Dreams and Realities
RUSSIA The Congress of the Supreme Council of Soviets meets in a vast gold & marble room of the Kremlin that once held the throne of the Tsar. This week it meets again. Reorganized under the Constitution of 1936, this is its third meeting in its present form, its eleventh since its organization in 1922. If this meeting makes more news than its predecessors, it will be, not because of its deliberations, but because it is addressed by Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili Stalin.
What Stalin says of world affairs makes news wherever he says it. To a war-haunted Europe, the Soviet Union has ceased to be the home of Soviets, of Five-Year Plans and collective farms, of propaganda campaigns and celebrations over the building of blast furnaces--it has become a potential enemy or ally for a gigantic struggle in the making. Imperceptibly, as the menace of war loomed bigger, outside interest in new ways of Russian life ebbed, interest in the Red Army grew.
But if war comes, the strength, stability, efficiency of the Soviet Union's new institutions may count far more than her planes and tanks, more than her standing army of more than two million. It will be a test of the theories of Lenin as well as of the practices of Stalin, of the hold that socialism--or of a social structure that calls itself socialist--has on the loyalties of 170,126,000 people. What has it given them? How firmly would they unite to defend it? After the purges and crises, after the Five-Year Plans, how much enthusiasm remains for the system that gave rise to them?
Significant to the Soviet regime is that Stalin has chosen the Supreme Council as his sounding board. Since 1930 he has spoken often: to Communist Party Congresses, to graduates of the Red Army academies, to the public on the opening of the Moscow subway. In dry, prosaic, unemotional speeches, packed with phrases like "the idiotic disease of political carelessness," and with schoolteacherish questions and answers ("What is the essence of this attitude? The essence of this attitude is. . . .") Stalin has lectured Young Communists, delegates of the Third International, Stakhanovites, collective farmers, shock troopers, school children. But this is his first speech to the 1,143 people who make up the main governmental body of the Soviet Union.
Government. Soviets in Russia perform administrative functions roughly comparable to those of municipal councils, State legislatures, Congress, in the U. S. Originally committees formed in factories and towns when the Tsar's authority broke down, there are now 70,000 of them to whom delegates, not always Communist Party members, are elected by secret ballot in direct elections, but from candidates selected by the Communist Party. Over local Soviets are Soviets of townships, over them Soviets of regions, over them Soviets of the twelve national districts, nine "autonomous regions," 22 "autonomous republics" and eleven "constituent republics" into which the country is divided, all nominated and elected in the same way. On top of the whole heap is the Supreme Council of two houses. To Moscow last week to hear Dictator Stalin there came:
>569 deputies to the Council of Union, elected for four-year terms on the basis of one for each 300,000 population.
> 574 delegates of 54 nationalities to the Council of Nationalities. Ukraine, Uzbek on the Afghanistan border, Turkmen on the Caspian, Armenian, Georgian, six other "constituent republics" sent 25 each. Tatars from the Volga, Karelians from the swampy North, Buriat-Mongolians from the shores of Lake Baikal, Moldavians from the southwestern borders of the Ukraine, 18 other "autonomous republics" sent eleven each, while 45 came from nine regions and twelve from national districts like Komi, Chukotsk in the Arctic.
>Of the 1,143 in both houses, 13 are under 20, 284 are under 30, 831 under 40, seven over 60.
> There are 330 peasants, 465 workmen, 65 soldiers, 187 women, 870 Party members. There are 53 presidents of collective farms, an 80-year-old scientist, a 19-year-old textile worker, a Cossack writer, an actress. There is Comrade Deputy Olga Leonova, 42, whose official biography begins "Stern and miserable was the childhood of O. F. Leonova." There is Deputy Bach, 82, exiled in 1878, whose record begins, "A. N. Bach has lived a long and beautiful life." There is Alexander Bussy-gin, 32, who was so electrified during the Stakhanov movement that he forged 1,001 crankshafts in one shift (675 was the norm), 1,005 the next, 1,015 the third.
Nobody expects an opposition to challenge Stalin's speech. Deputies may discuss, argue, criticize specific Government acts, but not party policy. But circulating back to their union republics, autonomous republics, provinces and national regions at the end of their session, they are a part of the vast official, governmental, administrative and bureaucratic apparatus that translates policy to the 170,126,000. Their Presidium of 37 members elected at a joint session is theoretically the highest executive organ of State power, the interpreter of laws, donor of decorations, holder of the right of pardon. They form into the body of soviet law measures initiated, approved, determined by the Communist Party--though Party decrees are theoretically binding only on Party members. They are the shadow of the Party, moving when the Party moves. Bigger than military questions is the problem of how much their moves mean to the 23,000,000 industrial and office workers, the 93,500,000 peasants and artisans, who in time of war will be compelled to protect the State, and who for 20 years have made sacrifices for its future.
Party. The 547 deputies who are now between 30 and 40 were in their teens or younger when the Bolsheviks grabbed power. On the eve of a session of the Congress of Soviets the Bolsheviks seized telegraph, telephone and other Government offices. The Congress then met, not in the Kremlin, but in what had been a girl's finishing school; on the night of Nov. 6, 1917, a few hours before it was to be called to order, a short, baldheaded, tireless revolutionary named Lenin stepped out of hiding before the delegates, stilled their applause, said laconically, "Comrades, we shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order."
In the years that followed, while Russian economy climbed slowly back to its pre-War normal, the Party he addressed plunged into turmoil unequaled in political history. Bolsheviks fought Whites, but they also fought Czechs, English, Germans, French, Americans, Japanese, Letts, Mongols, Poles, on 14 fronts and for more than four years--fought with inadequate arms, starvation rations, an exhausted population. They signed with Germany a treaty as punishing as the Treaty of Versailles, lost a quarter of their manufactures. Said Lenin, "I would give up Petrograd for a breathing spell of 20 days." They fought the armies of Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich, the troops of sadistic Baron Ungern von Sternberg near Mongolia. Astonishing as was their victory to the outside world, in view of the forces against them, it was more astonishing to themselves--for as students of Marx they counted on revolution coming in the industrialized countries of the West.
Lenin, an economist, politician, agitator; Trotsky, an editor, strategist, orator; Radek, a journalist; Chicherin, son of an aristocratic family; Kamanev, a student of law; Rykov, Lenin's secretary; Zinoviev, a master of intrigue, a practical politician, "Lenin's greatest mistake"; Stalin, then 38, an editor; Bukharin, a dry, colorless theoretician; Lunacharsky, a dramatist; Dzerzhinsky, a politician--no group seemed so ill-equipped for the tasks before it as Russia's new leaders. All intellectuals, most of them hardened by years of exile and prison, they were masters of history who misread history, who banked on an international revolution that did not occur, and who called in the sonorous and yet biting language of Marx to an unlistening world proletariat. Seizing the Petrograd radio while the war still raged, they broadcast frantically for peace: "To all! To all! To all!" They summoned a congress of the Third International, sent out a manifesto which began: "Europe is in flames; the wolves of capitalism howl among the ruins!" They dropped their rigorous membership requirements only when Denikin was marching on Moscow, when membership, involving danger above everything, could appeal only to revolutionists. When the civil war ended they were masters of the country--a starving, typhus-ridden, spent and ruined country that lay, in "chaos and old night," from the steppes of the South to the black, reckless, European plain.
When they called their first All Union Congress of Soviets in 1922--which delegates had trouble in reaching--steel production had fallen 96%; mining, 98%-agriculture, 58%.
Four years before, a homely, dark-eyed, colorless girl named Fanny Kaplan stepped up to Lenin when he finished speaking at Michelson's factory in Moscow, shot him in the lungs and neck. On the eve of the second All Union Congress, Lenin died, the conflicting groups he had held together split apart.
Between its third and fifth sessions, the fight of Stalin and Trotsky rocked the Party, involved more people. Party membership grew fast: 735,881 by 1924; 1,260,784 by 1930; 2,800,000 (including candidates) by 1934.
Its history, heroic before Lenin's death, became confused afterwards. No year passed without a Party crisis. No contemporary political conflict produced such blind and savage invective as the factions hurled at each other. In comparison with the bitterness of their conflicts, an explosion of political violence like Hitler's blood purge of 1934 seemed no more than a gangster cleanup. No theories were at stake when Hitler shot. But in Russia each group considered itself truly socialist, the builder of a new world, the inheritor of Lenin's theories. In the rush of practical problems, the daily collisions of old and new, the need for decisions affecting the lives of millions, each backed its program of action, and each, as conflicts grew fierce, denounced its opponents as the betrayers of the revolution, the corrupters of doctrine, the debasers of facts.
Lenin died on Jan. 21, 1924. Thereafter:
> In 1925 Trotsky was dismissed as Commissar for War after a struggle over a program for the peasants, ousted from the Council of Labor and Defense; Kamanev and Zinoviev were forced from important posts.
> In 1926 Trotsky, joining forces with Kamanev and Zinoviev, tried to force Stalin from control of the Communist Party. Subsequently Kamanev and Zinoviev were removed from the Political Bureau; Bukharin took over the Third International ; Trotsky was exiled to Turkestan. Kamanev and Zinoviev were expelled, exiled, recanted, reinstated and--four years later--expelled again, until their careers ended, with those of Rykov, Bukharin, an unknown number of others, in the lurid mysteries of The Purge.
> There were party crises over collectivization, the Five-Year Plan, the Chinese Revolution, the trials of wreckers, until, after Stalin's friend Kirov was assassinated in 1934, they culminated in a two-year purge, in trials that creaked and groaned with weird confessions, unearthly plots, Dostoevskian admissions of treachery.
How solid now is the Party with this history behind it? How closely united is it with the innumerable functionaries, editors, managers, educators, propagandists, secret police, bureaucrats--the props of party dictatorship, the agents of party rule? In what shape has it come out of the purge?
The present 1,677,666 Party members, and candidates for admission, organized in 130,000 cells, represent a drop of more than 1,100,000 in four years. More than 1,000,000 are new members, have joined since 1929; some 130,000 joined before 1920. More than 1,250,000 are under 40, were in their teens when the Revolution was fought. With them are some 5,000,000 members of the Young Communist leagues, who may be as old as 30, but are generally in their twenties or teens, dating their experience, not from the years of famine and civil war, but from the years of the Five-Year Plans, the expulsions, the trials. Around them revolve the carriers of the Soviet Union's economic life: 23,000,000 industrial and white-collar workers, 93, 500,000 peasants and artisans.
Industry. There were 10,000,000 industrial workers in Russia before the Revolution. There were only 1,500,000 more after ten years of Soviet rule. But as the First Five-Year Plan gave way to the Second, the Second, less publicized, to the Third, as Stalingrad grew on the Volga, Sverdlovsk on the site of the Tsar's execution, industrial life moved as swiftly as the political life of the State. The 37,000 plants that were nationalized by the end of 1920--two-thirds of them employing fewer than 15 men each--gave way to 61,000 large-scale, State-owned, State-operated industries. The industrial machine that had stalled in 1922 was at its pre-War average in 1926. During the Five-Year Plans:
> 16,400,000 clerks and workmen swarmed into new plants; steel production jumped from 4,251,000 to 17,600,000 tons yearly; oil and gas production jumped from 11,749,000 to 30,600,000 tons; electrical production increased from five billion kilowatt-hours to more than 36 billion; 11,300 kilometers of railroads were built, as well as hydro-electric projects, chemical plants, textile mills.
Small compared to the quantitative increase in U. S. productive capacity in 1920-29, the Five-Year Plans represented a greater rate of increase. They doubled Russia's industrial stature, made her an industrial power, left her self-sufficient in production of oil, coal, iron ore, manganese, cellulose, cotton, super phosphates. But it set a vast segment of the Russian proletariat moving from factory to factory, from village to city, in one of the great tidal movements of humanity that Tolstoy long ago described as the ceaseless wanderings of workmen over the earth. It ended uniform wages. Breakdowns, delays, confusions, led to experiments in management, industrial shock troopers, new incentives for labor, trials for sabotage. They resulted in celebrations at the dedications of power stations, but also in decrees that made factory managers liable to five years' imprisonment for inefficiency, led eventually to penalties on individual workmen for defective work.
Promising less, the Second Five-Year Plan visualized more modest gains: 178 new coal mines, 107 rolling mills, 93 oil cracking plants, 15 cotton mills, 21 shoe factories, eleven silk mills, along with a big extension of rolling stock, locomotives, tractors, power plants. Although it called for an 18.5% increase in consumer goods, ration cards were not abolished until 1935. Production of automobiles and trucks, in a country which has only 600,000, climbed slowly from 49,750 in 1933, to 199,315 in 1937. Production of shoes, in a country which produces one pair a year per person, declined by 38,000,000 pairs in 1938. After the famine year of 1932 consumption of foodstuffs jumped: average working-class family in Moscow got twice as much meat, twice as much butter and sugar. But in 1932 only 35,000 tons of butter were sold in the Soviet Union, only 49,000 tons of milk. (U. S. consumption: 51,128,000 tons in 1932.) But by 1935, 207,000 tons of milk were sold.
The first Five-Year Plan introduced unequal wages by penalizing inefficient work; the Stakhanov movement increased their spread by rewarding exceptional effort. In a coal mine in the Don Basin, to celebrate International Youth Day, Alexei Stakhanov organized a crew that upped production from seven to 35 tons per man; Vinogroadova, of the Ivanovo Textile Mills, tended 144 instead of 24 looms; Maria Demchenko, digging sugar beets in the Ukraine, got 37 more tons to the acre. Rewards of publicity, governmental honors, free rides in all streetcars, an allowance of ten rubles a month for greater production marked an increase in the tendency toward wage differentiation, inequalities in living standards, as great as those in capitalist countries, within the working class itself.
Average wages for the country as a whole increased from 1,427 rubles yearly in 1932 to 2,776 in 1936, jumped to 3,000 in 1937 for workers in heavy industry. But wage scales mean little; real wages are determined by such intangibles as social services as well as by the quantity, quality and price of goods wage earners can purchase; shortages of consumer goods, increased rewards for some grades of labor, make wage rates doubtful criteria for estimating living standards. The feverish enthusiasm of the Five-Year Plans settled down to normal growth; industrial production had been shoved to the East in one mighty lunge; towns like Stalinsk in Siberia with 300,000 population had been built on wasteland; urban population had almost doubled.
But still Russia had sewage systems in only 95 of her cities, had added only 62 in 22 years. Only 416 cities scattered over one-sixth of the world's surface had water-supply systems, 194 of them laid since the Revolution. Industrial mobilization, sustained and carried on with an intensity never before attempted, built steel mills, dug mines and canals that looked staggering in view of what Russia had before; it also increased from 34 to 71 the number of cities having streetcar lines. Per capita expenditures on social services increased three-fold in five years; but benefits that looked big in statistics were thinly diluted when spread over the still more staggering statistics of Russia's population; despite tremendous changes in the status of labor they could not be compared with the efforts it made, the political and economic upheavals that accompanied them.
Agriculture. For 50 years before the Revolution the fate, the character, the future of 100,000,000 Russian peasants haunted Western observers. When Tsar Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861 (for which Mark Twain wrote him an eloquent tribute) they expected the peasants to stir. But scarcely a disturbance rippled the 300,000 age-old, slumbering villages. Studying governmental efforts that threatened to smash their habits of life, Henry Adams wondered: what would happen when the leaven of change began to work?
The leaven of change at the War's end left the peasants in possession of 95% of Russia's cultivated land. They held it while the harvests fell to 58% of their pre-War average, worked it in 25,000,000 homesteads until the drive to collectivize the farms began in 1929. The first Five-Year Plan called for a 20% collectivization in 1930. But when lower taxes, credit, use of farm machinery, did not move the kulaks, the more prosperous peasants, the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" was decreed on Jan. 5, 1930. Thereafter:
> Five million kulaks were uprooted, their property confiscated, an unknown number exiled.
> 10,000,000 families stampeded in less than a year into collectives planned to absorb 4,000,000 in five years; uprisings spread in the villages, were ruthlessly suppressed; peasants, anticipating the loss of farm animals, slaughtered 25% of their cows, 33% of their sheep, 50% of their hogs.
On March 2, Stalin published an article called Dizziness from Success, called a. halt. But the waves of motion set up did not subside: 4,000,000 families moved back to their farms by May. In the Central Black Soil region--Russia's richest farmland--64% of collectivized families fled home two months after the drive ended. And although, the next year, 58% of peasant households were in collectives, livestock continued to be slaughtered until it was made a capital offense, until the 1933 livestock population was smaller than it had been in 1922, until 5% of collective farm income was devoted to repaying peasants for property they contributed. But there were fewer peasants, more prisoners, and 19,000,000 fewer horses, 14,700,000 fewer cattle, 3,000,000 fewer hogs, 95,100,000 fewer sheep and goats.
But the 243,000 collective farms now spread unchallenged over 99.1% of the country's cultivated land. They hold 93% of all the peasants. Insofar as socialization of the land means giant State fan and collectives, agriculture is socialized for the first time in history. The wooden plows and peasant strips--the crazy, antiquated setup by which a household cultivated a piece of "near" land close to the hut and a piece of "far" land distant from the village--are finished. Startling are the simple figures of mechanization--collective farmers operate 474,500 tractors, 150,000 combines, 170,000 motor trucks. They include 734,000 tractor drivers, 165,000 combine operators, 124,000 chauffeurs. Last year rural districts bought 225,000 tons of household soap, 82,000,000 Ibs. more than they bought the year before. They bought 73,000 more tons of confectionery, spent 104,000,006 rubles for wine, banked 347,000,000 more rubles, used 24% more sugar, spent 16.3% more for manufactured goods, bought twice as much cotton goods as they had in 1933, bought from their cooperatives 250,000 bicycles, 200,000 phonographs.
But against the blank expanse of 1,000,000,000 acres collectivized--four-fifths of the arable and grazing land--the music of 200,000 phonographs does not carry far. There is a tractor for each 1,000 acres of cultivated land, but because collectives vary tremendously in size, mechanization is highly developed in some regions, barely launched in others. There are only 20 tractor operators and four automobile drivers for every 500 peasant families, two combines for 20 square miles of collectivized land. Like the industrial worker, the peasant's standard of living has bettered, but even less than with the city dweller have the changes in his status been in terms comparable to the upheavals that he has been through. The land has been socialized, but not the life of the land; an agricultural revolution as sweeping as the industrial revolution in other countries has swept over the peasantry, giving agricultural order to the economy, insuring an adequate food supply in the event of war, but not yet giving the peasants themselves benefits to compensate for the ruthlessness that carried it through.
Future. Revolutions are not made in parlors, but against them. When a society splits apart the cracks go all the way through it, tearing through family relationships as well as the economic fabric of life, ripping through old customs and old beliefs, old routines and old ambitions, old friendships and old habits that seem to have lived forever. When the Russian Empire went down under the War's hammering, it came as a convulsive crash on a scale without precedent in recorded history: 25,000,000 citizens lived in France when Louis XVI fell; 139,000.000 lived in Russia when the Tsar lost his throne. But only when it had fallen were its weaknesses plain.
Seen in perspective against Tsarism's fall and the dislocation that followed, Soviet weaknesses and Soviet strengths emerge more clearly. In the Tsar's day the 10,000,000 industrial workers were legally classed as peasants although they were crammed into cities and had no claim to the land. The peasants were virtually voteless and voiceless except for their chance to vote for a village leader of some other class, to vote in separate elections to the weak duma. Intellectuals were denied free expression; businessmen were dis criminated against in favor of nobles.
Falling, the world's second largest Empire pulled down its 436,418 State officials, its 50,000 military bureaucrats, high officers and generals, its 91 universities and 859 newspapers, its complicated maze of unworkable laws that froze the population into the classes of their birth. Falling, it left its army leaderless, ill-armed, ill-fed, desperate; its factories without materials, a financial panic terrifying in its immensity spreading with defeat. Tax gatherers and teachers, police officials, judges, the masses of office holders who carried its word to the villages, disappeared or lost their power; titles to land went up in smoke.
But the dislocation of life did not end with its fall. Russia lost 6,000,000 lives in the World War; more than that in the years of panic and anarchy that followed it. In this period the dream of a new kind of world that would be better and stronger than the old grew in men's minds--a dream formed long ago in exile, strengthened in Tsarist prisons, fed by hunger. In the years of civil war it proved to be stronger than the armies of the Tsarist generals, stronger than Allied intervention. As long as it lived and grew it inspired actions that its enemies could not match, fertilized minds that had been apathetic, created plans for a future of far more than huge factories, giant farms.
A. D. 1939 is the future of 1917. Some of the factories are built; the farms are socialized. Bigger than questions of Russia's military might is the question of whether what the people have now represents what they fought for before. They have seen the enrollment in schools grow from 8,000,000 to 30,000,000, the number of universities grow from 91 to 700, the number of big cities of over 100,000 population grow from 14 to 74; 70,000,000 illiterates taught to read and write, the circulation of books swell from 86,000,000 to almost 700,000,000; the Red Army emerge as a formidable fighting force. But they have also seen wild and merciless conflicts among their leaders, waves of executions and arrests, decrees that swept them, almost overnight, into and out of collective farms, into and out of factories that represented a new way of life for them.
If, looking up from the 1,143 deputies of the Supreme Council of the Soviets, Joseph Stalin considers the strength of Germany or Japan, he can find much rea son for confidence, much for uneasiness.
Industrially and economically, Russia is better off than when the War that was to smash its social order broke in 1914. But the Soviet Union of 1939 looks misshapen and weak as the fulfillment of the dream of 1917; it is stronger as a power in a world of power politics than as the centre of social experiment. During the civil wars and invasions the people had little to fight with, a goal to inspire them. Paradox is that in struggling to make their dream a reality they have gained more to fight with, less to fight for.
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