Bread,Toil and Victory
At night happy crowds surged through Moscow's streets, and fireworks tore the darkness to flaming shreds. Cannon roared a 20-gun salute. Silent for months, antiaircraft guns now traced fiery zigzags across the sky. Red Square was ablaze with light.
Thus, last week, the capital of embattled Russia celebrated the capture of Kharkov. Thus, too, Russia let off some of the strain accumulated through two years of blood, tears, broken hopes and cruel disappointments. The celebration was a safety valve. Confident of triumph, Russia's leaders were now allowing the people to relax for a night, to laugh, to inhale the sweet air of victory.
Our Daily Bread. But even in the inebriation of success, Russia's little man could not forget the harshness of his daily life. When he thought of victory, he also thought of hlyeb--bread, sustenance. For in Russia today, the sharp pangs of hunger come as regularly as the dawn.
An average Russian lives on less than two pounds of food a day, half of it in black bread. The balance is compounded of five ounces of potatoes, four of cabbage, three of cereals, two of meat or fish.
Sugar is rare, butter almost unobtainable.
When Lend-Lease lard reached Moscow, the housewives thought it too precious for cooking, used it as a bread spread.
Though in the past eight weeks the Red Army has recaptured countless acres of rich wheatland, its bulk still remains in enemy hands. Not until 1944, and perhaps later, will the little man's dinner pail be well filled.
To meet the crisis Russia has turned to Victory gardens with a vengeance. This summer 10,000,000 people are tilling 2,500,000 acres of such gardens in a desperate race with hunger.
In the Urals every major munitions plant owns a Victory garden, whose produce is turned into the community kettle. Many a factory now also pickles its own cucumbers, salts its own cabbage in huge concrete vats. In Leningrad the city council has gone into preserving on a citywide scale.
But the Victory gardens, no less than Russia's farmlands, cry for seed. Especially acute is the problem in the recaptured territory, swept clean of food and seed by the retreating Nazis.* Today, all over Free Russia bloom "Acres of Friendship." The seed from these is the free farmer's gift to his newly liberated brethren.
This summer 15,000,000 families in Russia have had their first taste of Idaho peas, New Jersey tomatoes, Oregon onions, Michigan beets. Planted on 500,000 acres of Russian soil, the seed was the gift of U.S. farmers and seedgrowers through the Russian War Relief, Inc. For some of this seed this will be a native's return, for the Red Turkey wheat and Kherson oats were first brought to the Middle West by immigrants from the Ukraine.
The Way of Life. Never high, Russia's living standards today touch rock bottom. Hunger and overwork are bad enough. But the Russian has also to cope with shortages of nearly every item of daily use, from frying pans to buttons and pencils.
Russia's leaders know that scarcity is laden with political dynamite. An elaborate system has been created to watch over living conditions. But the watchdogs themselves are subject to stern punishment if things do not go well. For a "heartlessly bureaucratic" attitude, many a plant manager has been given a stiff jail term. For this attitude, too, the Commissar of Social Maintenance of one of the Soviet Union Republics has been tossed out of her job.
"Trade-union officials," anxiously cried Pravda, "readily make flowery speeches at meetings. . . . But they are too busy to look after kitchens and community dining rooms. Of what good is a factory committee chairman who calmly watches long queues at dining rooms, without realizing that time is a weapon? Of what good is an official who is not interested in the efficiency of the bathhouses, laundries, barbershops and clinics at his factory?" Yet harsh words and laws have created no comforts. In the city of Ryazan a factory dormitory last May proudly announced the acquisition of a change of bed linen. Kirov lacks laundries. In the new lend-rush towns in the Urals workers wait for weeks to get into the banya, the bathhouse so dear to the heart of every Russian. In Moscow, where thousands toil on night shifts, no streetcars run at night for lack of electric power.
But in contrast the Russians also point to Ivanov, where 70,000 citizens walked into the streets one morning to give the town a thorough scrubbing. And rhapsodically Russia talks of Leningrad, whose scarred sidewalks today are carefully swept by white-aproned janitors, where the flower beds are trimmed, where "We-Press-Your-Pants-While-U-Wait" shops are open once again, where the corner kiosks sell fruit punch.
In Sweat We Toil. Of all the Allied nations, none is closer to total mobilization than Russia. Those who do not fight, work. Among the workers are 5,000,000 school children, tilling fields. Of every ten farm workers, seven are women. Once the land of the 40-hour-week, Russia today works its women 66, its men 84 hours a week. Children work harder than adults did before the war.
To boost production, the Reds have wedded incentive to compulsion. The incentives are many and generous. A man does not have to wield a bayonet to have his picture on Pravda's front page; he might do it by mining more coal, plowing more land, raising more pigs. The cream of the cream may become Heroes of Socialist Labor. The next best receive the coveted Order of Lenin, medals, bonuses.
For the efficient factory, there is the Russian equivalent of an "E" pennant, the Red Banner.
Another device is interfactory "Socialist Competition," for better, bigger, faster output. Such competition becomes especially fierce on the eve of Red anniversaries. Then the entire nation watches the progress of the contests with the anxiety of a Broadway bookie studying Belmont handicaps.
But when rewards and contests fail, the Government's face turns stony. The worker is a soldier of the rear. If he leaves his lathe, he is guilty of desertion and is punished accordingly. Russian law compels managers to report every shirker and absentee. If they fail, they themselves might spend the next five years in prison.
Pokazhem Miru. And yet the Russians take pride in their sufferings and sacrifices. War's searing flames, they say, have tested, then tempered, their mettle. Today, though hungry, weary and regimented, the Russians think they are the world's chosen people. Their new slogan is Pokazhem mint!--"We'll show the world!"
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