Books: The Russian Spirit

RUSSIA AND JAPAN—Maurice Hindus —Doubleday, Doran ($2).

RUSSIA’S ECONOMIC FRONT FOR WAR AND PEACE—A. Yugow—Harper ($3).

Last June most democrats agreed with Adolf Hitler—within three months the Nazi armies would be in Moscow, and the Russian incident would be one with Norway, France and Greece. Even U.S. Communists shivered in their Russian boots, put less faith in Marshal Timoshenko, Voroshilov and Budenny than in Generals Winter, Mud and Slush. When the Germans bogged down, backsliding fellow travelers slid back, a statue to Lenin was unveiled in London, and nearly everybody sighed: The impossible has happened.

The purpose of Maurice Hindus’ book is to show that the impossible was the inevitable. The ferocity of Russian resistance, he argues, reflects a new kind of Russian spirit, was armed by a new Russian industrial and agricultural strength.

Few observers of Russia since the revolution are better qualified to say so. Among U.S. journalists, Maurice Gerschon Hindus is the only professional Russian peasant (he came to the U.S. when a boy).

Through four years at Colgate University and a postgraduate course at Harvard, he managed to retain a slight Russian accent and his intimate ties with the good Russian earth. “I,” he sometimes says with a Slavic spreading of hands, “am a peasant.” Fee fi fo fum. When the Bolsheviks began to “liquidate the kulaks [successful farmers] as a class,” Journalist Hindus dashed over to Russia to see what was happening to his fellow peasants. Result of his observations was Humanity Uprooted, a best-seller whose thesis was that it may be tough to be collectivized by force, tougher still to be herded off to forced labor in the Arctic, but that collectivization was the greatest planned economic readjustment in human history; it was changing the face of the Russian land. It was the future. This was also the viewpoint of the Soviet planners, with the result that Journalist Hindus was given unusual opportunities to observe the new Russian spirit in the making.

In Russia and Japan he brings his firsthand knowledge to bear on the question which may well decide the issue of World War II. What is this new Russian spirit? It is not entirely new. “Fee fi fo fum, I smell Russian blood! For today the Russian spirit is marching through the world, and it throws itself in your eyes and slaps you across the face.” These words are not from a speech by Stalin. They are the lines the old witch (Baba Yaga) always speaks in the oldest of Russian folk tales.

Old women were crooning them to their grandchildren when the Mongols burned the dark villages about their ears in 1410.

They repeated them when the Russian spirit had routed the last Mongol out of Muscovy twelve years before Columbus discovered the New World. They are probably repeating them today.

Three Powers. But the Soviet State has changed the Russian spirit, says Author Hindus, in three important ways: 1) by “the power of the idea”; 2) by “the power of organization”; 3) by “the power of the machine.”

> By the “power of the idea,” Hindus means that in Russia the private ownership of property has become a social crime. “Deep into the consciousness of the people—especially of course in the youth, that is, those twenty-nine years old and younger, and of whom there are over one hundred and seven millions in Russia—has sunk the concept of the utter wickedness of private enterprise.”

> By the “power of organization,” Author Hindus means the total control by the State of industry and agriculture so that every peacetime function is in effect also a military function. “The Russians, of course, never hinted at the military aspects of collectivization and thereby lulled foreign observers into a complete disregard of this feature in the vast and violent agricultural revolution. They stressed only its farming and social implications. . . . Yet without collectivization they never could have waged war as effectively as they have done.”

> The “power of the machine” is the idea to which a generation of Russians has sacrificed food, clothing, cleanliness, even the barest comforts. “Like the power of the new idea and of the new organization it is saving the Soviet Union from dismemberment and extermination by Germany. It will save it no less,” Author Hindus believes, “from attempts at subjugation by Japan.” Asia’s Icebox. Author Hindus believes that a Russo-Japanese war is inevitable.

His reasons are less interesting than his analysis of Russia’s Far Eastern strength.

For three thousand miles behind Vladivostok, Russia’s Wild East is rapidly being turned into one of the world’s great factory belts. Among the most exciting sections of Russia and Japan are those which demolish the legend that Siberia is Asia’s icebox or a Russian Botany Bay. Actually Siberia produces both polar bears and cotton, contains great modern cities like Novosibirsk (“the Chicago of Siberia”), and Magnitogorsk (steel), and is the center of Russia’s gigantic armament industry. Even if the Nazis should reach the Ural mountains and the Japanese should reach Lake Baikal, Hindus does not believe that either could ever effectually strike at the great industrial state that would remain.

No Separate Peace. Nor does he believe that the Russians would ever make peace if this should happen. For they are fighting not merely a national war. They are continuing the revolution in the form of a national war. “Too vivid ever to be forgotten are the memories of the sacrifices that people have made for every lathe, every engine, every brick that has gone into the new factories. . . . Butter, cheese, eggs, white bread, caviar, fish, that they and their children should have eaten ; textiles and leather that should have sup plied them and their children with shoes and clothes, were shipped abroad … to obtain the valuta with which to pay for the foreign machinery and the foreign services. . . . True enough Russia is fighting a nationalist war; the peasant, as al ways, is fighting for his home and for his land. But the Russian nationalism of today is rooted in the concept and the practice of Soviet or collectivized control of ‘the means of production and distribution,’ even as Japanese nationalism is rooted in the concept of Emperor worship.”

Fact Book. Author Hindus’ somewhat emotional judgments are surprisingly corroborated by Author Yugow’s Russia’s Economic Front for War and Peace. No such friend of the Russian revolution as Author Hindus, Economist Yugow is a former member of the Soviet State Planning Board who now prefers to live in the U.S. His book about Russia is far less readable than Author Hindus’, much more factual. It does not excuse the cost in human misery, death and oppression of Russia’s new economic and military power.

He hopes that one result of the war for Russia will be a turn toward democracy—the only system under which he believes economic planning can really work. But Author Yugow agrees with Author Hindus as to why Russians fight so savagely, and it is not from the “geographic, everyday variety” of patriotism.

“The workers of Russia,” he says, “are battling against a return of private economy, against being returned to the bottom of the social pyramid. . . . The peasants wage a dogged and active battle against Hitler because with Hitler would return the old landowners or landowners made over on a new Prussian pattern. The numerous nationalities that make up the Soviet Union fight because they know that Hitler destroys all possibility of their development. . . .

“And, finally, all citizens of the Soviet Union go to the front to fight determinedly until victory is won because they want to defend those undoubtedly tremendous—even though inadequately and insufficiently realized—revolutionary achievements in all fields of labor, culture, science and art. . . . Many and great are the grievances and demands that the workers, the peasants, the various nationalities, and all the citizens of the Soviet Union bring before the dictatorial government of Stalin, and not for a single day does the struggle for these demands cease. But at present above everything there stands before the people the task of defending their country against the enemy who personifies social, political and national reaction.”