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?_
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.