MOSCOW'S ATTITUDE 171
The contrast between these two classes has recently grown in
intensity. Walter Duranty mentions that 1934 was a turning
point in social life. He describes how dance halls and jazz
bands are springing up everywhere in Moscow., Leningrad
and other cities, where the Communists indulge in dancing
and flirtation like the detested bourgeois of the Western world.
The big hotels, formerly reserved for foreigners, have now
become the meeting places of the Communist public, which
spends the hours until the early morning eating, drinking and
dancing. All are well dressed, and Duranty thinks he can see
the coming of a new age of gaiety and cheerful living in the
Soviet Union.
Other foreign observers who have been able to observe the
night life of the Communist aristocracy at Rostov-on-Don
and elsewhere have reported that the most acute misery and
distress prevailed within a few yards of these haunts of pleasure,
They came to the conclusion that this new orgy of amusement
was partly a consequence of the latterly increasing corruption
among wide circles of the official world. This corruption, and
the attendant illegal revenues which many Soviet officials
now enjoy, were strikingly revealed in the great trial at Kiev3
which ended with sentences of death or long terms of
imprisonment for numbers of leading officials in various
local economic organizations. This re-emergence of social
activity is not, as Duranty thinks, a result of improved con-
ditions; it is merely an indication of the growing gulf between
the elect and the mass of the non-privileged. It should be
remembered that a desire to impress the outer world with the
growth of a bourgeois system in the country has induced the
Government to foster the growth of society life and night life,
with Paris frocks, jazz music and other attributes of modern
sophistication.
Two worlds face one another to-day in the Soviet Union,
separated by a deep gulf. The privileged govern, administer
and control industry, agriculture and trade. They may be