RUSSIA: Giant Strides

SIX YEARS ARE WE WITHOUT LENIN, BUT WE FOLLOW LENIN’S PATH WITH GIANT STRIDES!

(Unanimous headline in every newsorgan of the Soviet Union last week on Lenin’s sixth deathday.)

Electric Stride. General Electric Co. announced last week that it has begun to build at Schenectady, N. Y., the four largest hydroelectric generators in the world, each rated at well over 100,000 horsepower, all to be installed in early 1932 on the Dnieper River near Zaporozhe in the fertile, rustic Ukraine. Together the quadruple battery of titanic machines will supply enough power to light three million average homes.

Political Stride. Elderly, harassed Michael Ivanovich Kalinin is the puppet-President of Russia, a peasant-born figurehead (TIME, Nov. 26, 1928). Some 150,000,000 peasants hope that he defends their interests in proletarian councils of the Kremlin. He tries to. But last week he was obliged to pledge his support to a policy most peasants hate, the project to exterminate the kulak or “moneyed peasant” as a class (TIME, Jan. 13). Just now this is the thing closest to the heart of cold, quiet Dictator Josef Stalin, the arch-proletarian who is also making Russia stride.

Writing with stark frankness last week in Pravda (Truth), Dictator Stalin denied reports that a kulak, after the Government has seized his land, will be allowed to stay on it as a humble toiler on the Government’s “collective farm.” In the Dictator’s mind such a policy smacks of weakness, sentimentality and therefore danger. “The kulak must be completely liquidated!,” he wrote, using a popular but ambiguous Soviet verb also correctly used in the sentences, “Let the hangman now liquidate the condemned!” and “Let us, Comrade, endeavor to liquidate the static in our radio.”

What Stalin appeared to mean was that a kulak family once deprived of their land must migrate completely away from their district. Even if they survive they will be so poor as to have been liquidated as kulaks, and if they die they will have been liquidated as men.

The Great Stride of kicking all moneyed peasants off their farms is expected to be completed by 1931. “For without prompt and vigorous acts,” wrote Stalin, “all our talk about liquidation of kulakism as a class will be just foolish talk.”

Religious Stride. Striking were events in the Kremlin’s campaign against Religion last week; but more important is it to realize that every week, almost every day, some Russian church is being turned into a school, day nursery, workers’ dormitory, theatre, factory or a granary—as in the case of the once glorious House of God at Petrovsky, now rapidly filling with grain which will obliterate its lower tier of angels and finally its higher tier of adoring saints.

The Cathedral of St. Isaac in Leningrad (once St. Petersburg) is now the Counter-Religion Museum. It contains a display of 1,100 pairs of nails, said to have been collected from 1,100 villages. The Russian Clergy are accused of having permitted the adoration of each and every pair of these nails for centuries as the authentic pair with which Christ was nailed to the “True Cross,” Of the latter, several complete examples are on view, together with a collection of obscene statuettes, which the Clergy deny were carved by Russian monks in their monastery leisure. In Tiflis the 100-ton chimes of the Cathedral were recently melted down and sums raised by selling the metal were spent to establish the Tiflis Workers’ Zoo.

To cap all Soviet anti-religious climaxes to date came, last week, the dynamiting and flinging into the River Moskva of the Simonov Monastery with its 400-ft. bell tower.

Five thousand zealous believers in Lenin’s maxim Religion is Opium for The People assembled on the eve of his deathday anniversary before the monastery, dwarfed by its enormous walls, resolute to destroy its high-spiried belfries. As the chief electrician stepped to the dynamite switch nothing could have been more appropriate than that old French revolutionary chorus “Vive le son! Vive le son!! Vive le son de I’explosion !!!”* But instead the Comrades roared their own Red Flag, their International.

CrrrrrrrrrrASHbooooooooMMOOOORRooooooooomm! Turrets, walls and belfry rocked and rose, crumpled, crashed, subsided. Six hundred years ago the good St. Sergius began what was now ended. Pouncing with zeal on the debris, each of the 5,000 Comrades picked up as big a chunk of stone as he could carry, ran panting and puffing with it as fast as he could to the brink of the wimpling Moskva, plumped his burden in, watched exultingly while it sanka fitting deathday tribute to LENIN.

*i.e. Long live the sound of the explosion!