POLICE STATE

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 70, Issue 119, 4 March 1950, Page 5

POLICE STATE

LIFE IN RUSSIA TO-DAY 1 ANSWERS TO MANY QUESTIONS NEW YORK (By Airmail). In Russia to-day there are “Legions of thinking, intelligent people who chafe under the omnipotent police state and long with their whole beings for freedom,” reports a trained American observer who recently left the Soviet Union.

“In coming years, the strongest, most determined foes of the police state are likely to develop east of the iron curtain, where not even forcible indoctrination can neutralse the lessons of immediate knowledge and experience,” writes Edmund Stevens, who has just completed a three-year assignment as Moscow correspondent of the “Christian Science Monitor.” From his observations in the Soviet capital, Stevens warns: “It is essential that the West learn to distinguish between the police state and the Soviet people, for if the former are implacable foes, the latter, unless stupidly antagonised, are potential 'friends and allies, and it is they who eventually will decide their country’s destiny.” Only a relatively small number of Russians are members of the Communist Party, which rules with iron discipline. From among the masses, says Stevens: “Thousands . upon thousands of people in all walks of life have at some time sustained some deep personal hurt from the police regime. Each new purge or “ideological campaign’ adds new contingents of malcontents. While all open criticism of the regime is effectively prevented and the ears and eyes of the MVD (secret police) are omnipresent, such is human nature that every individual has at least one person he fully trusts, and thus an endless chain extends, even though it lacks organised form.”

Three Groups Stevens divides to-day’s Russians into three groups. Those about' 25 or under, youngsters who grew up under Stalin and are susceptible to indoctrination; .those between 25 and 35, who he says show gradual frustration in the police state, and those over 33, whose disillusionment breeds either cynical resignation or intense inner rebellion. “The cynics are among the party staff, the majority of the citizenry are apathetic, but many at the least sign of hope would gravitate toward the third (rebellion),” the writer reports. There are two kinds of Soviet citizen. The elite are the select group of party members, risen from 2,000,000 after the purge of the thirties to more than 5,000,000 now, with the recruitment of youngsters who grew up under Stalin. The. other Soviet citizen is a member of the great conglomerate mass of Russian peoples. Of the elite, the upper crust includes the ruling Politburo, the military leaders, fac- , tory directors, celebrities of letters and the stage and screen and the like. Many of them have their Dachas — country houses—in what is called the “forbidden one” guarded constantly by the MVD. “These privileged groups comprise the cream of Soviet society,” writes Stevens. “Not that the Russians have even a remote counterpart of Western social life. For leading citiens of a revolutionary new society, their behaviour patterns are surprisingly conservative and conventional. Indeed, they are more restricted and inhibited than their counterparts in western ‘Bourgeois’ countries.” This upper crust is well fed, well paid, well housed. They live well, if nervously, under the constant vigilance of the secret police, who watch both \ them and those who would dare approach them.

What of the Peasant?

Now, how about the other side? Stevens describes it thus : So far as the peasant is concerned, the Soviet Government has evolved techniques of squeezing him far more thoroughly than Czarist landlords did. Save in a few pampered areas, “The peasant has yet to reap most of the benefits enjoyed by the urban intellectual and working class. The mpney the peasantry collected from high food prices in wartime was cancelled by the currency reform. Their obligations to the state in kind and money have upped from year to year. Consumer goods abundant in the cities have yet to reach most rural areas, and prices to the peasant are higher. “The serflike bondage of the ‘free’ Soviet citizen to his job is one element of an unrelaxing economic stranglehold upon the masses. Equally important is the total state control of the production of food and consumer goods, a control constantly used to coerce and cajole, reward and punish in the interests of the Communist party line.” Under this Soviet system the worker is bound to his job 1 “as fast as ever a gall dry slave was chained to his oar.” Under the. eye of the MVD vast forced labour groups operate in important state enterprises. Use of female labour is on a scale unparalleled in any other modern economy, and the women have equality in the toughest of manual labour.

The Trade Unions have nothing in common with trade unionism as the West knows it. Provisions supposedly safeguarding workers, says Stevens, have “about as much meaning and application as the civil liberties guaranteed in the Soviet constitution.” The strike weapon is utterly outlawed, and the real purpose of the Trade Union is to aid the government in getting as much labour as humanly possible out of Soviet workers.

Property of the State

“Under the Soviet system, the people have become the property of the State, along with land, industry and other forms of national wealth,” he writes. Thus the State dictates what an individual thinks, reads, eats, wear, where he lives, where and how he works, whom he can marry. The State assumes the right of calling him for a third degree, of searching tiis home, or of completely shutting him up by the simple expedient of arrest and confinement, with no appeal. In this state the Soviet citizen is trapped, and “the methods of the police state are nowhere so revealed as in the treatment of Soviet citizens who apply for permission to go abroad,” Stevens says.

The story of the Soviet wives of foreigners is well known. Except for the lucky few who got out during the war and the immediate post-war honeymoon period between east and west, all of them are still there. The Soviet wife of a foreigner is nagged

and pressed to a degree that few have the moral stamina to resist. Sooner or later most file for divorce. The foreigner in the Soviet Union is constantly shadowed by the MVD, none more than the foreign diplomats. The foreign press is subject to arbitrary and capricious censorship from which there is no appeal. Often, writes Stevens, censors deliberately distort the meaning of a correspondent’s cables. It is commonly assumed that the correspondent’s telephone is connected to a central listening post. Even his servants often spy upon him. “The most embittered, disillusioned members of the Moscow diplomatic colony,” Stevens says, “invariably are those who first came full of sympathy and admiration for the Soviet Union, full of friendly eagerness to get to know the country and its people.