S.S.R. was heading for bankruptcy and ruin, the Webbs say: After almost 20 years it is still here, and even its eagerest enemies admit that it is strengthening its hold. And will it spread? Again the Webbs say: It will. How? When? Where? They shake their old heads and do not answer.

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