CHANGING RUSSIA

Greymouth Evening Star, 21 December 1934, Page 20

CHANGING RUSSIA

NEW CASTES AND GRADES. A. T. Cholerton, “Daily Telegraph” Moscow correspondent writes:-—. Anyone resident in the big cities of Russia to-day who keeps observant eyes cannot be in any doubt about it. A Red “bourgeoisie d’Etat,” as. it might be called, is rapidly emerging out of State Capitalism. . . This new upper layer, comprising “responsible workers” —in other words, key officials and managers, officers of the Army and Police. Soviet men of letters, painters who limn the triumphs of Bolshevism in peace and war—certainly regards itself, not as a separate class, but as an elite, a deserving vanguard of the still vague and misty “proletariat.” . Its growing, privileged comfort, in the form of modern flats, cars, amusements, some travel, better food and clothing, is evidence of the progress and consolidation of Soviet society, for which the “responsible workers” provide an essential framework. Economic inequality has always existed in Russia. Tn a famous speech last February Joseph Stalin actually erected it into a principle of Sovietism. It used to be practised with great circumspection. What strikes me now,, especially after several weeks’ absence in Europe, is the sudden burst ol speed with which it is coming out into the open. This is a very important new fact, for economic inequality.. This new fact is rapidly changing the face of life in Moscow and a few other big cities —it is not yet apparent in the neglected provincial towns. It is quite plainly tolerated, and to some extent encouraged. The Dictatorship evidently believes that the stabilisation can be safely attempted; now that the peasants are collectivised, the old intelligentsia are finally squeezed down, new people are in the saddle, everything has been pretty well nationalised (etatised), and everybody driven in under the State.

Not very long ago the Kremlin announced that the “classless society ’ would be realised under the present (second) Five-Year Plan. Except in the most abstract Marxian sense, that has not happened. Present-day society in Russia is a “declassee society,” teeming with new castes or grades—a humorist recently counted 6S—not a classless one. 'What the Kremlin really seems to have meant was that socalled “class war” could now be safely suspended. MEN BETTER DRESSED.

The new Electoral Law, enfranchising a large number of deported peasants and holding out hope of like favour to former bourgeois citizens now “regenerated,” is evidence of this intention. The right to vote in a Soviet election actually means little, but the concession of it to some members of the “depressed classes” is accepted as a signal that there will be less persecution in future. Its importance is symbolical. In Eastern countries symbols count for much. Under Dictatorship people rapidly develop a sixth sense, which tells them when it is safe to begin doing certain things openly. They react instantly to changes of atmosphere in high places. In the grim setting of “class war,” even those on the winning side must take care to look like an oppressed proletariat. What was sinful in days gone by is so no longer. Men who used to dress down to look like manual workers, now begin to dress up like members of the bourgeoise.

And, above all, their women rush to get clothes, usually shoddy and outrageously dear, in the latest “Western” fashion, at the new State shops. Nobody has yet been able to explain satisfactorily how they do it. “Mostorg.” the general stores near Opera, formerly owned by an English firm, Muir and Merrilees, even offers foreign cloth at 180 to 280 roubles a metre, which is seven to ten weeks’ average wage or salary of all Trade Union members! The same Red emporium flaunts dinner jackets, but I have never yet seen them in wear save on the backs of officials deputed to receive visiting foreigners or those delegated to attendance on foreign parties.

Orghonikidze, the powerful Commissar for Heavy Industry, has ordered his engineers to dress more smartly. The Red directors of his factories are to see that this is done.

For years “the lascivious, decadent Western fox-trot” was frowned upon by Red purists. Indulgence in such pleasures, except by the specialist personnel surrounding foreigners, might have meant reprimand or even arrest. Now Defence Commissar Voroshilof has ordered all his officers to learn modern dances. Even university students are being taught them. The childish mass games in the parks, which so delighted visiting foreign “pinks” and other romantics, are now forsaken. Soviet youth dances to modern tunes. Already in the public parks I notice railed-off dancing enclosures, reserved for those who can pay five roubles. Teachers from the Opera Ballet are in attendance within. MOSCOW’S SHOPS. There is, of course, a great deal of trompe-l’oeil about all that. For every clear-sighted observer, Moscow remains a very grim city. House fronts are repainted, hut for the most part cloak squalid, rickety, densely over-crowded tenements. The windows of the new “commercial shops,” “open to all citizens." are bright with clothes and food, but very few citizens can afford to buy in these places, and there is still very little to be had in the workers’ “co-operatives.” Yet. I see humble folk promenading good-temperedly through “Eliseef’s,” the big provision stores on the Tverskaia, just re-opened as “Model Gastronem No. 1,” with poultry and fish at 9 roubles a pound. They are getting some reflected glory from possession of a shop described by the Moscow Press as “unique in Europe.” What Bolsheviks sneer at elsewhere as “State Chauvinism” is a very important psychological factor in Moscow. The same naive Chauvinism is apparent in the reason that a young student gave for the official encouragement of dancing: “A Red staff officer attending the 10th Anniversary Celebrations of the Turkish Republic in Angora was asked to dance by a Turkish lady, but did not know how to dance. That cast shame upon all of us!” Thus renewed contact with the outer world, although on purely official business, helps to change atmosphere.

With one “frown from above” all that would be swept away in a night. Last year’s great famine and the cruel “class-war” drives are too near for safe prophecy; but unless there befall some national catastrophes or renewed strife breaks out in high places, I do not think there will be official interference. Stalin is certainly aware that the delirious strain of the years

1929-33 could no longer be borne, and (hat the Russian people stand in dire need of relief, and are ripe and eager for pleasure. After all, it is only the fanatical few who will willingly lay down their lives for “Industrialisation,” or committees with names barbarously truncated or indicated by mere initials. ZIK. ZK. ZKK. Fancy fighting and dying for BBC!

The official Press again launches the cult of “the Hero” and “Fatherland.” They have not yet learned to do it well. Postichef, Stalin’s youngest, and toughest lieutenant, who has been given charge of Ukraine, tells a congress of Soviet editors, now meeting, that they ought to be ashamed to praise the Fatherland “in the trite language of circulars.” “What they must convey is the colour of her fame and glory. Said he: “The German Fascists have their ‘Wacht am Rhein,’ with its halo of deep romanticism. It is their boast that the best people guard the Rhine. Every young German is proud to be entrusted with guarding that river frontier between German}- and France. But what, 1 ask you, is the Rhino when compared with our Far East?”