My Russian Education

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 136, 11 June 1938, Page 2 (Supplement)

My Russian Education

We Cover the World

No. VII. — Copyright TWELVE years in a country i> which two decades ago experienced the most sweeping social upheaval since the French Revolution is certain to be an education for all but the most hopelessly stupid and unimaginative. One may like or dislike the Soviet regime; one may accept or reject the Communist philosophy and interpretation of life. What one cannot very well do, assuming any reasonable measure of intellectual curiosity, is to remain indifferent, to fail to react somehow.

This is why the record of a Russian assignment almost inevitably tends to become, to some extent, the summing up of a Russian education, an essay in personal history. By far the biggest story in the Soviet Union durir.g the last 15 years has been the unfolding and development of the revolution through several phases, the uses to wh}ch the victory won by the Communists \n the civil war have been put.

Both the veteran hard-boiled reporter who prides himself on getting the news without any corrupting taint of views and the bright young man who would be in his element beating the competing newspaper by an edition on the latest development in a murder story would be lost in Moscow. No one, it seems to me, has done or' can do a passable job of covering the Soviet Union without absorbing fairly large doses of Russian history, pre-war as well as revolutionary, economics, and Communist political theory. However much it may go against the grain of the news tradition, a certain measure of interpretation is necessary if news reports from Moscow are to be intelligible.

Welcomed Chance

To Go To Russia

I went to Russia in the summer of 1922 with virtually no reporting experience, domestic or foreign, and a strong sentimental sympathy with what I conceived to be Bolshevik theory and practice.

My wife was a Russian-born girl who generally shared my sympathy with the Soviet regime at this time.

I welcomed an opportunity to go to Russia in 1922. On the occasion of this first visit I had only the slenderest of free-lance connections; a general invitation to contribute occasional mail articles to the "Christian Science Monitor," and a similar arrangement with two or three impecunious Left Wing magazines. Our plan was to be abroad at the most for a year and to spend part of that time

hi Germany, wher<; inflation at that time made it possible for the foreigner to live in comfort, and even luxury, for a few dollars a week.

Towards the end of 1923 I became the regular full-time Moscow correspondent of the "Christian Science Monitor." Every foreign correspondent has his own news-gathering problems and methods. As the representative of a daily newspaper which, because of the unusually far-flung nature of ite circulation (there are probably at least as many readers of the "Monitor" in California as in Boston) and because the general development of its editorial policy has always laid special stress on the desirability of dispatcues of a solid interpretative character, intended to outlast the day on which they are published, my problems were different frojn thoee of the correspondent of the vigorously competitive newe agency. The latter is always haunted by the fear that the "opposition," or rival agency, may beat him by six minutes on some exciting development. But all Moscow newspapermen faced aome common problem*.

First, there was the censorship. Soviet officials have always maintained a bashful reticence about the implications of this institution. Newly arrived correspondents in Moscow are unctuously as6ured that the sole purpose of the censorship ie to help therti to avoid inaccuracies. This, of course, is a tale for the marines. During more than a decade of service in Moscow I never knew the censors to display the slightest concern about inaccuracy in itself. On the other hand, the most convincing proof of authenticity would not push through a message that was politically distasteful or inexpedient.

Censorship Was Not

The Only Trouble

Still more important was the consideration that any mail article which was too outspoken in the opinion of the Soviet authorities exposed the correspondent to the risk of expuleion. Soviet efforte to control the activities of foreign newspaper men are by no means restricted to the censorship of cables. A close syetem of personal espionage is maintained; letters ire frequently opened and telephone* are

The Author ■ — William Hem]) Chamberlin spent from 1922 to 1934 in the Soviet Union as correspondent for the "Christian Science Monitor. , ' He was born in Brooklyn ond entered newspaper work immediately) after leaving college. He interrupted his long Moscow assignment only once for a few months in 1927 when he went to Shanghai to cover the Chinese revolution, also for the "Monitor." After completing his monumental history and delivering a series of lectures on Russian conditions before universities, public forums and other gatherings in America, Chamberlin sailed in 1935 for Tokyo. Since that time he has been the "Monitor's" chief Far Eastern correspondent. . His wife, Sonya Troslen Chamberlin, is a Russianborn American whom he met in New York before he Wznl to the Soviet Union. They have a daughter, Nadezhda (Hope) Elizabeth, born in Moscow.

tapped. Because of my wife's knowledge of Russian I had no need of a translator. But'the average foreign correspondent, at least during the first years of his stay, is obliged to employ a secre-tary-translator, who is, of course, a Soviet citizen, and who is not likely to be in a position to refuse a request from the G.l\U. for information about the doings of his or her employer.

The Soviet regime shares with other dictatorships a noteworthy psychological peculiarity. Utterly callous and hardboiled in carrying out acts of ruthleesiic*s, such as the shooting of 48 people without trial for alleged sabotage in the food industry, or exiling whole villages in mid-winter for resistance to grain collections, it is ae sensitive as the most temperamental prima donna when any inquiring reporter writes a plain, unvarnished taie of its less pleasant activities. The closest kind of check-up is maintained on all news appearing about the Soviet Union abroad, even°in the smallest and most obspure newspapers.

CensoreWp, as I found, was by no means the sole problem involved in covering a dictatorship. Under the Soviet systeai many news eourcee which are naturjer utilised in democratic countries are closed and others arc definitely tainted. There k no opposition Press, with the aid of which one might check up on the official interpretation of a new decree or a diplomatic note. There are no opposition •statesmen to be consulted or interviewed, no opposition deputies to be buttonholed in the lobbies durinjr a Congress of Soviets. On every subject of the day there ie just one available published version—the official one.

Even the purveying of official information was increasingly ecanty and inadequate, and provided a subject of constant and quite futile grumbling among the journalists. In this respect there was a marked deterioration during the latter period of ,ny stay. In the first years of the New Economic Policy,

1923-25, high Soviet officiate were fairly accessible; I recall interviews with Premier Rykov and President Kalinin, with Trotsky, Chicherin and Litvinoff. Chicherin, who death was recently reported from Moscow after ill-health had removed him for years from anv participation in public affairs, was one of the most striking and fascinating of these personalities. A scholar and an aristocrat, descendant of a long line of diplomats, who had joined the Bolshevik

party long before the revolution, he was distinguished by hie amazing fund of historical and political knowledge and his extraordinary mastery of all the leading European languages.

However, I don't think I took an unreasonable length of 'time in cutting my eye-teeth in Moecow, or in emerging from the soporific state of propaganda fairy tales from which eome people never do seem to wake up in Russia. The years from 1922 until 1929 represent a progress to a halfway house in my Russian education. The early attitude of distinctly favourable partisanship melted away, not into violent aversion, but into a kind of detached neutrality.

Not Allowed to Know Trotsky

The inverted class tyranny of the Soviet regime grated on me more and more the longer I stayed. In the beginning it seemed wonderful to find so many workers in high positions. Later I began to realise that intelligence and capacity are far more important qualifications than blood, whether red or blue, and that a Communist worker might sometimes, like a Grand Duke of Czarist times, be a drunkard, a moron, or simply unfit for the post to which he had been appointed through class favouritism. My naive, "petty-bourgeois" conception of the revolution had been that it was designed to abolish privileges of birth and wealth and to give every Soviet citizen equality of opportunity. It had abolished pre-war privileges thorouglilv enough and converted them into mortal

disabilities. But it had set up even more rigid caete and class distinctions in their place.

The methods by which Trotsky was eliminated from the higher councils of the Communist party were unpleaeantly suggestive of Boss Murphy and Tammany Hall. I have never been & theoreti-

cal "Trotskyist." On the basicj issue of the controversy between Trotsky and Stalin, the possibility of building up Socialism In one country, it seemed to me that, putting aside hair-splitting quibbles as to when Socialism could be regarded as achieved, the Soviet Union had no alternative except to make the best effort it could to create a Socialist regime on the basis of its own resources. The flame of world revolution simply would not ijrnite. And the reason for this was to be found not in the bureaucratised stupidities of the Communist International, under Stalin's dictatorial leadership (although there were plenty of these), but rath?r in the unfavourable objective situation. Xo amount of eloquence and strategy could make violent revolutionaries out of British trade-unionists, or create a solid Soviet regime, on the Russian model, on the shifting sands of China's vast hosts of backward, impoverished peasants and city Lumpenproletariat.

Actually the party rank and file never had an opportunity to learn what Troteky stood for. The iron rules of party discipline, so conducive to the building up of a personal dictatorship, were invoked against the Trotskyists; they were given no chance to advocate their ideas in speeches and pamphlets. They were not even allowed to publish the programme which they prepared for the consideration of the Party Congress which, expelled them from membership in the latter part of 1927. Now, when objective circumstances have made the outlawed Trotskyiste the defenders of the direct interests of the Soviet workers against the oppression and exploitation of the State bureaucracy, no group in the country ie so mercilessly harried and persecuted by the political police.

Year by year, up to 1929, one could see signe of improvement and recovery from the appallingly low level to which living standards had been reduced when I first arrived. Finally there was the consideration that, whatever might be said in criticism of the Soviet regime, it was the only possible government for Russia. It had emerged victorious from the ordeal of battle; it had beaten Russian conservatism on the battlefields of Siberia and Ukraine; Russian democracy had been a stillborn dream.

A hungry people demands scapegoats and amusements. The Soviet authorities tried to satisfy this need by organising several public sabotage trials, with a maximum of publicity, all designed to prove that the main cause of the prevalent hardships was the sinister wrecking activity of engineers who had been bought by foreign gold, and were acting in league with emigre Russians, and the General Staffs of Great Britain and France.

Side by side with this tragedy of the intelligentsia (there were successive waveg of arrests among engineers, agricultural exj>erts, historians, natural scientists and statistician*), an equally grim process was going on in the villages

under the euphemistic term 'liquidation of the kulaks as a class.' No one ever worked out a satisfactory definition of what constitutes a kulak —or 'fist,' to give the word its Russian meaning. Broadly speaking, the kuleks were the 4 or 5 per cent of the Soviet peasants who were a little better off, or a little less poor, than their neighbours. The kulak was the man who owned a little brick-kiln or windmill, who had enougli sense to vary his wheat or rye with some more profitable cash crop, who possessed a flock of sheep or a small herd of co we. The kulak, by his mere existence, wa*> a challenge anil a stumbling-block to the newly-organised collective farms. Almost every peasant would rather enjoy this status of an independent individual smallholder than work under the direction of en alien farm manager without the stimulus of personal ownership of held* and cattle. Therefore the kulak, regardless of whether he openly opposed collective farming or not, must be destroyed. From the beginning kulaks were excluded from membership in collective farms. Early in IU3O a decree was published authorising their 'liquidation' as a class wherever collective farming had become the prevalent form of agriculture. What this meant was, that millions of human beings, the great majority of whom were guilty only of being a little more efficient than their neighbours, were violently dispossessed, driven from their homes with little but the clothes on their backs, and either turned out to shift, for themselves or packed in foetid goods trains end sent on long journeys to the timber camps of Northern Russia and Siberia and to Magnitogorsk and other new construction enterprises, where they were sentenced to rough, unskilled labour. The measure was carried out with the greatest brutality. Particularly appalling was the mortality among children, both on the crowded trains, where the supply of food and water was scanty and irregular, and in the places of exile and forced I«botir. where scanty rations of the coarsest food were provided. The climax was the famine of 1032-33. This, I think, was the mo*t important story I covered in the Soviet Union. It was, to a considerable extent, an exclusive story, not because my colleagues did not know about it. but'because, for various reasons, no one except myself dug into it very deeply.

Seven Famine Deaths

In Only One Family

The circumstances of the case were unusual, even for the controlled and hobbled journalism of the Soviet Union. Two successive bad crope in 1931 end 1932, combined with he<».vy State requisitions of grain and other food products, partly to feed the swollen cities and new industrial centres, partly for military storage, partly for export, had eet the stage for catastrophe. As early ae the autumn of 1932 there were predictions that the coming winter and spring would witness ortright famine instead of the hungry conditions which had become familiar during previous years.

Visit to a Real

I left Moscow on a trip to America in Xovember, 1932. When I returned in the spring of 1933 I found everyone talking about the famine which wae devastating the southern and south-eastern part of European Russia and parts of Central Asia, but no one writing about it. For this last fact there was quite good reason. Not only did the censor hlandlv deny the existence of famine, but no' journalist was permitted to travel in the Ukraine, Xcrth Caucasus and other famine areas, and report the situation on the ba*is of his observations.

Our trip (my wife accompanied me. and we both worked overtime every day during the two weeke of the journey, talking to as many people as we could find) turned out more successfully than I might have expected. We visited three regions (Kropotkin, in the Xortli Caucasus, and Poltava and Belaya Tserkov, in the Ukraine), all separated from each other by hundreds of miles, at least 15 villages, and talked with hundreds of people, mainly peasants, of course, but also with Soviet officials, heads of collective farms, townspeople, railway workers, and foreign agricultural experts. I am sure of the correctness of the fundamental conclusions we reached ae of anything I learned during my stay in Russia.

The first house we entered, quite at random, in a Cossack sta-uitsa, or village, called Laduzhskaya, was occupied by a young Cossack woman, nursing a baby, and her mother. In that house there had been seven deaths from famine during the preceding winter and spring: the brother of the young woman, his wife, and five young children. There was not a single person whom we questioned in Laduzhskaya and in the larger neighbouring etanitsa, Kazanskaya, who did not tell some similar story of tragedy affecting friends and near relatives.

In Poltava, a beautiful old Ukrainian town situated on a hill, the authorities were more on the look out for us. They furnished us with a car and several trusted comrades for an inspection trip through the villages. Although we sometimes missed the freedom with which we had tramped about in the Cossack country around Kazanskaya, we also learned the essential truth about Poltava. It was easy enough for an official in Moscow to assure the credulous tourist that all stories of famine were lies of the malicious capitalist Press. It was not so easy for the Soviet or collective farm president in Zhuke (the largest of the villages we visited near Poltava) to follow this example, M'canse some peasant in the office or the field was sure to pipe up with a. disconcerting story of how Aunt Masha j:ot very weak in March when the bread was all gone and died in

Village of Death

April, or how Uncle Ivan had swelled up after he had been on a diet of eat* and dogs and ground weeds for a few weeks and died in great agony.

The Soviet Government could easily have averted the famine if it had desired. A complete cessation of exportation of foodstuffs in 1!>32 er diversion of a small anion i : of foreign currency for purchase <rf grain and provisions would have sufficed.

Our last experience on the trip wa* the climax. We clipped unobtrusively into Belaya Tserkov, a country town south-west of Kiev, largely inhabited by Jews, and walked out into the neighbouring villages without benefit of car or companions furnished by the local authorities. Again and again we were advised by peasants to "go to Cherksiss" if we wanted to sec the worst the famine had done in this region. And after a long walk we entered this true village of death, where the multitude of abandoned houses, gaping windows, weed-grown gardens, l>ore mule witness to the recent catastrophe. This catastrophe wae put in concrete terms by a young Communist named Fiehcuko, secretary of the Chcrkass Soviet, who told n<, on the authority of the village record . that over 000 people had died out oi the village's population of more than 2HOO, while several hu'idrnd more had fled. To harrowing stori-s of individual loss and suffering there was no end. One that somehow made the deepest impression on me was that of a mother who had, lost her tfoce children, who, as she said, were eo good and so ucheni (learned), because they, unlike herself, had been able to go to school. I can never seen Stalin in the benevolent poses which he now prefers, holding a child, without recalling the*e three Ukrainian peasant children and the uncounted host of unknown victims of the famine to which they belonged.

After Cherka*s I had just one desire: to get out of the Soviet Union and to tell the story ci the famine, with what I believed to be its political and economic implication!. Thia, to th» best of my ability,

Looking , back from ft perspective of three yearn, I see no reason to regret or to modify ray reaction. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew, which look a negligible number of victims by comparison with the Soviet man-made famine, lias survived in historical memory four centuries as a jrhastly testimonial to religious fanaticism. I see no reason why the Soviet famine, with its milljoiiH of vietiniH. should not stand as an equally impressive warning againfct the consequences of economic bigotry and clhhh fanaticism armed with the power of absolute dictatorship.

What I carried away from Russia, along with a profound distrust and dislike of dictatorships which, I am convinced, can never be benevolent even if it desires to be so, was a strong belief that liberty ie the eurest <ruarantee of well-being and the bent touchstone of the value of any social order or civilisation. Imagine the preposterous sabotage-hunting if Habeas Corpus had been functioning, or the famine if the ruling party had to reckon with an opposition Press, an Opposition in Parliament, and the votes of the Ukraine and the North Caucasua at the next election!

I suspect that 12 years under a dictatorship have made me a thoroughly unrepentant Liberal and a democrat for life.