RUSSIA: 20 Year Success?

Russia’s long awaited first election under Joseph Stalin’s famed new “Most Democratic Constitution In The World” of delegates to the upper and lower houses of the new Supreme Soviet (TIME, Dec. 7, et seq.) was finally set last week for Sunday December 12.

The State reported that there are in the Union about 169,000,000 people of all ages (42,000,000 townspeople and 127,000,000 country dwellers), that about 100,000,000 adults are expected to vote, that 145,000,000 ballots have already been printed and that 15,000,000 copies of the new electoral law have been distributed. As a means of suggesting the superiority of Stalin’s new Democracy over any other Russian news-organs throughout the provinces were instructed to print an expose of polling corruption last week entitled How I Was Elected Governor of New York. Soviet peasants and villagers, their eyes bugging at these revelations, mostly did not recognize the name given as that of the author, “Mark Twain,” or realize that this humorist died in 1910. On the contrary, this week “Governor Twain of New York” is in millions of semiliterate Russian rustic minds a significant symbol of what the village Communist editor contrasts with Stalinist Democracy as corrupt Bourgeois Democracy.

Article XVII of the new Constitution says that to every republic in the Union is “reserved the right freely to secede from the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.” Last week any danger that secessionist ideas may sprout in the minds of prospective voters under Stalinist Democracy seemed averted by the last of a long series of practical measures. The State announced without explanation that Premier Useyin Rakhmanov of the Republic of Azerbaidzhan had been removed from office. Having broken him last week, J. Stalin had broken a premier or president of every one of the Socialist Soviet Republics which comprise the Union.

Assignment in Utopia. The State’s announcement that the Russian revolution of October 1917 will now be reviewed 20 years later by the election of December 1937, pointed up last week sharp interest in recent efforts to evaluate the Soviet regime as a whole. Fresh to hand were the 658 pages of Stalin-interviewer and longtime Moscow Correspondent Eugene Lyons’ new book Assignment in Utopia (Harcourt, $3.50). It seeks to answer without pussyfooting many such questions as Did the first Five-Year Plan Succeed? and impressive are the terms in which Mr. Lyons’ opening chapters qualify him as a witness in the Case of the Soviets.

Landing as a child on Manhattan docks with his immigrant parents. Gene Lyons grew up on the rowdy East Side where his family soon became sweatshop workers. He turned radical instead of rowdy, grew up among U.S. Communist stalwarts and was toughened in proletarian struggle by two-and-a-half years of feverish work as propagandist member of the SaccoVanzetti Defense Committee. For a year he edited in Manhattan the Soviet Russia Pictorial. From this he graduated to assistant director of the New York office of TASS, then as now the official news agency of the Soviet State. Its director succeeded in interesting President Karl A. Bickel of United Press in Mr. Lyons, and when U. P. finally gave him the job of its Moscow correspondent Gene was as sure as his TASS colleagues that what he would send from Russia to be read daily by 30,000,000 U. S. readers would be angled “for the cause.” He, his pretty wife Billy and daughter Eugenie arrived in Moscow in the bleak winter of 1928.

Although now convinced that the Communism or “Democracy” of Stalin “every month brings the Soviet state closer in essence to the fascist states of Italy and Germany,” Mr. Lyons of the sweated East Side remains an apostle of radicalism. “The Leninist-Trotskyist-Stalinist methods of revolution . . . when history’s record is clearer,” will serve, he thinks, “chiefly as an object lesson how not to make revolutions.”

How Not to Make Revolutions. In the 20-year Soviet period now closing, Observer Lyons was in Russia during the period of six years which saw: the ending of the NEP (New Economic Policy) of Lenin; the expulsion of Trotsky; Stalin’s economic regimentation of the Soviet Union by a policy of Five-Year Plans; and the ensuing industrialization and collectivization.

Recalling that Dictator Stalin officially “claimed a quantitative fulfillment of 93.7%” for the First Five-Year Plan, Mr. Lyons analyzes in a chapter the figures on which this is based, discusses many a “cute piece of arithmetical legerdemain” used by Kremlin economists. “That the Plan has been accepted even by hostile capitalist economists as on the whole ‘successful’ shows the gullibility and naivete of those who deal in cold figures instead of living realities.”

“Living Realities.” After asking whether the Five-Year Plan was a success Eugene Lyons answers: “For whom and for what? Certainly not for the socialist dream, which had been emptied of human meaning in the process, reduced to a mechanical formula of the state as a super-trust and the population as its helpless serfs. Certainly not for the individual worker, whose trade union had been absorbed by the state-employer, who was terrorized by medieval decrees, who had lost even the illusion of a share in regulating his own life. Certainly not for the revolutionary movement of the world, which was splintered, harassed by the growing strength of fascism, weaker and less hopeful than at the launching of the Plan.

“If industrialization were an end in itself, unrelated to larger human ends, the U. S. S. R. had an astounding amount of physical property to show for its sacrifices. Chimneys had begun to dominate horizons once notable for their church domes. Scores of mammoth new enterprises were erected. A quarter of a million prisoners—a larger number of slaves than the Pharaohs mobilized to build their pyramids, than Peter the Great mobilized to build his new capital—hacked a canal between the White and the Baltic Seas. . . . Two-thirds of the peasantry and four-fifths of the plowed land were ‘socialized’ —that is, owned and managed by the state-employer as it owned and managed factories and workers. The defensive ability of the country, in a military sense, had been vastly increased, with new mechanical bases for its war industries.”

Stalin launched the Second Five-Year Plan which is now under way, says Mr. Lyons, by having the Soviet parliament adopt measures which “redefined Socialism to mean merely state monopoly of all branches of economy—a feudalistic serf ‘socialism’ undreamed of by socialist theorists and philosophers and agitators before the Soviet era.”

Censorship De Luxe, While Stalin was still seeking recognition of his regime by President Roosevelt, correspondents in Moscow could be of immense service by tinting their dispatches favorably to influence U. S. opinion, but Mr. Lyons thinks that once recognition was achieved the State has found it convenient to jockey out of Russia nearly all the more experienced U. S. correspondents who know too much about the last 20 years. Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinoff, charges Mr. Lyons, secured his own dismissal in 1934, and he thinks that today the Kremlin prefers to have in Moscow diplomatic and other representatives who are sufficiently Capitalist not to worry about whether Stalin has betrayed the Revolution: “The Kremlin . . . outwardly pretending satisfaction over the appointment of William Christian Bullitt as the first American plenipotentiary, actually viewed him with dire misgivings, only too well borne out by his subsequent withdrawal in a mood of tight-lipped disappointment. Mr. Bullitt’s successor, a corporation lawyer with lots of money [Ambassador Joseph E. Davies], unencumbered by pro-Soviet leanings, was far more to the Kremlin’s taste.”

Journalistically most scandalous is the Lyons chapter which starts on page 572, entitled The Press Corps Conceals A Famine. In this, ex-Muscovite Lyons relates “the whole shabby episode of our failure to report the Russian famine of 1932-33.” The entire corps of Moscow correspondents went even beyond concealing the facts, according to Gene Lyons. He relates how Gareth Jones, an English journalist and onetime private secretary to Lloyd George, came to Moscow, took down the story of the famine from the correspondents in his little notebooks, returned to England and created a furore. The Soviet Chief Censor Umansky then got the Moscow corps of correspondents to sign a round robin that “damned Jones is a liar,” after which they joined Umansky in a drinking bout. Long afterward Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune broke the story that there had already been at least 1,000,000 famine deaths in the Soviet Union, and then according to Mr. Lyons, “the Times could no longer ignore the subject.” Ultimately, Duranty of the Times indicated a Soviet famine mortality of 1,500,000; Maurice Hindus “at least three million” and the Christian Science Monitor’s Willam Henry Chamberlin 4.000,000. The Soviet Government has “stopped the publication of vital statistics for the period in question.”

Since Journalist Lyons was never an enrolled member of the Communist Party, never held office under the Soviet State, his disillusionment is less severe, his judgments milder than those in Russia 20 Years After (Hillman-Curl, $2.50). This work by Victor Lvovich Kebalchich, former Member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International of Moscow, and onetime Editor of Communist International, the worldwide newsorgan of Communist Party Propaganda, is today perhaps the sharpest work on Stalinism by an ex-insider.

Likable Dictator. E. Lyons attributes Russia’s famine directly to Stalin’s policies of first, so antagonizing the peasants that food production dropped catastrophically and second, refusing to import food which would have made up the shortage, saved several million Soviet lives. Thus the Dictator is in Mr. Lyons’ opinion about as deep in blood guilt as any figure in all history. Joseph Stalin personally impressed Interviewer Lyons most favorably: “Stalin met me at the door and shook hands smiling. There was a certain shyness in his smile, and the handshake was not perfunctory. He was remarkably unlike the scowling, self-important Dictator of popular imagination. . . . Stalin pushed over a box of cigarettes, took one himself, and we all lighted up. The standardized photograph of Stalin shows him smoking a pipe and I had a feeling of faint disappointment that he was not measuring up to the clichés, even in this regard. . . .

” ‘Comrade Stalin, the press of the world is by this time in the habit of calling you dictator,’ I said. ‘Are you a dictator?’

“I could see that [Defense Commissar] Vorishilov waited with interest for the answer. Stalin smiled:

” ‘No, I am no dictator.’ . . .”

Afterward, with the United Press jubilating throughout the world at Lyons’ scoop and booking him for radio speeches and lecture tours, his own reaction was: “I was overwhelmed with a conviction of failure. I had failed to confront Stalin with the problems which were by this time weighing on my own conscience—the use of terror as a technique of government, the suppression and punishment of heretical opinion within the ranks of devoted communists, the persecution of scientists and scholars, the distortion of history to fit new policies, systematic forced labor, the virtual enslavement of workers and peasants in the name of socialism. … I was depressed by the feeling of a magnificent opportunity frittered away.”

Similarly Walter Duranty, to whom Stalin granted an interview suddenly a few days later, has repeatedly told friends he curses his own failure to query J. Stalin on fundamentals.

Shrewd, even charming and a consummate, instinctive master of humans, the Dictator this week was getting everything set to score a greater triumph at the polls on December 12 than has ever been scored by Hitler or Mussolini—scores of millions more yes-ballots. Trouble was at latest reports that nominating bodies throughout the Soviet Union were all trying to nominate Stalin as their candidate. Some 1,143 new elective offices have been created and means will have to be found to keep the Dictator from being elected to each. Last week “Most Popular Soviet Novelist” Peter Pavlenko sloganed: “For richer fields and bigger rivers, for better mines and still more triumphant airplanes, for faster ships, for deeper knowledge of our fatherland—for Stalin!”