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.
It proved effective, as was to be expected. A brutal, simplified
economy which ignores most of the people’s wants and devotes all its
energy and materials to preparing for war, is better able to prepare
and to make war than a more complete economy devoted to satisfying
its people’s peacetime needs. Sparta was stronger in battle than
Athens, but should we measure the value of a society by the efficiency
with which it makes war? If so, we ought to value the Nazis above
all others, since they are still leading in this activity. Hitler’s
society took Sparta as its model; Stalin’s took Spartacus. The Nazis
met their identical twin when they struck the Red Army in battle.
Hitler wishes us to believe he is crusading against a fundamentally
different regime in a “crusade for civilization.” We shall not be
deceived.
Q. _What would be the result if Stalin were really to try to hold out
indefinitely? Could he do so? Has he the resources in the Urals to
carry on there?_
A. He has almost everything he needs in the Urals except sufficient
oil. If he were cut off from oil in the Caucasus, he would have to
import supplies over the trans-Siberian, already overburdened. If he
really were determined to carry on in spite of all odds, and could make
Sverdlovsk or Cheliabinsk another Chungking, it would compel Hitler to
keep an important fraction of his total forces in action in Russia;
it would probably prevent Hitler from being able to attempt to invade
England; it would lead to a deadlock which could be turned into victory
by our intervention.
Q. _Would it be possible for us to supply the Russians with sufficient
to make up for their losses? Could we enable them to carry on?_
A. Our shipments to Russia are as important morally as materially;
indeed their token strength is greater than their real strength. We
shall never be able to make up for the territory Russia has lost to
the Germans--60 per cent of their steel supply, 45 per cent of their
manganese, 49 per cent of their tire production, and so on. Our
shipments will always be limited by the transportation facilities of
the trans-Siberian railway and the route through Iran, both of which
are long and time-consuming. Actually we can scarcely hope to get
enough American supplies in the hands of the Red Army to make much
real difference before next spring, no matter how hard we try, and
we ought to do our best. It is the publicly announced policy of both
Washington and London that Russia shall have priority on the vital
war materials. But everything is up to Stalin. If he wishes to quit
and announce that he had not received sufficient aid from Britain and
the United States, he will be able to do so any time during the next
several months, and make a case at least among his friends.
If Stalin decides to hold on, we have a two to one chance to beat
Hitler in the long run; if he decides to quit it means we face much
worse odds. There is only one way we can persuade him that we are going
to put our full powers into the struggle. It is our crystal-clear duty
to ourselves, our children, and our national future to keep Stalin in
the war by ourselves going formally to war against Germany. It is a
crime against America to wait.
3. ENGLAND
Q. _What place do you think Churchill will have in history?_
A. If Churchill brings his country victorious out of this war, he
will without a doubt go down as the greatest man in English history.
No Prime Minister of the sixty ministries since Walpole, and none of
the Monarchs when they exercised unlimited power, nor any Admiral or
General has upon his tombstone: “He saved England from death.” Many
have saved England from defeat. Many have added to England’s power and
glory. But only Churchill will be entitled to the supreme rank, for
never before has England been threatened with the supreme penalty of
national extinction. Among the Prime Ministers Lloyd George would have
a place near Churchill, but the alternative to victory in the first
World War was not the alternative in this war. Among the defenders of
England, Nelson, Wellington, and the Great Duke of Marlborough would
rank near Churchill. But the alternative to victory against Napoleon or
Louis XIV was not the alternative England faces now. And no England of
the past ever faced such odds as Churchill and his people faced at the
fall of France. Whatever the decision, Churchill has already achieved
greatness. This man who used to be accused of playing at politics and
acting only for himself has been lifted by his responsibility to forget
himself in the Battle of Mankind.
Q. _Is Mr. Churchill really backed by all the British people?_
A. Mr. Churchill is the most popular and trusted leader the British
people have had within the memory of living man. The man who caused
the defeat of the General Strike in 1926 is if anything more popular
among the working classes than among the upper classes. In the House
of Commons he usually receives heartier applause from Labor members
than from Conservatives even though he is the head of the Conservative
party. This is partly because the Conservatives cannot rid themselves
of a tinge of resentment at the man who was always, consistently,
unfailingly right about the coming of the war, and what it would be
like, while they were always, consistently, unfailingly wrong. The
Conservatives out of a rooted misconception of the character and
intentions of Hitler, felt an instinctive sympathy for him almost up to
the time he actually began to drop bombs upon them. The Labor party on
the other hand shared Churchill’s antipathy for Hitler from the very
beginning, and there was thus early established a bond between the
great British aristocrat and the British working classes which has been
greatly strengthened by his leadership of the war. I doubt if there
is a single Labor party leader with as devoted a following among the
British workers as Churchill has.
Q. _What part in the war has the British workingman played under
Churchill’s leadership?_
A. The British workingman, inspired and informed by Churchill, has been
superbly and intelligently patriotic. It is this union of Churchill
with Labor which has warded off defeat in the most desperate hour,
and which with our help will eventually win the war. British Labor’s
attitude toward the struggle which will decide the fate of all the
world for generations to come is a reproach to that minority of
American labor which has failed to understand the fact that the liberty
and the life of every individual American workingman depends on the
outcome of this war. During those awful months following the evacuation
of Dunkirk, the British trades unions voluntarily gave up all the
trades unions rules which, designed to protect the interests of labor
in peacetime, hampered production and became a danger in war. They
lengthened hours, took less pay for more work, stayed on the job to the
point of complete exhaustion. In the course of about three months the
British workingman doubled the production of weapons and munitions, and
almost tripled airplane production by the end of the year. It could not
have been done without Churchill. From 1932 to 1939, for seven years,
Churchill had been tirelessly teaching, preaching, exhorting, and
pleading with the British public and the British government to meet the
German menace. By the time the war came the British working classes had
learned from Churchill what it was about. They learned much faster than
the Chamberlains and many a muddleheaded rich appeaser.
Another impressive sign of the wisdom of the British Labor Party from
the leaders to the rank and file is that you do not hear from them the
demands for a “definition of war aims” which are so loudly voiced by
groups of American liberals. These Americans who are so concerned about
establishing the chemical purity of British intentions, and who insist
on a blueprint of the peace settlement, and a guarantee that the world
will be made over in a style that meets with their approval--these
Americans show precisely the incomprehension of Hitler that Chamberlain
showed with his appeasement. Your ordinary British dock worker knows
more about the meaning of the war than scores of American intellectuals
who are still bleating about war aims. As the British Labor publicist,
G. D. H. Cole, put it, “The Labor leaders and the great majority
of their followers alike believed firmly that the defeat of Hitler
mattered immeasurably more than anything else. For this reason they
were ready to put aside even their socialism and the greater part of
their reforming policy and even to abstain from criticizing openly
the government’s mistakes rather than run any risk of dividing the
national elements which stood for a vigorous prosecution of the war.”
Q. _Is Churchill what you would call a realist or an idealist?_
A. Churchill is both. He is a hardheaded, tough-minded idealist and
an imaginative, generous realist. He is convinced that the policy
which works for the good of all will also work best for the good of
the individual. This is the foundation stone of civilization. Hitler
believes that the smart man is the man who exploits others. Hitler’s
are the ethics of the “heel,” the gangster, the racketeer, the cheat
who is always on the lookout for a chance to swindle, or rob, betray,
or murder for profit. The Churchill attitude is that of the moral man,
the member of society. The Hitler attitude is that of the amoral man,
the bandit preying upon society.
I do not think Churchill is formally a religious man, although he
attends divine services and thus sets an example for the nation under
his leadership. But Churchill’s beliefs add up to something closely
approaching practical Christianity. It seems to me that very few
Americans really understand what Churchill stands for. He is so much in
the public eye as a war leader, that we are bound to think of him as
a warrior first. We forget or never were told that he is first of all
a builder. Before the war, in the field of international relations he
believed passionately in the life-and-death necessity of sustaining the
League, of collective security through the League.