TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 587
of private power to which the enjoyment of individual liberty might
give rise, the Soviet Government had also cut the roots of an incentive
to produce and to create which individual liberty alone could keep alive.

If the tasks of production and creation were ever to be taken wholly
out of the hands of human beings and were to be assigned wholly
to an impersonal 'Collective Man', the result could only be to bring
production and creation to a standstill. The psychic driving-force of
personal purposefulness and zest cannot be effectively replaced by the
goads of governmental terrorism and coercion, and the rulers of the
Soviet Union had tacitly confessed that they had learnt this lesson by
experience when they had introduced their 'Stakhanovite' system of
differential rewards for different degrees of efficiency in output, which
was familiar in the West under the name of 'piece-work', and when
they had sought to find an alternative to the monetary incentive for
competition in honorary incentives of the kinds that had proved effective
in Western monarchies under the anden regime and subsequently in the
recreational field of non-professional sport. Such concessions by Com-
munism to Individualism may have tempered Communism's damping
effects; yet these were no more than mitigations of a system that was
intrinsically inimical to the application of human energies to economic
purposes, and a non-Russian and non-Communist observer found it
hard to see how, in the long run, on the economic and administrative
(as distinct from the ideological) plane, a Communist totalitarian regime
could avoid evoking an extreme manifestation of the defensive, negative,
unenthusiastic trade-union and civil-service e"thos. This prospect was
a serious menace to the Soviet Union's chances of success in her com-
petition with the United States, where even the trade-unionist indus-
trial working class was infected with the American middle class's belief
in the virtues of private enterprise and with its determination to keep
this source of economic productivity and creativity alive.

The Soviet Union's present economic inferiority to the United States
was as indisputable as it was depressing for believers in the Soviet
Communist dispensation; and, though this inferiority was due, not
merely to a difference of regime, but to the backwardness of Russian
technology as appraised by Western standards, the Soviet Government
had debarred themselves by the extravagance of tbeir mendacity in
their own domestic propaganda from making the valid and pertinent
points that this technological backwardness of Russia's was at least as
old as the seventeenth century and that, since the Bolsheviks* own
advent to power in A.D. 1917, they had emulated the achievements of
Peter the Great himself in notably diminishing the length of Russia's
technological lag behind the contemporary progress of her Western
neighbours.1 Instead of claiming credit for their genuine and praise-
worthy successes in narrowing the gap between Russia's and the West's
technological and social performance, they had painted, for their sub-
jects' edification, a fancy picture of an instantaneously attained Soviet
Communist Earthly Paradise by comparison with which the contem-
porary Capitalist World was a howling wilderness. In consequence, the
i See IX. viii. 126-49.