LIFE IN MODERN RUSSIA: CONDITION OF THE PEASANT.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20231, 15 February 1934, Page 8

LIFE IN MODERN RUSSIA: CONDITION OF THE PEASANT.

Machine Has Taken the Place of God: Hope of a World Revolution Dead .

By

William Allen White.

11. In modern Russia, the machine has taken the place that religion had in old Russia. T o-day in Russia the will of Cod is a mechanistic process. Recently Corky wrote a play describing the death of an atheist with a devout wife. She brought in the priests and all the paraphernalia of the Church to consecrate and sanctify her husband’s passing. Gorky staged a beautiful and solemn scene. Beholding it, the modern Russian audience burst into laughter. In a recent play a mother cries out at the loss of her son, “Oh, my Godl” and the audience hoots with delight. God is comic relief.

QN THE OTHER HAND, in a recent film which is taking Russia by storm the climax comes when, after a long fight against heavy odds, the engineer, lighting a cigarette, presses the lever that first starts in motion the machine that has been building through a year, a machine which will bring food and comfort to millions. The audience bursts into applause as the engineer smiles and puffs at a cigarette, and watches the slow start and the rising speed of the powerful machine.

All over Russia, from the Baltic to the Pacific, great machines are turning raw material into finished products. Machines that make other machines are rising all over the land, and machines that make machines that make machines are building everywhere. The power of these machines is measured by the million horsepower and the impact of this tremendous power keeps Russia moving; for the most part moving forward.

All around is chaos. Men are inept. Scientists at cross purposes. Experts engaged in vast quarrels. But the machinery moves. Russia is an iron government. What Europe and America have done in three hundred years, Russia is trying to do in two decades. Her old gods were too slow. So she turned on the juice and made a new god who is working with a million cogs and levers and wheels and literally is hurling Russia across the ages into the modern world.

The Machine God. Of course, there are injustices in the process. Starvation—mass starvation—might easily become but an incident of the great hegira from the age of Jenghis Khan, the Boyars and the Romanoffs into the complex civilisation of the 20th century. These one hundred and seventy Russian millions are pushing forward without stopping for a Magna Charta or a Bill of Rights, or for any democratic process or parliamentary form.

Naturally, in the onrush hundreds of thousands are crushed, broken, assassinated, trodden under foot and lost. But the machine moves; the mechanistic process is the will of God. So the old, slow gods of the old righteousness and the old justice and the old loving kindness furnish the comic relief which snaps the taut nerves of these mad Slavs and makes them crackle and rattle in ribald laughter at any mention of the ancient forms of faith. At the Economic and Monetary Conference in London in June stood Litvinoff, Russian Foreign Minister, high priest of the new faith, calling upon his new god in the midst of delegates from the sixty-six nations forming roughly what is called Christendom. The delegates were met to consider a way out of the economic jungle into which the world has wandered. They had phrases and shibboleths, formulas, clauses, theories and reforms to suggest. Litvinoff offered as his solution of the world depression to buy one billion dollars’ worth of goods, to buy it of the world and set the world’s machinery whirring to supply the needs of the Soviet Union. Some order that! It included from 25 to 66 per cent of the existing world stocks of aluminium, nickel, copper and lead, onethird of the annual world export of machinery, and the whole of last year’s total output in shipbuilding. That order was Russia’s solution of the depression. It was exactly typical of the Russian mind, typical of the Russian Revolution, typical of the deep, perhaps subconscious impulse in the Russian heart giving impact to the blind momentum that is modern Russian life.

The Russian Bolshevists in 1918 made one major blunder and its consequences are still hampering the Soviet Union. One

morning this summer after the harvest in the black earth country of Central Russia, newspaper correspondents in Moscow received telegrams from their papers asking them about the story that the Russian peasants suffering from famine were killing and eating their children. The story had been given out by a well-known churchman, and the world was aghast. Now these telegrams came to Moscow as a result of the Bolshevik blunder of 1918— fifteen years ago, when the Bolshevists believed that the World War would end in a peace without victory. They were convinced that in rage and dissatisfaction at the futility' of war the workers of the world would rise in world revolution. The Russian blunder arose because the Bolshevists, knowing little of America, underestimated the weight of American help to the Allies in the Avar. So the Bolshevists roared loudly and long about world revolution. MoreoA-er, they began spreading propaganda for Avorld re\-olution and so scared the rest of the Avorld into perpetual kitters Avhich recur AvheneA'er the A\-ords Bolshevist or Communist appear. The connection betAveen that mistake fifteen years ago and the flood of telegrams inundating the neAvspaper correspondents at Moscoav this summer is simple and direct. For if the Avorld had not been scared stiff by the Bolshevik talk of world revolution in 1918, 1919 and 1920, the Russian Government would not be isolated financially as it is to-day. If Russia could borrow money profitably she Avould not have to sell the surplus products of her peasants in the Avorld market to get cash with Avhich to build up her factories. The Peasants’ Shortage.

Last year Russia sold fifteen million tons of grain, and a proportionate amount of butter and poultry and eggs. She kept enough grain and foodstuffs to feed her cities and to fill her Avar chests in the Far East. But the peasants wintered on a shortage of food. The shortage of food Avas the basis of the churchman’s story of the famine in Russia, Avhich was driving the peasants into infanticide and cannibalism; an absurd story, but having its foundation in the fact that Russia during the last year has been compelled to li\'e upon the shortest food ration it has had for a dozen years. The peasants raise enough food to feed themselves and the nation, even to fill the Avar chests and to create a carry-over surplus, but not enough in bad years to permit the necessary sale of foodstuffs to finance the building of an industrial civilisation.

Hope of a Avorld reA-olution has passed out of the Russian mind Avith the years since 1920. The responsible rulers of Russia noAV know that unless the depression continues and brings living standards of the outside Avorld to a point below endurance, there is no hope for world re\-olution. A few crusaders, the lunatic fringe of Bolshevism, set forth e\*ery year to inflame the world, but the torch of their ardour so far has not inflamed the Avorld.

The party leaders gh’e lip service to the theory of world re\ T olution, but they are devoting their time and their energy to the problem of building up Russia industrially into a great, human machine with its heart of steel and stone and copper—a mighty mechanism that by a purely mechanistic process shall bring justice into the Russian world. They hold no strong hope of e\-angelising revolution Avith the world of capitalism. But the blunder they made in 1918 in clamouring for Avorld revolution has delayed the success of their own experiment and cost the Russian peasants many a sad and hungry day.