Part 12

A. Strikes have been outlawed _de facto_ in the Soviet Union since its earliest years. Soviet trades unions are merely the instruments for helping the State enforce discipline. They are the classic type of company unions. We can sum up this aspect of Soviet State Capitalism by saying that whereas this form of collectivism was intended originally to free the workman from all the disabilities, injustices, and inequalities suffered by the workman under the individual capitalist employer, all that has happened is that the workman has exchanged a comparatively weak, sometimes well-meaning, individual or corporate capitalist employer for a monster, all-powerful, completely egocentric, impersonal, soulless monopoly, the State, which has all the faults of the worst individual employer multiplied a millionfold. It is just as greedy as the worst individual, but has no check upon its greed, and it is never as efficient as the least efficient individual. It is Jack London’s Iron Heel in reverse.

Q. _It was the original Bolshevik theory, was it not, that their Planned National Economy would be superior to Unplanned Capitalist Economy because it would prevent the cyclic recurrence of economic crises, such as 1929-1930? It was to end all booms and depressions by ending overproduction. Hasn’t the Soviet Union done at least that much?_

A. We cannot tell, because the Soviet Union has never, in the twenty-three years of its existence, had anything like sufficient production, much less overproduction.

Q. _Why couldn’t the Soviet Planned Economy succeed?_

A. We can split the total failure into five parts: First, failure adequately to replace the profit system; second, failure of planned production; third, failure of planned distribution; fourth, failure of the monetary system; fifth, failure of Soviet construction to keep up with deterioration. Behind all these four failures looms the black father of them all, the Terror.

Q. _Why do you devote so much importance to the Soviet Terror?_

A. From having witnessed its importance in the Soviet Union. Aside from that, we ought to be able to recognize purely theoretically its paramount role in any attempt swiftly to transform an individualistic society into a collectivist society. For thousands of years men have been living more or less free individual lives. Suddenly it is decided to create a collective, as the Bolsheviks decided in Russia. At the time of the Revolution there were said to have been no more than ten thousand Bolsheviks. Eventually they were to impose their will upon 200,000,000 people and reorganize them into a vast, badly functioning, but nevertheless authentic anthill. To do this as swiftly as the Bolsheviks wanted it done required compulsion, applied without stint, to every unit in the ant heap. Having no say in the matter these multitudes of human beings were required to change every habit of their lives; were ordered even to change their instincts. It took unlimited compulsion to achieve a semblance of the goal. The instrument of compulsion was the Terror.

It produced an ant heap, but the ant heap never was able to do more than provide minimum food, lodging, and clothing for its ants. For a long time outside observers leniently agreed that this must be due to the strain of reorganizing an individualistic into a collectivist society, but now that a generation has passed, the tendency is to consider that more fundamental faults are to blame.

First, it appeared that the motive for work was not so effective in the ant heap as it was in the outside world, since from the day of its foundation until this moment the Soviet workman has produced less per capita per hour than capitalist workmen anywhere in the world. Furthermore, higher ranks, as engineers, technicians, superintendents, managers, and directors in the Soviet Union were so notably inefficient compared with their capitalist colleagues that for a time the anthill authorities imported and paid highly trained specialists from the outside world to set an example and teach.

This effort too was a failure, as Soviet production usually declined to its original level after departure of the foreign specialist. Also the men of enterprise who in a free society risk their capital and brains to found factories, dig mines, and sometimes swindle their fellow men, were assigned in the anthill to the Gosplan, the Government Planning Commission. There, in the effort to plan production for 200,000,000 people, the anthill failed most dismally. The conclusion was that the collective with its rigid wage scales, limited incomes, prohibited labor market, and ban on profits had not provided a motive for work as stimulating and productive as the profit motive and the competitive wage system in the free capitalist world.

Q. _How can you call it a free capitalist world? There isn’t any freedom left in the capitalist world. Look at all the checks on business here in the United States. Do you consider our farmers free? They can’t even plant what they want._

A. Yes, I call it free, as free as bird life compared with the Soviet Union or with Nazi Germany. The trouble with you and with all of us who complain about the checks on business, on agriculture, and so on, is that we lack the experience of being really without freedom. Unless you have lived in a slave state, under a real tyranny, you simply do not know what freedom means. All these checks about which you complain are legal checks imposed by law made by representatives of your choosing and passed upon by courts which are eventually also of your choosing, and drawn within a constitution which was also chosen and is now maintained by the people’s free will. If you dislike any of these checks, you have only to get a majority to agree with you and you can change it. To compare the lack of absolute freedom in our world with the absolute lack of freedom in the totalitarian world, whether Bolshevik or Nazi, is the same as to compare a traffic policeman with the warden of a penitentiary.

It was precisely this effort at penitentiary production on a continental scale that broke down the Russian effort at planned national economy. It proved impossible to plan effectively for so enormous an aggregate of human beings every detail of their production. A few of the population, perhaps two per cent, were zealous Communists who were willing to work harder to make the collective successful than they would have worked for any amount of profit.

Terror was used to make the other ninety-eight per cent fit in and work. But the Terror took away from the managers, supervisors, and technicians the willingness to take responsibility. A mistake, honest though it might be, could cost a factory manager his life. In the Soviet Union the man who makes a mistake is automatically suspected and accused of sabotage. The only way to be safe is to make no decisions, pass every responsibility to a higher authority. This is the rule today throughout the Soviet economic apparatus.

Parallel with this effect of the Terror is the benumbing influence of the unforgiving rigidity of the Plan. Each factory manager is given a quota to fulfill. Quotas are calculated at a trifle more than normal maximum capacity. No excuses are accepted for nonfulfillment. In the chaos of Soviet economic life it is seldom that raw materials, fuel, tools, and labor can easily be brought together to fulfill a quota, yet failure may cost the factory manager “liquidation,” which means anything from dismissal or exile at hard labor to death.

Consequently, nearly all quotas are fulfilled in quantity, but quality is in practice ignored. The number of units of production is easily checked; quality is more difficult to check. Hence, Soviet industrial production is lower in quality than in the capitalist world, and this is a partial explanation for the divergence between Soviet industrial statistics which show a high level of production, and the facts of Soviet economic life which demonstrate to the naked eye how low the level of production is. Some observers have estimated that at least thirty per cent should be taken off all Soviet industrial production statistics to allow for the quantities of entirely unusable goods produced.

Q. _But we used to prize highly many objects of Russian manufacture, and you can still see in jewelry and antique stores all kinds of finely made things, enamel work, and leather goods, wonderfully printed books. What has become of them?_

A. Nearly all that fine handicraft is gone now. The Russian artisan used to be one of the best in the world. Home handicrafts formerly supplied a sizable fraction of Russian consumption goods, not only the things you mention, but furniture, pottery, textiles--wonderful hand-woven linen and wool--and lacquer work. Most of these artisans, or such of them as outlived the hardships of the Revolution, have been forced into factories today to turn out mass production articles inferior to any in the world, including the Japanese.

I often wonder what a Moscow citizen would say if he could walk through an American five-and-ten-cent store. I am sure he would think he was being deceived. He could not imagine such a wealth of high-grade, luxurious articles. Once one of the younger members of the Rosenwald clan visited Moscow and as we looked in the pitiful shopwindows I remarked that if he wanted to start a revolution in Russia all he would have to do would be to distribute a few million Sears Roebuck catalogues among the workers and peasants of the greatest poorhouse in history. Such a system of nationwide mail-order distribution would be utterly beyond the comprehension of a Soviet citizen, for one of the weakest links in the weak chain of Soviet economy is the distribution of goods.

Poor as the goods are, they are not so poor as the method of putting them in the hands of the consumers. Since there is always a goods shortage, the consumer is placed in the permanent position of a supplicant, glad to get anything even if it is a substitute for a substitute for the article he wants. Allocation of the scanty supplies is made from the top down. The local community is not asked what it needs. The Planners arbitrarily ship certain quantities of shoes, hoe handles, and seed, and the recipients have learned to be grateful, no matter if what they needed was kerosene, matches, and cloth.

Q. _But you said something about the monetary system, that it had failed too. How can a monetary system fail in a completely planned national economy?_

A. The monetary system under the Soviets seems just as difficult to handle as it is in the capitalist system. The authorities incessantly juggle wages against prices, raising the one, lowering the other, inflating the currency, selling bonds and even lottery bonds, as blatantly gambling as the old Louisiana lottery. Yet the answer never seems to be achieved satisfactorily. Always the citizen’s purchasing power is behind his needs. Fundamentally, of course, the answer is that there is never enough of anything to go around.

Q. _But isn’t the answer to that the fact that the Soviet State is taking away from the citizens today in order to invest in productive industry from which the citizens will draw a dividend tomorrow? At least I should have thought that was the theory._

A. That is the theory, but one of the tragic aspects of the epic struggle of the Russian Bolsheviks to make their collectivist system work is that their investments in factories and machinery wear out almost as fast and sometimes faster than they can replace them and build new ones. The bad workmanship of the buildings and the poor quality and rough handling of the machines results in a speed of deterioration far beyond the normal in the capitalist world. If they had given their population slightly better food and living conditions and had therefore been compelled to limit their investment in new buildings and machines to something like a capitalist standard of new investment, deterioration would probably have taken away more plant than they could replace.

Q. _How do you explain such inefficiency and wastefulness?_

A. For all the reasons given before, and for another which I left for a different category since it is, so to speak, historical, while these reasons we have discussed are current. The historical fact of import at least during the life of this generation is that the Bolsheviks twice in twenty years exterminated their ablest people in the country, or rather I should say, the Bolsheviks first killed off the ablest people of old Russia and then Stalin killed off the ablest Bolsheviks. It has been so long ago, and the popular interest and sympathy in the Soviet experiment was at the time so great, that we have almost forgotten what the Bolsheviks did to their own countrymen.

Their conviction was that they could not establish Communism, or Socialism, without physically exterminating the persons who had become, under capitalism, better off than the mass of the people. They reasoned that no capitalist, and by that they meant any person who lived a little better than the poorest member of the community, would ever tolerate willingly the establishment of a Socialist State. They believed all such people would attempt to wreck the new Socialist economy. The professional revolutionaries had spent half their lives attempting to wreck the capitalist system, and they attributed to the capitalists a similar resolution.

In Germany, the Nazis succeeded in coercing the capitalists into becoming useful members of the National Socialist Collective. In Russia, the Bolsheviks set out to destroy the capitalists as a class, or rather every human being who by his birth, or position, or accomplishment, had become identified as an active member of the old system. First, they killed off the aristocracy and landed proprietors, numbering several hundred thousand, and including of course the Czar and his family. Then they exterminated the industrialists, not very numerous, because Russia was the least industrialized of the great nations. Nevertheless they were important. With them a little later were exterminated the managers, supervisors and technicians, the scientists, the professional men, dentists, surgeons, lawyers, teachers, and judges. These numbered a million or more.

By the time I got to Russia in 1925 all these were fully exterminated. By extermination I mean just that. They were either shot, or sent into exile in the Arctic or the deserts of Central Asia, or condemned to penal labor under such conditions that they died within a few years. They were nearly all killed. Only the most meager remnant remained, a few accidents of survival. I shall never forget the man who peddled cigarettes. I shared a house in Moscow with Theo Seibert, correspondent of the _Hamburger Fremdenblatt_, today, alas, editor of the _Voelkischer Beobachter_. Theo and I used to try to get the old man to talk, but he was too frightened to make much sense. The baldheaded trembling man who begged us to buy his cigarettes had been a Justice of the Moscow Supreme Court! His survival was just an accident.

After this initial massacre the Bolsheviks let a pause ensue and for several years no great killings took place, just the routine score or so of executions per month. But when the Five-Year Plan was inaugurated, the decision was made to exterminate the kulaks. A kulak was the term applied originally to a peasant who had risen sufficiently above his neighbors to employ labor. That made him an exploiter, a person who lived from the surplus value produced by his hired hands. The Bolsheviks, however, chose to amplify this category to include all peasants who, even if they did not employ labor, had become in the least degree more prosperous than their neighbors. This prosperity, based for the most part upon the individual industry and sagacity of the kulak, might consist in the possession of two cows to the neighbor’s one. In any case the reasoning of the Bolsheviks was that they could not afford to tolerate the existence of any peasant who, forced to join a collective farm, would at the beginning have to live worse than he had lived as an individual farmer.

Such peasants, the Bolsheviks reasoned, would be just as incorrigible enemies to collectivism as the aristocrats and industrialists. They had to die. They did die. This was the greatest Soviet mass slaughter, because there were a great many more such peasants than there were aristocrats, or industrialists, or intelligentsia. It took about two years to do away with the kulaks. Tens of thousands of G.P.U. troops and agents sought out every family of better-than-average peasants throughout the entire Soviet Union, and forced them into boxcars and herded them off to places of exile, down to Kazakstan or up to Narimsky Krai, to places where it was too hot or too cold to live. It is a conservative estimate to say that some 5,000,000 of these more enterprising farm workers and their families died at once, or within a few years.

This process destroyed what there was left of the originally non-Communist party talent in Russia. You would have thought that this ought to satisfy the Bolsheviks. It did, but it did not satisfy Stalin. There was no more opposition to the Bolshevik program. There was not a human being left in Russia who had any connection with the old regime. Not in modern history has there been such a clean wiping of the slate. The Bolsheviks were left not only as absolute masters, but containing a country in which every living person was their hopeful or cowed collaborator. Then came the fatal quarrel between Stalin and Trotzky. Out of this quarrel came the great purges by Stalin which destroyed for the second time within a generation the principal talent of Russia.

This may be regarded as the most fateful slaughter of all. Bolsheviks could argue that the extermination of every vestige of Czarist Russia could be justified on account of the inefficiency, inhumanity, unproductivity of the old regime, and the fact that, according to Bolshevik reasoning, members of the old regime would never cooperate with the new. But now Stalin was destroying not the old, but the new regime, all its talents, its best intellects, its best characters if you like.

Beginning with the politicians, he killed off in the course of four years of uninterrupted purges, the top fourth or fifth, to estimate it conservatively, of the Party itself, of the Army, Navy, and Air Force leaders and then of the new Bolshevik intelligentsia, the foremost technicians, managers, supervisors, scientists. There is, of course, enough youth among 200,000,000 for the nation to recover even after such a purge. The youth whom Stalin spared have proved in battle how boundless are the forces of Russia, the first country Hitler ever tackled with lives to waste!

Q. _You have not made it clear, if the Soviet system is so brutal a tyranny, how it is that the Red Army has been able to stand up so well to the Germans._

A. The answer is that the Red Army has fought as Russians have always fought under any regime, bravely, enduringly, stubbornly, gallantly. Russians have always had to fight despite their government; as they did in the last war, as they are doing in this war. The general distaste of the outside world for the Bolshevik system led many to forget that the Russian soldier retains in the Red Army all the martial virtues he possessed in the past. And have we forgotten that the Imperial Army in the last war held the Germans for three years? If the Red Army does as well we will be eternally thankful. True, the Germans in the last war had to divide their forces into two fronts, while today the Red Army has to bear the shock of nearly the full force of the whole German land forces. The task of the Red Army is accordingly heavier.

But our appraisal of the Red Army’s resistance has been strongly influenced by an element which has colored and distorted our judgment of the quality of any army which faces the Germans. That element is our recollection of the collapse of the French Army, which was due to a score of causes besides the excellence of the German Army. It was so overwhelming, bewildering, and impressive that it gave rise to the involuntary, subconscious feeling that the Germans were invincible. Now when any troops stand up to the Germans we are inclined to judge it a miracle of valor and military effectiveness. This is not to take away one whit of the immense credit due the Russians for holding up Hitler’s juggernaut but it is fair to point out that if we had not seen France fall, if for example Germany had attacked Russia before attacking France, everybody would have expected the Russians to put up just about the resistance they have put up. After all, Russia is a nation of double the population of Germany, with incomparably greater natural resources, and with twenty-three years of unflagging preparation for precisely this war. If there had been the exceptional virtue in the Soviet collectivist system which is ascribed to it by its disciples in America, it should not merely have stopped but should have defeated, routed, and conquered the Germans.

Q. _Aside from the fact that everybody was influenced by the French example, most military experts seem to have been deceived about the fighting ability of the Red Army. Why was that?_

A. It seemed almost as though Stalin wanted the outside world to think his army less strong than it was. None but the most acute of professional observers, among them Colonel Faymonville, for years American military attaché to Moscow, and now a member of the Allied military mission there, had a correct view of the Red Army. Hitler for the first time in his life admitted he had “had no idea” how strong the Red Army was. No outsider was ever allowed to see more than fragments of it. No newspaper correspondent, for example, ever put foot over the threshold of a Red Army barracks. Maneuvers were nearly always carried out in secret without the presence of military attachés. One almost had the feeling that Stalin had deliberately arranged the initial debacle of his attack on Finland in the first Soviet-Finnish war in order to deceive the world into thinking his army inferior to its real strength. Of course that makes no sense, and the fact was that Stalin had been led to think he could walk over Finland with ease and hence had not properly prepared his attack. Nevertheless the net effect of the first Finnish war combined with the secrecy thrown about the Red Army was to make even military attachés in observation posts around Russia believe the Red Army extremely weak. There was always the greatest difficulty in obtaining the most elementary facts about the Red Army. The Soviet government published less about its military establishment than any other great power. It kept concealed the very existence of important armaments factories; it never published production figures in the arms industry; it furnished the League of Nations less information about its vast army than any other members of the League. The G.P.U. Terror made it possible to envelop the Red Army in an impenetrable blanket which even the Germans were not able to pierce.

This secrecy emphasized the surprise that many felt at the outbreak of the war, when the Soviet economy was now indisputably revealed to have been a totally one-purpose economy, for the single end of making war. Every student of the Soviet Union had realized the great emphasis laid upon national defense, but everyone had supposed that at the same time the Soviet Planners were working primarily, if ineffectively, to create a thousand-purpose economy for the satisfaction of the myriad needs of the population. No one had divined what turned out to be the fact, that this huge economy was being organized for nothing but fighting.