IN A SOVIET FACTORY

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 105, 6 May 1933, Page 19

IN A SOVIET FACTORY

An Austrian journalist, Lili Korber, has provided interesting material iv "Life in a Soviet Factory." She was thoroughly. conversant with the language, and had travelled for ten months in the country before taking service as a hand in the Putilov tractor factory in Leningrad. She worked there for two months, living in a community house, sharing fifth-day excursions, taking part in meetings, debates, and merrymakings with her comrades, and keeping a daily diary. Her pictures of everyday life, kaleidoscopic, and very much alive, givo the impression of perfect sincerity. _ Readers' reactions will "vary according to their sympathies, but even those most favourably predisposed will retain a nightmare impression of the blinding, deafening, stunning effect of unremitting propaganda, the utter absence of privacy or repc , the eduction of the individual to a cog in the wheel, the appalling possibilities of blackmail and persecution inherent in the universal espionage, and finally, the terrifying phenomenon of the Bolshevik prigchild—by all of which. Fraulein Korber 's enthusiasm appears undaunted. If the West is to learn from Bussia, due heed will have to be paid to fundamental differences of temperament and tradition between the democratic European and the intoxicated idealists of the Soviet Republic.

This is Mr. Bllery Walter's final judgment in his "Russia's Decisive Year":— I had had three tremendous disillusionments: .First, when. I learned that one could not send the truth out of the Soviet Union or tell the truth about the outside world in Eussia. The second was when I found out that tho peasants had been tricked by the Government and were unhappy. The third was when I met Bussia's leaders and learned that they were not altruists, but individuals interested in their own comforts and in a class snobbery equal to that of Romanov Bussia. Professing an indifference to wealth, they strive ruthlessly for power.