Part 11

He would have obtained guaranteed deliveries of the oil and grain and other products he needs. His guarantee would be the disarmament of the Red Army to the point where the Germans could march in at any moment and enforce their demands. He would also have obtained the right to march his troops across the Ukraine, or sail across the Black Sea and from the Caucasus drive at Suez, or eventually India. Furthermore the re-neutralization, or the military emasculation, of the Soviet Union would free Japan’s rear from the danger of attack, and would proportionately increase the chances of Japan’s attacking southward in the area of our vital interests. Such a compromise peace would enable Hitler to endure many years longer than if he had to fight on to the complete conquest of Russia, against a nationwide, scorched-earth, guerilla warfare.

Q. _You make it seem as though a compromise peace were quite possible. Why then did Stalin fight at all?_

A. You mean, when the Germans attacked? Because he was given no choice. There was rumor of Hitler’s having submitted an ultimatum or terms to Stalin, but as it turned out Hitler submitted no demands at all; he simply attacked.

Q. _Why didn’t Hitler at least make the attempt and demand of Stalin the things he wanted, including the demobilization of the Red Army?_

A. I suppose he knew that even Stalin could not successfully order the demobilization of the Red Army without suffering the danger of revolution. Hitler had successfully brought the armies of several powers under his control without fighting: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, but they were small states which would never have stood a chance for more than a few hours or days of resistance against the Germans. It seemed to many people that Hitler could have done the same with Russia. The acquiescence of Stalin in every other German demand encouraged this belief. But Hitler never made the trial.

Q. _I still do not see why he did not try._

A. Perhaps because of Napoleon. This is only a theory of mine, but in analyzing Hitler’s motives for attacking Russia, it struck me that his vanity may have led him to wish to impose his will by force upon Stalin, his only remaining rival on the continent, and to do the thing Napoleon failed to do, conquer Russia. Hitler is an admirer of Napoleon. When he first visited Paris he spent half an hour alone by the tomb of Napoleon, then ordered the remains of Napoleon’s son brought from Vienna to be re-interred beside his father. Hitler does not collect ordinary Napoleonana as Mussolini does. Hitler collects the same countries which Napoleon once collected or tried to collect. He is not merely going over the same territory, he is consciously emulating Napoleon.

The French Emperor’s excuse for attacking Russia was that Alexander refused to join Napoleon’s blockade of England, the “Continental System.” Historians now agree, however, that Napoleon went into Russia in 1812 chiefly to satisfy his vanity and his lust for war and to appease his jealousy of Alexander, his only remaining rival on the continent. Alexander was willing to do almost everything Napoleon wanted, but Napoleon wanted to impose his will by force. So with Hitler. He had even less excuse than Napoleon for attacking Russia.

I share the opinion of many observers that Hitler could have had anything he liked from Stalin, beginning with the delivery of all available materials even if it meant stripping the Russians, and including the permission to pass troops through Russia, and even including perhaps consent to as much of a demobilization of the Red Army as Stalin believed he could order without danger of revolt--possibly enough to have satisfied Hitler that the Red Army could not attack him. Nor does it seem likely that the Red Army ever would have attacked the Germans except after they had definitely lost the war in the West, and then it would have made little difference who delivered the final blow.

The Russians would probably have behaved toward Germany exactly as the Italians behaved toward France. In their anxiety to run no risks, the Italians waited until their intervention made no difference; the French were already defeated. So Stalin would probably have waited until the German Army was knocked out before he moved.

Q. _But wasn’t it likely that Stalin would have attacked if Hitler attempted to invade the British Isles?_

A. Not unless it had become apparent that the invasion had not only failed but that the German Army had lost practically all its Air Force and was about to collapse. If this contention is correct, there was no danger to Hitler from the Russians, and the material supplies he seeks could certainly have been obtained in greater quantity by peaceful coercion than by war.

Q. _You have given us quite a number of strong points of the Soviet Union. Can you outline its weak points?_

A. Without pleasure. It is no pleasure to expose the demerits of a force which for the time being, at any rate, is fighting against our major enemy, and has fought gallantly and has lost more blood than all the other opponents of our enemy put together. Yet it seems to me useful always to keep our eyes open and to know as much as we can about the characteristics of friend and foe and especially of the sort of ally which has the ambiguous role of the Soviet Union toward both Britain and America, neither friend nor foe, but possessed merely of the same enemy.

The fundamental weakness of the Soviet Union and the root of all its evil is the fact that the Bolsheviks believe and practice as their first rule of political conduct that the end justifies the means. This rule led to adoption of the Terror as the chief weapon in the struggle to establish Socialism, and the Terror in turn made it impossible to establish Socialism. The Terror destroyed democracy. Without political democracy, the vaunted economic democracy of the Soviet Union became a farce. Constant coercion of the masses through the Terror benumbed them. Production was concentrated on war materials and the output of consumption goods never rose above subsistence level. The Soviet Union became a permanent pauper state. The level from the standpoint of culture and comfort remained barbarian, but the Russians showed they had the virtues of barbarians. When the time came to fight they proved they could stand up better to their Nazi brother barbarians than any of the civilized folk of Europe.

The principle that the end justifies the means works in wartime as it is a barbarous principle and war is a barbarous business, and that is one reason why the Russians have done as well as they have against the Germans. In peacetime the principle that the end justifies the means defeats itself because peaceful processes are not promoted by violence. The Bolsheviks used the Terror to force every member of the vast community of Russia into a pattern of National Planned Economy, but after thirteen years of watching the Five-Year plans, now in the midst of the Third, we can scan the whole Russian scene and soberly observe that National Planned Terror plus Bolshevik zeal have not been able to produce anything like as much for the whole population as free capitalist economy running on the profit motive with a competitive labor market. I am not for Hoover capitalism, but even it is incomparably better than Stalin’s economy.

Q. _What authority have you to speak about Russia?_

A. Possibly no authority, but a good deal of experience. I was for two years a correspondent in Moscow, from 1925 to 1927--that was during the NEP--and thereafter made three long trips and visited every part of the country from Vladivostok to Odessa and Leningrad to Tiflis. I was the first correspondent to visit the huge industrial plants of the First Five-Year Plan from the Urals to the Caucasus, and after a 17,000-mile trip which lasted three months I wrote a series of twenty-four articles, which were given a Pulitzer prize. That was in 1930, and I made another study trip in 1934 and another in 1937. I keep up as well as one can by diligent reading and contact with friends fresh from the Soviet Union and it appears that the conditions there today, aside from the war, are about as they were when I was last there. Most capitalist critics of the Soviet Union oppose it because it has done away with the institution of private property and of profit, and substituted a collectivist system. It would not make much difference to these capitalist critics whether the Soviet collectivist system worked or not. What irks them is that it has eliminated the form of economic organization which has enabled them to become well to do.

This is not of any interest to me. The only thing that interests me about the Soviet collectivist system is whether it works or not. If it works better than ours, to bring more happiness to everybody in the community than our system, then let us have it. But the trouble with the Soviet collectivist system is that it simply does not work to make men happier. It’s only success has been to make men fight. That is what we need now, but it is not enough.

Q. _Can you prove that the Soviet system does not work?_

A. I am not going to try to do it with statistics. I have played and worked and sweated with Soviet statistics as much as the next man, but if there ever was a country on earth where the old saying, “Figures don’t lie but liars figure,” is true, it is the Soviet Union, where avowedly and openly it is announced that the Statistical Office must consider itself in the service of propaganda for the national good. I can give you only a reproduction of the impressions I had, and which you would have had if you had been with me.

The two chief impressions you get from the Soviet Union are its extreme poverty and the all-pervading Terror. True, the Terror diminishes as one gets away from Moscow and the large cities, but it is present in greater or less degree everywhere. The population as a whole is desperately poor and always afraid. I thought when I read of the German attack on the Soviet Union, and then of the valiant initial Soviet resistance, that the war must have come to the Soviet population as a sort of release.

Although “the NKVD instituted severe police measures to round up Fifth Columnists,” nevertheless the net effect of the impact of the war upon the Soviet population must have been very much like the opening of jail doors. The national emergency and the necessity for all to get together and fight for their lives, I am sure had an inspiriting effect even greater than it would have in a less primitive Western community. That wartime spirit of exaltation is not true of the Soviet Union in peacetime. In ordinary times, the Soviet population is surely the unhappiest 200,000,000 ever to live under one flag in one vast succession of barracks and slums covering one-sixth of the land surface of the globe and stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea and from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Baltic. Think of that immense area with its huge population and reflect that from one end of the country to the other there cannot be found a single household (aside from those of high Soviet officials, and a few artists, journalists, and other privileged classes--not more than a few thousand out of 200,000,000) possessing the food, clothing, furniture, the necessities and conveniences of an ordinary workman’s family in the United States.

After two years of warfare and bombing and blockade it would be difficult to find in all England a workman compelled to live as uncomfortably, unhygienically, and with as poor food and clothing as the ordinary Moscow workman. The average family on relief in America lives better than the privileged Moscow workman’s family. I particularly emphasize “Moscow workman” because he is the best-off person in the Soviet Union with the exception of the tiny privileged group I have mentioned. The revolution was made for the proletariat and what there is to enjoy goes to the workman.

The peasants on their collective farms live on the whole on a level beneath that of any large group of white people in the world. The Soviet peasant’s condition is substantially that of a serf. He is bound to his collective and may not leave without permission. He is paid chiefly in kind and his pittance of cash is almost useless, since there are such small supplies of anything in the stores to buy. He eats day in and day out, year in and year out, for breakfast, dinner, and supper black bread and cabbage soup and little else.

The average Russian peasant does not taste meat more than a few times a year. He is able to live on this diet because his black rye bread contains everything necessary for complete nutrition save fat, which he gets from a meager ration of salt pork. His relationship to the collective is the relationship of serf to master. The serf under the Czar could be punished by his master; so can the Soviet serf be punished by the NKVD, without trial, and whereas under the Czar the landowner had no power of life and death over his serfs, the NKVD has that power not only over the peasants but over every human being in the Soviet Union except Stalin himself and his immediate cohorts.

Q. _If the peasant is such a serf, why has he not revolted now that the advance of Hitler’s armies has given him a chance to do so?_

A. It may sound flippant but it is the sober truth that the Russian peasant serf does not know that he is a serf; he is convinced that he lives better than any farm hand in the world. He has utterly no standard of comparison. He is as incapable of judging his position in the world as the Eskimos in _Kabloona_ who had never seen a white man until Gontran de Poncins visited them. The Russian peasant is as shut off from the outside world as an inhabitant of old Japan before Perry. Within his world he has no neighbors better off than himself. This makes him a happier man than if he were able to observe and become envious of more pleasant ways of life.

Q. _What is the NKVD?_

A. That is the name given the Soviet Political Police in 1934. It has had three names, first the Cheka, then the G.P.U., pronounced Gay Pay Oo, and now NKVD, pronounced En Kah Vay Day, which is an abbreviation for the _Narkomvnudel_, itself an abbreviation of four Russian words meaning Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Whenever the Political Police has accumulated too much blood on its name, it is changed, but its functions remain the same: to administer the Terror.

Q. _Are the people in the collective farms better off than when they were individual farmers?_

A. I did not know the Russia of the Czars, but the peasant himself gave a very good answer to that when he refused to go into the collectives, and rather than enter with his livestock, killed it by the thousands of head, until within a year more than half the cattle, horses, pigs, and sheep of the country had been slaughtered. The Soviet Union has not yet entirely recovered from this animal massacre. The peasants slaughtered their livestock because once collectivized, the livestock passed completely out of control of the peasants. Stalin later conceded each collective farm peasant the right to own one cow and one pig as his private possession. Otherwise the members of the collective may not dispose of the product of their own toil.

Q. _But isn’t that precisely the nature of a collective, for all members to pool their resources and labor and then draw the dividends?_

A. That is the theory, but the dividends for the Soviet peasant consist of the barest subsistence. They must turn over to the State trusts a stipulated amount or share of whatever their collective produces, wheat, or dairy products, beef or pork, and this share is usually so high that there is nothing left for the peasants to eat but black bread and cabbage. It is the settled policy of the Five-Year Plans to take from the soil all its produce except the minimum subsistence for the peasants and devote it to industrialization, by distribution at high prices to the workmen, and by export, in exchange for machines from abroad.

Q. _Then, surely the Russian workman is much better off, since the whole system is supposed to be for the benefit of the proletariat._

A. He is better off than the peasant, but he is worse off than any other white workman in the world. In the winter of 1934-1935 I made a survey of the Russian standard of living and compared it with the standard of living in capitalist states. In order to make the comparison as fair as possible I chose the little capitalist states which used to be a part of Imperial Russia--Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.

First I spent two months in Moscow, studying the standard of living of the workmen in the best Moscow factories. These workmen were more favorably situated than any others in the Soviet Union. Then I spent three months studying the standard of living of typical working-class families in the little capitalist states. To my surprise I found that the poorest workmen’s families in the capitalist states lived considerably better than the Moscow workers, who were the most prosperous in all Russia.

This was after seventeen years of Communism, and the capitalist states used for comparison were among the poorest in the world. They had all suffered more from the World War than Russia as a whole had suffered, and they began their new national lives from scratch, without capital or credit. Yet the average workman in Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland was living at least twice as well as the best-off workmen in the Soviet Union.

Q. _How did you get your facts?_

A. By visiting scores of homes and talking with the housewives. I asked each one fifty to a hundred questions, and found out the total family income, how it was earned, and how it was spent. Then I made up a theoretical basket, to contain a week’s supply of food for a workman, and found out by direct inquiry the number of hours a man would have to work to earn the basket. I found that in order to buy the basket the Soviet workman had to spend an average of twice as many working hours as his fellow worker in the small capitalistic states, while he would have to spend over three times as many working hours as a workman in the United States.

The Moscow workers, as the workers in most parts of the Soviet Union, live in barracks, one or more families to a room, brutally overcrowded. The Soviet Union has never succeeded in solving its housing problem and seems, indeed, to be slipping steadily backward, each year jamming more and more people into tenements fantastically full. It is not unusual to find four families sharing a single room. Imagine how much privacy they have, with each family’s quarter of the room partitioned off by a hanging sheet. In the little capitalist states, many workmen had their own cottage homes, a thing utterly unknown in the Soviet Union.

The food eaten by the capitalist workmen was incomparably better in quality and greater in quantity than the Soviet workman’s food. The clothing worn by the Soviet workmen and their families was pathetically threadbare, sleazy and cheap, while the capitalist workmen were well-dressed in comparison. Now these Russian workmen, it must be remembered, were in the midst of their Second Five-Year Plan, and were the recipients of the cream of its production. They were the beneficiaries of that vast scheme of National Planned Economy which was to produce so much more efficiently than the capitalist system that before long everybody in the Soviet Union would be living like rich men in the United States. It was their idea that the time would soon come when production of every conceivable kind of commodity would be so prolific in the Soviet Union that everybody could have his every material want satisfied. “From each according to his ability--to each according to his need,” the classic Communist ideal would be finally attained.

Now after twenty-three years of trial it seems certain that in place of Soviet State Capitalism, any form of private capitalism under a democracy would have given Russia not only the blessings of individual liberty, but far greater industrial production, which of course is the prime measure of any economic system’s success. This is not a mere speculation. If you take the graph of Imperialist Russian industrial production before the last war, and prolong it over the next twenty-three years at the same rate of increase as the years 1900 to 1914, you will find that Czarist Russia would have produced more in 1940 than the Soviet Union with all its Five-Year Plans. What Russia could have accomplished under a liberal democratic, or a free democratic-socialist regime, we can only guess.

Both Lenin and Trotzky once remarked that no matter what else the Soviet Union did, if it did not succeed in producing more than the capitalist system produced, the Soviet system must be called a failure. If it is objected that the Soviet Union had to spend its surplus on defense, one can reply that a system which is so poor that the population has to live on a bare subsistence level in order to maintain its armed services, is a failure also. Twenty-three years is a long enough trial for any system to show at least some hope.

Q. _What is State Capitalism and what has this to do with the war?_

A. It has a great deal to do with the war, because Soviet weakness tempted Hitler to attack and Soviet weakness is a direct outcome of Soviet State Capitalism. This term means that the State is the monopolizer of all industry, trade, and agriculture. It is the sole employer. It is the owner and manager of all factories, mines, shops, farms, fisheries, transport systems, in short of every means of production and distribution in the country.

No one can work for any other employer except the State and the State has absolute power to order every minute detail of the daily lives of its employees, the whole population. The Soviet workman is no less a serf than the Soviet peasant, for the workman also cannot leave his job without permission, and he also has no control of any kind over his employer, no means of bringing pressure on him, because his employer is the State and the State is not elected, but its representatives are appointed from the top down, beginning with Stalin.

Q. _You say the State is not elected, but how about the Soviet elections we hear about?_

A. The voters are presented with a ticket chosen by the Party and they are allowed to accept the Party candidates. Citizens of the Soviet Union have exactly as much voice in their government as citizens of Nazi Germany have in theirs, that is, none at all. It is nevertheless interesting to note that the tyrant in the Soviet Union still thinks it worth while to preserve the farce of elections while the tyrant in Germany has apparently dispensed with them altogether.

Q. _But cannot the Soviet workmen bring pressure to bear on the authorities by striking?_