by Les Weil
Another peculiarity of the hierarchic system is that every demotion, each step down the slopes of the pyramid, is final and irrevocable. In other countries, governments and individuals have their ups and downs. In the Soviet Union there are few examples of a come-back for a politician, bureaucrat, technocrat, scientist, writer or artist, once he had started moving down the slope.
V. Journey's Start
A FREE-LANCE writer ranked somewhere near the bottom of the hierarchy. However, I was not a simple free-lance; I had an 'organisation'-the MORP--which, being affiliated to the Comintern, was situated somewhere in the middle range of the pyramid. Moreover, I was a Party member, which improved my grading; but only a member of the German, not the Russian Party, which lowered it. I also carried on me a letter from AGITPROPEKKI (Department of Agitation and Propaganda of the Executive Committee of the Communist International) which again considerably improved my grading.
Such `to whom it may concern' letters serve as a kind of passport in the Soviet Union. It is on their strength that the citizen obtains his permits, his accommodation, ration card, and so on. Accordingly, these letters are very carefully worded and graded, to convey the exact degree of priority to which the bearer is entitled. Mine was a`strong' letter, signed by the head of AGITPROP EKKI, Comrade Gopner, in person. It said that I was a delegate of the Revolutionary Writers' League of Germany, and that I was travelling under the sponsorship of the Comintern.
On the other hand, I was also a bourgeois foreign correspondent, working for several important newspapers, and duly accredited as such with the Press department of NARKOMINDYEL, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This placed me in one of the top grades on another side of the pyramid, as it were. It entitled me to accommodation in INTOURIST Hotels where such existed; to travel in the `soft class' on trains; and to buy my food at INSNAB, the co-operative stores reserved for the diplomatic corps, the foreign Press And foreign technical advisers. I disliked availing myself of these bourgeois privileges, but as I was travelling alone through remote and famine-stricken rcgions of the country, it was often the only way of obtaining food and shelter.
I was careful never to show my bourgeois, NARKOMINDYEL documentation at the Party offices and factories that I visited, nor to travelling companions, for the immediate result would have been to arouse distrust and suspicion. On the other hand, I never showed my Comintern letter to hotel managers, railway officials and co-operative store managers--it would have deprived me of the preferential treatment for bourgeois tourists who have to be humoured for reasons of propaganda. Such a double existence was not regarded as dishonourable. On the contrary, it reflected the basic dualism of ' NARKOMINDYEL line' and `Comintern line'--the two aspects of the Soviet Union as a respectable international power, and as a clandestine centre of the world revolution. To bear this duality constantly in mind was one of the first lessons taught to every Party member.
Thus I travelled symbolically in two different guises, and literally with one set of documents in my right-hand pocket, another in my left-hand pocket. I never mixed them up, thanks to the simple memorising device that the Conuntern was `on the left'.
Even so, it would have been impossible for me to travel alone without falling back on the help of the only organisation that functioned efficiently everywhere throughout the country: the G.P.U. In every railway station in the Soviet Union there was a G.P.U. Commissariat which maintained a minimum of order in the chaos. The function of the `Station G.P.U.' was not political surveillance, but to act as railway officials, travel agents and information centres for official travellers. When I got out of the train in a new town, I went straight to the Station G.P.U., presented my papers, and was provided, as a matter of routine, with those basic necessities which no individual traveller can obtain without the `organisation' behind him: a room or bed, ration-card, means of transportation. My sponsors were the Comintern and the Foreign Ministry, neither of which had branch offices in small places; so the Station G.P.U. took me under its wing until it was able to hand me over to the care of the slow-moving local Party Committee or Government Guest House. In short, the Station G.P.U. had none of the sinister associations ti that notorious body, of which it formed a kind of administrative publicservice branch. It was, as I have said, the only efficient institution throughout the country, the steel framework which held the pyramid together. Yet it was characteristic that this frame should have been subordinated not to the general machinery of governmental or municipal administration, but to the Pollitical Security Department. It is not the Terror, but the existence of this ubiquitous organisation without which nothing can be done, and which alone is capable of getting things done, that defines the structure of the totalitarian police state.
My idea for the book, and for the series of articles which would constitute its backbone, was to describe a journey across the Soviet Empire from its most northerly to its most southerly point, from the Arctic regions to the frontier of Afghanistan. My superiors in the Party had approved the project. The Arctic I had visited the year before, as a member of the 'Graf Zeppelin' Polar expedition;' this was to provide the contents of the first part of the book. Part two was to be devoted to the achievements of the Five Year Plan in Russia proper and in the industrial Ukraine; part three to the development of the backward regions of Central Asia. The latter part of the journey took me across the Caucasus into the three Autonomous Soviet Republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbeijan; then across the Caspian and through Turkestan from Krasnovodsk to Ashkhabad and the oasis of Merv in the Karakum desert; then down to the Afghan frontier and up again to Bokhara, Samarkand and Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan and administrative centre of Soviet Central Asia; then via Kasakstan back to Moscow. Altogether I spent five months on this journey, travelling by railway, steamship, paddlesteamer, motor-car and on horseback. This last means of locomotion was by far the most comfortable; you can't overcrowd a horse. Some of these Central Asian regions had not before been visited by Europeans, except by Russian Government officials.
Yet all this was less exciting than it may sound. It was a unique opportunity to explore a little-known, exotic part of the world; my itinerary led through some of its most striking landscapes and towns--the Caucasus, Mount Ararat, the Karakum desert, Tiflis, Baku, Samarkand. In a foolish and unpardonable way I spoiled it all, for, encased as I was in my closed universe, my eyes and mind were focused on statistics, factories, tractor stations and power plants; to landscape and architecture, to flower and bird, I paid little attention.
It had also been hammered into my head, and into the heads of two hundred million Russians, that to pay undue attention to the relics and monuments of the past was a sign of a morbid, sentimental, romantic and escapist atticude. The old folk songs were forbidden all over Russia; they would have evoked an unhealthy yearning for bygone days. Some classics which expressed a`socially progressive attitude'--for instance, War and Peace, Oblomov and Dead Souls--were read in school and reprinted in cheap editions by the State Publishing Trust; the rest, including most of Dostoievsky, were, if not exactly banned, condemned to oblivion by the simple means of not reprinting them. (The State monopoly in publishing is in the long run a more decisive feature of the Communist regime than the concentration camps and even the one-Party system. The Communist's duty was not to observe the world but to change it; his eyes were to focus on the present and the future, not on the past. The history of mankind would start with the World Revolution; all that went before was merely a chaotic, barbaric overture.
The same was true of philosophy, architecture and the fine arts; and this attitude was by no means confined to fanatical Party bureaucrats. Professor Landau, the outstanding genius among Russian physicists, once tried to convince me during half-an-hour that to read any philosopher earlier than Marx was a simple waste of time. Auden's call `to clear from the head of the masses the impressive rubbish' expressed a similar attitude. It was less absurd than it appears today; born out of the despair of world war and civil war, of so
cial unrest and economic chaos, the desire for a complete break with the past, for starting human history from scratch, was deep and genuine. In this apocalyptic climate dadaism, futurism, surrealism, and Five-Year-plan-mystique came together in a curious amalgam. Moved by a perhaps similar mood of despair, John Donne had begged: `Moist with a drop of Thy blood my dry soule'. The mystic of the nineteen-thirties yearned, as a sign of Grace, for a look at the Dnieper Dam and a three per cent. increase in the Soviet pig-iron production.
So I set out for Mount Ararat and the city of Bokhara, not to feast my eyes and delve into the past, but to see how they were doing on the Central Asiatic cotton production front. There were of course occasional lapses of discipline, a peep now and then round my self-imposed blinkers; even a travelling salesman may notice that a sunset lends colour to the sky. But on the whole I stuck with a deplorable purposefulness to my programme and spent most of my time visiting factories, kolkhozi, workers' clubs, kindergartens and Party offices. The people who took charge of me when I arrived in a new place, knew little or nothing of the history, architecture and prerevolutionary folklore of their town. They were all members of the Party, schooled by the Party, conditioned by the Party. A seventeenth-century church or a fifteenth century mosque was for them 'just an old building', dismissed with a shrug. If the visitor betrayed interest in a Byzantine mosaic or a carved column, this romantic, bourgeois attitude was passed over with a lenient smile; foreign comrades were expected to be backward in their ideological training.
Another factor which helped me to stick to my programme is the uniform dreariness of the average Russian town and its lack of architectural character. New Bokhara, though located in the heart of Asia, is a typical Russian garrison town, hardly distinguishable from Kharkov or from a suburb of Moscow. This uniformity reminds one of the middle-towns of America--but of an America made up entirely of the slummy parts `on the wrong side of the tracks'. It was a lucky circumstance that had made me start my travels in Kharkov and not in Moscow. Thus from the beginning I became acquainted with everyday life in the provincial towns of the Soviet Union, as little known abroad as the dark side of the moon. The face that is turned towards Europe is Moscow--the only town where foreign diplomats and journalists are permitted to congregate. But Moscow is less typical of the rest of the Soviet Union than any other capital in relation to its country. It is the centre of a centralised empire, the seat not only of the Government and Party, but of the managing personnel of all branches of industry and agriculture, of production, distribution and every other national activity. Hence Moscow has absolute priority in supplies, from food and fuel to tooth brushes, lipsticks and other luxuries unknown to the rest of the country. The living standard of Moscow in 1932 was about that of a Welsh mining town during the slump; but even so it was exceptional and enviable compared with any other place in the Soviet Union that I visited in the course of a journey covering several thousand miles.
The Revolution had brought little change to the townscape in the peripheral regions. There may be a new factory in the suburbs; privileged citizens may possess a radio and even a telephone; but the overcrowding and neglect of the buildings and the emptiness of the shops, the disappearance of all little marks of opulence, of all colour and joie de vivre, have made the, Soviet middle-town even sadder and drearier.
A Communist writer--a woman whom I greatly admired--once made an unguarded remark that has stuck in my memory. She was telling us, a small circle of Party members, about a clandestine meeting of hers with a comrade in a forest in Austria. It had been spring, and despite the circumstances she greatly enjoyed her walk in the woods. When she met the other person, a Party official, he had launched at once into an `analysis of the difficulties confronting the movement and the means of overcoming them'. From that moment it had seemed to her that the birds had become silent, and the air had lost its fragrance. She was and is a devoted Communist, and this experience greatly distrubed her. `Why,' she asked pathetically, `why is it that the leaves die wherever we go?
In retrospect my overall impression of life in Russia has become tinged with the sadness and desolation of this remark.
The first part of my travels was intended to be a broad survey of the achievements of the Five Year Plan in the industrial regions of the Russian and Ukrainian Republics. I started with 'S.K.r', the newly founded synthetic rubber factory in Yaroslavl. From there a paddle steamer took me down the Volga to Russia's Detroit, the automobile works of Gorki (which is the new name of the fabulous Nishni Novgorod). In the chapter that I wrote about Nishny, two pages were devoted to the factory, and half a page to this most fascinating of all ancient Russian towns.
From Nishny I returned to Moscow, then undertook my pilgrimage to the holy of holies: the Dnieper dam. It inspired the following rhapsody:
In the shrill light of the August morning the white semicircular dam offers a supernatural sight. The savage river rears and foams in the throttling grip of this lassoo of cement, but in vain: it is overwhelmed, deflected, forced to race through the pressure chambers where nine flaying turbines drain its accumulated fury and transform it into electric power. If these turbines were tilted up, each would be higher than a four-storey house, and each of them is a match for ninety thousand horses--the next largest turbines, at the Niagara Falls, have only seventy-five thousand H.P. Vibrating high-tension wires of altogether six hundred miles' length convey the stream of electrones, fed with energy from the stream of water drops, to the new giants of industry which will transform the rural Ukraine into an industrial base of the Red Continent, second only in importance to the Urals.
After the Dnieper dam, I intended to visit the coal mines of the Donetz basin but failed to obtain the necessary permit. Next I was to make a tour of the German kolkhozi in the Ukraine, but my permit was cancelled at the last minute. These collective farms with a population of half a million Germans, the descendants of colonists who had come to Russia under Catherine, were among those worst struck by the famine. A few years later the survivors were deported to Siberia, simultaneously with the liquidation of the VolgaGerman Republic. Both populations have since vanished as if the earth had swallowed them.
The famine was at its peak and AGITPROP became anxious to pack me off to regions where language barriers would cut me off from contact with the natives; but this of course I only understood later. At any rate, I had seen enough factories in European Russia, and my impressions were beginning to tall into shape. When the Party had agreed to the outline of the book that I submitted, they had not realised that, as a one-time student of engineering and a former science editor, I possessed a more specialised knowledge of technology and industrial efficiency than the average newspaper reporter. The picture of Soviet industry at the end of the first Five Year Plan that I had gained was that of a young giant who was in turns afflicted with paralysis of the limbs and by epileptic fits. The cause of the crisis was not sabotage And not bureaucratic incompetence as such, but the rigid, hierarchic centralisation. It `instilled a grotesque fear of initiative and responsibility in all branches of the administration. It reduced every official to a cog; it often brought the whole machine to a standstill--or worse, it made the machine turn in the wrong direction by sheer force of inertia whenever the man at the top failed to press a button in time."
It so happened that the year I spent in the Soviet Union--1932-33--was perhaps the most crucial year in its history. The regime was at a crossroads. Forced collectivisation and rigid centralisation of industry had led to the famine and to the near-collapse of production. The common cause of both disasters was the general breakdown of incentives to work.
I have tried to analyse this astonishing new social phenomenon in The Yogi and the Commissar. In an equally disastrous situation in 1923, Lenin had introduced the New Economic Policy: a compromise between collectivistic and liberal economy. Nine years later Stalin was faced with the choice between two possible methods of overcoming a similar crisis: either to make the regime more elastic or
to make it more rigid. The first method--Lenin's choice in 1923--would have implied concessions to the peasants amounting to a New Economic Policy in agriculture; a certain amount of decentralisation in industry, the restoration of the Trade Unions' independence of the State, the raising of the workers' living standards through the free interplay of collective bargaining, and so on. But this would have meant softening up the whole hierarchic structure of the regime; and this risk Stalin could not afford. He chose the opposite way: the pyramid was made even more rigid, fortified with steel and concrete. At the top of the pyramid, exorbitant discriminatory rewards were created for the benefit of `shockbrigaders,' `Stakhanovitcs' and the new `proletarian millionaires'. At the bottom of the pyramid, incentives were replaced by `educational coercion' (even the forced labour camps are officially called `Re-education Camps'), which led, step by step, to more generalised forms of terror.
Before I left European Russia, I finished a first series of six articles on the achievements of the Five Year Plan, and took them to the Moscow headquarters of MORP. It had been agreed that MORP would exercise a kind of preliminary censorship under the guise of 'comradely advice', before the articles were delivered by me to the official censor at the Press department of the Foreign Office.
At this point my first difficulties in Russia began. MORP did not like my pieces. They were partly over-critical in a mechanistic way, and partly they expressed a romantic attitude. This verdict was communicated to me by Sergei Tretyakov, who was then, I believe, chairman of the Russian section of MORP, in the presence of Paul Dietrich, representing the German section of the Comintern.
Tretyakov, author of several successful novels, was then at the height of fame and official favour. His manners were so distant and reserved that I can hardly remember what he looked like, except for the vague impression of a tall, gaunt man with cautious gestures and a Mongoloid face. He was shot as a spy in 1938.