Part 12

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.

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.