THE STALIN ERA

Anna Louise Strong

Formatter’s Note

The Stalin Era was originally published in 1956 by Mainstream Publishers in New York. According to my research into copyright law, works published prior to 1978 required deliberate renewal for their copyright status to be maintained. I delved into the U.S. copyright office’s records, and could only find the initial copyright registry; no record of any renewal exists. For works published in 1956, copyright lasted for 27 years, meaning that the work would have fallen into the public domain after December 31, 1983.

Anna Louise Strong died in 1970 without having renewed this copyright. Even if she had, it would have subsequently expired after 2010, as U.S.C. Title 17 § 301 clearly dictates. Some calculation techniques put the expiry at 2026, but from my reading, the life of the author + 70 year term is inapplicable to works published prior to 1978, and regardless would not apply from publication date. As such, this work exists now in the public domain.

I have worked carefully to format this text as printed in the initial publication. There may be errors, and those errors are entirely my own, and will be fixed as I find them. As a work of history and social commentary, it is of vital importance, and a perspective rarely seen in Western English-language publications. As such, I present it to you now, in honor of Anna Louise Strong, and in honor of the tireless work and sacrifice of the people of the Soviet Union and all they accomplished for socialism.

CONTENTS

- Author’s Foreword

- I. Socialism in One Country

- II. The Five-Year Plan

- III. The Revolution in Farming

- IV. New People

- V. The Great Madness

- VI. The Fight for Peace Fails

- VII. The Pact That Blocked Hitler

- VIII. War of the Whole People

- IX. The Second Rebuilding

- X. Stalin and After

Author’s Foreword

I think that, looking back, men will call it “the Stalin Era.” Tens of millions of people built the world’s first socialist state, but he was the engineer. He first gave voice to the thought that the peasant land of Russia could do it. From that time on, his mark was on all of it, on all the gains and all the evils.

It is too soon to sum up the era, and yet one must try to. For controversy has arisen over it and the beliefs of many around the world are being torn. It is the very best people who are most disturbed by Khrushchev’s revelations of thousands of brutal injustices and harsh repressions when socialism was for the first time built. They are asking: Was this necessary? Is that always the path to socialism? Or was it the evil genius of one man?

I think the Russians do not ask this. They build already far beyond the Stalin days. They are analyzing this past as a means to a better future. They know that all human progress is bought most dearly, not only by deaths of heroes in battle but by deaths of men unjustly. They also know that all the evils endured through the socialist building led by Stalin, whether these came by necessity, error or crime, were far, far less than the evils they suffered by deliberate will of the Western world in the wars of intervention and the Hitler invasion, less even than they suffered through America’s delay in the promised “second front.” They will repair their own lacks without advice from us.

To my friends of the West, I would say: This was one of history’s great dynamic eras, perhaps its greatest. It changed not only the life of Russia but of the world. It left no man unchanged of those who made it. It gave birth to millions of heroes and to some devils. Lesser men can look back on it now and list its crimes. But those who lived through the struggle and even many who died of it, endured the evil as part of the cost of what was built.

Shall we forget the Europe of 1940, when the armies of France collapsed in eleven days before Hitler and when Europe feared a new Dark Ages of a thousand years? Shall we forget the assault on all mankind by the proclaimers of a master race against slave races, and how this assault was broken on the men and women of Stalingrad? They built feverishly, wastefully, but they built strength that stood when the world was reeling. And for this the world is in their debt today.

Nor for this only. The Stalin Era built not only the world’s first socialist state and the strength that stopped Hitler. It built the economic base for all those socialist states today in which are one-third of mankind; it built the surplus which can give to the ex-colonial peoples of Asia and Africa the freedom to choose their development in open market. It, thus, has built a base on which can grow the variety and freedom of the many nations and their unity in lasting peace. The evils of that era came from many causes—from Russia’s past habits, from pressure of hostile encirclement, from Hitler’s Fifth Column and, in part, from the character of the man who led. Most of all, they came because the democratic and technically developed working-class of the West left the first building of socialism to an illiterate, technically-backward peasant people, who knew that they were not ready for the task and yet who built.

Anna Louise Strong

I. Socialism in One Country

The world’s first socialist state was built in a backward peasant country. By all past theory, this could not be done. Socialism implies, or was thought to imply, a more plentiful life, built on surplus, with widening freedom and culture. It was expected to come when capitalism had fully developed the mechanism of production but could not satisfactorily distribute the surplus goods. It implied technically competent workers, aware of the defects of capitalism, and conscious of collective power to make plenty for all. They would take power, nationalize the productive mechanism and use it for the common wealth. There were debates about how much “force and violence” the take-over would need.

Tsarist Russia had no modern productive mechanism and no surplus. When it collapsed in World War One, there were no goods and little food. Nor were there competent workers, and the peasants lived in the Middle Ages. The Bolshevik Party, under Lenin, came to power not because of any wide demand for socialism, but because they were the only disciplined group that expressed the people’s demands for “peace, land and bread.” The country was in chaos—peasants seizing nobles’ lands, workers starving when factories closed for lack of materials, soldiers deserting the front. These workers and soldiers elected “Soviets”—councils—to voice their demands. Lenin said these Soviets were a base for popular, democratic rule. “All power to the Soviets” was the slogan under which the Bolsheviks took power.

The take-over was simple. Soldiers and workers seized telephone, telegraph, government offices, stormed the Winter Palace. The All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, already in session, declared itself the government on November 7, 1917. It quickly passed three decrees: on peace, on land, on state power. The decree on peace proposed to all warring governments—the first World War was on—to negotiate peace. The decree on land made all land state property, in which working peasants had users’ rights. The decree on state power gave all power to the Soviets. From all parts of the country telegrams announced the electing of local Soviets. Peasants’ Soviets held a congress and joined the new government, which called itself a Soviet Republic

To take power was easy; it was done in a day. To hold power was harder; it took many years. Dispossessed nobles and previous government chiefs formed armies with the aid of foreign powers. The German Kaiser seized Poland and the Baltic States, sent troops to Finland to help Baron Mannerheim set up a reactionary regime, and into the Ukraine and North Caucasus to seize grain, coal, iron and oil. Britain, France, Japan and the United States sent troops to the Arctic ports, through Vladivostok into Siberia, and into the Caucasus and Central Asia. Wars of intervention lasted until 1920–21. When they ended, Finland, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania had been detached as separate states. Bessarabia had been annexed by Romania. The rest of Russia was ruled by Congresses of Soviets.

This Russia was ruined, without crops, raw stuffs or machines. Peasants’ livestock had been killed and implements worn out in seven years of war. Two famine years, in 1920 and 1921, took millions of lives. All through the once fertile Volga countryside, which I visited in 1921, no peasant children could go to school even if there had been schools. Peasant children had neither shoes nor clothing; they crouched all winter on the big family ovens, clad in thin rags, unable to go outdoors. To stimulate economic recovery, Lenin introduced the “New Economic Policy,” known as NEP. It permitted all kinds of production—socialist, cooperative, even capitalist. The state kept the mines, railways and heavy industry—all badly ruined—but private ownership continued in small industries, shops and farms.

Life revived, but Lenin’s life was over. When he died, in January, 1924, the standard of living was still far below even the meager life of prewar days under the tsar. Neither industry nor farming had recovered from the catastrophic decline of seven years of war. Nor was the country socialist, though the ruling party promoted socialism. Basic industries were state-owned and were being repaired by sacrifices of workers, who worked for small wages—at first for no wages except food—and gave their holidays to make locomotives, street-cars and other equipment for the common wealth. Lenin had rightly counted on their devotion to the public properties. But much industry and trade was capitalist. Farming, especially, was in the hands of small owners, the strongest of whom were petty capitalists, called kulaks, who profited and grew by exploiting other peasants and cheating the state. Lenin himself said that, while such conditions lasted, the economic base existed for capitalism rather than socialism.

The people had, however, caught from Lenin a vision of a Russia which, under socialism, might become the world’s most progressive and prosperous state. Everyone knew they had a long way to go. But Russia, they thought, would not have to complete the change to socialism by herself. The exhaustion of World War One and the Russian example would, it was thought, start other revolutions in Europe, especially in Germany. With the help of the German working-class, far better educated and technically more competent than the Russian, the new social forms for Europe would be built. More than once this revolution seemed imminent in Germany—in 1917, 1918, 1920 and 1923. The question whether Russia, unaided by any advanced country, could build a socialist economy, did not arise as practical politics in Lenin’s day. When it did arise, in discussions that began in 1924, most Bolshevik theorists held that Russia could not.

It was Joseph Stalin who formulated in August, 1924, the idea of building socialism in Russia without any outside help. A few months earlier he had said the exact opposite, stating that “for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of a single country, and particularly of such a peasant country as Russia, are inadequate; for that, the efforts of the proletariat of several advanced countries are required.”[1] In August, however, arguing against Trotsky, Stalin said that a Soviet government could develop Russia and build socialism, even without the aid of any foreign working-class, because it would be supported by the vast majority of the people, including the peasants. Stalin did not appear to notice his own inconsistency and probably was unaware of the great importance this formula would later gain. Consistency was not his need, for in those days he was not considered a leading theoretician. His talent lay in organizing. He had become General Secretary of the Communist Party. As such he was in touch, if not with all workers and peasants, at least with the most energetic demands of the land.

So Stalin voiced, not a completed theory, but the growing demand of the people to build their own country, and the growing faith that they could do it, even without foreign help. In seven years since the Revolution, the Bolsheviks had learned self-confidence in managing the state. The idea that their hopes of socialism should depend on European workers whose revolutions failed to come off, began to annoy. When Stalin declared that Russians could stand on their own feet, build any economic system they chose, this gave the Revolution a continuing aim and called men to patriotic endeavor. The accepted Bolshevik theorists of the time, Zinoviev and Kamenev, hardly realized that a new, powerful thesis had been introduced. When Stalin, in 1925, asked the Fourteenth Party Congress to give formal sanction to the idea, he got it without trouble. A few months later, the two theorists awoke to the meaning of the new thesis and criticized it as substituting “national communism” for the orthodox view. Later, Trotsky joined in attacking the theory.

Joseph Stalin, who thus crystallized almost casually the thesis by which the Russian people were to live for twenty-five years, was not a Russian. He was Georgian, from one of the southern nations conquered by Russian imperialism. His father, a cobbler, had been born a serf. Unlike most of the Bolshevik leaders, Stalin came from an oppressed class in an oppressed nation. At the age of nine, he entered an ecclesiastical school, not long open to children of lowly birth. The teachers found him one of the best pupils with “a streak of self-assertiveness and an eagerness to outshine others.” The school-master and local priest got young Joseph a scholarship for the Theological Seminary in Tiflis, which was maintained to Russianize bright young Georgians. He entered in 1894, when nearly fifteen. He found a harsh regime in which teachers spied on intimate doings of pupils, who were not even allowed to read secular books. Caught reading Victor Hugo in his third year, young Joseph was shut in a punishment cell. Soon he was reading even more forbidden books. In one, by Karl Marx, he read: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world; our business is to change it.” He joined a secret socialist organization, helped organize railway workers, and was expelled from the Seminary in 1899.

Years later Stalin said: “I became a Marxist because of my social position … and also because of the harsh intolerance … that crushed me mercilessly at the Seminary.”

The young Georgian became an organizer of workers, living dangerously under many names. “Stalin”—man of steel—was a name his comrades gave that stuck. He accepted Lenin’s views as soon as he read them and supported Lenin staunchly thereafter. Often arrested, he was four times banished to different places in the Arctic and each time got away. The fifth time, in 1913, he was sent to the farthest north of Asia, where the Yenesei flows into the Arctic; from this place there was no escape until the Revolution freed him. He studied and wrote in exile, especially analyzing the problem of “nationality,” which he had faced as a Georgian under Russian rule. His work on nationalities became known among fellow Bolsheviks; when they took power in 1917, they made Stalin Commissar of Nationalities, in charge of the problems of non-Russian peoples in the new state.

In 1922, Stalin became General Secretary of the Communist Party, a strategic post whose possibilities were not fully realized until he developed them. He was a natural choice for the job, since most of the other leaders had lived abroad in Europe during the tsar’s oppression, and had developed as writers and speakers in lands where speech was free. Stalin had organized in the underground of tsarist Russia. His weapon had become, not the spoken or written word, but the close, organized contact in which men’s lives lay in their comrades’ hands.

As General Secretary, and as member of the Party’s Political Bureau, Stalin became one of five men—Lenin, Kamenev, Trotsky, Bukharin, Stalin—who made “policy.” Lenin was recognized chief, Kamenev was his deputy in various tasks. Trotsky was in charge of the civil war, Bukharin of press and propaganda. Zinoviev, who later became a member of the Politburo, had stature as president of the Communist International. None of these leaders seemed to grudge Stalin the daily grind of party organizing, which at first brought little renown. Nor did they seem aware of the gradual changes by which Stalin built the dominance of the Party over the nation, and his own control over the mechanism of the Party. It is hardly likely that even Stalin planned it all ahead. But, given the Party apparatus to handle, he built the Party—and himself with it—into power.

Many books have appeared in the past two decades, which, like Isaac Deutscher’s study, have attempted to detail the political maneuvers by which Stalin consolidated his position under Lenin and later isolated and overthrew his rivals. However, I note only a few incidents that forecast both the strength and the limitations of Stalin’s later work. In 1922, he was given the task of preparing a Constitution through which Russia became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In the original draft, which Lenin saw and approved, the jurisdiction of the central government was limited to defense, foreign affairs, foreign trade, railways and communications. Police, including the political police, were put under local rule. Towards the end of the year, Stalin’s appointees in Georgia were fighting a strong opposition, and were using the political police to jail opponents. The final form of the Constitution, adopted in December, gave Moscow a centralized political police with branches in all republics.

Stalin was thus responsible for centralizing the power of the political police. His ruthlessness against the Georgian opposition led to his only conflict with Lenin; this was in Lenin’s last days.

Lenin’s famous “testament” must be understood in connection with news reaching him during his illness about brutalities in Georgia. Lenin suffered three strokes. The first was at the end of May, 1922; from this he recovered enough to return to work and to approve the first draft of the Constitution. At the end of autumn, he had a second stroke, but recovered enough to dictate notes to his secretary in December. Feeling the approach of death, he dictated a memorandum on the danger of “a split in the near future,” and mentioned Trotsky and Stalin, “the two most able leaders,” as chief rivals. This memorandum was more critical of Trotsky than of Stalin, did not impute evil intent to either, and gave no advice. A few days later, on December 30, 1922, the very day in which Stalin was triumphantly guiding his Constitution to fulfilment in the founding Congress of the USSR, Lenin dictated notes that held Stalin “politically responsible” for excesses in Georgia. Six days later, on January 4, he added to the testament a postscript, stronger than anything yet written:

“Stalin is too rude, and this fault … becomes unbearable in the office of General Secretary. I propose to the Congress to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and to appoint to it another man, more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades.”

Lenin’s criticism of Stalin had thus hardened in two weeks, possibly from information he got from delegates coming to the Constitutional Congress. Lenin did not release this memorandum; only his wife and his secretary knew of it. For Lenin’s health improved and he began to handle matters himself. He sent Kamenev to Georgia to investigate; he told the Georgian “opposition” that he would himself present their complaints to the Party Congress. In the midst of these moves, on March 8 he suffered his third stroke, which removed him from political activity, though death did not follow for nearly a year. When the Party Congress met, in April, 1923, he was not present to challenge Stalin. Nor did Trotsky attack Stalin, for the latter had shown himself conciliatory, yielding many points.

Two incidents in that Congress showed Stalin’s strength and method. In reporting for the secretariat, he showed that the Party was gaining control over every field of public life. The percentage of Communists had grown from 27 to 57 percent among district trade union officials, from 5 to 50 per cent in the managerial staff of cooperatives, from 16 to 24 per cent in the commanding staff of the army. All organizations were coming under Party control. The second incident was Stalin’s reply to a critic who demanded more freedom of discussion in the Party. Stalin said that “the Party is no debating society,” that Russia is “surrounded by wolves of imperialism, and to discuss all important matters in 20,000 Party cells would place all one’s cards before the enemy.” Stalin won every point in the Congress. When, after the Congress, strikes broke out and clandestine groups were discovered, dissenters were arrested by the political police.

Thus, even before Lenin died, Stalin had developed a Party machine which was gaining control not only of government, but of all public organizations, and which identified its own power with the interests of the Revolution and the nation. He had also established, through the Constitution, a strongly centralized political police, and had shown that in any conflict between free discussion and his concept of national security, he chose security before freedom.

When Lenin died, on January 21, 1924, Stalin took charge of the funeral, was prominent among the pall-bearers and, over the protests of Lenin’s widow and some other Bolshevik intellectuals, arranged for the mausoleum in the Red Square. Here, he diverged from Lenin’s modesty and austerity, yet understood better than any of the Europeanized Bolsheviks how the Russian people, still largely peasant, would be moved by a shrine and a “saint with incorruptible flesh.” The tens of millions of simple folk who later passed through the mausoleum and “got strength” from the sight of Lenin, arc proof of this.

Stalin had reasons for thinking himself Lenin’s most loyal disciple and natural heir, in spite of that “testament.” He had been a Bolshevik twenty years, a member of Lenin’s central committees for ten years, and had served directly under Lenin for six stormy years of revolution. He could easily consider that last conflict as a misunderstanding due to Lenin’s illness, which could have been cleared up if Lenin had recovered. All the other leaders had had worse clashes. Trotsky had opposed Lenin for years and only joined him at the moment of revolution. Zinoviev and Kamenev had been traitors in the very hour of the uprising, opposing it and giving its details in an opposition newspaper. Lenin had forgiven them all. Compared with their sins against Lenin, Stalin’s may well have seemed to him trivial.

When Lenin’s will was read at a plenary session of the Central Committee, May 4, 1924, to decide whether it should be made known to the forthcoming Party Congress, Stalin was saved by the alliance he had made with Zinoviev and Kamenev. Both these old Bolsheviks feared Trotsky as a possible “Bonaparte”; they regarded Stalin as a humbler man they need not fear. Stalin had modestly taken the position that no single person could be Lenin’s successor, but only a committee. So Zinoviev spoke of the “harmonious cooperation” in recent months, and was “happy to say that Lenin’s fears had proved groundless.” He moved that the testament be not publicized but communicated privately to chosen delegates. This was carried by 40 votes to 10. The last serious threat to Stalin’s growing power thus passed.

In the next few years, Stalin consolidated power. In a series of critical decisions on policy, he defeated and finally drove from the Politburo one rival after another—Trotsky, then Zinoviev and Kamenev, then Bukharin and Rykov. Each opponent denounced Stalin for “despotism,” but each time Stalin swung the majority in the Politburo and won wide popular support as well. Yet, with the defeat of each opponent, the right of dissent was more and more challenged. By December, 1929, the Fifteenth Party Congress declared: “adherence to the opposition is … incompatible with membership in the Party.” After each victory, Stalin made overtures to beaten opponents and took them back if they “repented.” When Trotsky proved unyielding, Stalin proposed that lie be exiled from Russia. This was done. Opposition to the “Party line” had thus become a crime. Yet, most individual members of various “oppositions” had “repented,” been reinstated, and were working on jobs that Stalin assigned.

This condensed history of maneuver gives only the mechanics. Similar maneuvers are common in politics, both in states and trade unions. Stalin was skilled in maneuver, but that is not enough to explain his rise or his great work. He rose, I think, through two characteristics that all men have who are leaders, and a third characteristic that only the greatest have. He had a deep sense of what I can only call the “will of the people”; he had matchless technique in releasing that will in action. Lastly, he had the conviction, and was able to give it to others, that his actions carried mankind forward to a better day.

When I speak of “the people’s will,” I mean something far stronger than the choice we exercise in voting in November. I prize my vote; I might be willing to die for some of the rights it expresses, but I would not die for the difference between the Republican and Democratic candidates. Between these I might make “my choice,” but I would not call it “my will.” Some aims exist, especially in times of crisis, for which men willingly die. They are aims identified with collective needs, with the nation’s interest, or with a better world for the children. Such aims deserve the name “the people’s will,” for the people will fight for them, die for them and suffer injustice for them.

“Peace, land and bread” was such an aim in Russia when tsardom fell. Lenin expressed this aim and became the power. “Socialism in one country” was such an aim in Russia of the mid-twenties, in a people possessed of a rich but ruined country, seeing no help in any other nation but conscious of their own collective wealth. Stalin expressed this aim, contradicting his own past theory without caring, digging the aim not out of theory but out of the will of the people, feeling his theory and conviction grow as the people rallied. This was what smashed opposition—not mere cleverness in maneuver, but the closeness with which he, more than others, sensed and voiced the people’s will. He was closer to that will through his social origin, son of an oppressed class in an oppressed nation. He was close to it through years of underground struggle, when other leaders wrote from abroad. Lastly, he was close through his job as Party Secretary, where he daily sampled the most energetic desires and discontents of the land.

His personal approach was modest, direct, simple; his analysis of problems was exceptionally clear. His technique for sizing up group opinion dates from his early days. “I recall him well,” a veteran Bolshevik told me, “a quiet youth who sat at the edge of the committee, saying little and listening much. Towards the end, he would make a comment, perhaps only as a question. Gradually, we came to see that he summed up best our joint thinking.” This description will be recognized by anyone who ever sat in a discussion with Stalin. It explains how he kept his majority, for he sized up the majority before he laid down “the line.” Thus, his mind was not that of the despot, who believes that orders can operate against the majority will. But neither was it that of the passive democrat, who awaits the vote and accepts it as final. Stalin knew that majority support is essential to sound political action; but he also knew how majorities are made. He first probed the thought of a group and then with his own words swung the decision as far as he could get the majority to go.

This same technique he used with the nation. Neither Stalin nor the Russian people knew Western techniques in voting; when he learned of them, they did not impress him. But through all the period in which I knew of him, he constantly heeded and took into careful account the desires that drove men to act. All kinds of people who made achievements in production—a milkmaid who broke the milking record or a scientist who broke the atom—would be invited to discuss it with Stalin and tell how and why it was done. He “had his ears to the ground,” as American politicians put it. Russian peasants put it poetically. “He listens even how the grass grows,” they said. Stalin himself gave his technique of leadership. “One must not lag behind a movement, for to do so is to become isolated. … But one must not rush ahead, for this is to lose contact with the masses.” This was the aim for which he himself—and usually successfully—strove.

A leader must not only sense the people’s will but release it in action. Will is not static, whether in a man or a nation. It may be damped down to despair or encouraged to great deeds. Stalin’s ability to awaken and release will amounted to genius. I myself had experience of this.

I had organized The Moscow News and got into such baffling difficulties with its Russian editor that I wanted to resign and even quit the country in despair. On a friend’s advice, I sent my complaint to Stalin. His office phoned me to “come down and talk it over with some responsible comrades.” It was put so casually that I was thunderstruck to find myself at a table with Stalin, Kaganovich and Voroshilov, as well as the persons against whom I complained. The small Politburo, steering-committee for the USSR, was taking up my complaint. I was ashamed.

Stalin set me at ease by asking whether I could follow discussion in Russian. Then he launched a question and let everyone talk. He himself said less than anyone. He did not even sit at the head of the table as chairman, but casually at one side where he could see all the faces. At first, I was disappointed because he was so unimposing; then I forgot it in the speed of the talk. Later, I realized that Stalin, by an occasional word, a question here and there, the repeating of another’s word with an emphasis, had kept the discussion moving and to the point. As he brought out all the views, I began to understand even the people about whom I had complained. I had thought I wanted to resign and get away from it. I told them that that was all I wanted. But as Stalin repeated: “Is that all? Are you otherwise quite content?” the desire that had been latent awoke and I knew that what I really wanted was a bigger, better paper which, with the new understanding arrived at, now seemed possible. I said this, and this is what we got.

From that time, I regarded Stalin as the best committee man I had ever met, a man who could bring diverse views into harmony with a speed amounting to genius, and awaken and encourage the will to act by indicating, out of many views, a correct path. This, I think, is how he appeared to others in those early years of the Five-Year Plan. When he later diverged from this method, then he broke from his own theories and from the technique by which he first rose.

For Stalin, whatever his later practice, gave the classic expression of the danger of individual decision, unchecked by collective thought. When Emil Ludwig, and later Roy Howard, sought to learn how “the great man made decisions,” Stalin impatiently replied: “With us, individuals cannot decide. … Experience has shown us that individual decisions, uncorrected by others, have a large percentage of error.” He added that the success of the USSR came because the best brains in all arenas—science, industry, farming, world affairs—were combined in the Central Committee, through which decisions were made.

This standard he, more than anyone, instilled in the Soviet people. For he always acted “through channels” and after building majorities. If he also acted through a centralized political police to suppress opposition, this dualism, which to the West seems contradictory, was not alien to the Russian thought of the late twenties. It was the type of police to which they were accustomed, first under the tsars and then under Lenin. For Lenin, with all his democracy, installed the Extraordinary Commission—the Cheka—to handle counter-revolution without due process of law. If Stalin expanded the police function, by classing all “opposition” as counter-revolution, only the more Westernized among Bolsheviks objected. For everyone knew that, in building Socialism, they were encircled by a world of foes.

In all my years in the USSR, I never heard them speak of “Stalin’s decision” or “Stalin’s orders,” but only of “government orders” or “the Party line,” which are collectively made. When speaking of Stalin, they praised his “clearness,” his “analysis.” They said: “He does not think individually.” By this, they meant that he thought not in isolation but in consultation with the brains of the Academy of Science, the chiefs of industry and trade unions. Even towards the end, when men immoderately deified him, they hailed him not as “Great Ruler,” but as “Great Teacher,” the leader who analyzed the wray. This separates him from the despots of history, despite many despotic acts.

By this type of consultation, from the desires and brains of millions, awakened and organized by Stalin, came “socialism in one country,” through a series of Five-Year Plans.

II. The Five-Year Plan

The world outside the Soviet Union first heard of the Five-Year Plan as a wildly extravagant scheme of Moscow. We who travelled the distant parts of the Soviet country saw it take form in villages, factories, cities, provinces. We saw it grow from the need of farmhands for a living, from the hunger of unemployed youth to create, from the vast unexplored, unexploited resources of prairies and mountains, public property whose owners willed to enjoy their wealth. Then we saw the passion of these tens of millions hammered by the brains of local Communists and by the State Planning Board into a plan to industrialize the country and make it independent of foreign powers.

Not by accident was it in Soviet Central Asia that I first heard of the Five-Year Plan. The Tashkent paper ran a seven-column headline: You Won’t Know Central Asia in Five Years. There followed a half-page map of the region, dotted with new constructions, railroads, factories, each with the date on which it was planned to begin and to complete it. This was the joint project of the organizations of Central Asia, yet to be correlated in Moscow’s central plan.

The following year, I again visited Central Asia and rode on horseback to the Pamirs, that high wild area between Russia, India and China that is known as “the roof of the world.” Some days on the trail beyond the railroad, I chatted with an Uzbek roadmender. He knew three words of Russian: “road,” “automobile,” and “piatiletka,” (Five-Year Plan). With these and with many proud motions, he told me that the camel trail would be a road for autos as far as the frontier, then ten days by horse. The Five-Year Plan would do it.

A year later still, writing for the newly organized Moscow News, I journeyed to the opening of the Turkestan-Siberian Railway, May-Day, 1930. “First of the Giants of the Five-Year Plan to Open,” the railway proclaimed on banners and in the press. A thousand miles of rail had been driven in a north-south line over uninhabited plains and deserts. My old friend, Bill Shatoff, veteran of a hundred free speech fights in America, veteran also of the Russian civil war, was construction boss. They built in record time, a year and a half faster than the “Plan” calculated. Thus, they ran into a financial crisis; the workers had to be paid for finished work while the government budget gave funds only for the following year. Shatoff stormed Moscow, cadged money from all sources, yelling: “Shall I lay off victorious workers while a budget catches up?”

All this was past. Four special trains were coming to the opening. Ours carried delegates from a hundred factories, “champions” rewarded for good work by this trip. Soviet journalists came from a score of cities; foreign correspondents from all the world filled two cars. All of us knew that this railway changed the history of Asia, united Siberian wheat and timber with Central Asan cotton, brought Soviet trade to the edge of Western China, and bound the far southeastern border of the Soviet Union with a thin, steel line of defense.

Our train ran by no schedule, for ours was the first train. On new-placed rails the cars swayed drunkenly behind a festival locomotive painted green. It was a gift from the Repair Shops of Aulie-Ata, repaired by volunteers in spare time without wages. It flamed with banners. An engine crew chosen from the volunteer repairmen, rode day and night on “their engine.” This was their victory also, the opening of Turk-Sib.

New towns were growing on the line already, rough settlements of pioneers. Shatoff spoke to them in meetings at every station. He recalled details of their struggle, hunger and thirst in the desert, blinding blizzards in winter, when “bureaucrats” had failed to send warm clothes. He noted babies “still in the arms of mothers, yet older than this town.” He spoke of the new world their work created, a better world for workers of all nations. I heard a gaunt woman mutter with tears in her eyes: “Swell guy, our boss!”

Under a hot sun, a Russian-Kazak festival went on at the junction. Nomad Kazaks had come horseback hundreds of miles to greet the great “Iron Horse.” A giant crane called “Marion,” from its trademark “Marion, O.,” picked up couples, a Russian and Kazak together, and gave them joy-rides in the air. Young men danced on the rails and sang new songs about the “black steed, swifter than a hundred horses,” whose coming brought jobs and schools and freed them from tribal oppressors. But the chiefs still had power; when the young men tried to keep for themselves the prizes they got for good work, their fellow tribesmen threw them to the ground and took the prizes for the chiefs. Such were tribal manners, now at last challenged by the new road.

Under the eyes of ten thousand people, who had come to this naked wilderness, the north and south rail-laying crews put the last steel in place. The last spike was driven by high officials of Russia and of Kazakstan, by Shatoff for the builders, and by 70-year Katayama, leader of Japanese Communists, delegate from the Communist International. The meaning of Katayama’s blow on the joining spike was clear. This railroad was more than the joining of wheat with cotton, more than the opening of new lands to pioneers, more than the weapon of young herdsmen against tribal oppressors. This road was world revolution marching down through Asia.

The workers all along the line, knowing its great importance, asked the people of our train who had come to open the railway. Not Stalin? Not Kalinin? No? Then they resigned themselves to lesser dignitaries, knowing that from Moscow and return was two weeks journey and that all across the land were equally important enterprises yet unfinished. Far to the West, the world’s biggest power-dam was rushing to completion on the Dnieper. Far to the North, the new steel town of Kuzbas was struggling into life. In Stalingrad, the world’s biggest tractor plant was almost ready to open; in Sverdlovsk, the world’s biggest plant for heavy machine-building was being built.

“First of the Giants to Open,” the Turk-Sib claimed the honor. But it was only one of scores of giants reared in the thundering Five-Year Plan.

American engineers who came to help the Plan on contract, liked to say that it wasn’t really a “plan” at all. Technically, they were right. The Plan was never a blue-print to be followed precisely—it was a challenge to be met and then surpassed. It was not made solely by Moscow, but simultaneously by Moscow and the farthest ends of the land. In factories and villages, people discussed what they wanted, what they could make, what they needed in order to make it; their local plans went by channels to “the center,” were correlated and sent back for local adoption.

In all the land, from Leningrad to Vladivostok, there rose a mighty hum of building. In 1931, I went for Moscow News to cover these constructions. Twenty years later, when I was arrested in Moscow, the cop seized all my notebooks of those trips as evidence of “spying.” The giants of the Five-Year Plan had suddenly become war secrets. But in the early thirties they were showing off to any who would look.

Some said in 1931 that the Stalingrad Tractor Works was a failure; some said it was a huge success. Both were liars. Stalingrad Tractor Works was neither a failure nor a success—yet! It was a war. A war for the first Soviet conveyor. In America, the conveyor took a generation to grow. Here, it was won quickly by battle. Stalingrad Tractor Works cost lives and youth. Strong men fainted at the forge on hot summer days. Three Americans—Zivkovich, Covert and Ninchuk—worked sixty hours, without sleep, to repair Machine No. 7, which held up “The Line.” They staggered from victory, more dead than alive; they were met by cheers and medals. That’s not work. That’s war.

Strong men held back tears when “the camel” went up on their shop—the laughing camel, sign posted on shops that lagged. Men who had done their utmost sobbed because their shop had not done its utmost, and turned back to make it do more. It wasn’t enough for one man, or a hundred, to do the utmost. Organization had to be built. They no sooner conquered one detail, then another slipped up to stop them. There were a thousand details to concentrate on at once. That had never been done in Russia.

The works lay twenty minutes north of the city by an abominable road. The road was part of the works; it broke machines. A new water main had been laid; for by depending on the city system, they had been without water in the heat of July. They were building more storage warehouses—a year late. For lack of proper storage, nobody knew what spare parts were available. The Line would stop for lack of a certain part; yet there might be hundreds of such parts stored somewhere a month ago. It was clear why Stalin stressed “system, accounting, responsibility.”

Every shop had its “production conference.” In the machine shop they were discussing “quality” and “lack of small tools.” A worker said: “The parts stand around in the sandy wind and then go into the motor with grit on them; parts should first be washed in kerosene.” Another called attention to the bad timing of inspection; radiators should be inspected before they were fastened to the tractor, to avoid the labor of taking them off later.

All praised the Pravda reporter who fixed a mistake that had ruined sixty motors. He had no technical knowledge but he found the line held up for lack of motors. He located sixty motors that were “defective,” discovered that the same part was bad in all of them, and traced that part back to the shop that made it. The cause, he learned, was a cutting tool badly dented, a green hand who thought it didn’t matter, a careless engineer who paid no attention. “You, you, YOU have held up sixty tractors,” he accused the engineer. The tool was fixed, the parts arrived properly. Just one of ten thousand things that had to be done. More sinister troubles like sabotage, with which we will deal in a later chapter, also disorganized production.

Would all the ten thousand things ever be done right—all at the same time? Yes, the curve of production sometimes went up, sometimes down, but in the main the trend was upward. Twice, the hosts of the Works had rallied to a battlecry, fought without counting the cost and won. First, when they opened the plant for the Party Congress in June, 1930, an incredibly swift job in spite of difficulties. Next, when they finished the 5000th tractor by the end of the first year. Both times, many of the upper personnel and nearly all the American specialists, thought it couldn’t be done. Both times, the will of the workers—especially of the Komsomols—Young Communists—put it through successfully.

“We have forces to call on that they do not know,” said Tregubinko, secretary of the Party organization in the works, as he lay on a sick bed, handling his job by phone while giving me an interview. He stressed piece work, system, strict accounting between departments—“system, accounting, responsibility,” demanded by Lenin and again by Stalin—the hardest, most necessary thing for a not-yet-mechanized land to learn.

Signs that they were learning were everywhere: in the road repair between the city and the works; in the first classes graduating from the plant’s technical schools; in the newly opened “factory kitchen” serving 11,000 meals a day; in the improved relations between American specialists and Russians; even in the kiosks that served soda pop and cold beer so that hot, thirty workers would not have to drink Volga water and get typhoid (as they had the previous year).

Four months after my August visit, the works reached a steady 110 tractors daily. It was “up to plan.” The war for the first Soviet conveyor was won. Twelve years later, the men of the Stalingrad Tractor Works drove the armies of Hitler back from the ruined yards of the works, driving their own tanks.

Everyone in the Kharkov Tractor Works—Russians, Ukrainians, Americans—said what an improvement it was over Stalingrad. That was true but not fair. The Stalingrad Works pioneered; its pains helped all who came after.

The American specialist, Raskin, took me through the plant. In Stalingrad, the foundry had been a laggard shop, marked with “the camel”; in Kharkov, it had over twenty improvements. The Stalingrad Plant had fine machines, straight from America, but green peasant help half ruined them. Workers in Kharkov knew better; they learned from Stalingrad. All the departments, like transport, storage, service, had benefited from experience, and were better in Kharkov. Improvements which, under capitalism, are forced by competition, had here been freely exchanged. Kharkov took over a whole year’s experience from Stalingrad.

The Kharkov Works had a special problem. It was built “outside the plan.” Peasants joined collective farms faster than expected; their need of tractors could not be met. Kharkov, proudly Ukrainian, built its own plant “outside the Five-Year Plan.” Americans cannot imagine the difficulties. All steel, bricks, cement, labor were already assigned for five years. Kharkov could get steel only by inducing some steel plant to produce “above the plan.” To fill the shortage of unskilled labor, tens of thousands of people—office workers, students, professors—volunteered on free days. Since the working week at that time was five days, staggered, one-fifth of the people were free every day.

“Every morning, at half-past six, we see the special train come in,” said Mr. Raskin. “They come with bands and banners, a different crowd each day and always jolly.” It was said that half the unskilled labor that built the Plant was done by volunteers.

There were two places from which to see Kuznetsk Construction Job. You could see it from Main Street; there you saw chaos. You could look at it from the hill; there you saw what had been built. Here are my notebook pictures.

“Main Street” is what I call the road, still nameless, that runs across the center of construction, narrow, between heaps of dirt, iron pipes, long girders, where two carts can barely pass, bumping in deep gullies. You go along it at noon. “Hi! Don’t run me down!” You shove away the horse’s head and duck into a nook between timbers. Twenty men pass with a heavy rail; they block the string of carts for a moment. Footwalkcrs have found a better path by dodging into a line of pipes, waist-high, that parallels the road. They hurry through the pipes, crouching.

A dozen railway lines cross Main Street. Cart traffic stops while a line of cars passes back and forth, loaded with great steel plates for the blast furnaces. They hunt a spot in the chaos to deposit plates; there are few such spots, so the cars shunt for twenty minutes while the carts are blocked. When the cars have gone, a giant hay-wagon blocks the road; the cart traffic gets criss-crossed in passing it. And here a big truck halts right in the road, while a dozen husky peasant girls shovel dirt into it from under the nose of the power-plant, dirt that should have been removed a year ago. A million cubic yards of dirt is still in wrong places.

From Main Street the paths diverge on both sides: on one side to coke-ovens, blast furnaces, the power plant; on the other to the boiler shop, foundry, open hearth and the skeleton of the coming rolling mills. They are perilous paths, clinging to hillsides and climbing piles of debris. They change daily as construction changes. Only men on the job know the way.

Two days it rains. Then all the chaos of Main Street is sunk under Siberian mud. Mud flows into shoe-tops; side-hill paths become impassable to carts. All work loses twenty-five percent in efficiency.

A thousand criticisms are heard from American engineers, Russian engineers, inspectors, editors. Why does everything get in its own way? Why must blast furnace and coke ovens and power plant fight each other for tracks? And for men? And for a little space in which to unload. Why isn’t there a decent road? Anyone on the job can tell you how this steel mill should have been built. First the roads, railroads, carpenter shops, housing, storage yards, excavation, water supply, sewerage; then the dirt removed, then the building. When the building is done then installation of equipment, then testing, then operation. Anyone tells you that.

Frankfort, construction boss, also tells you. “The plans were changed while we built. Japan moved into Manchuria; we needed more steel. There was a choice of proceeding in orderly fashion—this meant a year’s delay—or doing everything at once. We took the second way. Then, too, we Russian engineers have no experience in this modern type of steel mill. And we can never expect materials by plan.

“In America, you order ten carloads of firebrick by phone and get them in a few days. We ordered some of ours a year and a half ago. We waited without firebrick for the blast furnace for four months. Then it all came at once; there was no space for it and we dumped it everywhere in the way of other work. Our steel should have come in May; it came in September. Trainloads of equipment come from all parts of Russia and from abroad; cars get sidetracked and delayed.”

A day after the talk with Frankfort, when the mud has dried a little, we go up on the hill. We rise above the planned houses and reach the colony of mud shacks built by tens of thousands of peasants who flooded over the hills for jobs. Not finding housing, they dug in, each stealing from the construction a few timbers, a few firebricks, a few panes of glass. This mounts up, causes unexplained shortage, calls for police action.

From the hillside, we look down on Kuznetsk. The coming steel mill stretches three miles along the valley. Directly in front rise eight giant black cylinders of the blast furnace. A year ago, when I last was here, there was just the start of excavation, where men dug dirt with small spades and carted it off on boards or in boxes, in ancient Asian way. Now, the first furnace prepares to open. A wisp of vapor curls from its chimney, which must dry out for weeks. Then loads of iron ore, coke and limestone will be hoisted to the top and begin to burn their way slowly down. The coal is here. “The iron is on the way,” wires Magnet Mountain, 1500 miles away in the Urals. The time is counted in days when steel will be made in a modern plant for the first time in Siberia.

Beyond the eight great cylinders are a dozen mighty structures: the tall black chimneys and massive concrete walls of the coke ovens; the factory school, turning six thousand peasants into steel workers. Seven stories high rises the power plant; one turbine will operate in a few days. Next comes the many-peaked roof of the foundry; only half excavated and finished, it has already produced two hundred tons of castings. Beyond to the left is the Open Hearth, to open later, made on the biggest scale of any in the world. Still further are lofty steel columns rising from concrete foundations; they are the beginning of a blooming-mill equal to that of Gary, now the world’s largest.

Nor is this all. For under the brow of the hill far off to the left, we glimpse the two-and-a-half million dollar firebrick plant, just making replacement brick for the furnaces; the rambling shops of Stalmost, which rivet boiler-plate for the furnaces; the boiler shop and machine shop, already working. Dim in the distant mists are the brick kilns making ordinary brick for the new city; and the wood working plant that turns out standard houses.

Two years ago, this was a lonely valley with a sleepy village of fifteen hundred souls. Last year there were a few barracks and dugouts, some excavations. Now the new city stretches down the valley beyond the limits of vision, some people living in dugouts, some in barracks, some in four-storey brick houses of the “socialist city.” A steel mill that ranks with the world’s largest has arisen in Siberian wilderness.

It wasn’t Frankfort who built it. Nor the American specialists, nor the 45,000 workers on the site. All over the USSR they built it, in steel mills of Leningrad, in shops of the Ukraine. Everywhere went the call: “Hurry for Kuznetsk.” The workers hurried and followed through on their work. During my visit a train came from Leningrad; it started as one train and arrived as two. A “shock-brigade” came from the Leningrad works as escort, to see their shipment past lazy Siberian stations. In every station they searched for cars bound for Kuznetsk that had been side-tracked. They started with 39 cars and arrived with 90. They had stirred up station-masters all along the way.

That was Kuznetsk Steel Mill. Sleepy Siberian hills, unskilled peasants, shipments scattered along two thousand miles of track. And against this, the shock-brigades of workers across the USSR, who would not let Kuznetsk fail. For Kuznetsk opened Siberia to industrialization. Already, it had turned thousands of peasants into steel workers and given experience to hundreds of engineers. Another steel mill, twice as large, was next to be built a little way down the valley. “Twice as large” everyone said quite calmly. For after Kuznetsk, no other plant in Siberia would be as hard to build.

Magnitogorsk—the name means Magnet Mountain—was bigger than Kuznetsk. Here is no space for its tale. Let us only note that a city of 180,000 people sprang full grown in a year and a half on the slopes of the Ural Mountains, five hundred miles by rail from the nearest other city. It w7as the world’s biggest construction camp, boasting the most highly concentrated iron ore deposit in the world. A city of youth, with youth’s energy, with sixty percent of its workers under twenty-four. A city of thirty-five nationalities, which already had opened thirteen schools, a technical high school and two technical universities, one for metallurgy and one for building trades. Already, they had a city theater, half a dozen movies, a circus “better than Sverdlovsk.”

This city, too, existed to bring forth a steel mill, to be for the Urals what Kusnetzk was for Siberia. This, too, was built by the tense effort of workers all over the USSR. Here, also, young workers invented new ways of work and new short-cuts, competing in records with Kuznetsk. And these were only two among scores of giants that the Five-Year Plan produced.

In January, 1933, Stalin reported to the Central Committee that the former backward peasant Russia had become the second industrial nation in the world. The Five-Year Plan had been basically completed in four and a quarter years, from October, 1928, through to December, 1932. The number of workers in industry had doubled, from eleven million to twenty-two million; output also had doubled.

“Formerly we did not have an iron and steel industry. Now we have such an industry,” he reported.

“We did not have a tractor industry. Now we have one.

“We did not have an automobile industry. Now we have one.

“We did not have an engineering industry. Now we have one.” He went on through the aviation industry, the production of farm machinery, the chemical industry and others and added: “We have achieved these—on a scale that makes the scale of European industry pale.”

The plan had cost heavily in dislocation of populations and disorganization of harvests. But never in history was so great an advance so swift. Had the pace been less swift, the Soviet people believed that not only their Socialism would have been postponed but their existence as a nation would have been in danger. For, in 1933, Japan already probed their borders from Manchuria and the German Nazis published claims to the Ukraine. The Soviet people believed that they might have faced invasion on both borders but for their swiftly rising economic might.

“We could not refrain,” said Stalin in that January report, “from whipping up a country that was a hundred years behind and which, owing to its backwardness, was faced with mortal danger. We would have been unarmed in the midst of a capitalist environment which is armed with modern technique.”

With the conclusion of the first Five-Year Plan, the USSR plunged into a second, which proposed five times as much new industry as the first had built, and a technical reconstruction of the whole economy. Yet, as Stalin said, the task was “undoubtedly easier”; no future Five-Year Plan would be as hard as the first. Five-Year Plans became the pattern by which the country moved ahead.

By 1935 the Soviet leaders began to speak of socialism as “victorious.” Its economic base was secure.

A year earlier, when over the land thundered the 1934 slogan: “Quality and surplus are the next battle,” a Moscow News reporter came back from a Siberian tour. “Guess the news from Kuznetsk! They’re competing with Magnet Mountain in flower-beds.”

The office burst into a gale of laughter. Kuznetsk, that mud hole, where they crawled through lice and dirt to build a city of steel! Blast furnaces they might compete in. But flower-beds? No!

“It’s a fact,” said the reporter. “I’ve the competition terms—they include parks, boulevards, workers’ clubs. Magnet Mountain has lawns, trees, and the best auto-buses. But Kuznetsk has a street-car line and a theatrical troupe from Moscow. The Meyerhold company was playing there.”

III. The Revolution in Farming

The same years that saw the swift growth of socialized industry saw an equally swift revolution in farming. Between 1930 and 1933, some fourteen million small, inefficient peasant holdings were combined into some 200,000 large farms, collectively owned and managed, serviced by tractors and machines. The change was needed to bring prosperity to the farmers and security to the nation. For, in 1928, the old style Russian farming could not even feed the cities; it could never provide food for rapid industrialization or for expanding education and culture. Farming, along with industry, had to be modernized.

Russian peasants, in 1928, farmed by methods of the Middle Ages, methods that even went back to Bible times. They lived in villages and walked long distances to fields. A family holding of ten or twenty acres would be split into a dozen pieces, often widely scattered, and usually in ridiculously narrow strips on which even a harrow could not turn. One fourth of the peasants did not own a horse; less than half had a team of two horses or oxen. So plowing was seldom and shallow, often by homemade wooden plow, without a metal share. Sowing was by hand, the seed cast from an apron to the earth, where birds and winds carried much away. There was little machinery; the Fordson tractor I got for a children’s colony on the Volga won fame as the only tractor within two hundred miles.

Social life was equally medieval. The Old Man ruled the home. Sons married, brought their wives to the patriarchal homestead and worked the farm that their fathers still bossed. So farm practice remained old fashioned, unchanged by young views. Much of it was determined by religion. Holy days fixed dates for sowing, religious processions sprinkled fields with holy water to insure fertility, rain was sought by processions and prayers. The ultra-pious regarded tractors as “devil-machines”—priests actually led peasants to stone them. Any fight for modern farming thus became a fight “against religion.” I recall the tremendous campaign the Young Communists made against the Holy Helena to secure early sowing in Ivanovo province, where the feast of Helena had for centuries fixed the date.

By 1928, the farms had recovered from war devastation; the total crops equalled those before the war. Far less grain, however, was reaching the cities. Tsarist Russia had exported grain even though peasants starved. Soviet peasants were eating better than before, but marketing little. The surplus often got into the hands of kulaks, those petty rural capitalists who had grain not only from their own fields but through owning flour-mills and through money-lending against harvests. They fought the state for control of grain and for the support of the peasants.

The Right wing of the Communist Party held that kulaks should be allowed to get rich and that socialism could win through state ownership of industries. The Left wing was for forcing peasants rapidly into collective farms under state control. Actual policy shifted for several years under pressure of different groups in the Party. The policy finally adopted was to draw peasants into collective farms by offering government credits and tractors, to freeze the kulaks out by high taxes and, later, to “abolish them as a class.” Membership in collective farms was theoretically voluntary; in practice, pressures were sometimes used that went to excess.

American commentators usually speak of collective farms as enforced by Stalin; they even assert that he deliberately starved millions of peasants to make them join collectives. This is untrue. I travelled the countryside those years and know what occurred. Stalin certainly promoted the change and guided it. But the drive for collectivization went so much faster than Stalin planned that there were not enough machines ready for the farms, nor enough bookkeepers and managers. Hopeful inefficiency combined with a panic slaying of livestock under kulak urging, and with two dry years, brought serious food shortage in 1932, two years after Stalin’s alleged pressures. Moscow brought the country through by stern nationwide rationing.

I saw collectivization break like a storm on the Lower Volga in autumn of 1929. It was a revolution that made deeper changes than did the revolution of 1917, of which it was the ripened fruit. Farmhands and poor peasants took the initiative, hoping to better themselves by government aid. Kulaks fought the movement bitterly by all means up to arson and murder. The middle peasantry, the real backbone of farming, had been split between hope of becoming kulaks and the wish for machinery from the state. But now that the Five-Year Plan promised tractors, this great mass of peasants began moving by villages, townships and counties, into the collective farms.

The chairman of Atkarsk Collective Farms Union waved a pile of telegrams at me—there had been no such organization six months before. “On November 20, our county was fifty percent collectivized,” he exulted. “On December 1, 65 per cent. We get figures every ten days. By December 10, we expect 80 percent.”

A few months earlier, people had argued calmly about collectives, discussing the gain in sown area, the chances of tractors. But now the countryside was smitten as by a revival. One village organized as a unit, then voted to combine with twenty villages to set up a cooperative market and grain mill. Samoilovka held the record one day with a “farm” of 350,000 acres. Then Balakov announced 675,000 acres; then Yelan united four big communes into 750,000 acres. Learning of this, peasants of Balanda shouted in meeting: “Go boldly I Unite our two townships into one farm of a million acres.” A thousand horses came out in the field in Balanda for a “sowing rehearsal.” An old man of seventy ran in front of the camera: “Photograph me with the horses; now I can die. I never saw such a day.”

Into these discussions penetrated organizers from the Party, sometimes farm experts giving counsel, sometimes workers ignorant of farming but aflame with zeal for collectivization. “Aren’t a thousand horses in one field too many? It may be thrilling but is it good farming?” Discussions were hot and hostile. Later, Moscow denounced the “disease of giantism.” But at first the enthusiasts called all caution “counter-revolution.” Families split; the young men followed the enthusiasts, eager for new ways. The old men doubted; they saw themselves losing control of the household along with the acres. The women worried over the fate of the family cow. What animals would be common property was not quite clear; there were several forms of collectives.

Kulaks and priests clouded the issue with rumors, playing on emotions of sex and fear. Everywhere, I heard of the “one great blanket” under which all men and women of the collective farm would sleep! Everywhere, rumor said that babies would be “socialized.” In some places, kulaks joined collectives—to rule or ruin. Elsewhere, they were being expelled from collectives as undesirable. Some collectives took in kulaks’ horses but not the kulaks, as had been done with landlords’ equipment in the Revolution. Kulaks fought back by burning the collective barns and even by assassination. A trial of twelve kulaks for the murder of a Party secretary was closing in Atkarsk. “He died for all of us,” declared the prosecution; the peasant audience wept. The storm of collectivization rose higher as farms were named in the martyr’s honor.

As I left the area, I asked a local official. “What docs Moscow say about this, about that?” He replied, hurriedly but proudly: “We can’t wait to hear from Moscow; Moscow makes its plans from what we do.”

Moscow was making plans, I learned when I returned to the city. News from all basic grain areas was correlated into those plans. The Five-Year Plan had called for a 20 percent collectivization by 1933; this drive gave 60 percent in some areas by 1930. No tractors or machinery had been planned for anything like this. So Moscow cut to the bone the imports of raw cotton, dooming the people to more years of rags. Moscow cancelled an order for Brazil coffee at bargain prices and made an enemy of Brazil. Moscow increased import of farm machinery and briefly made a friend of Henry Ford. That was when the city of Kharkov decided to build its own tractor works “outside the plan,” to meet die needs of the Ukraine.

In mid-winter, I went to the Odessa region to see the first of the Tractor Stations. A farm expert named Markovich had devised an efficient, economical way of serving farms with tractors. Instead of selling machinery to peasants who could neither run nor repair it, he kept several score tractors in a single center, with a full complement of machinery, a machine shop and a school for drivers. This station then contracted with collective farms within a radius of twenty miles or more, to supply tractors for whatever work they needed, taking payment in grain. The arrangements were flexible. One fairly prosperous farm, with many horses, rented tractors only for breaking virgin soil; while a pioneer Jewish collective, which had recently received land from the state but was very short of live stock, had most of its field-work done by the tractor station. State-owned tractor stations proved so useful that they spread rapidly throughout the USSR. They are the dominant form of machine-supply today.

The winter of 1929–30 was a time of considerable chaos. The precise form of the collective was not yet clear. Stalin, also making his plans from the peasants’ actions, stated on December 27, 1929, that the time had come “to abolish kulaks as a class.” This merely authorized what poor peasants were already doing, but with the authorization they began doing more. Cruel tales came of the unroofing of kulaks’ houses, of chaotic deportations. Meantime, organizers, eager for a record, forced peasants into farms by threat of deportation as “kulaks”; they “communized” cows, goats, chickens, even dishes and underwear. Kulaks grossly exaggerated these excesses and incited peasants to kill and eat their livestock and “go naked into the collective where the state supports you all.”

“Why doesn’t Stalin stop it?” I asked a Communist friend. “Has a kulak no rights? This is chaos!”

“There is really too much anarchy,” he answered. “It comes from division in the Party; we Communists must take the blame. Stalin has stated the ‘line’—‘to abolish kulaks as a class.’ The Right-wing elements, who control the government apparatus”—I knew he meant Rykov—“delay the formulation in law. So the Left-wing elements among our local comrades, having no law as guide, do what is right in their own eyes and the eyes of farmhands and poor peasants. This is anarchy. We expect government decrees soon; then there will be more order.”

The first decree appeared February 5, 1930—it authorized deportation of kulaks in areas where collectivization was “total” and where peasants’ meetings asked for the deporting of definite people after hearings. The list must then be checked by the provincial authorities, and arrangements made for the districts to which the kulaks should go. These were usually construction jobs or virgin land in Siberia. After the decree, the anarchy lessened, but there still seemed to be many mistakes and excesses. Why didn’t Stalin take it in hand?

“We cannot attack our local comrades until the collective seed is in collective barns and the sowing safe,” said my Communist friend. “Otherwise there might be widespread famine.” He meant that peasants, who already had eaten livestock and then expected the state to feed them, might also eat their seed grain. “We are like a man on skis on a swift slope,” he added. “We cannot stop nor control speed or distance. We can only guide our jumps and try to land on our feet. If we cannot, then everything is finished.” I knew what he meant for when I went to Riga to renew my passport—Washington had as yet no embassy in the USSR—I found men in the American consulate giving full time to collecting data on Soviet collectivization from scores of local Soviet newspapers. They sent a thousand pages of reports to the U.S. State Department. Foreigners predicted the collapse of the USSR through famine. More than one border nation was reported to be getting its armies ready to march.

On March 2, 1930, when the basic grain areas had their “seed collections” made, Stalin issued his famous statement: “Dizziness From Success.” He said that the speed with which peasants joined collective farms had made “some comrades dizzy.” He reminded everyone that membership was voluntary and that the type of collective farm recommended for the present period socialized only the land, draft animals and larger machinery, but left as personal property such domestic animals as cows, sheep, pigs, chickens. Every paper in the land published the statement in full; millions of copies circulated as leaflets. Peasants rode to town and paid high for the last available copy, to wave in the face of local organizers as their charter of freedom. Stalin suddenly became a hero to millions of peasants, their champion against local excesses. Stalin quickly checked this hero-worship by publishing Answers to Collective Farmers, in which he stated: “Some people speak as if Stalin alone made that statement. The Central Committee does not … permit such actions by any individual. The statement was … by the Central Committee.”

Toward the end of March, I went south to meet the spring. Twenty-four hours from Moscow I found it, on the line to Stalingrad. When my train set me down after midnight, I was appalled by the crowds of peasants who surrounded me, pouring out bitter words. “A former bandit got into the Party and bossed our village.” “Stalin says collectives are voluntary, but they won’t give back our oxen.”

Next morning in the township center, I heard similar complaints heaped on a tired secretary from dawn till long after dark. “The chairman isn’t here,” he explained. “He went to help a village where kulaks last night burned a barn containing twenty-seven horses that were relied on for the sowing. He must organize emergency help.” Meantime the secretary wearily repeated to all comers that of course they would get their oxen back if they decided to leave the collective farm, but they couldn’t disorganize sowing by grabbing the oxen on a day’s notice from field-gangs plowing twenty miles away. Especially, when they kept changing their minds several times a week.

Farms seemed going to pieces under a dozen pressures—violence of kulaks, attacks by priests, official stupidities and just plain inefficiency of medieval Russia. Yet, as soon as I left the railway and went inland, the chaos was replaced by a spectacular, mass sowing. I saw then that all journalists who judge by the railway and the township center must judge wrongly. All complaints and injustice flowed to the railroad and sought adjustment from the township center. No peasant who could plow went to the railway—he was plowing. Beyond the railroad, men were fighting for a record harvest to establish their right to land and machines.

“The First Bolshevik Spring,” they called it, the first sowing on collective farms. There were miles of rich black earth in a single field, one crop rotation planned for the whole. At regular intervals came the field brigades—horses, oxen, or tractors moving in rhythm across the land, in the swiftest, deepest plowing this soil had ever known. At night, the earth was dotted with campfires whence music of balalaikas and the singing of men and women rose. Opera singers were there from Moscow; they led festival processions to the fields that replaced the old religious processions. A white-haired professor of astronomy from Leningrad toured the camps with lantern slide lectures on the stars; to the field-gangs it was “culture,” to the Communists it was “anti-religion.” Brigades of city mechanics came as volunteers to repair farm implements.

It was the most dramatic sowing in human history. Millions of peasants, for the first time consciously mixing with the life of the cities, with workers, farm experts, artists and journalists, all swept along in a great crusade, built in a single spring the agricultural basis of socialism.

Three figures stand out for me from that great sowing: Ustina, the farmhand; Melnikov, the reporter; Kovalev, party secretary of a township.

Ustina was chicken-woman of a large collective farm called “Fortress of Communism” She had been a servant from the age of eight. After the Revolution she joined a small, struggling farm commune; she was so destitute that she wrapped her newborn babies in newspapers. Step by step, those communards built a sound farm, with tractors and an incubator—Ustina won this from Moscow as a prize for good work. After two years of relative comfort, the communards were again hungry, because so many hungry, penniless farmhands had rushed to join them, and they had to feed everybody till harvest. Some had argued for restricting membership to those who brought their own food-grain. Ustina said firmly: “This is our second war. The first was a murdering war. This is not murdering, but it is war all the same. So we must help all who are with us.”

Working out from Stalingrad went the Travelling Struggle, a newspaper published from three railway cars. It journeyed through the spring from township to township, investigated and published abuses, and even summoned judges from the city for special courts. Melnikov, its most energetic reporter, could digest ten shocking cases daily and find in them no discouragement but a call to battle. He told of the bandit, Zotev, who got elected as president of a village of his clansmen, then tried to deport as a kulak a Red Army veteran who had exposed his banditry. He told of the zealous organizer who swept through seven Kalmuck settlements and collectivized them all in seven days by listing their property and telling them they were now one farm. The illiterate Kalmucks, to whom a government paper was magic and authority, dared not even drive their hungry sheep to summer pasture lest they be “stealing government sheep.” When Stalin’s statement of “Dizziness from Success” reached them, all seven settlements took off into the desert in one night.

Not all the anti-Sovet sheets in America could invent more “Bolshevik atrocities” than Melnikov triumphantly recorded in his routine. This Travelling Struggle had had more than two hundred officials arrested that season for crimes ranging from graft to banditry. But when I asked whether the harvest would be much less because of the turmoil, Melnikov stared as if I were crazy.

“Less? It must be much greater! Have you not seen tractors doubling the sown area? Have you not seen, even without tractors, how farmhands and peasants use kulaks’ horses to increase area seventy percent? The kulak sabotaged the harvest, fearing taxes and hating the Soviet power. These new owners drive forward like madmen.”

The hunger of the poorer peasants for more life was the power released in that “First Bolshevik Spring” This power was led by Communists who, despite inexperience and excesses, were a disciplined and tireless group. I could pick them out in field brigades by their tense concern that everything go well. It is thus I recall Kovalev, Party secretary of a small Tartar district south of Stalingrad, and his talk with ten shiftless, deserting peasants.

These peasants were leaving the collective farm. One said: “I have no warm coat and they make me pasture livestock in the rain.” Another: “They work my camel hungry and he dies before my eyes.” A third: “My wife won’t live with me since I joined the kolhoz.”

The reasons seemed sound to me but not to Kovalev. “These conditions you always had” he said. “Nobody offered a golden dish in the kolhoz. Faults of management can be corrected. Men working at night must have warm clothes. Hay is scarce from last year’s drought, but it will be no better in individual fields. Who leaves will not better himself, for the whole Soviet power helps the kolhoz. A peasant is not an independent person; his farm depends on the nation and the nation depends on his farm. Our land is surrounded by capitalist lands. We must swiftly build great industry and modern farming or we perish. That great factory in Stalingrad will this summer give tractors to your farms. That great power station, Stalgres, will this autumn give light to your homes. While these are unfinished, they need bread; there must be a great increase in grain. Can this be done if every peasant sits at home, deciding whether to plow? The task of every citizen this year is to strengthen the collective farm.”

After two hours of such argument, the men’s wives called to them from outside. Kovalev invited them in, but they refused. They had their minds made up and their men obeyed. Without wasting a word in regret, Kovalev turned to five Communists still remaining in the room, including local teachers and a librarian. He assigned them at once to work in field gangs on harrows; their main task was to build morale. He phoned Stalingrad for an emergency supply of hay and also for a Tartar woman organizer to work among the wives. He told the librarian to send travelling libraries to the field-gangs. It was able generalship, worthy of a larger sphere. This was one small Tartar village on poor soil. Into every such village the Party organizers penetrated, fighting the war for Soviet wheat that spring.

Melnikov guessed right. Though the seed was sown in the chaos of class war—by men who stormed their way out of the Middle Ages in a year—yet such was the drive of their awakened will that when crop-returns at last came in, the Soviet Union (and the foreign powers who watched like hawks) knew that the country had achieved the widest sown area and the greatest harvest it had ever known.

That harvest changed the history of farming for the world.

One harvest was not enough to stabilize collectivization. In 1930, it was put over by poorly organized, ill-equipped peasants through force of desire. In the next two years, the difficulties of organization caught up with them. Where find good managers? Bookkeepers? Men to handle machines? In 1931, the harvest fell off from drought in five basic grain areas. In 1932, the crop was better but poorly gathered. Farm presidents, unwilling to admit failure, claimed they were getting it in. When Moscow awoke to the situation, a large amount of grain lay under the snow. Causes were many. Fourteen million small farms had been merged into 200,000 big ones, without experienced managers or enough machines. Eleven million workers had left the farms for the new industries. The backwardness of peasants, sabotage by kulaks, stupidities of officials, all played a part. By January, 1933, it was clear that the country faced serious food shortage, two years after it had victoriously “conquered wheat.”

Stalin accepted the blame for the Party at the Central Committee Plenum; it had been caught napping. When the emergency was seen, the measures taken were quick and sound. To meet the immediate need, ruthless pressure was put on the farms to deliver all grain they owed the state, on taxes or for machinery, whether or not they had grain for themselves. “Shall workers who honestly gave you tractors, starve because of your inefficiency?” they were asked. The grain, in state hands, was then used to put the whole country on rations. It was doled out even to the farms that had failed, in the form of rations at sowing time for those who worked. From one end of the land to the other, there was shortage and hunger—and a general increase in mortality from this. But the hunger was distributed—nowhere was there the panic chaos that is implied by the word “famine.” Under nationwide iron rationing, the harvest of 1933 was brought in.

Meanwhile three measures were taken to prevent future catastrophes—a new law on grain collections, a Congress of Farm Champions and the organization of “political sections”—“Politodels”—in the tractor stations. The grain collections, which formerly bore lightly on weak farms, were changed to reward good harvests and penalize inefficiency. The Congress of Farm Champions brought to Moscow the “champions” from the best farms, and publicized throughout the land their methods, sending them home with honors to lead whole areas to success. And, since two-thirds of the farms were already serviced by tractor stations, these were now expanded by 20,000 new, efficient people, of a type never before seen at work in rural Russia. Factory directors, army commanders, university professors volunteered to work in the “politodels” to organize “efficiency” on the farms.

The foreign press called it “Stalin’s war against the peasants.” The Soviet press called it “our war for harvest yield.” It was a nationwide fight by both farms and cities. My husband, working at the time for the Peasants’ Gazette, spent forty days flying from farm to farm of the North Caucasus in a two-seater plane, in charge of a “brigade” of ten other reporters. On landing, he would measure square-meter samples of the harvested area, count the wasted grain-heads, calculate how much loss this meant for the farm, and note what methods best saved the grain. Such facts, collected by ten people, were wired to all the press to guide the harvesting as it moved north. My husband lost thirty pounds in those forty days; he came home exhausted and filthy with lice. He figured his gang had saved nearly a million bushels. This was only a sample of the all-out struggle that year.

The conquest of bread was achieved that summer, a victory snatched from a great disaster. The 1933 harvest surpassed that of 1930, which till then had held the record. This time, the new record was made not by a burst of half-organized enthusiasm, but by growing efficiency and permanent organization.

Victory was consolidated the following year by the great fight the collective farmers made against a drought that affected all the southern half of Europe. In former years, drought-stricken peasants would have eaten their livestock and fled to the cities to look for jobs. In 1934, the collective farmers held regional congresses, declared “War Against Drought” and planned measures to suit each region. Some used their fire departments to haul water; some planted forest glades. On North Caucasus slopes, they dug thousands of miles of irrigation ditches, saying: “We have mountains; we don’t need rain.” In each area where winter wheat failed, scientists determined what second crops were best; these were publicized and the government shot in the seed by fast freight. This nationwide cooperation beat the 1934 drought, securing a total crop for the USSR equal to the all-time high of 1933. Even in the worst regions, most farms came through with food for man and beast and with strengthened organization.

By 1935, the new farming was stabilized; for two years almost no one had wanted to leave the collective farms. The model constitution for a farm, the model type of “farm plan” had been determined; crop rotations and the location of fields was settled. For three years, the grain crop had run fifteen to twenty million tons above past records; the sugar beet area had doubled; the area in cotton was two and a half times any in the past. There had been heavy loss in livestock because so many had been killed and eaten in the first year of collectivization. (In China, the cooperative farms, learning from the Russian errors, buy the animals from the peasants on the instalment plan.)

More important than the economic gain was the change in the peasant. The farmers not only learned reading and writing; they went in for science and art. Seven thousand “laboratory cottages” where the farmers studied their own crops, exchanging data with the government experiment stations, were set up in two years in the Ukraine alone. Almost every farm had its drama circle, its gliding and parachute-jumping club, even its aviation courses. The farmers related themselves to the nation’s life and the nation related itself to the farmers. A Soviet agricultural scientist said to me: “We scientists used to feel unregarded, but now that the collective farms demand our science, we see our work for several thousand years.”

In the second world war, when German tanks were captured or German planes forced down in rural areas, local farmer guerrillas were able to drive the tanks or fly the planes to the rear. Life magazine said, March 29, 1943, in a special number: “Whatever the cost of farm collectivization … these large farm units … made possible the use of machinery … which doubled output … (and) released millions of workers for industry. Without them … Russia could not have built the industry that turned out the munitions that stopped the German army.”

After the war, in 1947, I was flying across the USSR and landed at Kazan, on the Volga. There were so many dozen small planes at one end of the field that I thought it must be a military training field and wondered why they let us land.

“Oh, no,” said a Russian. “Those are the planes of the collective farmers. They have flown to town on various errands.”

IV. New People

The characteristic of the people who built the new industries and farms was boundless initiative. When Americans speak of Soviet people as “regimented,” I always laugh. Every land and age has its frame of conformity and its channels for changes. But never in any land, until my later visits to China, have I rnet so many dynamic individuals as those who found expression in the USSR’s Five-Year Plans.

Bill Shatoff was a sample. I found him sick in bed in a Novosibirsk hotel. He was building railroads, fighting for rails, for cement, for labor; his eyes had gone bad with the strain. I asked why he didn’t bring his wife out, have a comfortable home, regular meals, some rest. Bill stared.

“The greatest thing in life,” he said, “is work. No, not just work. Creation! And in this spot of time in which we live, there is the chance to create without end or limit. Could I turn from an hour of creation to be nice to a wife or to come to dinner on time?”

This zeal to create filled not only the leaders. It was born in millions of plain citizens as they saw new roads to life. In the previous chapter, we saw how once illiterate peasants became farm scientists, amateur actors, parachutists, aviators. Far greater changes took place among more backward nationalities. The USSR had more than a hundred and fifty nationalities in all stages of development, from reindeer-keeping Eskimos and sheep-herding nomad Kirghiz to peoples with old civilizations like Armenians and Georgians.

Soviet policy was to let all national cultures develop, as long as the economy grew towards socialism. But fifty-eight small nationalities had not even an alphabet, much less books. So scientists developed written languages for them; books were printed in Moscow in a hundred languages, until book publication in the USSR, at the end of the first Five-Year Plan, was greater than in Germany, France and Britain together. Books were only one transforming force; there were also new laws, science, art.

The greatest transforming force was the peoples’ own struggle for life. The writer, Panferov, put it this way in a Paris conference:

“The working class built a dam on the surging Dnieper and made its unruly waters serve man. It transformed the misty Urals into an industrial center and mastered the wild and distant Kuzbas. In remaking the country, the working class remade itself.”

In the early thirties, everyone discussed “new people.” A Russian writer offered to Moscow News some one-page sketches of “new people.” He said he had about a thousand of them. To our surprise, he added: “That’s not too many to show all the kinds of new people developing under socialism.” A Sverdlovsk newspaper was running a daily column called “New People,” giving anecdotes that illustrated changes in habits and views. Some of these, I fear, proved later to have been wishful thinking; the struggle for socialism neither brought Utopia nor abolished sin. None the less, great and significant changes did appear in people. Of all the many, I shall take only a few: the freeing of women in Central Asia, the children’s way of choosing future jobs, and the rise of the Stakhanovites—all illustrating, in different ways, the quality of that period’s life.

The change in women’s status was one of the important social changes in all parts of the USSR. The Revolution gave women legal and political equality; industrialization provided the economic base in equal pay. But in every village women still had to fight the habits of centuries. News came of one village in Siberia, for instance, where, after the collective farms gave women their independent incomes, the wives “called a strike” against wife-beating and smashed that time-honored custom in a week.

“The men all jeered at the first woman we elected to our village soviet,” a village president told me, “but at the next election we elected six women and now it is wc who laugh.” I met twenty of these women presidents of villages in 1928 on a train in Siberia, bound for a Women’s Congress in Moscow. For most it was their first trip by train and only one had ever been out of Siberia. They had been invited to Moscow “to advise the government” on the demands of women; their counties elected them to go.

The toughest fight of all for women’s freedom was in Central Asia. Here, women were chattels, sold in early marriage and never thereafter seen in public without the hideous “paranja,” a long black veil of woven horsehair which covered the entire face, hindering breathing and vision. Tradition gave husbands the right to kill wives for unveiling; the mullahs—Moslem priests—supported this by religion. Russian women brought the first message of freedom; they set up child welfare clinics where native women unveiled in each other’s presence. Here, the rights of women and the evils of the veil were discussed. The Communist Party brought pressure on its members to permit their wives to unveil.

When I first visited Tashkent, in 1928, a conference of Communist women was announcing: “Our members in backward villages are being violated, tortured and murdered. But this year we must finish the hideous veil; this must be the historic year.” Shocking incidents gave point to this resolution. A girl from a Tashkent school gave her vacation to agitating for women’s rights in her home village. Her dismembered body was sent back to school in a cart bearing the words: “That for your women’s freedom.” Another woman had refused the attentions of a landlord and married a Communist peasant; a gang of eighteen men, stirred up by the landlord, violated her in the eighth month of pregnancy and threw her body in the river.

Poems were written by women to express their struggle. When Zulfia Khan, a fighter for freedom, was burned alive by the mullahs, the women of her village wrote a lament:

“O, woman, the world will not forget your fight for freedom!

Your flame—let them not think that it consumed you.

The flame in which you burned is a torch in our hands.”

The citadel of orthodox oppression was “Holy Bokhara.” Here, a dramatic unveiling was organized. Word was spread that “something spectacular” would occur on International Women’s Day, March 8. Mass meetings of women were held in many parts of the city on that day, and women speakers urged that everyone “unveil all at once.” Women then marched to the platform, tossed their veils before the speakers and went to parade the streets. Tribunes had been set up where government leaders greeted the women. Other women joined the parade from their homes and tossed their veils to the tribunes. That parade broke the veil tradition in Holy Bokhara. Many women, of course, donned veils again before facing their angry husbands. But the veil from that time on appeared less and less.

Soviet power used many weapons for the freeing of women. Education, propaganda, law all had their place. Big public trials were held of husbands who murdered wives; the pressure of the new propaganda confirmed judges who gave the death sentence for what old custom had not considered crime. The most important weapon for freeing women was, as in Russia proper, the new industrialization.

I visited a new silk mill in Old Bokhara. Its director, a pale, exhausted man, driving without sleep to build a new industry, told me the mill was not expected to be profitable for a long time. “We are training village women into a new staff for future silk mills of Turkestan. Our mill is the consciously applied force which broke the veiling of women; we demand that women unveil in the mill.”

Girl textile workers wrote songs on the new meaning of life when they exchanged the veil for the Russian head-dress, the kerchief.

“When I took the road to the factory

I found there a new kerchief,

A red kerchief, a silk kerchief,

Bought with my own hand’s labor!

The roar of the factory is in me.

It gives me rhythm.

It gives me energy.”

One can hardly read this without recalling, by contrast, Thomas Hood’s “The Song of the Shirt,” that expressed the early factories of Britain.

“With fingers weary and worn,

With eyelids heavy and red,

A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,

Plying her needle and thread.

Stitch, stitch, stitch, in poverty, hunger and dirt,

And still, with a voice of dolorous pitch,

She sang the song of the shirt”

In capitalist Britain, the factory appeared as a weapon of exploitation for profit. In the USSR, it was not only a means to collective wealth, but a tool consciously used to break past shackles.

Every year the Soviet Union produced its crop of heroes, usually the makers of records in production. In 1935, the names most heard were two. Stakhanov, a coal miner, devised a better production method—his name was used for a movement. Marie Demchenko, a sugar-beet grower on a collective farm, studied beets in the laboratory cottage and in the spring of 1935 challenged all the beet-growers: “Let us flood the land with sugar; my brigade pledges twenty tons of beets per acre.”

Hundreds of farms accepted the challenge. Thousands of visitors inspected Marie’s brigade at work; millions of readers followed the determined drive, as they nine times hoed the field and eight times cleared it of moths by fires at night. The whole country sighed when no rain came in August, and cheered when Marie got the fire department to pour 20,000 buckets of water on her land. She got twenty-one tons per acre amid the nation’s plaudits. In a year or two, her record was surpassed but her fame remained green.

The end of her story is significant. Marie’s gang were invited to Moscow to the November celebrations. They stood in the leaders’ tribune. Marie told Stalin, gushingly, how she had dreamed of coming “to see the leaders.” Stalin replied: “But now you also are leaders.” Marie considered this. “Well, yes,” she agreed. Stalin asked what reward she wanted. Marie wanted a scholarship to study beets. She got it. Such were the ideals of rewards and leadership in 1935.

Many articles were written about the kind of people socialism should produce. When a group of Turcoman horsemen made an amazing 2,690 mile run across deserts to Moscow, and Stalin complimented their “clearness of goal, perseverance … and firmness of character,” Pravda elaborated the theme into an editorial on the Soviet ideal of character. This was declared to be “the exact opposite” of the unquestioning obedience which Hitler had shortly before demanded of German youth. “Strong and original individuality” was declared to be the quality of the Soviet citizen. “Not submission and blind faith but consciousness, daring, decision. … Strong individuality, inseparably connected with the strong collective of the toilers.” “From the clear goal seen by millions … grows remarkable voluntary discipline.” Thus was deliberately stated an ideal defying that of the Nazis.

In the latter half of 1935, the Stakhanovites began to shake the country. Simultaneously in a hundred places, workmen on new machines began to shatter standards of production, often against indifference or opposition by management, but followed by strained attention of fellow-workers. Every country in the world took notice, calling the movement a “speed-up.” It was more than that—it was a storming of the world frontiers of productivity. Some miners in the Donbas doubled Ruhr production; some blacksmiths in Gorki Auto Works broke standards set by Ford; some shoemakers in Leningrad made records fifty percent above the Bata Works in Czechoslovakia.

Hundreds of American specialists who five years earlier tried to “teach the Russian,” must have grumbled when they heard about it, “Why couldn’t they do it when we showed them how?” The reason was clear. The USSR had equipped itself with new machines and brought eleven million greenhorns to operate them. The greenhorns broke machines—but learned. They could not learn when their teachers told them; it had to grow in their nervous systems. But what they learned was not only the technical skill of the Americans. It was skill with the pride of ownership added—ownership of the mechanism that makes the modern world.

People who attended the All-Union Congress of Stakhanovites —everyone in Moscow wanted to go—told of its thunderous cheers. The press grew lyric over “taming the fiery steed of science,” “preparing the way to Communism where each shall receive according to his needs.” In all the discussion appeared the new people’s characteristics—a joyous initiative, a pride in mastery of complex processes, a conscious cooperation with society, a hunger to learn.

Stakhanov told his thought when he made his record. “International Youth Day was approaching; I wanted to mark it with a record. My comrades and I had for some time been thinking how to break the shackles of the norm, give the miners free play, force the drills to work a full shift.” Busygin, the blacksmith, declared: “There’s nothing I dream of as much as studying; I want to know how hammers are made arid to make them.” Slavnikova wanted to “beat the record” on a machine she had studied but never used. The foreman opposed it. She told him: “I’m a parachute jumper. That norm doesn’t scare me. I’ll upset it.” She did.

Vasiliev, a blacksmith who made a record in forging connecting rods, used the words “boded up” and “exploded” to express his feelings. When his 1934 record was beaten, he “boiled up” and went back to work four days before his vacation ended. “I beat Andrianov, but then I saw in the papers that a Kharkov smith made more than a thousand. Then I exploded. I made 945 in one shift. … I consulted my gang how to organize our work place; then we got 1,036. We discussed it with the foreman and told him how to change the furnace; he gave us a furnace that could heat 1,500 in a shift. What steps us now? We talked it over and placed the metal in such order that it was easier to take up. On October 27, I made the All-Union record, 1,101 in a shift. Comrades, I haven’t yet got out of that hammer all she’ll give, but I’m going to.”

The Stakhanovites disdained overtime work as a confession of inefficiency—they insisted that a rhythm be found which should not be physically exhausting. “If the work is done right, you feel better and stronger.” They were keen on teaching their skill to others. The locomotive engineer Omelianov, after making a record, demanded “the slowest engineer” as a pupil and made him, also, a record breaker. The demands of these men broke the technical processes. An engineer told me: “I’m sitting up nights to plan the How of work to keep up with them.”

“Ten years hence,” said a Stakhanovite to me, “farming and industry may cease to be our main occupations. We shall produce all we need. But there are other occupations. Human development, exploration, science—to these are no limits.” He recognized no bounds to man’s advance, neither in man’s own nature nor in time and space.

Youth, especially, knew no limits. Schools helped children discover their aptitudes early; summer camps and excursions widened their field of choice. Newspaper discussions drew out their self-expression; one newspaper, the Pioneer Pravda, was almost all written by children. In Tiflis, the children of railway workers built and operated a half-mile railway in the Park of Culture and Rest; it carried passengers, collected fares, and used the money to expand the road. In most of the “grown-up” activities, a place was found for children. In the 1934 “war with drought,” children’s groups of gleaners followed the reapers and competed in saving grain-heads; in a northern county, children proudly told me how they collected tons of bird-droppings and wood ashes to fertilize exhausted fields.

On the Murmansk train, in 1934, I met twenty young “Arctic explorers,” all under sixteen, bound for the polar regions. Their interest in maps, Arctic cruises and northern peoples, had won for them this organized cruise. They would meet adult Arctic explorers who would treat them smilingly as possible future colleagues. That same summer, ten of the best botany pupils were given an expedition to the Altai Mountains, where they hiked 1,200 miles and found twenty-seven new varieties of black currants and a type of frost-resistant onion. Two of these “young botanists” were sent as delegates of the others to take the plants to the aged plant-creator, Michurin.

The feelings of Soviet youth in those days appear in two incidents. Anna Mlynik, valedictorian of the first Moscow class to finish the new ten-year school, said in her valedictory, June, 1935: “Life is good … in such a land, in such an epoch. We, young owners of our country, are called upon to conquer space and time.” Some extravagance is allowed to valedictories, but youths in the past have been subjects of kings or citizens of democracies; never, till Socialism, dared they call themselves “owners” of the land in which they lived. The same year, Nina Kamenova made a parachute jump from icy space twice as high as Mt. Rainier, winning a world record. Her words on landing, at once seized by Soviet youth as a slogan, were: “The sky of our country is the highest sky in the world.”

Even while they happily bragged, the assassination of Sergei Kirov had started a chain of investigations which were to transform the triumphant mood of 1935—when Utopia seemed just around the comer—into the “great madness” of 1937.

One fruit of those happy days remained for history—the new Soviet Constitution was born in those years.

The USSR has always claimed to be democratic; this the West has always denied. Here is no space to trace die Soviet political and electoral system in detail. Whatever Americans thought of Soviet elections, Soviet people took part in them at least as energetically and hopefully as we. They not only voted for candidates; they wrote their demands into the “Nakaz,” the “People’s Instructions” which became first order of business for incoming governments.

In the 1934 elections, my husband spent every evening for a month as a precinct worker, visiting every person in his precinct and stimulating them not only to come out but to list things they wanted the government to do. He told me of an old woman who had never before voted—“What use am I to the Soviet Power,” she said—but who, on his prodding, looked around her kitchen hung with laundry and decided to ask the government for more public laundries. She got them eventually, too. Moscow City Soviet, that year, received 48,000 “people’s instructions” and had to report on them all in three months. Many, of course, were duplicates or had to be referred to the central government, but a large number were reported back to the people in a novel way. The demands could be met, said the City Soviet, if the people who wanted them would give volunteer work. “Soviet democracy” was judged not only by the number who turned out in elections—this grew from 51 percent of the voters, in 1926, to 85 percent in 1934—but by the number of volunteers a deputy could gather to help in government tasks. Much work on taxing and housing commissions, for instance, was by volunteers. Howard K. Smith, in the late thirties, noted the atmosphere this created, and said on his visit to Moscow: “You got the impression that each and every little individual was feeling pretty important doing the pretty important job of building up a State. … The atmosphere reminded me of a word … it was ‘democracy.’”

Since the 1922 Constitution, however, great changes had taken place. The basic wealth of the land was publicly owned; the people were no longer illiterate. Indirect, unequal voting from die place of work no longer fitted; people everywhere knew of their national heroes and could vote for them directly. On February 6, 1935, the Congress of Soviets decided that the Constitution should be changed to conform to the changed life of the nation. A commission of thirty-one historians, economists and political scientists, under Stalin’s chairmanship, was instructed to draft a new Constitution, more responsive to the people’s will, and more adapted to a socialist state.

The method of adoption was highly significant. For a year, the commission studied all historic forms—both of states and of voluntary societies—through which men have organized for joint aims. Then a proposed draft was tentatively approved in June, 1936, by the government and submitted to the people in sixty million copies. It was discussed in 527,000 meetings, attended by thirty-six million people. For months, every newspaper was full of people’s letters. Some 154,000 amendments were proposed—many, of course, duplicates, and many others more suitable for a legal code rather than a constitution. Forty-three amendments were actually made by this popular initiative.

In the great white hall of the Kremlin Palace, 2,016 delegates assembled, in December of 1936, for the Constitutional Convention. It was a congress of “new people” risen to prominence in tasks of industry, farming, science. Farmers came, no longer listed under the generic title “grain-growers,” but as specialists, tractor-drivers, combine-operators, most of whom had made records. There were directors of great industrial plants, famous artists and surgeons, the president of the Academy of Science. This was the new representation of the Soviet Union towards the end of the second Five-Year Plan.

The Constitution reflected the changes in the country. It began with the form of the state and the basic types of property. Land, resources, industries were “state property, the wealth of the whole people.” Cooperative property of collective farms, and “personal property” of citizens in their income, their homes and chattels, were “protected by law.” Elections were to be by “universal, direct, equal and secret ballot for all citizens over eighteen.” The section on “Rights and Duties of Citizens” was cheered section by section; it was the most sweeping list of rights any nation ever guaranteed. The right to life was covered by four headings: “The right to work, to leisure, to education, to material support.” The right to liberty was expanded into six paragraphs, including freedom of conscience, of worship, of speech, of press, of assembly, demonstration and organization, freedom from arbitrary arrest, inviolability of home and of correspondence, “irrespective of nationality or race.”

The Constitution was a direct challenge to Nazi-Fascism, then in power in Germany. The Nazis called democracy outworn; all Soviet speakers hailed democracy and socialism as “unconquerable.” Hitler preached “superior and inferior races.” Stalin challenged him in one of the most sweeping statements ever made of human equality: “Neither language nor color of skin nor cultural backwardness nor the stage of political development can justify national and race inequality.”

Tens of millions of people poured into the wintry streets of the USSR to hail the event with bands. Progressives around the world hailed it. “Mankind’s greatest achievement,” said Mrs. Sun Yat-sen in far-away China. Romain Rolland spoke from the placid Lake of Geneva: “This gives life to the great slogans that until now were but dreams of mankind—liberty, equality, fraternity.” The Constitution was violated even while it was written. This is not unique; few Constitutions are punctiliously observed. But the Constitution of the USSR was violated by its author, Stalin, who was clearly very proud of his “democratic Constitution,” yet who was guilty of a strange duality. For, while the Constitution remained the basic law of the USSR, proudly observed by the people, the government departments and the ordinary courts, it was not even noticed by the Political Police. This organ, given by Stalin in 1922 a centralized power, had become a state within a state. It respected neither the Constitution nor any other laws of the USSR. From this grew the dark events of the following years.

V. The Great Madness

I do not think anyone anywhere knows the full story of the excesses that occurred in the USSR in 1936–38, or can yet assess properly the blame. An uncounted number of people, certainly many tens of thousands, were arrested without warning, and sent without trial to convict camps in the north and far east; thousands were executed and their fate not even reported to their friends. After Stalin’s death, the USSR began to review these cases. Khrushchev, in attacking Stalin in February, 1956, at the Twentieth Party Congress, reported 7,679 cases of persons “rehabilitated” in the past two years. Most of these were dead. The most shocking revelation was that of the 134 members of the Party’s Central Committee, elected in 1934 at what was called the “Congress of Victory,” 98 persons—70 percent of all—had been arrested and shot, mostly in 1937–38.

The anti-Soviet press finds easy solution; it claims that socialism is by nature “totalitarian and ruthless.” Nobody who knows the initiative of Soviet people in recent years and their passion for what they call their “freedom,” accepts such a view. Khrushchev and others have an almost equally simple explanation; Stalin, and “the cult of the individual,” are blamed. Stalin must certainly be held responsible but a statement of his guilt is no final answer. For Stalin acted through channels; a plenary session of the Central Committee of the Party supported the actions that were set in motion in February, 1937. An entire regime was involved. Moreover, Khrushchev himself says that Stalin, in all these actions, “considered that it must be done in the interests … of the working masses, in the defense of the revolution’s gains.” Some day, I think, the Soviet Union, in its review of cases and of history, will assess what happened. Meantime, I see it as “the great madness” and look for hints of how it came about.

All governments have the problem of “subversion” by enemy agents or disaffected citizens. Seldom is it handled quite sanely by due process of law. Often—we note our own land—it becomes a source of witch-hunts and neighborhood terror. This lack of balance doubtless comes from the fact that the offenders are not ordinary criminals, easy to catalogue, with penalties to match. They are men of different loyalties from those demanded by the state. A stable or confident regime is not greatly worried by them; for they are a small minority. But in times of war, or to any regime under stress, they are more disturbing than ordinary criminals.

All of Europe was thus disturbed in the late 1930’s. The Spanish War produced the term “fifth column” to describe the secret followers of Franco who helped take Republican Madrid from within. Later, Hitler’s “fifth column” so penetrated many governments of Europe that they collapsed at the first touch of war. Broadly speaking, this fifth column included men like Prime Minister Chamberlain and Premier Daladier, who weakened the defenses of their nations by destroying democracy in Spain and, later, by giving the Czech fortifications to Hitler, in order to tempt his armies eastward. It included American industrialists who sold scrap iron to Japan, and strengthened her against the USA. None of these people considered themselves traitors. Nor, probably, did Quisling and Laval and others who, with various excuses, took part in puppet governments serving the invader. From the standpoint of Nineteenth Century nationalism, they were traitors to their nation. From the standpoint of today’s progressives, they were traitors to mankind. If Hitler had won, they would be judged otherwise. The victors write the history books.

With this as background we consider Russia. The USSR was invaded in its first years by many foreign armies invited by former Russian leaders; only by costly wars were they driven out. Pressures and threats from capitalist states continued, using any disaffected group within the country. The first two years of the Five-Year Plan saw an “epidemic of sabotage” by the higher engineering staff, many of whom had contacts with former foreign owners of industries now nationalized. Let us glance at this sabotage; any American who in those years worked in Soviet industry can give you examples.

In its simplest form, it was hardly more than the making of graft on the side. A representative of a Cincinnati firm that sold machines to Soviet industries was told that the machines were no good. He had to fight official red tape even to go from Moscow to Samara to see the factory where the machines “failed to work.” When he got there, he had to force his way in with the aid of the political police. He found a terror-stricken superintendent who admitted that the American machines had never been tried but were still in their cases. The superintendent had been bribed by a German company to send the bad report, and had arranged with a Moscow official to keep the American from reaching Samara. My American informant was not much shocked; he grinned at the “trick” he had exposed. To Russians, building public industry at heavy cost, such acts were crimes.

My own first contact with the intrigues of foreign agents came in 1930 when I visited the first tractor station near Odessa. Twice on the train, I was questioned by GPU officers; when I convinced them that I was an American writer, they left. “Why is the GPU so busy around here?” I asked the porter. “Is it because the line runs close to the Romanian frontier?”

“It is your German leather coat,” he replied. “They thought you might be one of these agents stirring up Mennonites.” Later, I learned from local farmers that German agents were a factor in the sudden decision of large numbers of Mennonite farmers, German by descent, to “flee the atheist land.” Whole villages had sold or abandoned homes and cattle and gone to Moscow, demanding passports abroad. Some harvests that could ill be spared, were thus demoralized.

Many Americans told me of sabotage they found in industry. One had a supervisory job in an auto works. A GPU investigator summoned him and, showing him pieces of metal, asked if he knew their nature.

“Certainly,” he said. “They are parts of a heavy machine-gun.” The investigator then astounded him by the news that they were being made in his own shop on the night shift. The foreman and one technician were found to be the offenders; the rest of the workers had not known that they were equipping a secret arsenal for a traitorous gang.

Another American who investigated breakdowns in steel-mills, laughed as he told me: “I’m picking out saboteurs. I don’t pick the actual people. But when I open the gear-box of a cranky machine, down under a steel table that takes half a day with a crane to remove, and find those gears clogged with nine pailfuls of dirt and steel shavings, then I show it to the director and say: ‘This couldn’t happen by accident.’ He’s a good guy who doesn’t know his way around steel mills, but his eyes light up. He knows whom to grab.”

As more Russians learned the technical side of industry, sabotage lessened for it was more easily detected. The engineers were also won to loyalty by the success of the Five-Year Plan. In 1931, Stalin announced that engineers and technicians, formerly under suspicion, were “turning towards the Soviet government” and should be met by cooperation from the workers. The “epidemic of sabotage” thus passed but the deeper sabotage inspired by foreign agents remained. This, when it reached the courts, was treated with increasing leniency in 1931–34. The economy was advancing; the few saboteurs were not greatly feared. Earlier “wreckers,” most of whom had been sentenced to work in their own profession on some construction under the GPU, reappeared in normal occupations, sometimes with the Order of Lenin, which they had won while working under duress.

The GPU still justified itself by turning up plots, but sentences lessened. The fifty-two engineers and technicians in the Shakhta Case, convicted in 1928 of wrecking coal mines, were given death sentences, and five were actually executed. A similar conviction two years later, in the Industrial Party case, brought automatic death sentences but these were commuted “in view of repentance.” Those convicted soon had good jobs again. The Mensheviks convicted in 1931 of “inspiring peasant uprisings in connivance with foreign powers” were only given prison terms; it was stated that they were no longer dangerous enough to be executed.

This growing leniency was due to the country’s growing confidence. The fear that Japan would attack had been strong in 1931, but lessened when Japan reached the Siberian border and did not invade. Hitler, of course, had stated claims to the Soviet Ukraine, but few people then expected Hitler to last. Litvinov was successfully making non-aggression pacts with neighbors; it seemed the USSR might avoid that always-dreaded war. As the first Five-Year Plan passed into the second, the good feeling we noted in the previous chapter grew. Especially after the 1933 harvest, the Soviet people felt confident in their growing strength.

The assassination of Sergei Kirov, on December 1, 1934, smashed this dream of security. Kirov, secretary of the Communist Party in Leningrad, was Stalin’s close friend and probable successor. He was murdered by a Communist who had access to the headquarters through his membership card. A shock went through the land, that a Communist might hate the leadership enough to murder. The shock grew when officials of the GPU, assumed to be protecting Kirov, seemed implicated, and when investigation found connections with foreign powers, i.e. Germany, through one of the Baltic States. There followed a year and a half of investigation in which most people forgot Kirov. Then, suddenly, it was announced that the higher ranks of Communists were involved. The Procurator of the USSR brought to trial the so-called “Leningrad Center.” Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others went on trial August 16, 1936. They were convicted and executed. Other trials, both national and local in scope, followed, culminating on July 11, 1938, with the court martial of eight leading Red Army generals and their execution on charges of treason. It was probably the most sensational series of treason trials in history.

The most important cases were tried in a large hall to which were admitted the Soviet and foreign press, the foreign diplomatic corps and a changing stream of representatives from factories and government offices. I sat in the court and watched the tale unfold. Zinoviev and Kamenev, once friends of Lenin and eminent theoreticians, told the judges, the audience and the world that, having lost power through the rise of Stalin, they had conspired to seize power by assassinating several leaders, presumably including Stalin, through agents who, if caught, would not know the identity of the top conspirators, but would appear to be ordinary agents of the German Gestapo. The chief conspirators, with reputations intact, would then call for “party unity” to meet the emergency. In the confusion they would gain leading posts. One of them, Bakayev, slated to become head of the GPU, would liquidate the actual assassins, thus burying all evidence against the higher ups.

That was the tale I watched unfold in the court day after day. The defendants were vocal; they bore no evidence of torture. Kamenev said that by 1932 it became clear that Stalin’s policies were accepted by the people and he could no longer be overthrown by political means but only by “individual terror.” “We were guided in this,” he said, “by boundless bitterness against the leadership and by a thirst for power to which we had once been near.” Zinoviev stated in court that he had become so used to giving orders to large numbers of people that he could not endure life without it. Minor agents gave testimony connecting the group with the Gestapo. One of them, N. Lurye, claimed to have worked “under guidance of Franz Weitz, personal representative of Himmler.” Some of the lesser lights apparently first learned in court of rhe fate their chiefs had reserved for them; this added to the venom with which they attacked those chiefs.

“Let him not pretend to be such an innocent,” cried the defendant Reingold against co-defendant Kamenev. “He would have made his way to power over mountains of corpses.”

Was the story credible? Most of the press outside the USSR called it a frame-up. Most people who sat in the court-room, including the foreign correspondents, thought the story true. Ambassador Davies says in his book Mission to Moscow, that he believes the defendants guilty as charged. D. N. Pritt, eminent lawyer and British Member of Parliament, was similarly convinced. Edward C. Carter, Secretary-General of the Institute of Pacific Relations, wrote: “The Kremlin’s case is … terribly genuine. It makes sense … is convincing.” Even Khrushchev’s comprehensive attack on excesses of this period, does not say that any of the open trials were a fraud.

For me, as I listened to the defendants, often from only a few feet away, the process by which once revolutionary leaders became traitors seemed understandable. They began by doubting the Russian people’s ability to build socialism without outside help; this was the open discussion in 1924–27. Their doubt deepened through the contrast between Russia’s inefficiency—which even brought the land to famine in 1932—and the efficient German organization they had known. Was it hard to believe that Russia might profit by German discipline, impressed by the iron heel? Plenty of irritated people in those days made such remarks.[2] Eventually there would be a German revolution; they themselves might promote it from within. Meantime, they would be rid of the hated Stalin.

If once we admit that these first trials were genuine—and trained foreign observers thought they were—then we have a situation that might well drive a nation off its sane base. Not only were they surrounded by hostile capitalist states; their own revolutionary leadership seemed deeply penetrated by agents, plotting assassination and government overthrow. After the conviction of Zinoviev and Kamenev, arrests and trials spread wider. Tomsky, former chairman of the Central Council of Trade Unions, mentioned in court by one of the defendants, confessed guilt and committed suicide to escape arrest. Regional trials began in the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Far East. In the Far East, the chief of the GPU fled to Japan and many of his subordinates were arrested as Japanese agents.

The army was next involved. The chief of its political commissars, Marshal Gamarnik, committed suicide June 1, 1937. On July 11, Marshal Tukhachevsky, only recently a Vice-Commissar of Defense, was court-martialed with seven other top commanders, the first big trial to be held in secret. It was announced that die defendants admitted to being in the pay of Hitler, whom they had promised to help get the Ukraine. They got the death sentence. Some corroboration of their guilt came from abroad. G. E. R. Gedye, Prague correspondent of the N. Y. Times, cabled June 18 that “two of the highest officials in Prague” told him they had “definite knowledge that secret connections between the German General Staff and certain high Russian generals had existed since the Rapallo Treaty.” I myself was later told by Czech officials that their military men had been the first to learn and to inform Moscow that Czech military secrets, known to the Russians through the mutual aid alliance, were being revealed by Tukhachevsky to the German High Command.

What most startled Soviet citizens was probably the fact that the treason trials finally pulled in Yagoda, chief of the GPU. When he was executed as a traitor and when many GPU officials were jailed on the charge of “arresting innocent citizens” and “using improper means to extort confessions,” doubts were spread about the investigating arm of the government. Who then was guilty? Who innocent? Who was arresting whom?

A sense of insecurity spread among the Soviet people, replacing that exultant sense of progress they had felt in 1934. It was not due alone, and not even primarily, to personal fear of arrest or to concern for friends. It was due to the knowledge that the enemy had penetrated high into the citadel of leadership, that nobody knew who was loyal. This was the first time any nation came to grips with the deadly efficiency of the Hitler Fifth Column. They felt it as a fight for the nation’s survival, but a fight in the dark. This nightmare quality of the struggle affected not only the people, but also, I think, Stalin. He produced the theory that the nearer a country got to socialism the more enemies it would have.

The defendants in open trials were far from being the only victims. Those years, and especially 1937, are recalled by all Soviet citizens as a time of great mental distress caused by many unexplained arrests and the suspicion these spread in all circles. People were taken away at night and never seen afterward. Sometimes they re-appeared. George Andreichine was twice exiled to Siberia and each time came back fairly soon to a better job. Most people thus arrested were not executed but sent either to a convict labor camp or to residence in a distant place. The “terror” was due not so much to knowledge as to lack of knowledge of the fate of friends.

My closest woman friend, who had lived with me several years before she married and moved to Leningrad, was exiled with a ten-year sentence. Nine years later, I again met her in Moscow and learned what had happened. Her husband had been arrested; she never learned the details of the charge against him. Believing him innocent, she pestered the offices of the GPU and was herself arrested, charged with being “the wife of an enemy of the people.” She was sent, not to a camp but to a small town in Kazakstan where she got a job as teacher in the high school. Once a month she had to report to a local GPU official, an intelligent man with whom she had “many interesting discussions.” Several times he questioned her about her view of her own arrest and the many other arrests that she knew occurred.

“The way I have figured it,” she replied on one occasion, “is that the Nazi fifth column penetrated the GPU and got high in it and has been arresting the wrong people.” Her questioner replied; “Many people have that view.” He did not say what kind of people shared the view or whether he was one of them.

This theory may, in part, explain Khrushchev’s most shocking revelation, that of the 1966 degelates to the 1934 Party Congress, 1,108 were later arrested, and that of the 134 persons this congress elected to the Central Committee, 98—or 70 percent of all—were not only arrested but shot. Those who attribute this to a mad paranoia of Stalin have still to explain why even a paranoiac should eliminate his most successful and loyal supporters. The “Victory Congress” of 1934 was composed precisely of those who had stuck to Stalin’s line, and celebrated the triumph of socialism in both industry and farming. Their drastic elimination within three years becomes somewhat more credible as the successful attempt of a Nazi Fifth Column to get rid of the nation’s most efficient patriots.

Such cases as I myself knew would support the view that it was often “the wrong people” who were arrested, people who seemed almost picked out for the purpose of disorganizing. On our Moscow News staff, three people were suddenly taken. If I had to pick our three most useful, energetic workers, these would have been the ones. They were Party members, always working hard both for the paper and the trade union, always willing to work nights in emergencies. Yet, our staff was supposed to go to a trade union meeting and “thank the government for removing the wreckers.” I refused to go. I even protested about it to our editor-in-chief.

He agreed that there might be innocent victims. “Let them take it up with their deputies,” he said. “The deputies to the Supreme Soviet are handling lots of these complaints. People who are conscious of innocence and fight for it will eventually come back.” It was true that all the deputies were handling complaints of constituents. The famous actor, Kachalov, deputy from my ward, told me such appeals formed the greatest part of that year’s work. But it was not true that the innocent always came back. Thousands died in exile.

Let us now turn to the revelations of what was happening in the Party’s upper circles, as revealed by Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin in 1956. He also dates the excesses as beginning “after the criminal murder of Sergei N. Kirov,” from 1935–38. “It was precisely during this period,” he says, “that the practice of mass repression through the government apparatus was born … first against the enemies … and subsequently against many honest Communists.” He reveals that immediately after the Kirov murder, and on Stalin’s initiative, directions were issued to the courts to speed up investigations, sentences and punishments. At that time, Yagoda was chief of the GPU. Stalin found him too dilatory and wired from Sochi on September 25, 1936, that Yezhov should be appointed Commissar of Internal Affairs, since Yagoda showed incompetence. Yezhov’s appointment and his plans were approved by the plenary session of the Central Committee in February, 1937. The number of arrests at once multipled; Khrushchev states that between 1936 and 1937 the arrests increased tenfold. Torture was used, he says, to extort confessions; Stalin authorized it. Previously, the Soviet people had prided themselves on the absence in their jails not only of the torture used by the Nazis, but of even the third-degree as practiced in the United States.

The year 1937 was the high tide of repression. Suddenly, Yezhov disappeared from the scene; he was rumored to have been taken to a mad-house. A new Party resolution was passed in early 1938. The madness began to recede. It was recognized as having been madness, even in Stalin’s days. In the middle forties, I asked a GPU official whether a certain case that had happened in 1937 could be reviewed. “Anything that happened in 1937 can reviewed,” he replied. Thousands of the cases, however, were not reviewed until after Stalin’s death.

In fixing the blame for the criminal railroading of innocent people in 1937, Khrushchev makes several statements. “We are justly accusing Yezhov for the degenerate practices of 1937,” he says. He adds, however, that Yezhov prepared lists of persons whose sentences were determined in advance of any hearing, and sent the lists to Stalin for approval, and that Yezhov could hardly have sentenced certain prominent victims without Stalin’s okay. “Stalin was a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious,” says Khrushchev. His precise summing up of what happened is important:

“Using Stalin’s formulation that the closer we are to socialism the more enemies we will have, and using the resolution of the February-March Central Committee Plenum, passed on the basis of Yezhov’s report, the provocateurs who had infiltrated the State Security organs, together with conscienceless careerists, began to protect with the Party name the mass terror.”

The picture is clearly not a simple one of Stalin, as despot, getting rid of his enemies. It is a complex picture, combining the acts of many groups. Stalin’s responsibility was that, being “distrustful and sickly suspicious”—a not unnatural state in a man whose close friend has been assassinated and who has heard in open court that his own assassination was planned—he appointed Yezhov, gave orders to hurry up the investigations and sentences, and devised the theory that enemies multiply as socialism nears success. Yezhov, later found to be a madman, gave the effective orders. The Central Committee, convinced by Stalin’s argument and Yezhov’s reports, also approved the acts. The actual initiators, as stated by Khrushchev, were “provocateurs”—i.e., agents of Nazi-fascism—and “conscienceless careerists”—i.e., men who invented plots to advance their own jobs.

This analysis by Khrushchev does not greatly differ from that of my exiled friend, who said that the Nazi fifth-column “penetrated high in the GPU and arrested the wrong people.” I have called the actions of this period “the great madness,” because the actions were not sane, but were participated in by many people, and are not yet fully understood. The Soviet investigators who are reviewing the cases will, I think, eventually get to the bottom of them. They will find the key, most probably, in actual, extensive penetration of the GPU by a Nazi fifth-column, in many actual plots, and in the impact of these on a highly suspicious man who saw his own assassination plotted and believed he was saving the Revolution by drastic purge.

It would be naive to think that the years around 1937 saw the only unjust arrests and executions, in the USSR, of the Stalin era. They occurred in lesser numbers from the beginning of the revolution through the last days of Stalin, when certain doctors were accused of plotting against the health of Soviet leaders, confessed— presumably under torture—and were later found innocent. The arbitrary power of the political police was the greatest evil of the Stalin era. It was not invented by Stalin; it was born of the “black hundreds” of tsardom, and nourished on “the terror” under Lenin. All good Communists said a special, extra-legal arm was needed to protect the revolution. Such terrors have attended other revolutions, including the American and the French. But it is easier to create a political police than to abolish it The rulers find it useful; it checks dissenters. So Stalin, in 1922, when the political police was slated for down-grading under local authority, decided to centralize it as a means of control. Three times, in my years in the USSR, it was decided to limit the police powers and bring the State Security organs under law; each time the name changed but the powers resumed. Such a police becomes a state wdthin a state, with a vested interest in finding “plots,” some of which really exist. Such a police presents another danger; its hidden membership is the first organization penetrated by enemy provocateurs.

Was any political police needed? The Soviet people seemed to think that it was. My own husband, when he learned of the exiling of my best woman friend, said only: “Too bad that she had to get entangled with that husband.”

Other Russian friends took an even more ruthless view. I recall one who maintained that if the political police held one hundred suspects and knew that one was a dangerous traitor but could not determine which one, they should execute them all, and the ninety-nine innocent ones should be willing to die rather than let a traitor live.

My editor-in-chief, when I protested the arrest of our three staff-members, gave me a far more sweeping statement of the reason why the Soviet people were not protesting.

“Why don’t you see the basic picture? Our leading economists think the world will crash about 1939. The greatest struggle mankind has known is due. This struggle will decide whether the world goes down into dark ages of slavery and war, or whether mankind wins through to a better world.

“Where, in this struggle, is there a sure foundation? We Bolsheviks think that, in spite of our technical backwardness, it may devolve on this country to save civilization for the world. Man’s destructive powers grow fast; half the capitalist world has turned back to the Middle Ages. Civilizations have fallen before. What is our duty to the coming world crisis? We must come up to it as strong as possible, with as much wheat as possible, as many healthy people as possible, and as few wreckers as possible. We are going to do it. With two Five-Year Plans completed, we can do it. Those who doubt or interfere are traitors, not only to our Soviet land but to mankind.”

They were strong words; they silenced me. They were said by Michael M. Borodin, who was arrested in 1949 about the time I was, and who died in a far eastern camp.

What safeguards are there anywhere against injustice? There are the hard-won rights of the West—“due process,” “habeas corpus,” “trial by jury”—costly rights, not easily had by poor people, and rights that Russia never knew. An even longer list of rights was guaranteed in 1936 by the Stalin Constitution and violated in the same year by the Constitution’s own author who—even his chief detractor said so—thought he was saving the revolution thereby. The conclusion must be, I think, what the Russians have drawn, that no man should be deified as Stalin was. It is true that his acts went “through channels,” that even the great madness of 1937 was approved by resolution of the Central Committee. But it was approved without the test of a courageous opposition; all who thus approved, with Stalin, bear the blame. Nowhere in the world is justice sure or perfect. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty and justice, not only under capitalism, but even more under socialism. The value of the Khrushchev speech is not only that it was followed by the curbing of the power of the political police by law, but that it awakened horror among the Soviet people. This active horror of an informed people against injustice is the only sure safeguard.

A certain type of vigilance the Soviet people learned in the great madness. It was something that Russians needed to learn. Appeals to the “watchfulness of the people” against spies and saboteurs filled the press. “Don’t talk in the street-cars about your factory; you may give information that will help the enemy locate and evaluate our industries.” The people heeded; the happy, loquacious Russians became silent towards foreigners. I recall the article I wrote for an American magazine about “My Soviet Daughter,” describing my step-daughter’s fondness for the chemical factory where she worked. My husband asked me to change it to an electric plant, lest I reveal the existence of a chemical plant within an hour’s ride from our home.

Two other personal anecdotes show what this period did to the minds of people. Just before a May-Day demonstration, I learned that several score Americans were upset because they had come to Moscow for the demonstration and there was no space in the tribunes of the Red Square. I suggested to Intourist that they might march with the staff of Moscow News and see the Square in passing. The Intourist representative replied: “We should be grateful, but do you know them well enough to guarantee that they have no pistols or bombs?” That settled it. All correspondents knew how exposed Stalin’s person was at these demonstrations. I had been told that agents of East European lands often came to the USSR as “American tourists.” I refused to guarantee all my fellow countrymen, sight unseen.

I spent that summer on the shores of Moscow River, near the little suburb Fili. I knew there was a big industrial plant there; I had seen Fili workers thousands strong in parades. Years later, in New York, after the war began between Germany and Russia, I read in a paper that the famous six-motor bombers, which rivalled and in some ways surpassed the American “flying fortresses,” were made in that Fili Plant. If that was true, I know how every Fili worker must have longed to brag of it to me, an American. Nobody ever did.

Such silence is not natural to Russians nor pleasant to their friends. But it may have had survival value in those years.

When World War Two finally came to the USSR, the rest of the world noted the relative absence of the Hitler Fifth Column, which had overthrown most of the governments of Europe. Howard K. Smith commented: “Had Russia not liquidated a few thousand bureaucrats and officers, there is little doubt that the Red Army would have collapsed in two months.”[3] This was the judgment of others; I do not entirely share it. But I know that the Soviet people endured those years of madness in the belief that they prepared desperate defenses, that they were already at grips with an enemy that walked in darkness, and that every elimination of a traitor might later save thousands of lives, or even the fate of the land. This sense of fighting in darkness an enemy high in the leadership, was what gave a nightmare quality to those years.

VI. The Fight for Peace Fails

In early 1955, in the brief sensation when Moscow withdrew charges against me, I was interviewed on television many times. Almost every interviewer asked whether I thought the Soviet people and their leaders really wanted peace. They clearly felt that this was a vital question to their audience and one on w’hich there were doubts.

I always replied: “They want peace as no American knows how to want it. No leader could hold his job unless the Soviet people believed he promoted peace. Here, in America, the war made people prosperous; homes that lost sons were few. In the USSR, every home suffered heavily. They were all hungry, many lost their homes and every family I luiow lost some of its men. Twenty-five million people were left homeless. Everyone in the USSR feels the burden of work to repair that loss.”

It is surprising that the American people are ignorant of the Soviet people’s profound hunger for peace. It began with the October Revolution, itself produced by war-exhaustion, its slogans: “Peace, land and bread.” The first official act of the revolutionary government, on November 8, 1917, was “to propose to all warring people and their governments … immediate negotiations for a just and democratic peace, without annexations or indemnities.” The phrase was later made famous by President Wood row Wilson who borrowed it from the Bolsheviks.

Neither Wilson nor the Anglo-American Allies nor the Germans granted peace to the young Soviet Republic of those days. The Allies denounced the Bolsheviks for even making the proposal; they demanded that Russia continue the war. Unable to fight, Lenin was forced to conclude a separate peace with Germany, a “robber peace,” in Lenin’s words, in which Germany occupied the Ukraine and the Baltic States. When Germany was defeated, both the Allied victors and Germany fought Russia for two more years.

So desperate were the Russians for peace in those days that Lenin at one time was willing to split Russia for it. In March, 1919, William Christian Bullitt went to Moscow as President Wilson’s semi-official envoy and proposed that Russian territory be divided along all the local governments in possession at the time. This would have meant a Japanese puppet state in the Far East and British and French dependencies in the Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Arctic ports. Lenin agreed even to this incredible hold-up, because the Russian people were dying of starvation, pestilence and war. The many puppet regimes did not agree and the powers at Versailles refused peace to the Bolsheviks, wishing to destroy them utterly.

Not by appeals for peace nor by offers of territory was peace won, but by the courage and sacrifice of the Russian people. Real peace came slowly: first the cessation of actual fighting, then trade agreements, then—after years—diplomatic recognition. The last armed invasions were in 1920, by the Poles with French help, and in 1920–21 by the Finns under Baron Mannerheim, with both German and Allied help. The Japanese were not expelled from Vladivostok until October 1922. The United States did not grant recognition until 1933, under Roosevelt.

The first appearance of the new state in any international conference was in Genoa, in 1922. The Allied powers, wishing to dump the postwar economic burdens on Germany and Russia, summoned the victims to appear. The Soviets at once proposed limitation of armaments. “The forces directed toward restoring world economy will be strangled as long as above Europe and above the world hangs the threat of new wars,” said Georges Chicherin, chief of the Soviet delegation. Failing to get response, Chicherin signed the famous Rapallo Agreement with Germany, whereby the two orphans of the conference renewed friendly relations “on the basis of equality,” each cancelling the other’s debts. It was simple, decent, effective, the first move by any nation towards helping the Germans to their feet. Had others followed it, in those days when Germany aspired towards democracy, Hitler Germany might never have arisen.

Soviet diplomacy thus marched into the world arena with two policies—peace through limitation of arms, and equal relations offered to nations under stress. These grew from Soviet ideology and also from the Soviet Union’s needs. Peace, with the chance to rebuild, was her great desire. Peace was most menaced by the appetites of the big powers; so her natural allies were among the defeated or colonial peoples. The USSR sought, first, peace on her borders. Next, she sought as much world peace as possible, because war anywhere was likely to spread.

“Peace is indivisible,” proclaimed Soviet diplomacy through Maxim Litvinov, shuttling to world congresses and annoying diplomats by proclaiming that the way to disarm is to disarm.

The Soviets were the first to sign the Kellogg Pact outlawing war, proposed by the United States. They were usually the first to sign any peace proposal, sometimes before they were invited. Litvinov won plaudits from peace organizations but did not much influence the policies of the major powers. Many lesser governments, however, benefited from Soviet diplomacy. Turkey’s existence as a modern, independent state is partly due to the support Russia gave her at the Lausanne Conference, in 1923. Modern China— both the Peking government and the vanishing forces on Formosa—rose with the help the Soviets gave Dr. Sun Yat-sen in the early twenties.

Finland’s independence was a direct gift from the Bolshevik Revolution. When the tsar fell, Finland, then part of the Russian empire, asked for independence. The Kerensky government refused. Neither Britain, France nor the U.S.A, then wanted Finland’s independence, which implied the break-up of the tsarist empire, their ally in the first world war. As soon as the Bolsheviks took power, Stalin, then Commissar of Nationalities, moved that Finland’s request be granted, saying: “Since the Finnish people … definitely demand … independence, the proletarian state … cannot but meet the demand.”

The rise of Hitler changed all the power politics of Europe. For years, the USSR had supported German demands for revision of die Versailles Treaty, considering it an evil treaty, provocative of war. But Hitler was more provocative of war than the Versailles Treaty. When the Germans and Japanese left the League of Nations, the Soviets entered it, with the announced intent of building collective agreements against aggression. Thenceforth, Litvinov sought alliances among “the democratic forces” to restrain the warlike tendencies of the Nazis.

Britain, however, under Prime Minister Chamberlain, built up Hitler, granting to him in haste everything that had for a decadie been refused to the German Republic—the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Nazi-terrorized plebiscite in the Saar, German re armament, naval expansion, the Hitler-Mussolini intervention in Spain. British finance, which had strangled German democracy by demanding impossible reparations, helped Hitler with investments and loans. Every intelligent world citizen knew that these favors were given to Hitler because British Tories saw in him their “strong-arm gangster” against the Soviets. If any doubt remained of the aims of both the British and French foreign offices, the Munich Conference removed it. That cynical sell-out of Czechoslovakia was their trump-card in inducing Hitler to march East.

Anyone who watched, as I did, the British moves of those days, saw that Chamberlain, who spoke of “appeasing” Hitler, really egged him on. He suggested giving the Czech’s Sudetenland to Hitler before anyone in Germany dared demand it. When the Czechs seemed likely to fight rather than let Hitler march unopposed into their country, the British and French ambassadors in Prague threatened President Benes with the same policy of “non-intervention” that had already murdered the democratic government of Spain. When Nazi troops at last took possession of Czech lands, it was learned that London financiers had agreed with German industrialists weeks earlier for financing the industries thus seized.

The only ally that proposed to help the Czechs resist this sellout was the USSR. I was vacationing in a North Caucasus resort when the news of the Munich Conference came. There was cheerful approval when the Czechs threatened to resist. Several military officers made airplane reservations to Moscow. “We may have to support the Czechs.” Then news came that Benes had yielded under British and French pressure. The reservations were cancelled. “There is nothing we can do now,” an officer told me at dinner. “Better get in condition for the next aggression—against Poland or France.”

They discussed the forces behind the betrayal. Why were Chamberlain and Daladier willing to sacrifice twenty-seven Czech divisions and one of the best fortification lines in Europe? What made them give Hitler one of Europe’s best armament plants—the Skoda Works? Were they conscious traitors, or weak? A manager of a local industry said: “You can say it in four words—They’re afraid of Bolshevism.”

Hitler’s aggression next moved rapidly eastward. On March 15, 1939, in insolent violation of agreement, German troops marched into disarmed Prague. The USSR informed Germany that she “could not recognize” this seizure of Czech lands. She proposed to Britain an immediate conference of Britain, France, Poland, Romania, Turkey and the USSR to resist further aggressions. Chamberlain replied that the proposal was “premature.” At this signal, Hitler seized Memel, chief seaport of Lithuania and threatened Danzig, Poland’s outlet to the Baltic. By mid-April, seven German divisions stood on the borders of Poland awaiting marching orders; provocative incidents increased. The U.S. State Department was told by its representatives in Europe that “the highest French officials put chances of war at 10 to 1.”[4]

Voices in Britain and France demanded an alliance with the USSR to stop Hitler. “Unity with the USSR can save peace,” declared Lloyd George, Britain’s former prime minister. “Russian aid is vital to the democracies,” said Pierre Cot, former Air Minister of France. A Gallup poll, in April, found 92 per cent of British voters favoring alliance with the Soviets.[5] The USSR made several proposals for a triple alliance to guarantee both East and West Europe against the Nazis. Every suggestion was put on ice by the Chamberlain government and after delay, turned down. Chamberlain sought agreement rather with Hitler; on May 3rd he startled the House of Commons by saying he was ready for a non-aggression pact with Germany. Two days later, he refused the proposal of the USSR for a military alliance.

Even Conservatives began to protest Chamberlain’s actions. Winston Churchill, on May 7, in the House of Commons, demanded an alliance with the USSR. Under such pressure, the British and French ambassadors in Moscow wFere finally instructed, May 25, to “discuss” an alliance. Ten vital weeks had been lost since the rape of Czechoslovakia. Three more weeks were wasted in waiting for a certain Mr. Strang to get to Moscow. This representative, sent by the British Foreign Office to “handle discussions,” proved, on arrival, to have no authority to sign anything. “Discussions” continued seventy-five days, of which the British took fifty-nine to write proposals while the supposedly slow Russians used only sixteen. The Soviets were clearly in haste; the British as clearly delayed. Suddenly, Moscow learned that the British Parliamentary Secretary of Overseas Trade had been discussing with a German official a loan of half a billion or a billion pounds.

To the Moscow leaders, it was clear that Britain either trifled or was trying to push war east. War, they feared, was upon them, not with Hitler alone, but with Hitler backed by Britain and the rest of the capitalist world—the type of war they had always feared. Most people in Britain were lulled by the discussions into the belief that agreement was being reached. Lloyd George was more discerning. “The world is trembling on the brink of a great precipice,” he said.

Twice, Moscow signalled the British people that the discussions were getting nowhere. The first signal was the resignation on May 3, of Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Foreign Minister. For a decade he had symbolized to the world a program for peace through collective agreements against aggression. This program had failed, said Moscow through Litvinov’s resignation. It failed in Manchuria, in Abyssinia, in Spain, in China, in Austria, in Albania, in Czechoslovakia, in Memel—eight years of failure, because the government chiefs of the Western democracies appeased or encouraged the aggressors. Such was the message but the Western press was so used to treating Soviet affairs trivially that they implied that Litvinov must have been liquidated for some imagined fault.

After six weeks, Moscow gave another signal. On July 29, Andrei Zhdanov, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Supreme Soviet, declared in an article in Pravda that the talks with Britain and France were getting nowhere and that he did not think either Britain or France wanted an alliance or intended to check Hitler, but might be negotiating just to keep the Russians quiet while Hitler prepared to attack them. This article made a brief sensation abroad, but most commentators dismissed Zhdanov as a hot-head.

At the end of July, when all Europe’s foreign offices knew that Hitler intended to seize the Polish corridor within a month, the Soviets made a last attempt. They suggested that Britain and France send military missions to Moscow to plan the mutual defense of East Europe on the spot. The missions waited ten days, then travelled by the slowest route; when they reached Moscow, it was found they had no authority to agree to anything. Klementi Voroshilov, Soviet Minister of War, with a galaxy of Soviet military officials, made serious proposals to an Anglo-French mission which was not authorized to accept. He proposed, if Hitler attacked Poland, to send two Soviet armies, one against East Prussia in the north and one through southern Poland against Central Germany. The Anglo-French mission replied that they must refer this to Warsaw; later they reported that the Polish government refused Soviet aid. The British and French, who had not scrupled to force the Czechs, by threats, to yield to Hitler, used no pressure to induce the Poles to accept the Soviet help.

On this, the negotiations broke down. “A frivolous make-believe at negotiations,” Voroshilov called it, in reporting to the August session of the Supreme Soviet.

So the Soviet Union made its decision. Hitler had offered a Non-Aggression Pact—he later admitted, in his declaration of war against the USSR, that the request came from him. The pact was signed between Germany and the USSR on August 23. It was not an alliance, such as the USSR offered Britain and France; it was merely an affirmation of neutrality such as the USSR had had with Germany since 1926, but which had fallen into disuse under Hitler. Molotov reported that the USSR signed because “the conclusion of a pact of mutual assistance (with Britain and France) could not be expected.”

The signing of the Pact at the moment when Europe, from hour to hour, awaited Hitler’s attack on Poland, changed the balance of forces in Europe. From East Europe, the first reactions were favorable. “Tension has lessened,” read the wires from Bulgaria. Cables from Latvia and Estonia read: “Since our two great neighbors … have agreed to maintain peaceful relations with each other, tension along the Baltic is relieved.” The Polish Foreign Minister found the situation “unchanged,” since “Poland never expected Soviet aid and did not want it.”[6] East Europe clearly hoped that the Pact, while it might not stop Hitler’s attack on Poland, would stop the eastward spread of the war.

Hitler’s allies were angry. Mussolini and Franco openly disapproved. Terrible was the blow to Tokyo, for Japan was already fighting the USSR on the edge of Mongolia, and was reported to have told Hitler that she would be ready by August to join “the big push.” The Japanese cabinet fell amid bitter attacks on Germany for signing peace with the USSR. Most wrathful of all were Hitler’s Tory backers in London. For the first time, they howled for Hitler’s blood. But hope and habit died hard in Chamberlain’s government. For ten days more, and even after Hitler marched into Poland, Chamberlain still sought a conference of the four Munich Powers—Britain, France, Germany and Italy—to settle Poland’s fate by agreement with Hitler. Only when this was refused, did Chamberlain sign the long-delayed alliance with Poland and urge the Poles to resist.

How could the Poles resist? Britain sent no assistance. The Polish Air Force ceased to function in two days; in two weeks, there was no longer an organized Polish army. The Polish government was in flight somewhere on the border of Romania, leaving only the heroic mayor of Warsaw to rally a last stand of desperate civilians. The only help that might have come in time—and the promise of which might even have prevented the invasion—was Russian help—refused by a Polish government that hated Bolsheviks more than it hated Hitler. The diehard voices in the British Tory press still hoped, not to save Poland, but, in the wreck of Eastern Europe, to “switch the war” against the USSR.

In that tragic time, when Poland was breaking, a Soviet diplomat said to me: “But for our Non-Aggression Pact, we would now be under attack, from both Europe and Asia, by the Alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan. Britain and France would have held the Maginot Line and financed Hitler. America would have been Japan’s arsenal against us, as she has been against China. By our Non-Aggression Pact, we drove wedges between Hitler, Japan, and Hitler’s London backers. It was too late to stop the invasion of Poland; Chamberlain didn’t even try. But we have split the camp of world fascism and shall not have to fight the whole world.”

So, the long struggle for peace through collective agreement of the democratic forces ended in failure. The Second World War began. But the USSR had gained, by the Non-Aggression Pact, a breathing space of nearly two years. More than that, it had split Hitler from his Western backers for the war’s duration.

VII. The Pact That Blocked Hitler

“Warsaw, as the capital of the Polish State, no longer exists. No one knows the whereabouts of the Polish government. Poland has become a fertile field for any contingency that may create a menace for the Soviet Union.”

In these words, V. M. Molotov announced on September 17, 1939, first by note to the Polish ambassador and then by radio to the world, that the Soviet Army was marching into Poland.

The British saw the meaning of that march better than did the Americans. Americans still speak of Stalin as “Hitler’s accomplice” in cynically dividing Poland. But Winston Churchill said in a radio broadcast October 1: “The Soviets have stopped the Nazis in Eastern Poland; I only wish they were doing it as our allies.” Bernard Shaw, in the London Times, gave “three cheers for Stalin,” who had given Hitler “his first set-back.” Even Prime Minister Chamberlain sourly told the House of Commons, October 26: “It has been necessary for the Red Army to occupy part of Poland as protection against Germany.” The Polish government-in-exile, which was in flight through Romania at the time but reached London some weeks later, never ventured to declare that Soviet march an act of war.

The population of the area did not oppose the Russian troops but welcomed them with joy. Most were not Poles but Ukrainians and Byelo-Russians. U.S. Ambassador Biddle reported that the people accepted the Russians “as doing a policing job.” Despatches told of Russian troops marching side by side with retiring Polish troops, of Ukrainian girls hanging garlands on Russian tanks. The Polish commander of the Lvov garrison, who for several days had been fighting against German attack on three sides, quickly surrendered to the Red Army when it appeared on the fourth side, saying: “There is no Polish government left to give me orders and I have no orders to fight the Bolsheviks.” That there was some opposition but only from small bands was shown by the casualty figures later released by the Red Army—737 dead and 1,862 wounded. Many of these occurred in the taking of Vilna by a small motorized force which was ordered to “reach Vilna by midnight“ from seventy miles away.

The American view that Stalin and Hitler had partitioned Poland in advance is not borne out by the way the partitioning occurred. The boundary between Germans and Russians changed three times before it was fixed at a conference, September 28. It is unlikely that German troops drove all the way to Lvov and attacked it for several days in order to give that city to the USSR. Nor is it likely that the Russians would have incurred casualties by rushing to Vilna, if the city had been allocated to them in advance. It seems probable that some statement of Russia’s interest in the non-Polish areas of Poland had been made, but that the march as it took place was not agreed in advance.

The view in East Europe was that Hitler planned not only to take Poland, but to drive southeast into the Balkans, and perhaps northeast into the Baltic states as far as he could go, using Lvov as the capital for a Nazi-Ukraine. German strategy indicated this, for after cracking the Polish front, the Germans did not wait to mop up Poland, but drove clear across the country, southeast to Lvov, and northeast to Vilna. Wide uprisings were said to have been planned by the Iron Guard in Romania to meet the German troops. Corroboration was seen in the assassination of Premier Calinescu as the Germans approached, and in an uprising that actually came off in a Romanian town on the Polish border but which fizzled out when it was seen that the troops across the river were Russians, not Germans.

“The action of the Soviets has checked whatever designs Hitler had on Romania,” was the London view, as cabled to the NY Times, September 28. “Respect for Russia has greatly increased; the peasants unquestionably prefer Russians to Germans along their border,” read an AP cable from East Europe, September 27.

The march into eastern Poland, thus, seems not a connivance with Hitler but the first great check the Soviets gave to Hitler under the Non-Aggression Pact. It seems to have been timed to the split second. Half a day earlier, a Polish government might have been found somewhere in Poland, functioning enough to declare the Russian march an act of war, thus putting Russia into war with Britain, Poland’s ally. Half a day later, the Russians might have found the Germans already slipping into Romania in the south and the Baltic states in the north. The Red Army marched on the precise half-day when the Polish government had fled into the unknown, but before the Germans took the strategic cities, Lvov and Vilna.

From that time on, Russia used the breathing-space granted by the Pact, not only to prepare for defense but to block Hitler’s penetration of East Europe through measures short of war. Hitler revealed this later in his declaration of war against the USSR and bitterly listed the Russian acts that blocked him.

Moscow’s first move was to build a wide buffer belt along her western border by alliances. Having prepared for friendly intercourse by giving Lithuania her ancient capital, Vilna, which the Poles had seized twenty years earlier in defiance of the League of Nations, Moscow invited Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia to send foreign ministers to Moscow to discuss an alliance. One by one, they went and signed on the dotted line. By October 10, 1939, less than a month after the Soviets marched into Poland, they had secured military alliances with these three Baltic states, which in the past had been highways for invasion. A powerful chain of naval bases, originally built by Peter the Great, thus came under Soviet control. While most American comment denounced the action, Walter Lippmann got the point, saying: “Every day it becomes clearer that Russia is constructing a great defense area from the Baltic to the Black Sea.” The Baltic States, themselves, resented the term “vassal” applied to them by the Anglo-American press. They thought themselves not badly off. Their internal organization was not at the time affected; they merely gave bases to the USSR in return for help in their defense.

The dramatic expulsion of half a million Germans from the Baltic States followed. How bitterly Hitler resented this was shown in his declaration of war when he told how “far more than 500,000 men and women … were forced to leave their homeland. … To all this I remained silent, because I had to.” These are not words of a complacent victor. The Baltic Germans were the upper class in the Baltic States; some had been there as landed barons for centuries. It was they who, at the time of the Russian Revolution, brought in the German troops to overthrow local red governments. Their expulsion scattered what was for the USSR the most dangerous fifth-column in Europe.

Having secured the southern Baltic against surprise attack, Moscow approached Finland, which holds the gateway of the north. Though Finland’s independence was a free gift from the Russian Revolution, Finland was known as the most hostile of the Baltic States. That early democratic Finland had been bloodily overthrown by Baron Mannerheim, ex-tsarist general, with the aid of the kaiser’s troops. Finland had become a base for international actions against the USSR. The Mannerheim Line—a system of forts well devised to shield a large force in an attack on Leningrad— was built under British direction. Later, Finland’s airfields were built by the Nazis. Made to accommodate 2,000 planes, when Finland had 150, they were clearly designed for use by a major power.

Moscow knew that Finland would not welcome an alliance. But the Soviets had something to offer. Finland’s foreign trade was ruined by the Anglo-German war, which closed the Baltic. Finland, gripped by a depression, wanted trade with the USSR and the use of the Leningrad-Murmansk Railway for access to the world. So when Moscow, on October 5, 1939, invited Finland to send a plenipotentiary to discuss “pending questions,” the result was a surprise. The Finnish government, before replying, declared partial mobilization, sent large armed forces to the border, closed the Stock Exchange, asked women and children to leave the capital Helsinki and appealed to America for “moral support.” The Soviet press expressed ironic irritation at the “inspired panic.”

The Finnish delegation came to Moscow October 11. The Soviets proposed an alliance, but dropped it since the Finns were unwilling. Then they proposed an exchange of territory to protect Leningrad. They asked that the border be moved back enough to take Leningrad out of gun-shot and that some small islands, guarding the sea approach, be given to the USSR. They offered in return twice as much territory, equally good but less strategic. They also asked a 30-year lease of Hangoe or some other point at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland—that long thin waterway that leads to Leningrad—as a naval base. President Cajander, of Finland, broadcast the statement that the terms did not affect Finland’s integrity.

A month of bargaining went on in which Moscow raised her offers. Finland stood to get nearly three to one in the territorial trade; and Hangoe base would be held, not thirty years, but only during the Anglo-German war and would then come to Finland fully equipped. Many Finns were boasting of the “smart bargain” their diplomats were getting. Then, suddenly, the Finnish negotiators broke off discussions with the cryptic remark that circumstances would decide when and by whom they would be renewed. The N. Y. Times reported that “diplomatic quarters in Washington” thought the Finns were influenced by hope of loans from the U.S.A. Since the Finnish parliament had not even been summoned, Moscow took it as clear that the Finnish cabinet acted on secret pressures from those forces in the West that wanted to “switch the war.”

So when Finnish artillery shot over the border in late November and killed Red Army men, Moscow sharply protested, and, when Finland disregarded the protest, Soviet troops marched into Finland on November 30, 1939. Finland declared war and appealed for foreign aid. The League of Nations expelled the USSR for “aggression.” Few acts of the USSR have alienated more friends than the Soviet-Finnish War. Nor were the Russians proud of it; nobody is proud of preventive war. Russians considered it a preventive war for defense of Leningrad.

To understand the Soviet-Finnish War, we must see it in the setting of the Second World War, of which it was a part. In late 1939, the Second World War was not yet total. Hitler was consolidating gains in Czechoslovakia and Poland. The Russian advance had blocked whatever further plans he had in the cast. Neither Hitler nor the West had yet attacked each other seriously. The Western Front was in what was called “the phony war”; both sides sat in their fortifications. Hitler was not yet prepared for an all-out assault westward; this took time to organize. And Hitler was also aware that he had friends in the British and French upper class who might yield to his demands. Important voices in the press of Britain, France and America urged that “the wrong war” had started, that the war should be switched against the USSR as the greater enemy.

This press campaign was not caused by the war in Finland. It began even when Hitler was marching through Poland; it was the continuation of the Chamberlain line. So when Finland broke negotiations, Moscow assumed that the Finns planned to keep the border boiling with winter incidents, leading up to intervention by stronger powers in the spring. “The idea of coming to the aid of Finland” explained Swedish Foreign Minister Guenther defending Sweden’s neutral policy after the war was over, “opened new vistas to the allied powers. The deadlock on the Western Front was not popular and the press of France spoke of the hunt for new battlefields.”

For the rest of the winter, the war in the West was off the front pages. The world’s eyes were fixed on the war in Finland, and on the attempts in the West to make it a joint attack against the USSR. Moscow’s aim was to get it over before the major powers could intervene. The Russians made both military and political mistakes in this war but not as many as Americans commentators assume.

The military campaign had four phases. The objective in the first phase was to move the border back from Leningrad and to take Finland’s Arctic port so that world war would not pour through Finland against the USSR. This objective was attained in two weeks; the land frontier was pushed back forty miles from Leningrad, and Petsamo, Finland’s Arctic port, was taken. The second period was one of relative passivity because the coldest winter for decades had set in. The third phase consisted of air-bombardment of Finland’s military establishments—war industries, railways, ports, airfields. Civilian casualties were few; Finland reported only 640 civilian deaths from air-bombing during the entire war.

The fourth phase was the cracking of the Mannerheim Line, a system of forts “in some respects stronger than the Maginot Line.”[7] Considered impregnable, it was cracked in a month by a shrewd plan, the first time a line of such strength had ever been taken by assault. Heavy artillery pounded the earth around the fortifications until their guns were thrown out of line. After that the line was assaulted. With the smashing of the Mannerheim Line, Finland’s resistance collapsed. The peace treaty was signed in Moscow, March 12, 1940.

London and Paris tried hard to prevent that signing. Britain refused to transmit Finland’s appeal, so Sweden served as intermediary. The French premier, Daladier, told Finland that an Anglo-French expedition was ready to sail to her aid and unless Finland asked for it, the Allies would not even guarantee her continued existence after the war. Chamberlain and Daladier pressured Sweden to let this expeditionary force pass through to Finland, though it would have involved Sweden in the war. On March 10, Chamberlain told the House of Commons that he was considering ways to break Sweden’s neutrality and compel continuance of the Finnish war. “London is buzzing with rumors of war on a much wider front and perhaps war with Russia,” cabled the N. Y. Times London correspondent, March 11.

The buzzing came too late. The attempt to “switch the war” into a world line-up against the USSR broke on Sweden’s insistent neutrality and on General Mannerheim’s underestimation of Soviet strength, Mannerheim had told the Anglo-French allies that he would not need help till May; by that time Chamberlain expected to force Sweden to let the troops pass. Neither the Finns nor the British dreamed that the Mannerheim Line could be cracked in a winter assault. Two months before the time Mannerheim set for the reinforcements, the Finns had sued for peace and the Soviet-Finnish war was over.

In the peace terms, the Soviets took the Mannerheim Line and the naval base at Hangoe, protecting both land and sea approaches to Leningrad. But they returned Petsamo and its nickel mines; they asked no indemnities but agreed to supply a starving Finland with food. As terms go, these were not excessive. Sir Stafford Cripps, British ambassador to Moscow in 1940, told me, as I sat at tea in his embassy, that the Russians might some day be sorry they had not taken more when they could. He was thinking of Petsamo, which was soon to be a Nazi base against Allied shipping on the Murmansk run. But Sir Stafford was wrong; Stalin’s political sense was better than Sir Stafford’s. The Soviets were well advised to make easy terms. Had their demands gone beyond the obvious needs of Leningrad’s security, Sweden’s neutrality might have been shaken. Then the world front that finally crystallized against Hitler, might have crystallized a year sooner—against the USSR.

The Finnish war had victories outside Finland. The sequence of Soviet acts, from the march into Poland to the treaty with Finland, had convinced East Europe that the USSR was strong and knew what she wanted and was serious about it to the point of war, but that her demands had reasons and limits. One thing she clearly wanted in 1940 was a broad buffer belt from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

So Romania knew that the time had come to give back Bessarabia, which she seized from the young Soviet power in its days of weakness, in 1918. Its people were not Romanians; they had made 153 uprisings against Romania in six years. The USSR had never recognized the seizure but never thought it worth a war. The Soviets had waited twenty years for the right moment. When Hitler was busy with the conquest of France, Moscow asked Romania for Bessarabia and got it without war. Russian ships again sailed up the Danube, a branch of whose delta became the Soviet frontier.

So the long buffer belt across Europe was completed—from Hangoe on the Baltic to the Danube mouth on the Black Sea—when Hitler, from his ravaging of Western Europe, turned east.

According to Hitler, Russia’s advance into Bessarabia saved Britain from a German invasion. Hitler was bragging a bit, and piling up a case to justify his Russian invasion, but there was a basis of fact in his declaration. To understand this, we must turn back to the war on the Western Front.

While the Finnish war lasted, Hitler made no serious attack against the West for reasons given above. But in spring of 1940, the Germans launched a rapid, successful blitz against the West; they seized Denmark, Norway, crashed through Holland and Belgium, smashed the French army in eleven days. They occupied the Atlantic coast of Europe, all set for invasion of Britain. The British army, disorganized by defeat in France, had abandoned its best equipment on the beach at Dunkirk. I passed through Berlin that summer on my way to Moscow, and found them bragging that they would be in London in early fall. Military experts of all lands expected the invasion; and most said the British defenses were inadequate. The British gold reserve was evacuated to Canada; columnists discussed the possible evacuation of the government.

Suddenly Hitler withdrew his main forces from the Atlantic Coast and threw them across Europe, southeast into the Balkans. The reason he later gave was that he could not expend the tremendous strength needed for an invasion of Britain while the Russians were picking up territory in his rear. Bessarabia was rich in grain; its fall to the USSR both disturbed Hitler’s economic base and stirred the anti-Nazi forces in the Balkans. He must clean up the Balkans first.[8]

The war in the Balkans was not expected by Hitler to be a long campaign. He had everything to lose by a long war in an area on which he relied for food and oil. It was to his interest to control it by economic penetration or seize it in a rapid blitz that would not destroy the harvests and industries. His aim was to consolidate the Balkan Peninsula against the USSR, smash the British-Greek armies in Greece and then take the eastern Mediterranean and Suez by a simultaneous advance through Turkey and Africa. American aid was increasing to Britain, the conflict was likely to be long, so Hitler needed the Near East oil.

“From that time on,” declared von Ribbentrop later, “Soviet Russia’s anti-Gennan policy became more apparent.” He thus described the fact that the USSR undermined and slowed the German Balkan campaign. It was done by diplomatic notes: a protest to Bulgaria for yielding, a non-aggression pact with Yugoslavia, a statement to Turkey that if she should resist the passage of German troops this would be “sympathetically understood.” Von Ribbentrop charged that the Soviets “secretly assisted Yugoslavia in arming.” It was common knowledge among correspondents in Moscow, that autumn, that the Soviets were sending food both to Greece and Yugoslavia. If they sent arms, that was within their rights as a neutral nation, and within the terms of the Non-Aggression Pact. The USSR had promised not to take part in aggression against Germany; but help to Hitler’s victims could not be defined as aggression.

Meantime, a swift internal struggle was on for control of the three small Baltic States—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. They had military alliances with the USSR, to whom they had given naval bases; but their governments were semi-fascist dictatorships, somewhat pro-Nazi. Hitler’s eastward march encouraged pro-Nazi groups in these stales. The USSR demanded the right to send larger forces of troops into these countries “in view of the increasingly disturbed conditions of Europe.” On June 15, 1940, technically as allies, considerable forces of the Red Army marched in. The local pro-German officials fled.

“Stalin beat Hitler into the Baltic by about twenty-four hours,” said a correspondent in Vilna. Most Lithuanians I met agreed.

I had the luck to be passing through from Berlin to Moscow. Learning what was happening in Lithuania, I remained and saw the amazing picture of a take-over from within. It was very constitutional and very happy. When the pro-German president fled, this brought the vice-president to power. He appointed a new premier and then resigned. This brought to power Justas Paletskis, a progressive journalist. Political prisoners were let out of jails; trade unions began to organize freely; all kinds of organizations came alive. Day and night, the singing did not cease in the streets of Kaunas, the capital. New elections were held for a “people’s government.“ There was a tremendous turnout to vote. The new assembly met, declared Lithuania a Soviet Republic, and applied for admission to the USSR. All this time, the jubilant workers and farmers, glad of the collapse of the pro-Nazi dictatorship, thought they were only expressing their own desire. The Red Army did not mix in the politics, except as it exchanged balls and theatrical performances with the Lithuanian army, on a basis of “fraternal equality.”

Only once did I hear the role of Moscow mentioned. Some Kaunas intellectuals thought that everything went too fast. They wanted slower elections, to organize political parties and debate. The workers and farmers weren’t worried; they put up slates through the unions and voted. But westernized intellectuals wanted more time.

“A lot of us think it’s too speedy,” said the chief of the Telegraph Agency to a woman who complained. “I understand Paletskis wanted six months to take us into the Soviet Union but Molotov said there wasn’t time.”

A gasp arose from the group. The woman who had objected spoke. “You mean that Hitler may get us? Then let the Russians take us quick.”

On July 21, 1940, Lithuania applied for admission to the USSR. I went with their delegation by special train to Moscow; it was greeted by garlands and delegations along the way. By early August, the Supreme Soviet in Moscow received three new constituent republics—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Paletskis was saying: “Our path to socialism is the easiest ever known. … We have done it by the will of the Lithuanian people through constitutional forms. … There arc no boundaries any more from Kaunas to Vladivostok, from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean.”

It was a masterpiece of political planning by Moscow, accomplished by the will of the Lithuanian people, which Moscow had known how to arouse.

The USSR stood solidly now on the Baltic, ready for any future test.

The German campaign dragged out in the Balkans. German troops crushed the Greeks and drove the British into the sea from southern Greece. They terrorized Romania and Bulgaria into submission and devastated Yugoslavia, which resisted. They reached the borders of Turkey and experts predicted that their next move would be through the Dardanelles. But Moscow’s pressure on Turkey, added to British pressure, worked. Experts predicted the fall of Suez, and Hitler’s troops were rumored already in Syria. But they had gone in the other direction—to the borders of the USSR.

Hitler saw that the USSR, as a neutral, was the immediate barrier in his path to world rule. In the twenty-two months of the Non-Aggression Pact, the USSR had three times blocked the Nazi advance. The Soviet march into Poland had checked for a year Hitler’s advance to the East; the Soviet return to Bessarabia had pulled him back from invading Britain; and Moscow’s power politics in the Balkans and Baltic had delayed him at the Dardanelles.

Hitler saw that the lone neutral hand of the Soviets had checked him more than he had been checked by all Europe’s armed forces combined—Poles, Danes, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, French, Greeks, Yugoslavs and British. He therefore turned and struck at the Soviet Union in the mightiest assault in human history.

VIII. War of the Whole People

At dawn of June 22, 1941, Hitler struck in surprise attack at the Soviet Union. Thousands of German planes bombed Soviet airfields; thousands of tanks smashed over the border, followed by millions of motor-borne troops. “The greatest military march in world history,” claimed Hitler. He did not overstate. By that onslaught the world’s two largest armies were locked in mankind’s most decisive struggle.

The Germans came fresh from the conquest of Europe. They had laid the groundwork for nearly a year. By building strategic roads in Poland, occupying Romania, sending troops to Finland, they gained access to the entire 1,800 mile Soviet western border, equivalent to the Canadian border from Vancouver to Buffalo. In the north, they drove from Finland against Leningrad and the Arctic port Murmansk; in the center, from Poland toward Moscow; in the South, from Romania towards Kiev and Odessa. Hitler claimed that nine million men were locked in active battle; millions more waited as reserves.

The view in Berlin, London and Washington was that Russian resistance would be smashed in a one-month blitz. After a fortnight, Washington cautiously admitted: “The Russians have put up the strongest resistance the Germans have yet met.” In six weeks, America and Britain began to re-appraise the conflict. Winston Churchill, now Prime Minister, broadcast praise of the Russians’ “magnificent devotion” and noted the efficiency of their military organization. Raymond Clapper cabled from London August 20 (World-Telegram): “Russia has opened up a new pattern for victory. Never before … has there been put up against Hitler the manpower sufficient and willing to do the job.”

Khrushchev, in his 1956 attack on Stalin, says that the German assault took Stalin by surprise, that he had not properly prepared; that even when Germans invaded Soviet territory, Stalin had brushed it off as “provocative, undisciplined actions,” and had refused to fight back. Khrushchev should know. The Germans certainly smashed many Soviet airplanes on the ground, as the Japanese did with Americans at Pearl Harbor; any aggressor has this advantage. But the Red Army did not ignore that June 22 onslaught; its defense astonished the world. If Stalin ignored earlier frontier incidents, he had a reason that seemingly escapes Khrushchev. This war was not going to be decided by force of arms alone, but by the line-up of the world.

Stalin indicated this in his first wartime radio speech, two weeks after the Germans invaded. He told the Soviet people that the enemy had taken considerable territory; he implied that they would take more. But this, he said, was no excuse for panic. “There are no invincible armies and never have been.” Germany had gained important military advantage by surprise attack but had “lost politically by exposing herself … as a bloodthirsty aggressor.” The Soviet counter-strategy must be “a war of the whole people.” The Army must “fight for every inch of Soviet soil,” but “in case of forced retreat,” everything valuable must be evacuated or destroyed. He promised loyal allies “in the peoples of Europe and America.” “Our war for the freedom of our country will merge with the struggles of the peoples of Europe and America for democratic liberties.” He summoned them, not only to resistance, but “forward to victory.”

For more than twenty years the Soviet people had prepared for this onslaught, but it took a different form from what they most feared. They had dreaded a joint attack by all the earth’s capitalist nations; they had feared that a world line-up would form against the USSR. This might have happened if they had fought in Poland two years earlier, when Chamberlain was in power; it would almost surely have happened if the Finnish war had dragged on till an Anglo-French force arrived; it might have happened if Russia had attacked Hitler during his Balkan campaign, as a British diplomat told me they should have done—“before Hitler strengthens himself by victories.”

Stalin had a different view of it. He saw, no doubt, that Hitler had used the twenty-two months of the Non-Aggression Pact to seize the wealth and armaments of Europe, but these months had also taught the people of Europe and of the world the nature of Nazi rule. When Hitler’s conquests began, sections of the European tried to adjust to the German “New Order” hoping that it might upper class supported them. Even many of the common people unite Europe. Two years had shown that the Nazis brought no “United States of Europe” but stark slavery and hunger to all but the dominant “German race.” Millions of Jews and Slavs were dying in concentration camps. The ripening hate of Europe counted, as the world line-up formed. America’s deep commitment as arsenal against Hitler counted. And, as Stalin had said it would, the blatant aggression of that surprise attack counted in the world line-up, too.

The first sign of a new world line-up came when Hitler’s call to a “holy crusade against Bolshevism” flopped. Most people expected Pope Pius XII to denounce the Bolsheviks. He did not. Others thought that Churchill, that ancient foe of Bolshevism, would seek neutrality. But Churchill declared support for the Russians in ringing words: “Any man who fights against Nazi-ism will have our aid; the Russian danger is our danger.” In the fourth week, Britain signed an alliance with the USSR; in this, she was quickly followed by the various European “governments-in-exile,” which had taken refuge in London and which now for the first time saw a chance of some day going home.

“The six-weeks’ stand of Russia has changed the outlook of London, Washington and Europe-in-exile,” wrote Anne O’Hare McCormick in the N. Y. Times. It also changed the outlook of “Europe-in-prison.” It quickened the resistance movements in Europe’s underground. By autumn of 1941, Europe’s underground battlefield became important; the Russian resistance to Hitler, and the alliances with various govern men ts-in-exile had combined all anti-Nazis in Europe—from Communists to monarchists—in the Resistance. But when one recalls how strong the anti-Soviet forces were in America, Britain and Europe, when one recalls that Senator Harry Truman said, in the first days of the fighting: “If the Germans are winning, wc should help the Russians and if the Russians are winning, we should help the Germans, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”[9]—then Stalin’s slowness to fight until Hitler’s surprise attack drove deep into Russia, does not seem stupidity or neglect.

The world’s military experts did not share the view Khrushchev put forward in 1956 about the unpreparedness of the Red Army. They burst into astounded praise. “For the first time the Germans have been met by an army trained, not for the war of 1918, but for the war of 1941,” wrote George Fielding Eliot, July 29, 1941. He noted the USSR used “defensive positions of great depth, stoutly held every where, camouflage of remarkable skill, protecting Russian artillery from air attack, mobile counter-attack units against German panzer columns, and an air-force that fully supports the ground troops.“ “It is an army modern in structure, tactically efficient, strategically realistic,” wrote Max Werner in the New Republic, August 11.

The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world.

As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army.

The blitzkrieg, on which Hitler relied for quick victory, thus failed to bring Russian collapse. Hitler was forced to a longer war, which the German economy could ill endure. “For the first time, Hitler is fighting in a new dimension,” said a N. Y, Times editorial. The writer was speaking o£ geography but the “new dimension” was more than geography. For the first time, Hitler was fighting an entire people, organized for total defense. In Soviet tactics, the activities of the army and of the people were coordinated. “The front is not only where the cannon roars,” was the slogan. “It is in every workshop, in every farm.”

The tremendous manpower of Russia had been conceded by everyone. But few people had realized how the quality of this manpower had changed. Socialized medicine, the care given to mothers and babies in childbirth, physical education and sports among young people had improved the national health. Army statistics had shown steady increase in height, weight, chest measurements. The education and military knowledge of recruits had also increased year by year. Millions of trained women took part in the defense; the medical service of the army was full of them, as were communications, supply and engineers. Civilians had prepared themselves physically to cooperate with the army. Six million people had passed the tests of the GTO badge—“ready for labor and defense”—which demanded all-round fitness in walking, running, swimming, jumping, rowing, ski-ing. Many had taken free courses in parachute-jumping and gliding—even small children loved to jump from the “parachute-towers” in the parks of culture and rest.

The form of the collective farm fitted admirably the needs of defense. Every farm had its working brigades with their leaders; these could act as labor battalions for the army, even bringing their own cooks and cooking equipment. Every farm had its summer-time nursery, run by the older mothers under trained nurses; this organization could handle the children in groups and evacuate them to the interior, in the returning box-cars that had brought up troops. Every farm had its civil defense group which had learned sharp-shooting and had weapons; here was a guerrilla band already formed.

As the Germans entered the Ukraine, a race began for the grain harvest. The farmers’ first job was to save this grain. Teachers, students, office workers went to the farms to help; even the army harvested in lulls between battles. By September 10, when the Germans reached the heart of the Ukraine, sixty percent of the grain had been moved east. Millions of fanners then also moved eastward, driving their trucks and tractors, or returning on army trains. They were not jobless, like refugees in Europe. They took their implements and found work elsewhere growing food. Some farmers, through choice or necessity, remained in the area held by Germans; these became irregular fighters, hitting the Germans from the rear.

The blowing up of the great Dnieper Dam startled the world with die realization that the Russians took this war far more seriously than other nations had. It was only one natural incident in the strategy which die Western press at once called “scorched earth.” Russians did not use those fatalistic words. They were not interested in “scorching” anything, but in saving things for themselves and taking them away from the enemy. In every industrial plant, as the enemy approached, the workers formed gangs to dismantle machinery, grease, pack and transport parts, and ship them east. The workers went east with their machines and set their factories up again in the assigned places in Siberia or the Urals.

When the city of Kharkov was occupied by the Germans, the Kharkov Tractor Plant took pride in the fact that it never stopped making tanks against Hitler—not even for a day. Most of the workers went east with their machines, but enough workers stayed in Kharkov to assemble the spare parts already made, and drive the last tanks against the enemy. Before their production stopped in Kharkov, their main plant was producing in the East.

How this Soviet strategy exhausted Germany, is told by Howard K. Smith in his book, Last Train from Berlin. The German war machine and the German people had fattened on the loot of Europe; they starved when Hitler entered Russia. Their troops came to the Dnieper and happily saw beyond the ruined dam the massive buildings of the great Dnieper industries, the first factories they had seen intact in the USSR, says Smith. But when they reached the buildings, every machine down to the last bolt and nut, had gone East. “That was defense,” says Smith.

“I was terrified when I saw from the air those great masses of working people,” said a German pilot in Moscow after his capture. He had been used to sowing terror among fleeing populations. But he himself felt terror at the sight of confident working people organized around their army, digging fortifications for their land.

Years earlier, when British and French military experts still thought in terms of trench warfare of 1914–18, Red Army journals had predicted the blitz type of war and had said that it would quickly overwhelm a weak enemy with little damage to the victor, but that if countries of equal strength were involved, and if the “blitz” did not at once succeed, there would be a long war which would then be decided by relative economic resources, war reserves and the people’s morale. This was the test which the Russians and Germans now faced.

By November, 1941, the Germans held the rich Ukraine and had looted Kiev; they were besieging Leningrad, the fortress of the north; they were in Moscow’s suburbs on three sides of the city, in sight of its lofty towers. The fight for the big cities began.

Modern cities are not expected to defend themselves. Civilians in most lands do not expect to fight. Paris declared itself an “open city”—when the Germans had beaten the French army, they just walked into Paris. When Warsaw’s heroic mayor fought after the government and generals fled, the world was surprised; we had forgotten how mighty the medieval cities were in defense. Stalin had not forgotten. He had fought the Finnish war to make Leningrad a defensible fortress. In Moscow, while building housing, he had also built unpublicized the world’s strongest fortress city.

Moscow was a fortress city in the Middle Ages. The walled Kremlin was its center; a mile out, this was ringed by a stone wall, and two miles out by a circle of earth-works. The wall and earthworks had long been replaced by two ring boulevards. Ten main highways shoot out from Moscow like spokes of a wheel; they are connected by these rings. Eleven railways branch out, also joined by a belt-line railway. During the Five-Year Plans, these boulevards and highways were lined with four-story apartment houses of concrete, especially thick against Russian winter. The ring boulevards were widened by transplanting their trees to backyards and parks. The beauty-lovers sighed. When the war came, Moscow found that tanks and motorized troops could maneuver in six columns at forty miles an hour anywhere in the city and shoot out in any direction without a traffic jam, protected everywhere by solid rows of concrete apartment houses four stories high. A modern fortress is not made by walls alone—the fall of the Maginot and Mannerheim Lines proved that. A modern fortress must give mobility to great force under protection. This Moscow gave. All war supplies were made inside the city, the power plant being based on lignite deposits behind the town. Air defense was based on fields within the city and to the east.

The Soviet government with the foreign embassies moved to Kuibyshev on the Volga, deep to the rear. Children went with their teachers to distant places like the Urals; they stayed two years. Civilians, whose work was not needed for the war, were also sent East. Moscow was the front; its people went on a diet of 1,600 calories. There was no coal for homes or schools; coal was for war industries. There was no electric light in homes on long winter nights that begin at four o’clock; electricity was for munitions. People went home from twelve hours work and stumbled into bed in darkness, pulling covers over their clothes. In the most dangerous weeks, one of my women friends, working on Moscow Radio, moved her bedding to the office and went on twenty-four hour duty, relieving two men who went to dig fortifications outside the town.

Stalin stayed in Moscow. On November 7, 194J, while German guns roared in the suburbs and Hitler announced Moscow already taken, Stalin reviewed the troops in the Red Square. This gave confidence to the people of Moscow; it told them that they, with their Commander-in-chief, were the hub of the nation’s defense. Moscow drove the Germans back sixty miles that winter and held them there.

Leningrad had it harder; it was under siege and gunfire two and a half years. Some of the time, people existed on five slices of black bread and two glasses of hot water a day. On this, they made munitions and fought Germans. More people in Leningrad died of hunger than of German shells. They died of lack of protein but not of the scurvy that plagued medieval besieged cities; Soviet scientists taught them to get vitamin C from pine needles in the parks. The famous composer, Shostakovich, was an air warden; he threw incendiary bombs off roofs when Germans dropped them. Between-times he composed his Seventh Symphony, dedicated to struggle and victory. Anyone who lived through that siege was given a medal engraved “Leningrad Defense.”

The Germans made their furthest advance in the war’s second year. They were held in the north by Leningrad, in the center by Moscow, but in the south they drove over dry, open plains as far as the North Caucasus grainfields and the city of Stalingrad. This city is on a plain without natural defense; it consists of thirty miles of factories strung along the Volga river. Stalingrad became the southern anchor of the Soviet defense, as Leningrad was the northern.

“Take Stalingrad at any cost,” Hitler ordered in the summer of 1942. Stalingrad’s fall would open the way to encircle Moscow from the south. It would open the road to Baku oil, to Iran and India, to a junction with the Japanese in Chinese Turkestan. Day by day, a thousand planes and a thousand tanks struck at this single city. In mid-September, this became two thousand planes and two thousand tanks. The Germans cut Stalingrad in half, in a dozen pieces. More than once, Hitler announced that he had taken it. He had truly taken most of it but not the people.

“There is no land beyond the Volga,” went the word in Stalingrad. They fought from street to street, from house to house, from room to room. They used rifles, grenades, knives, kitchen chairs, boiling water. The Tank Factory continued to make tanks and drove them against the enemy right from the factory yard. “Not a building is left intact,” said the German report. Then the people fought from cellars and caves. “Every pile of bricks can be made a fortress if there is courage enough,” went the word. “Every hillock regained, gains time,” Stalin wired them. The people of Stalingrad fought thus one hundred and eighty-two days. Then, fresh reserves, organized and trained far in Siberia, drove over the plains and took the city in a great pincers. Over 300,000 Germans were caught in that trap. They surrendered February 2, 1943.

Here, the tide turned on the long front of war. Here, the German drive to subjugate the world was broken on the men and women of one heroic Volga city.

More than two grim years of battles were yet to endure. But from Stalingrad the Germans were steadily forced back. In 1943, they were driven back through the Ukraine; in early summer of 1944, they were driven back over the Soviet frontiers. In late July, the Soviet armies faced them in Warsaw. In April of 1945, the Red Army stood in Berlin. In June, the United Nations was founded in San Francisco to plan the post-war world.

In the USSR, the people began to go back to the lands the Germans had ruined. They found a total destruction such as men had not seen since the days of Genghiz Khan. The Germans, defeated, wreaked slaughter on those civilians who blocked their conquest of the world. They slew millions by torture or in gas chambers; they dumped them down flooded mines, or burned them in buildings. They drove out or slaughtered all livestock. They took three million people away as slaves. Twenty-five million people were left homeless in the fields of south Russia and the Ukraine.

One action of that time must be noted, though it is not fully explained. During the war, seven entire small nationalities were deported to the East. It was not announced. We correspondents in Moscow heard rumors but when we inquired, we were told that German and Turkish agents had been corrupting the Volga Germans and the Moslem nationalities of the Crimea and Caucasus; the details were military secrets. Not until 1956, in Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin, was the world officially told that the Kalmyks and Karachai had been moved eastward in 1943, and the Chechens, Ingush and Balkars in early 1944. Khrushchev did not mention the Volga Germans and Crimean Tartars, who were moved in 1942. No explanation was given. One notes, however, that precisely in this period, in early 1944, Stalin announced on behalf of the government that the sixteen constituent republics would henceforth be allow-ed to have armies and foreign offices of their own; they had fought so well together that they had earned this final mark of nationhood. Some readjustment of national geography clearly went on in the midst of the war. How far it was punitive, how far precautionary, how far a more rational distribution of population, done under cloak of war, has not been revealed.

I cannot end this chapter without a glance at the Soviet armies as I saw them sweep through Poland to take Berlin. I watched from cities behind the lines, Warsaw and Lodz. They were the world’s strongest army, driving back the Germans, who had been the strongest army three years before. Three merciless years had beaten the Russians into shape. Unlike the Germans, they had the qualities those “new people” developed years earlier—wide individual initiative inseparably knit in a collective force. I am no partisan of war but I could only compare to a great symphony the accurate harmony with which they moved.

In late autumn of 1944, they stood on the Vistula facing Warsaw. West of the river lie wide marshlands that will not support tanks. The great offensive waited for the freeze. The First Polish Army, recruited from Polish refugees in the USSR, held the immediate center, opposite their ruined capital which the Germans were methodically blasting and burning, block by block. A Polish officer told me they had a big artillery piece every seven feet, to break the German forts, and prepare for the drive.

On Friday, January 12, Marshal Konev’s First Ukrainian Army struck from southern Poland, broke nine lines of forts and advanced twenty-five miles in two days. On Sunday, two new armies drove west and were woven into the action. Marshal Zhukov’s First Byelo-Russian, including the First Polish, drove through the center, taking 1,200 populated places in two days. Marshal Rokossovsky’s Second Byelo-Russian swung through the north over frozen swamps where the Narew joins the Vistula. After the breakthrough, the armored spearheads went rapidly; Zhukov’s tanks made seventy miles in one spectacular day. Rail crews changed the gauge of the east-west railways as they advanced; supplies thus came straight from the Urals, two thousand miles to the front. The unbroken flow of shells and gasoline astonished the military experts of the world.

Even a civilian like myself, charting it on a map, could not miss the superb rhythms in which those great armies encircled cities, always taking them from an unexpected side, and always counting on each other for the exact help they needed. Zhukov took Warsaw by a triple blow from north, south, and west, every direction except the expected east. Konev’s army raced clear across south Poland, swung around a fortress city on the German border and entered from the direction of Berlin. Even the ghetto factories were still working. They thus saved eight thousand Jews, the largest single group saved anywhere in Poland, for German practice was to kill Jewish and Slav prisoners before retreating. A prong of Konev’s army then thrust backward into Cracow, taking it so unaware and undamaged that it looked like a city that had never seen war. Zhukov similarly took Lodz from the “wrong direction,” intact in a single blow. When I moved to Lodz with the Polish government, just after, I found the suitcases of a German officer in the wardrobe of my hotel room.

American prisoners of war, released by the Russian drive and streaking their way across Poland, told me in Lodz the details that impressed them. They were intrigued by the Russian initiative which, besides regular methods, used every kind o£ device. Gasoline moved not only in regular tank-cars; but Russians dug up underground cisterns of it and fastened them on flat-cars to take along. Since the rail transport was needed for the armored spearheads, the infantry used many horses. The Americans saw infantrymen advancing in small peasant carts on which two men slept while others drove, thus going forward twenty-four hours a day. When the horses wore out, they were turned into some peasant’s yard and fresh ones taken. The effect was to pile all the Polish horses into the western provinces; a first task of the new Polish government was to get them back for the spring sowing in Central Poland. “We learned a lot about war,” the Americans said.

The tasks given to the First Polish Army showed political sense in the Soviet High Command. Poles had the honor of taking Warsaw; their numbers being insufficient for the job, Zhukov’s Russians encircled the city twenty-five miles out and cut German communications, while the First Polish stormed the city itself. Poles formed the spearhead that broke into Pomerania and took the Kolberg naval base; Poles and Russians took Danzig, the Poles taking the city center and raising a Polish flag over the town hall. These victories had for Poles historic meaning, for Germans and Poles have contested that seacoast a thousand years. Meanwhile the Second Polish Army, newly recruited in liberated Poland, moved from training camps to garrison duty in all large Polish cities, all of which were entrusted from the moment of liberation to the Poles. Two months later the Second Polish helped storm the Niesse and were among the first of Zhukov’s forces in Berlin. This was their right; the war had begun with Hitler’s aggression against their land.

This great drive liberated Western Poland so swiftly and in such manner that the Germans had time for very little destruction. The great exception was Warsaw; here General Bor’s uprising, staged prematurely and uncoordinated with the Russian advance the previous summer, had provoked complete destruction of the Polish capital, before the advance which I describe began. When Warsaw was liberated, people began to return to their homes from all directions. They found only heaps of rubble. All streets were blocked by fallen buildings. Town hall and opera house were fragments against the sky. Fine cathedrals, palaces, memorials of Chopin and Copernicus, were only scrap and memory. There was no water, no electricity, no gas; basements and sewers were clogged with corpses. On January 19, two days after the city’s liberation, President Beirut reviewed the Polish Army in the midst of the ruins, announced intent to rebuild Warsaw as the capital and called on all the Polish land to help. Several thousand people had already returned to live in cellars; they gathered around the tribune and cheered. Somewhere in that wintry ruin a bunch of flowers had been found for a small girl to give to Beirut.

The drive that I watched liberate Poland halted at the Oder, established bridgeheads and built up supplies for the assault on Berlin. This began April 18.

“Nobody who was there will ever forget that dawn on the Oder,” wrote Karmen, Soviet camerareporter, in Izvestia. “With thousands of guns roaring, the whole Soviet land moved on the enemy’s capital over a score of roads.” Other reporters noted that the roads were lined with cherry trees in bloom and waving birches; that the Poles went over the Oder drinking toasts with river water. Six days later, Red Army artillery had Friedrichstrasse as target. Karmen noted the hour; it was 8:30 April 22, 1945.

All Soviet writers mention the numbers of Russian, Polish and Yugoslav slaves that poured from German factories. Often the troops dislodged the enemy slowly to avoid killing their own people. In a typical case the Germans were firing from the roof of a large factory that made silk for parachutes. Suddenly a crowd of Russian women rushed from the factory to freedom, and embraced the arriving troops.

One old woman asked everyone. “My little dears, which is the road to Orel?”

The soldiers smiled. “We’ll send you, Grandma.” They put her on a truck for the rear.

IX. The Second Rebuilding

In Moscow, that last week of April recalled a popular song that had always seemed too slushy: “When the lights go on again all over the world.” The facts surpassed the song. Blackout restrictions were removed April 30 to prepare for May-Day. People poured into the streets and went from square to square, admiring the bright electric globes they had not seen for four years. Men walked the streets all night to demonstrate that curfew was over. Everyone left windows unshaded, not caring that dining and dressing were in public view.

At the May-Day demonstration people spoke of the last time a parade had been held in the Red Square, on November 7, 1941, when German guns roared in the suburbs and Stalin had given confidence by reviewing the troops in the Square. Now, the Red Army fought in Berlin suburbs and Moscow had stripped herself of the garb of war and donned the garb of May-Day—red flags and streamers and portraits of leaders. The huge ruby stars blazed again at night over the Kremlin; garlands of light again traced the streets and the bridges over the Moscow River.

In Berlin, the “Cease Fire” came at 3:00 PM, May 2; the news reached Moscow in early evening, climaxing the two-day holiday. The citadel of Nazi-fascism had fallen; from east and west, the armies of the United Nations—Russians, Americans, British—flooded the German land. Colored salutes of rockets flamed into Moscow skies and were answered by fireworks in the streets. People went to bed exhausted and happy, knowing that they would awaken to problems of a new epoch—the repair of devastation, the establishing of peace.

Devastation was heavy. Twenty-five million people were homeless, over 1,700 towns and 27,000 villages largely or wholly destroyed. Some 38,500 miles of railway were torn up, far more than enough to encircle the earth at the equator. Ninety percent of the Donbas mines were wrecked and flooded. The great Dnieper Dam was gone and the industries around it; rapids had reappeared in the river and navigation had ceased. Seven million horses, seventeen million head of cattle, twenty million pigs had been slaughtered or taken. More than three thousand industrial plants had to be rebuilt.

Worst of all was the loss of manpower. The number of dead has been variously given, from seven to twenty million. If excess mortality among civilians is counted, there were twenty million and more. Every family had losses. Of eight male heads of families among my husband’s brothers and sisters, three were gone, including my husband; none of them were counted among war casualties, for all were civilians who died as a direct result of war. The Soviet Union’s losses went far beyond those of all the Allies together; they were a hundred times as great as those of the United States. There were villages in the south where no men were left for young women to marry, where many fatherless children remained from the occupation, and fatherless youth ran wild.

Reconstruction began before victory. In the previous chapter we saw how tractor stations moved back and plowed to the sound of retreating guns. The Stalingrad Tractor Plant had been wrecked, but within three months after the Germans were driven from Stalingrad, tanks again rolled from its conveyors. The rebuilding of the Dnieper Dam and the industries around it began in 1944, while the armies still fought on the borders of Russia.

When victory came, the Soviet Union’s planned economy switched to peace production without a jolt. A new Five-Year Plan proposed to complete by 1949 the restoration of the liberated areas, and to raise their industrial output fifteen percent above the prewar output by 1950. This meant starting all over again in many places, as once they had started after the Revolution. But whereas, in 1921, they built on the ruins of a feudal and capitalist economy, now they built on foundations of socialist economy which, though battered, had withstood the war. They had that great base of industry and farms in the Urals and Siberia, whose amazing wartime growth was now revealed. From 1940 to 1943, electric power in the Urals had doubled; iron production had more than doubled. This second rebuilding, moreover, had trained personnel to start with, from the economy they had built before.

Moscow snapped with speed into postwar building. Deputies to the Victory Session of the Supreme Soviet appeared in the streets. The November holidays celebrated, as usual, production records. Stalingrad Tractor Plant, converted to peace production, announced Praetor No. 3,000 as a holiday gift. Sevastopol, another almost obliterated city, announced that its power plant and largest shipyard operated again. Leningrad celebrated the restoration of its biggest shipyards. Meantime, in the ground swell of the coming elections, called for February, 1946, deputies everywhere reported to constituents on war records, telling what they had done that entitled them to re-election in the first national elections since 1939.

The building of the postwar world was not so simple. “Nothing guides Russian foreign policy so much as a desire for peace with the United States,” said General Dwight D. Eisenhower to a House Committee of the U. S. Congress, in November, 1945. His words were accurate; I know, for I was there. I saw the crowds in victory celebrations toss Americans and British into the air in typical tribute. All Russians I knew hoped passionately that, with Hitler beaten, the War Allies might continue friendship into long years of peace.

They knew, of course—they had known all through the war— that there were elements in America that sabotaged the alliance, and even some who would rather see Hitler win. For two years, while Russians perished by millions, they had watched their Allies delay the promised “second front” in the West. Molotov had discussed it with Roosevelt in Washington, in May, 1942; American headlines had said it was “promised” for autumn of that year. Churchill, while refusing to promise, had given to Molotov an “aide-memoire” which read: “We are making preparations for a landing on the continent in August or September, 1942.” Month after month, the Russians, bearing the brunt of war, had waited. The Anglo-American landing did not come until June 6, 1944, when the Russian army had already liberated most of the USSR and was driving across Poland. Many Russians had bitterly wondered whether the Allies delayed so that Russia might take the loss, and landed at last in Normandy because they could not afford to let Russians take Berlin alone.

These suspicions died when strategy was planned together, when Roosevelt and Churchill met with Stalin in Teheran, and then in Yalta, to arrange the end of the war and the postwar world. Churchill in his history of the war, tells of the almost naive toast that Stalin drank at Yalta “to the firmness of our Three Power Alliance,” saying “May it be strong and stable. May we be as frank as possible. … Allies should not deceive each other. … In the history of diplomacy I know of no such close alliance of three great powers as this.”

“I had never expected that he could be so expansive,” comments Churchill, the hard-boiled imperialist. Stalin was voicing the hunger of all the Soviet people in those words. Russians in their hour of victory really hoped that their long isolation was ended; that their terrible war losses had bought for them the friendship of America and Britain, with long generations of peace.

Week by week, I saw that hope die in their faces. The change began with our atom-bomb on Hiroshima. Fear came back into eyes that had hardly yet seen peace. After the fear came thought: Why had America slain a quarter of a million people in two Japanese cities, when Japan was already suing for peace? Was Washington monopolizing victory, freezing Russia out of the Far-Eastern settlement? In the next days, two American moves, one in the East and one in the West, made Russians say, in disillusion: “The Atom Bomb diplomacy begins.”

In the East, Washington not only took sole charge of the armistice with Japan, freezing both Russia and China out of the arrangements, but made supplementary terms with the Japanese generals, by which they kept on fighting the Chinese Communists until America’s $300,000,000 air-lift could bring Chiang Kai-shek’s troops north to accept the surrender. In the West, Washington ordered Bulgaria to add to her cabinet some men of America’s choice, if she wished to be recognized. Russians were astounded. “We don’t tell France, Belgium, Holland to change their cabinets,” they said. “Bulgaria is our sphere.”

The blow next fell on Russia’s own reconstruction. During the war they had been led to expect a big “Reconstruction Loan” from America to rebuild the ruins incurred in the joint war. Donald Nelson, who went to Moscow, in 1943, as Roosevelt’s emissary, talked of six billion dollars as the right amount. Other American representatives confirmed this in following years. Russians took it seriously; they were hungry, cold. Then Roosevelt died, and Truman stopped even Lend Lease aid so suddenly that Russia-bound shipments were taken off ships in New York harbor. When Russia, listing her losses, asked for “the first billion” of that loan, the State Department “lost” the letter for nearly a year. Many Russians died of hunger in that victory year, for lack of that loan.

Soon, it became clear that none of the ruined nations of East Europe could hope for reconstruction loans from Washington, unless they remade their governments to suit the U.S.A. To some extent they were willing to do this. Bulgaria changed its cabinet at Washington’s order and postponed an election when America protested its form. All of the East European nations hoped for American loans and were willing to make adjustments. They offered industrial concessions to foreign capital; they were ready to postpone socialism, as Lenin did in the days of NEP. Nor did Moscow object to this; Moscow was not at all anxious to take on the economic problems of East Europe, in addition to her own. If these lands could get American loans by concessions to capitalism, Moscow was not disposed to interfere.

In the first years after victory, Moscow handled affairs in East Europe with a loose hand. Americans supposed the arriving Red Army would at once “sovietize” these eastern nations, nationalize industry, collectivize farms. American correspondents were amazed to discover that the Red Army did not even stop King Michael’s jailing of Communists; they called it Romania’s affair. When I was in Poland in 1945, it was “treason” to urge collective farming, lest this alienate the peasant. Moscow intended to have “friendly nations” on her border but any of Moscow’s acts in 1945–46—the long tolerance of King Michael’s brutally reactionary regime in Romania, the lack of Russian support to Communists fighting in Greece, the calling off of Bulgarian elections because of an American protest, the acceptance of three Poles from London into the Warsaw cabinet—indicated that Stalin would make many concessions in East Europe to keep his wartime friendship with Britain and the United States.

This was the logical growth of the doctrine of “socialism in one country.” For twenty years the USSR, desperately busy with building, had ever less concern with revolutions abroad. The early “dark Russia” that looked for salvation to the German working-class had become a great power, holding its example of socialism a sufficient role. Its chief aim in foreign affairs had not been the promotion of revolutions but to keep the capitalist world from combining against it in war. When this was avoided, when Stalin found himself in alliance with Churchill and Roosevelt, he had furthered the dissolution of the Communist International. In the Teheran Conference, that early doctrine of socialism in one country had developed into the thesis of “peaceful co-existence with capitalist states.” At Yalta, Stalin had gone further, conceiving the dream that the three great Allies, continuing their “frank friendship,” might together stabilize world peace.

It was a strange dream for a seasoned Bolshevik, that world peace might be built on a partnership of the world’s first socialist state with the two greatest imperialist powers. But the United Nations was built on it. Moscow’s policy in East Europe was also built on it in the first postwar years.

The concessions Moscow made were not enough for America. Roosevelt might have understood them, for he was a world statesman who knew history. But with the accession of Harry S. Truman to the presidency, all that was narrow and grasping in American imperialism found its tool in a small-town politician, with the A-Bomb monopoly in his hand and with no historic sense. Truman ignored—and probably did not even know—the fact that Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria had been in Russia’s sphere of influence a hundred years; that they owed their very existence as states to Russia’s war with Turkey a century ago. In the time between the two world wars, their rulers, being despotic monarchs, were anti-Soviet, but their peasant peoples never lost their love for Russia. So when the Red Army drove out the German armies, the pro-Nazi officialdom lied and new regimes arose that began to fight on the Russian side. Washington—in the person of Truman—saw only subversion in this.

Washington, which had never accepted the “anti-fascist” nature of the war, fought everywhere the anti-fascist front that emerged in all liberated lands. In Western Europe, American pressure succeeded in splitting this front and driving Communists out of the participation in governments to which their votes entitled them. This American aim did not succeed in the East. All these nations followed a common pattern, based on their own experience in the war. All had big landlords who collaborated with the Nazis and who fled with the German army; this facilitated the long over-due division of land among the peasants. In all those nations, the Germans had a stranglehold on big industry; their flight left industries ownerless as well as ruined. Nationalization of big industry became not only easy but actually necessary, unless Americans would take concessions, which they wouldn’t. In all these nations, the war had smashed and discredited former political leaders, leaving only one line-up—those who had collaborated with the Nazis and those who had resisted. Hence, governments first arose by coalition of small splinter parties, that included everyone who had fought Germans. American Embassies, however, cultivated disgruntled former leaders and demanded their inclusion in the governments. Sometimes, East European nations yielded, hoping for American favor. To Washington’s view, they never yielded enough.

American loans, which all East Europe hoped for, did not materialize. East Europe had to depend for economic aid on war-cxhausted Russia. This led to tensions over goods and prices, for of nothing was there enough. It led to a firmer hand from Moscow, doling out the goods. As the cold war policy of Washington deepened, Moscow’s policy in East Europe changed.

The sign of the change was the sudden brutal expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Communist fellowship, for demanding the type of “national independence” that had been gospel for all East Europe only two years earlier. Stalin’s personal antagonism to Tito and Yugoslavia’s vociferous insistence on more industrialization than Moscow felt able to supply, played a role, but an underlying reason for the change lay not in Yugoslavia but in Harry S. Truman. After continuously needling the Russians, he had announced the “Truman Doctrine,” and that he was sending troops into Greece and Turkey to “contain Communism.” This out-flanking of East Europe by an increasingly hostile America had the natural result. Moscow tightened control of East Europe, sought to weld it into a firm military bloc, and damned Yugoslavia when she objected.

Here is no space to review the long talc of “get tough” policies with which Washington shattered Stalin’s dream—which was also Roosevelt’s—of a long friendship between the USSR and the USA. Truman insulted Molotov on his way to the first United Nations Congress in San Francisco. America made the first U.N. Assembly downgrade the USSR for “aggression” because Soviet troops were slow in leaving Iran, though American, British, and French troops stayed on uncensurcd in many parts of the world. The “Berlin blockade,” which Moscow began as a temporary measure to protect East Germany’s economy from a flood of new currency printed in the American zone, was turned by Washington into a long demonstration of America’s superfluity in planes and supplies. The “Baruch Plan” for control of the atom, announced by Washington as a “peace” gesture, was seen by every Russian as an attempt to take ownership of Soviet natural resources through a U.N. Authority—controlled by Washington.

Insult seemed added to injury when American commentators more and more grudged Russia “the great territory grabbed in the war.” To Russians, this was their own territory, lost in the first world war, only partially regained in the second. The Russians had lost or ceded 330,000 square miles in the first war, and regained 250,000 in the second, a net loss of 80,000 square miles, which roughly covered the territory ceded to Finland and Poland. Russians had not grudged it when the world war turned both Atlantic and Pacific into “American lakes,” but when these same Americans, who had taken all the oceans and who were building bases on their islands and shores, called Russia greedy for taking back what she formerly owned, this rankled.

Inside the USSR, the Truman doctrine of “containment,” and the constant baiting of Russia by an America for whose friendship Russia had longed, bred an irritated, excessive patriotism, which denounced as “cosmopolitanism”—and almost as treason—any belief that any land but Russia had ever invented anything good. This sick nationalism grew as defense against the bitter knowledge that they had paid more than all their allies together for the joint victory, and that victory had brought them, not a partnership in building world peace, but a new hostile encirclement by American bases which still had an atom-bomb monopoly, and the taunt of “aggressor” for any expansion other than their own.

In the same period, there was a growth of anti-Semitism, which I cannot yet fully analyze. It was never official; the law that made anti-Semitism a crime was never revoked. Yet many acts took place, not only by individuals but by government institutions, against Jews and Jewish culture. These were always illegal and hence evasive. It was hard to know if the reasons given were true. When the Yiddish press and theater were discontinued in 1948, the reason given was that “there was insufficient demand for it.” Since the Jewish population had been evacuated from the German-occupied area and scattered all over Siberia, and had not entirely returned, this “reason” may have been at least partially true. But the excessive Russian nationalism of the time no doubt contributed. In 1949, Moscow News, the English language paper, was also discontinued and its staff arrested.

The causes o£ anti-Semitism were many. When the government evacuated citizens from areas invaded by Hitler, deliberate preference was given to Jews. The reason was sound; Jews would surely be killed by the Germans while Russians had a better chance to survive. This policy saved some two million Jews from death, but did not endear them to the Russians left behind. It increased the proportion of Jews among the refugees all over the eastern areas; refugees are a strain on a local population, and never enjoyed. Moreover, die accession of territory that had formerly been East Poland, added a population in which anti-Semitism was strong. Government circles were probably influenced by the rise of Israel and the tremendous demonstration of Jews greeting the arrival of the Israeli ambassador. It seemed to indicate, at least superficially, a dual citizenship.

How much discrimination there was against Jews in educational institutions is hard to tell. It was never general but certainly there was some. It was evasive and struggles always developed against it. My best friend felt for a time undermined in her university job, because she refused to yield to the anti-Semitism which seemed to be promoted by the Party secretary at the university. One day she came home exultant. “Now I know the Party doesn’t stand for anti-Semitism,” she said. “They removed A. … He was in charge of universities here for the Central Committee, and was behind much of this anti-Semitism.” This anecdote shows the confusion that existed. Anti-Semitism was sometimes promoted by people high in office, but always with evasion. The basic law that made it illegal, was never attacked, challenged, or revoked.

The disease of anti-cosmopolitanism passed, and anti-Semitism with it. Not by law or decree, but because of three facts. In 1950, the USSR reached the highest production in its history, with comparative abundance of goods. The USSR also attained the A-Bomb—the threat of America’s monopoly was gone. And, also in 1950, the Chinese People’s Republic was established in Peking, and at once made alliance with the USSR. The sick, excessive patriotism bred by the cold war could not survive close contact with an eastern, equal ally, whose inventions began a thousand years before Russia’s, and whose present intelligence and achievements even the most successful Russians had to acclaim.

The doctrine that each nation would find its own road to socialism, which had been briefly announced in the first postwar years for East Europe, and then buried under the nationalism of the cold war, again appeared, this time to stay. The thirty-year nightmare of “capitalist encirclement” which Stalin had hoped to escape by alliance with Roosevelt and Churchill, was ended by alliance with Peking. American air-bases still threatened the Soviet land, but from a distant ring; they could no longer “contain Russia.” And the Soviet’s strengthened economy and developments in A-Bombs and H-Bombs already forecast that military stalemate between East and West in which trade and economic aid became the decisive weapons.

One other event, in 1950, hastened this development. Washington dragged the United Nations into a war in Korea which all Asia saw as an attempt to intervene in the New China. From that war, American world leadership began to decline, first in Asia and then in Europe. The Soviet people glimpsed at last, not only prosperity but peace. Even perhaps a long peace, based not on alliance with Washington and London but on the great hunger for peace and prosperity among the ex-colonial and newly independent peoples of the world.

So the wheel came full circle. The nation that, in 1927, withdrew from promoting world revolution, and isolated itself to build socialism in a single hostilely encircled land, again began a world crusade. Not for world revolution but for world peace. Not for peace “by situations of strength,” as the Dulleses of imperialism always declare, but for peace through active pressure of the world’s peoples, through governments and over the heads of governments. The USSR became known for its “peace offensives.” “The Kremlin’s peace offensives present difficult problems for the West,” said the N. Y. Times, December 28, 1952. Three times, in 1952, Stalin had shaken the stock market by insisting “co-existence is possible.” The USSR also became the inspirer of peace petitions which demanded the outlawing of the Atom-Bomb; the USSR, as a state, worked for this through diplomacy. The citizens of the USSR, mingling again among the nations, worked for it through Stockholm Peace Petitions, Five-Power Peace Pacts, the Partisans of Peace. On these petitions, they got signatures from almost half the world’s adult population!

In Stalin’s last years, this policy was supported, not only by diplomacy and propaganda but by the Soviet Union’s growing economic power. In April, 1952, and against the American-imposed blockade of trade with the Soviet bloc, a World Economic Conference was called in Moscow, for worldwide trade without discussion of ideologies. The only man among the 400-odd delegates who violated the unanimously adopted rule against ideological discussion, was a man from San Francisco who insisted on declaring: “Free enterprise is best.” The Russians seem only to have grinned; they could afford to. For, as Howard K. Smith that year noted: “The standard of living in Moscow has improved beyond all recognition.”

The Soviet delegates moved to their aim with businesslike smoothness. The Associated Press noted that “Mr. Nesterov, president of the Russian Chamber of Commerce, picked out the weak points in the economy of other nations and offered trade with the USSR as the solution.” “They offered,” said the Wall Street Journal, April 15, “to buy British and Japanese goods that are a drug on the market; to supply coarse grains, timber and raw materials that west Asia and Europe badly need. They offered structural steel to India. … They offered to accept pay in foreign currencies. … They offered barter. … All this sounds tempting.” The NY Times noted, April 20th: “It hit the West at its most vulnerable point, for unemployment has risen in Europe … due to absence of markets.”

The USSR in other words, offered to help the capitalist world stay on its feet a little longer. Why? To relieve tensions, to keep the boat of the world from rocking, while the people of the world made up their minds at leisure between economic systems. The Russians, at long last, could afford to wait.

Stalin’s last public work was the fifty-page report he wrote for the Nineteenth Party Congress, in October, 1952. There had been a gap of thirteen years since the previous Congress in 1939; the USSR had been all but destroyed and again rebuilt. “The Congress assembled in a mood of highest confidence that the Soviet bloc can meet and withstand any trials the future may bring,” wrote Harrison Salisbury in the NY Times, Georgi Malenkov replaced Stalin as key-noter; the Soviet people took this as a sign that Stalin was building up Malenkov as successor, that he prepared to pass on his job.

Stalin himself published a report on “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR,” a thesis on the world situation and the way it might be expected to develop. He said that the economic result of the second world war had been “the collapse of the unified world market” and its replacement by “two parallel and opposing world markets.” The Soviet bloc, forced by the Western-imposed blockade, had strengthened its economy, filled in gaps and had now “a world market of its own.” The capitalist world market, narrowed by its own rejection of Soviet trade, would narrow still more, and this would increase antagonisms within the capitalist world. The USSR, he said “will not attack the capitalists and they know it.” This he had said before, but he added for the first time the prediction that the capitalist nations “will fear to attack the USSR, lest this destroy capitalism.” Therefore, he deduced, war is more likely between capitalist nations than between capitalists and the Soviet bloc.

This prediction, made while the McCarthy extreme of cold war still raged in Washington, seemed fantastic to many people. But Stalin saw symptoms of that military stalemate which was to produce the Geneva Summit Conference. And already the rise of the neutral bloc in Asia and of China’s influence in it, presaged for him the Bandung Conference, yet to come.

Lenin’s last testament had been an analysis for his comrades of the traits of different party leaders. Stalin’s was an analysis of trends among the earth’s nations.

So far had his country traveled in the thirty years in which he led.

X. Stalin and After

“Leaders come and go but the people remain.

Only the people are immortal”

These were Stalin’s words, addressing the Soviet metal workers, in October, 1937. In late February, 1953, Stalin was gone and the people remained. His place in history was in their hands.

In Moscow, women stood in snow around the loud-speakers, red-eyed. The Associated Press cabled the comment of a young house-wife:

“Can one imagine the steppe without its wide expanse?

The Volga without water?

Russia without Stalin?”

The AP correspondent heard the news in his auto; tears ran down his chauffeur’s cheeks. “Excuse it,” he said. “He was a man … that time he led the battle for Moscow from a hut near the front.” Somewhat later came news that prisoners in a convict camp in the east exulted, shouting that, with the “Old One” dead, freedom drew near. Stalin had built himself into all the life of Russia; he had been an essential part of its achievements and its evils for nearly thirty years.

Around the world, nations and individuals hastened to classify themselves by their attitudes. Peking newspapers were black-bordered. Flags flew at half-mast in France by order of the Ministry of Defense; the National Assembly stood in homage as Herriot saluted “the leader … who participated in our liberation from the Nazis.” In Wall Street, the stock market dropped a billion dollars; it recovered in two days. Harry Truman photographed himself for history by saying: “I am always sorry to hear of the passing of an acquaintance.”

Much American comment was less courteous. “Stalin’s ticket to hell is validated… The best we can hope is an internal war for the succession,” was the pious comment of the Los Angeles Times. President Eisenhower moved to implement this brutal aspiration. After official condolences which headlines stressed as “only official,” the administration was announced to be “preparing an aggressive effort to exploit the Soviet’s situation—to use all tools of propaganda, and more, to encourage strife within Russia and split off its satellites.”[10] American troops in Korea used the five minutes silence observed throughout the Communist world to “launch a big barrage.”

Western Europe was shocked by America’s reaction. Europeans, whatever their politics, respected the mourning of a great people for a leader who, more than any other, brought Europe to its joint victory over the Nazis. One recalled, by contrast with America’s attitude, how Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death was met by Moscow. Molotov went at once to the American Embassy at two in the morning and surprised Ambassador Walter Bedell Smith by his open grief. Even the hotel waiters served Americans with shocked sympathy, all mourning the man whose world vision had sought, with Stalin, a stable world peace. Stalin’s death gave a chance for America, by showing courtesy, to heal old wounds. But Washington’s attitude showed malevolence.

All agreed—the mourners and those who insulted them—that Stalin was important. Even the Los Angeles Times found it necessary to give five pages daily for several days to details of his illness and death. In 1924, they would not have given five lines. I know, for I wrote for Hearst’s International Magazine in April, 1924, the first article on Stalin ever published in America. “Stalin has no government post,” I wrote, “but as far as Lenin has any successor, it will be Stalin.” I had been told this by Russian Communists. The words sank into a well in America; nobody cared. But now, twenty-nine years later, Howard K. Smith said from Europe: “Stalin did more to change the world in the first half of this century than any other man who lived in it.” Let that stand as his worldwide epitaph.

He built up Russia to a great power, to the world’s first socialist state. Thus, he also speeded and helped give form to the rising nationalist movements in Asia, especially in China, and to the movements for a “welfare state” in the West. “He altered the West’s whole attitude to the workingman,” H. K. Smith noted. For all ideas of government planning, of “New Deal” in the USA and “welfare state” in Britain, arose in competition with Russia’s Five-Year Planning, to keep the 1929 world economic crisis from producing revolution.

Thus, in all lands, whether for him or against him, Stalin created history.

In later years, people in the USSR, looking back at their mourning over Stalin’s death, thought they recalled that the grief had been accompanied by a feeling that Russia had come to the end of an epoch and a new time was beginning in which many things would be different—especially, that lite would be freer than under the “old man.” Whether they really recall it or only transfer backward their present thinking, it was true. An epoch had ended; Stalin had to go with it. Always the people’s life moves forward by deaths of individuals whose job is done. Moses saw the promised land but was not allowed to enter. Stalin predicted the future but could not have led it. He had too much history on his back.

I do not think anyone can read his last work on Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, and think that Stalin’s intellect had grown senile. Details of the analysis may be attacked, but it was a forecast by a man who saw the world clearly and as a whole. He saw that the years in which he built socialism in one country were ended; that socialism was abroad now among one-third of the earth’s people; that this changed all the questions and all the answers.

His intellect grasped this, but the rest of him could not come through. The rigidity of age, which comes to all, was upon him. Despite his keen glance into a different future, his instincts and habits remained in the era of “capitalist encirclement,” when isolation and suspicion were his first defense. These habits had hardened; with age and power he had grown more suspicious, more dictatorial, more convinced that opposition to his lightest word was counter-revolution. Some people will diagnose this as paranoia; I do not think the term correct. I would say rather: “Power corrupts; no man in our time—or perhaps in any time—has held such power so long as Stalin.” His time had come to go, while yet his brain was keen and his nation moving forward, before the tests came which a new era would impose on a character no longer flexible. For the signs were ominous—that fantastic doctors’ plot and the credence he apparently gave it, was like a return to the madness of 1937.

These were the reasons why the Soviet people, even in mourning their leader, knew that their time had come to pass beyond him into a new age.

In less than a month after Stalin’s death, the “peace offensives” which the world had learned co expect as routine from Moscow, increased until more than one American newspaper called them “the peace blitz.” There seemed to be an all-out drive by both Moscow and Peking to compose their differences with the West. On March 22, the Moscow Radio repeated several times: “All outstanding issues &hellip can be settled by peaceful means.” On March 28, Moscow proclaimed wide amnesty for prisoners throughout the USSR. On Match 29, Peking offered to exchange sick and wounded prisoners in Korea on practically America’s terms. Two days later, Peking offered to settle the entire prisoner of war issue on terms close to the Indian Plan, which the U.N. had already accepted. Within three days appeared three other conciliatory headlines: “Russians Yield on Disarmament,” “Molotov Pledges Aid to Korean Truce,” and “Russia Extends Good Will to Germany,” a story of eased traffic tensions. This was climaxed, April 4, by the news “Moscow Releases Nine Doctors; Declares Them Innocent.”

By this time the blind, the deaf and the dumb knew that something was happening in Moscow. When had any government ever admitted: “Those confessions we announced some months ago were framed?” “There is a feeling in Washington that the Russian peace offensive is the most significant event since the second world war,” declared Newsweek.

On August 8, 1953, Moscow announced that the USSR had the H-Bomb. American radio programs went wild with hour-on-the-hour descriptions of how the Russians would come to annihilate our cities, “probably over the pole,” and “it might be tomorrow dawn.” The Pentagon talked preventive war: “We cannot permit Russia to stockpile H-Bombs,” and: “We must have action” to “stop Russia’s arms-drive within the year.” But Moscow calmly changed some tank factories to tractor works, renewed diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia and cut the cost of consumer goods for the sixth time. To the capitalist world this steady calm was more frightening than the H-Bomb; for it was based on the fact that Russia’s output of consumer goods per capita had already passed that of Italy and was approaching that of France.”[11]

Peace continued to gain through 1954 by the signing of the Indo-China Truce in a Geneva Conference which China attended and which Dulles tried to prevent. At the year’s end, however, Washington’s War Party had some successes that worried the world. The agreement to re-arm Germany, which most of Europe feared, was finally pushed through the French and Italian parliaments by American pressure. NATO announced that its future strategy would be based on atomic weapons; all Europe saw in this the inevitable doom of Europe in any future war, whichever side might win. Finally, in the last days of January, 1955, the U.S. Congress gave President Eisenhower the green light to make any kind of war he chose against China. With power to destroy the world left to one man’s discretion, it seemed that our planet might be rushing into its final war.

Moscow reacted with the most effective “Peace Drive” it had ever unleashed. This began with the swift conclusion of the Austrian Peace Treaty, whidi had been ten years delayed by disagreements between East and West. In early April, the Austrian Chancellor was invited to Moscow; in a week he returned with a treaty in which Russia made so many concessions that, despite some dismay in Washington, all the Powers signed on May 15. The Soviet’s chief demand was that Austria remain neutral in any East-West dispute; this the Austrians were pleased to do. The same month, Moscow made another “disarmament offer,” based this time on a previous Anglo-French proposal. It didn’t succeed; Washington turned it down.

The Russians didn’t stop with Austria. Premier Bulganin and Party Secretary Khrushchev next made a trip to Belgrade, where they apologized rather excessively to Tito for the unhappy break with Yugoslavia. By this unusual, but cheerful, loss of face, the Soviets gained, in a highly strategic position in southeast Europe, another neutral state, whose friendship was likely to grow. By late spring of 1955, it was clear that Moscow was building a neutral belt across Europe which could act to prevent border provocations between East and West. Pressures within Germany grew to achieve German unity, not by re-arming but by a similar neutrality.

In these same months of April and May, 1955, the representatives of twenty-nine Asian and African nations met in Bandung, Indonesia, and unanimously adopted a program for mutual aid. For the first time in history, the representatives of 1,400,000,000 people, the long submerged majority of humanity, gained a voice. Here came great neutralist states—India, Burma, Indonesia—on whose initiative the conference was undertaken. Here came feudal Arab states, jungle peoples of Africa, industrial Japan and sundry small states on Washington’s pay-roll, trying to stir friction by attacking Communists. Here came, also, the Communist Chou En-lai, prime minister of China, who refused to get angry, but said: “I did not come to quarrel; I came for the success of all the people here.” Due to his statesmanship and that of India’s Nehru, all these very diverse peoples unanimously agreed: 1) to trade with each other and give economic aid to each other; 2) to exchange information and students; 3) to work for a universal membership in the United Nations; 4) to oppose the production, experimentation or use of the A-Bomb and H-Bomb.

The Soviet Union was not invited to Bandung; it was an Asian-African show. But the Soviet Big Chiefs, after their visit to Tito, flew off to India, Burma and Afghanistan, and were very well received. The crowds that met them in Calcutta were larger than had come out even for Gandhi’s funeral. The Indians liked the Russian informality. They liked it when Bulganin, finding the garlands they hung on him too heavy, tossed some on the necks of his hosts. They liked it when Khrushchev grabbed a peasant’s sickle and showed that he, too, could reap. They especially liked it that distinguished foreigners adopted Gandhi caps and the Indian style of greeting, hands folded as if in prayer, instead of the Western handshake. “Why has no Westerner done this before?” they asked. The answer seemed clear. No Westerner had seen Indians as equals or copied in courtesy their manners in their own land. The Russians seemed to do it naturally.

The trip resulted in various trade treaties and in a joint declaration signed by Nehru and the Russians, which declared that China must have its “rightful place” in the United Nations and its “rights to Formosa”; that A- and H-Bombs should be “unconditionally prohibited”; that the road to peace lay “not in military alliances but in economic and cultural interchange.” By that signing, coming after the Bandung declaration, two-thirds of the human race were recorded for those views.

The drive for these policies was so effective that the chief issue of the British elections that spring became: “Has Eden done enough to keep us out of thermonuclear war?” To help Eden win the election, and also because of the torrent of letters Eisenhower was getting, the United States finally agreed to Four-Power Summit talks, which Washington had refused for ten years. They were set for July, 1955, in Geneva.

Meantime, the United Nations held its Tenth Anniversary Session in San Francisco at the end o£ June. What was planned as a routine birthday, became a world peace rally through three pressures. The demand of the world’s people for survival in an atomic age was focused on the U.N. The Bandung Conference, with a larger membership than the U.N., still sought its aims through U.N. channels. Lastly, the USSR sent its foreign minister, Molotov, with a delegation of eighty people. The importance Moscow thus saw in the session made Washington also take it seriously. Both Dulles and Eisenhower went; the presence of all these chiefs led to a discussion of the Geneva plans.

Suddenly, the press which had insisted that the Big Four meeting had nothing to do with the United Nations, noted that the world’s hopes and prayers surrounded the coming Summit Conference through the U.N. speeches. Washington’s tendency to bypass the U.N. was thus turned backward; technical preparation for the Geneva meeting was put in U.N. hands. The United Nations’ prestige reached an all-time high, not through its own achievements but through the hopes of the world, channeled by Molotov and the Bandung nations.

At last, for the first time in ten years, the Big Chiefs met in Geneva in late July. Friendly talk between Eisenhower and Bulganin sent startled hope around the earth. “The cold war is buried,” exulted the Journal de Geneva. “It is a mortal blow to the cold war,” del Vayo in The Nation, agreed.

Dulles summed it up cynically to a reporter: “Well, we didn’t give much away.” Bulganin summed it up historically to the Soviet Congress: “It relaxed international tensions … marked a turning-point in our relations with the West.” Columbia Broadcasting System summed it up factually: “Geneva settled nothing … was never intended to settle anything. … They only agreed to try to agree. Nevertheless, it may identify a new period for history.” All these summings-up were true. Neither side “gave anything away.” But both sides for the first time in years discussed policies in polite words. Both recognized openly that their policies could not be attained through thermonuclear war, since this would destroy both nations. Both sides were thus, at least for the time, committed to seek their aims through other means.

Thus, the Cold War collapsed. It had been based on the Atom Bomb monopoly in America’s hands; it had begun with the fall of the bomb on Hiroshima. But the advance of the USSR in economic power and in A- and H-bombs, the rise of a new China allied to the Soviets, and the rise of the neutral block in Asia, brought the Cold War, after ten years, to its ending. The recognition at the Summit of the atomic stalemate removed the weapon of the Cold War.

Moscow proclaimed faith in the Cold War’s end by giving the Porkhala naval base back to Finland, on the ground that it was no longer needed, and by cutting at once 640,000 men from the armed forces, and another 1,200,000 men in early 1956. Washington made no similar announcement, but the big military programs of NATO and SEATO withered from within. Everywhere, it began to be admitted that economic, rather than military competition, was the order of the new day.

In February, 1956, the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR met to assess the new period in history. Khrushchev’s keynote report listed an impressive summary of Soviet gains. Industrial output had grown 85 percent in five years; it had been multiplied twentyfold since 1928, when Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan began. Agriculture was not satisfactory; its shortages had, however, been met by the call to patriots to open virgin lands in Kazakstan and Siberia. This calling of volunteers to develop the common wealth had come down from Lenin’s day; it still worked.

Correspondents noted that Khrushchev spoke as if Communism were an accepted “law of history.” Soviet leaders were not interested in overthrowing capitalism; to them it was already on its way out. They were concerned with making socialism work smoothly, raising living standards quickly, developing worldwide ties that could make peace secure. Items in the next Five-Year Plan included a 30 percent rise in real wages, a drop in working hours to a seven-hour day or a forty-hour week, free tuition, not only in elementary schools but through secondary schools and universities. Government would be somewhat decentralized. Already, in Azerbaidjan, the big oil industry was 80 percent owned by Azerbaidjan, instead of by the central government. Most important of all was the curbing of the political police, the steady widening of civil rights.

Most significant for the world was the estimate of the new world situation. It was declared that the period of building socialism in one country was ended, that it was replaced by a world system of socialist states, containing one-third of mankind. Through friendship of this socialist system with the neutral bloc, a “Peace Zone” could be formed, including two-thirds of the earth’s people, strong enough to hold the peace of the world. Wars were therefore declared “no longer inevitable.” A basic tenet of Marxism that capitalism inevitably produces war, was not denied. It was amended by the statement that the non-capitalist world might now be strong enough to prevent wars, if its strength was intelligently and flexibly applied.

It was furthermore stated that in the change from capitalism, socialism would not necessarily follow the path that Russia had taken. Each nation would find its own path and some perhaps through parliamentary forms. The thesis that socialism arose through armed uprising of workers was not denied; it was outgrown. New ways became possible because of the strength of socialism on a world scale. This thesis stated only what had already happened. None of the new socialist states had followed the Russian road. In East Europe, socialism had come through coalition governments. In China also, the Communists had had a coalition with Chiang Kai-shek, and when he broke it by launching civil war against them, they had won by coalition with the anti-Chiang forces, including even the “national capitalists.”

The recognition of these changes brought also recognition of the fact that the Stalin Era was over, that Stalinism, so long imposed as absolute, was the strategy of a past epoch and the time had come for new strategy and new ways. With this went an analysis and criticism of the past era, in which many speakers at the Congress joined.

Most of this criticism was restrained and useful. Foreign policy, it was held, had been too rigid and isolationist. The break with Yugoslavia had been a bad mistake. The role of neutral nations had not been properly appreciated. Some speakers criticized the conduct of the war. The most searching criticism concerned the arbitrary power of the political police which had condemned thousands of innocent people and trampled “Soviet democratic rights.” Blame for the evils was placed on “the cult of the individual,” i.e., the deification of Stalin, which, especially in the later years, had allowed one-man decisions to rule unchecked.

Thus far, the criticism, if surprising, was unsensational. But at the end of the Congress, Khrushchev made an off-record speech to delegates only. It was not released to the press; Khrushchev himself declared that it must not be. It was clearly a burst of emotion, caused perhaps by the recent perusal of die thousands of cases of injustice which had been reviewed in the previous three years. Months later, the U.S. State Department released what purports to be, and probably is, part of this off-record speech. The Soviet government neither denied it nor officially claimed it. From this one assumes that it contained too much fact to be denied, hut that it was not sufficiently balanced to be released as an official statement.

Throughout this book, I have used Khrushchev’s off-record speech as an exposé of great evils and have considered various parts of it in their proper places. I have not used it as final authority, for the evidence is not all in, nor has it been fully evaluated in relation to the conditions and time. It is not even clear whether Stalin ever knew of all the excesses which Khrushchev attributes to him by implication. One must take into account the fact that the State Department published it to discredit the Soviet Union, and that the document has had, very widely, that effect. I cannot take it as the final voice of the Soviet Union, since neither the Soviet government nor Khrushchev issued it as such.

No voice today can be final about the Stalin era. Stalin is one of those who are judged by long history, the character of whose work grows clearer as it recedes from view. What we know, at least, is that he set out in 1928 to build socialism in one country, a backward peasant land surrounded by a world of foes. When he began, Russia was peasant, illiterate: when he finished, it was the world’s second industrial power. Twice over he thus built it, once before the Hitler invasion and again upon ihe war’s ruin. That stands to his credit forever: he engineered that job.

He engineered ruthlessly, for he was born in a ruthless land and endured ruthlessness from childhood. He engineered suspiciously, for he had been five times exiled and must have been often betrayed. He condoned, and even authorized, outrageous acts of the political police against innocent people, but so far no evidence is produced that he consciously framed them. The outrages seem rather to have come from complex causes, among which were Stalin’s tendency to suspicion and the Central Committee’s tendency to rubber-stamp what Stalin said. Despite these crimes against individuals, evidence does not lack that Stalin’s assertion that “people” are the most precious element in any nation, was no hypocrisy. His days were spent in the careful removal of obstacles that hindered the valid dreams of workers, peasants, engineers, who, but for his insight, would have remained frustrated and obscure but who, through his understanding, became leaders in farming, industry, aviation.

As the war drew on, as his age grew and his power, as the strain grew also of a struggle that was for the world’s future, Stalin, it is said, became more dictatorial, relying on himself alone. Yet “the cult of personality,” now blamed for all past evils, is a flaw in the worshipper no less than in the worshipped. When all that can be said against Stalin is piled and counted, I doubt whether anything less than the terrific drive he imposed on the USSR from 1928 onw’ard, could ever have built a socialist state in that land. Looking back, one can see how the other leaders—Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin—led towards destruction. None of them had, I think, as Stalin had, either the insight into the people’s needs, or the guts and will that were needed.

Through all the early years, many of the ablest Marxists, inside and outside Russia, said it couldn’t be done. Russians said to me in the early thirties: “It is too bad for the world that the first socialism is built in our dark land. If you Americans did it, or even those industrious Germans, it might be a proper job. But we, dark people, what socialism shall we build?”

Stalin said: “Build, or be crushed in ten years by foreign invaders.”

They built, and it stood when the foreign invasion came. So, Stalin proved right, but those doubters were partly right, also. For the socialism thus built was never the socialism men dreamed, the socialism of freedom and plenty for all; it was speckled by many flaws. How far those flaws derive from Stalin’s personality, how far from the dark Russian past, how far from the Nazi fifth column and the forty-year threat of war—this will be a theme for future historians and all will differ in apportioning blame.

On one thing, they will not differ. As far as any individual may claim the events he led, Lenin made the Russian Revolution, Stalin built the world’s first socialist country. Its faults can be corrected now.

To correct the faults of the USSR itself is not the serious problem; it can be done by an aroused people and by reasonably intelligent and devoted officials. The constitutional forms exist; so does the wealth and the will. The faults that Stalin left in the Soviet bloc in East Europe are more serious. When recent headlines shouted “Revolt in Poland,” “Civil War in Hungary,” our Western experts gleefully saw the “end of Moscow’s authority.” The governments in Warsaw and Budapest replied that their friendship with the USSR was “unbreakable,” that all they wanted was “sovereignty,” “equality.” What are these words? They have waited far too long—the time is late.

What “sovereignty” has any nation in today’s world? What “equality” has a nation the size of Poland in a bilateral argument with the USSR’s 200,000,000 people, holding one sixth of the world? These terms must be defined. They have been defined again and again in history; but always they must be re-defined in new conditions. Now they must be defined in a socialist sense. Unless this is done and quickly, then all protestations of “friendship” are hollow. Friendships between nations change; allies drift apart. Can anyone doubt this who looks at the past ten years?

This is the job that has waited since 1945, especially since 1950, and urgently since 1953 when Stalin died. Stalin did not solve it; his mind, set in the grooves of “socialism in one country,” could not create in terms of a socialist one-third of mankind. Khrushchev has not solved it; for the moment he has made it worse. His apologies to Tito, his attacks on Stalin, have released all the separatist tendencies in East Europe. These tendencies are strong, but so also are the tendencies toward union of socialist states. The forms of that union in diversity are still to be devised.

Let me illustrate by an anecdote. Ten years ago, I met a Czech in Moscow; he had come to make an economic treaty with the USSR. I asked him what truth there was in the American claim that Moscow exploited the East European lands. He replied: “When we deal with the chiefs of Soviet industry, they bargain for their prices and we bargain for ours. They are tough bargainers. But if they press too hard, then Gottwald takes it up with Stalin for a ‘political settlement’ and says the terms will ruin us. … Then Stalin gives us help.”

Stalin’s personal concessions to Gottwald were no substitute for economic planning! In the USSR, the state railways and the coal mines do not see eye-to-eye on the price of coal. Agencies exist to settle it: the State Planning Board, the Supreme Soviet, the Communist Party. What Planning Board exists for the Soviet Bloc? What Supreme Soviet? What Communist International, since the Cominform dissolved? Are bilateral pacts between a “sovereign” Poland and an “equal” USSR enough? Has the Warsaw Pact the necessary teeth?

Who will devise the ideological base and the practical forms to reconcile the need of Poles for freedom and their equal need for union with a socialist bloc that is strong to help? Will it be done by a man, or a woman, or a committee? Will it be done by a Russian, a Pole or a Czech? I think it will not be a Russian, for the Russians already have a big job to continue in their own land, a job whose roots are deep in “the Stalin Era.” It might be a Chinese—so far, Liu Shao-chi has done the best job on the theory of nationalism and internationalism. It might be the Italian, Togliatti, who has done perhaps the freshest and most creative thinking on the problems of independent paths to Socialism, and on new structures and new political forms to meet the new conditions of a new era. But I also think it might be a Czech, from a land that has endured the many assaults of all great powers in the cock-pit of Europe, while preserving both its love of freedom and its cooperative sense.

Whoever devises the forms of the new Socialist inter-relation of states, whether he be Russian, Chinese or Czech, will be Stalin’s successor in history, engineer of a new era. More than that, he will have laid not only the framework of socialist unity-in-diversity, but also the foundations of that world government which must someday be.

Footnotes

- [1] Problems of Leninism, by Joseph Stalin, International Publishers, N. Y. Page 61.

- [2] I heard an irate peasant woman in the Caucasus yell at an official: “Let the British come. Let the Germans come. Let anybody come and make order in this damn country.” She was not arrested; the official tried to placate her. If a city intellectual had said the same thing, he might have been arrested.

- [3] The Last Train from Berlin. Page 325.

- [4] Reported by the Alsop brothers.

- [5] N. Y. Herald Tribune, May 4, 1939.

- [6] UP, August 23, 1941.

- [7] James Aldrich, N. Y. Times, March 14, 1940.

- [8] Hitler’s words, in his declaration of war against the USSR were: “While our soldiers, from May 5, 1940, had been breaking Franco-British power in the West, Russian military deployment was continued to a more and more menacing extent. … From August 1940 on, I therefore considered it to be in the interests of the Reich no longer to permit our eastern provinces … to remain unprotected. … Thus there resulted British-Soviet cooperation … tying up such powerful fo.ces in the east that the radical conclusion of the war in the West … could no longer be vouched for by the German High Command.”

- [9] N. Y. Times, June 24, 1941.

- [10] Wall Street Journal, March 5, 1953.

- [11] New Statesman and Nation, Aug. 15, 1955.

Table of Contents

Author’s Foreword

I. Socialism in One Country

II. The Five-Year Plan

III. The Revolution in Farming

IV. New People

V. The Great Madness

VI. The Fight for Peace Fails

VII. The Pact That Blocked Hitler

VIII. War of the Whole People

IX. The Second Rebuilding

X. Stalin and After

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11