RUSSIA’S INDUSTRIALISM

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 July 1932, Page 9

RUSSIA’S INDUSTRIALISM

WORKS IN THE UKRAINE Mr. A. T. Cholerton, the “Sundaj Times” correspondent in Russia, sends from Dnieprostroi a vivid picture of. the new industrial centre which is being developed on the banks of the Dnieper, in the south of the Ukrainian ■Soviet Republic. Though living in Russia’s richest cornbelt the people are short of bread, and they work for a pittance. The .enterprise, 1 vast and 'menacing, is driven relentlessly on. He says:— A dam, one kilometre long across the mighty Dnieper, largely designed and its building supervised by Americans. A power-house at its southern end under the river’s right bank, fitted with nine turbines and generators to produce 560,000 kilowatts, imported from America, and now being assembled and installed by Americans, Opposite, on the left bank, fed by this the world’s most powerful hydro-elec-tric station, scarring the endless Ukrainian steppe, are eight miles of works, a future Essen planned and erected under the supervision of Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians, and an American.

Germans build the Martin furnaces and chemical works, Belgians the coke furnaces. A young Frenchman erects an aluminium plant designed to produce two-thirds of the total output of all France and to use 60,000 kilowatts Gf power. Another brilliant young Frenchman supervises the construction of the world’s, biggest ferrous alloys. plant, consuming 160,000 . kilowatts; and the way the world is going is shown by the fact that the French firm hiring out this yopng engineer to the Bolsheviks only has 10,000 kilowatts of energy at its disposal. Within convenient reach are the Vast manganese deposits of Nikipol, the iron mines of Krivoi Rog, the Donetz coal, the steel mills of Dnieprope-

trovsk, and a cnam oi war wuiunca. And when two smaller dams have been built, ships of 5,000 tons burden from the Black Sea will serve Dnieprostroi and steam through its giant locks to Dniepropetrovsk, fifty-six miles higher up the river. Much of this super-Krupp metal combine will be ready by the autumn. If Americans, Frenchmen, Belgians, and Germans supply plans and much of the machinery, supervise construction and fitting, what are the Bolsheviks doing? The Bolsheviks are doing what none of us* free Europeans can do, with our democracy, factory legislation, and powerful trade unions. The Bolsheviks, in addition to the executive engineers, supply the. labour and rule it with a rod of iron; dirt cheap, docile labour, living under conditions and working for real wages which neither Englishmen nor Frenchmen nor many Germans, even in their present dire distress, would accept, even supposing their unions > would let them. The iron, steel, bricks, 'cement, and timber are produced under similar conditions.

To pay for these metal plants, planned on a scale which other nations shrink from attempting, at Dnieprostroi, Magnetogorsk, and elsewhere, the Bolsheviks are ready, and, what is more important, are able, to squeeze Russia dry and strip her naked, underfeeding their people as they have never been underfed at any time these last ten years, and depriving them of nearly everything that we ■think makes life worth living. HUNGRY WORKERS

As I sat chatting with a foreign engineer, a tap came on the window. Sighing, he went into the kitchen and came back with two rather thin slices of bread. “A labourer from the dam,” he explained. “It’s like that all day long. Thousands of them. The poor devils are hungry.” For food, as for everything else, there is glaring inequality at Dnieprostroi. But the whole 60,000 working there, except the foreign colony and a few political bosses, are all terribly underfed. The mass of the navvies gets little but bad bread and river water. Skilled workers earn about 200-240 roubles a month, but free navvies “Black Labour,” as the Russians call it —only about 60. And on the local market flour costs 120 roubles ihe pood of 36 English pounds! An impressive little township, built on the left bank (opposite the fairyland village reserved for American engineers), cannot house more than the “upper tenth.” The submerged nine-tenths live in holes in the steppe to escape the terrible winds. No sanitation, no water supply. Their working capacity is perforce low: less than one-fifth of the average Englishman’s or Frenchman’s. “How can you expect them to put their backs into it on mainly bread and water?” a Communist remarked, with engaging frankness, adding: “If they worked like you foreigners, we shouldn’t have jobs for all our people.” In fact, unZler foreign conditions, what Russia is producing now could be produced by perhaps cne-third of her population. On the dam alone an army of 24,000, including many hundreds of women navvies, get in each other’s way Then* nature is such that they must work in crowds. Left to their own devices, they flop. It is the same' with the Russian engineers. “I have fifty-one engineers working with me, falling over one another. In my own country five would suffice,” one of the foreigners told me. “The two or three old engineers, trained before the Revolution, are first-rate but terribly scared. “But the rest . . cubs from the Soviet technical schools . . indescribably ignorant and idiotically cocksure. They ‘get away with it’ with political backchat that’s got nothing to do with engineering. It’s People’s Commissars they want to be, not working engineers. All the same, out of the bunch of fifty, there are sure to be two or three boys who’ll turn up trumps. That’s what I call ‘selection by mass.’ Whereas if there were only five, they would have to be the result of deliberate selection (which means political selection here), and probably all duds. So thank God for the fifty.” “But with such waste, can it work?” I asked.

“The waste is frightful. Their organisation is a scream of inefficiency, suspicion and chicane. And, except for a few old mechanics —they’ve no axe to grind, God bless them, they keep me from jumping into the Dnieper—the workers are just like coolies or Kaffirs. For that dam the Bolsheviks, out of pride or innocence, bought in America about twice as much building machinery as we should think of using on the job. And yet most of the work is really done

by the most primitive manual methods. It would ruin us. PLANTS THAT WILL WORK “But, after all, what does their labour really cost them? Paper roubles and practically nothing to buy •with them except the bread ration, a meagre dole of tobacco, and a lift c tea. I’ll say that for the Bolsheviks, they may be wasteful as producers, but they’ve just about ruled out the consumer. “Nevertheless,” he went on solemnly, “these colossal plants are going to work because they are well planned. The mould is there. The Russians have only got to fill it; and theyie going to, with time. Everybody complains . . . It’s surprising how freely the workers curse the Government out of hours. And the bosses make no attempt to hide the hunger and the rags. They can’t. But when the syren goes they all turn up all right? Fear? The herd spirit? The power of the word? Remember that they have nowhere else to go. What else can they do? “Yes, these plants are going to. produce all right. And then—Europe look out.” Nearly every foreigner employed at Dnieprostrdi is thinking about that. And he is not thinking in terms of dumped aluminium saucepans. He is thinking of aeroplanes, tanks, howitzers in the hands of this incompetent but brave and docile Russian people, inured to hardship, taking death lightly, and with no respect for life —160 millions of them, still half-nomad, and utterly alien to the humanitarian and i pacifist ideals of the West. J Dead horses lie around in fields,

stripped bare -by the locusts of the Five Year Plan. Cattle there seem to be none. The hungry peasants of this the Eastern hemisphere’s most fertile wheat belt, having eaten their seed corn, swarm into the hungry towns, trek even as far as Moscow to barter anything they still possess for bread. But the furnace-spires of these industrial cathedrals, raised to serve the most pitiless god of all, stand out over the Steppe like Chartres above the Beauce, the granary of France.