The First Time In History Two Years Of Russia S New Life August 1921 To December 1923

1 29 946

THE FIRST TIME
IN HISTORY

THE FIRST TIME
IN HISTORY

Two Years of Russia's New Life

(August, 1921, to December, 1923)
BY

ANNA LOUISE STRONG, PH.D.
WITH A PREFACE BY L. TROTSKY

BONI AND LIVERIGHT

PUBLISHERS :: :: NEW YORK

BONI & LlVERIGHT, INC.

Printed in the United States of America

PREFACE

Of the October Revolution and of Soviet Russia
there is already a large literature. On account of
the very character of the revolutionary epoch, each
new book has characterized, with good will or with
malice, a new step in the rapid course of revolution-
ary development.

There exist not a few books devoted to our civil
wan Some of them paint our cruelty and blood-
thirstiness; others tell of the heroism of the work-
ers' vanguard, of the unexampled self-sacrifice of the
toilers in the struggle for great new aims. Un-
doubtedly the breadth of the revolutionary struggle,
its great sacrifices, have attracted to the cause of
the Russian Revolution the sympathies not only of
the toiling masses, but also of the better elements
in the intellectual classes.

It is, however, necessary to state that the sym-
pathies of these latter have not always proved stable.
More than once we have observed that the very per-
sons and groups among the intellectuals who accepted
the Revolution but sighed on account of her cruelties
and destructive influence on culture, yet felt them-
selves not only injured but somewhat insulted when
the Revolution went over to the insistent drudgery
of daily effort; from the heights of tragic poetry
they, don't you see, were thrown down to the pro-
saic depths of the NEP. (New Economic Policy.)

5

PREFACE

The trouble is that the ethical-aesthetic standard
hy which is guided a considerable, and not the worst,
part of the intellectuals, is entirely unfit for the
grasping of great historic events. History is not
at all guided in its movements by the rules of morals
and beauty; it follows the logic of its inherent forces,
the classes and material factors underlying the bases
of all society. Ethics and aesthetics are already
phenomena of second or third place. The new class,
in the severe struggle towards a new epoch of his-
tory, by that very struggle lays down paths to new
ethics and aesthetics.

"Alas! alas I" exclaim some of the injured
"friends" in Russia, "behold the unlimited reign of
Tsar Nep. Where is the tragic and bleeding Rus-
sia of 1918, 1919 and 1920?"

The author of the present book, Anna Louise
Strong, does not belong to the number of such
"friends." She approached the Revolution not
from the aesthetic, or contemplative point of view,
but from the point of view of action. Under the
prose of the Nep, as well as under the dramatic
events of the civil war, she was able to see, or per-
haps at the very beginning, merely to feel, the in-
tense, stubborn, uncompromising struggle against
age-long slavery, darkness, barbarism for new higher
forms of life. When the Volga was stricken by
famine, Miss Strong arrived in Russia for the diffi-
cult, dangerous struggle with hunger and epidemics.
She herself went through typhus. In her numerous
articles and correspondence, she tirelessly made
breaches in, that wall of reactionary lies that made

PREFACE 7

the most important part of the imperialistic block-
ade around the Revolution. This does not mean, of
course, that Miss Strong was hiding the black spots;
but she tried to understand and explain to others
how these facts grew out of the past in its conflict
with the future.

Thanks to such an approach, the only correct one,
the NEP for the author of this book is not vulgar
prose, and not a liquidation of the Revolution, but
one of its necessary stages. The very people who
fought on all the fronts of the civil war, except*
of course, for the tens of thousands who fell victims
to French, English and American imperialism, are
working for the economic restoration of the coun-
try, in the name of the same aims, with the same
energy, the same readiness to give themselves com-
pletely. The difficulties here are truly incredible,
our economic and cultural backwardness is immeas-
urable, but a knowledge of our own backwardness,
when it takes hold of the wide masses of the people,
becomes in itself the greatest force towards cul-
ture. This force has been awakened by the Revo-
lution. We have it, and on it we are building. One
of the stages of our building, not infrequently mis-
taken, often awkward, but historically unconquer-
able, Anna Louise Strong shows in her book. That
is why we think it has a right to attention.

L. TROTSKY.
Moscow, 1923.

CONTENTS

PAGB

PREFACE, by L. Trotsky .... 5

CHAPTER

I. How RUSSIA Is "DIFFERENT" . . . * 13

II. THE COMMUNISTS' NEW PLAN ... * 35

III. THE BATTLE-FRONT OF INDUSTRY ... 62

IV. THE MONEY POWER IN RUSSIA .... 84

V. THE STORY OF RUSSIAN OIL 95

VI. THE BREAD BASKET OF EUROPE . . . 118

VII. How Moscow KEEPS HOUSE 134

VIII. THE WAR WITH ALCOHOL 154

IX. Do THE JEWS RULE RUSSIA? , ... 196

X. THE CHURCH REVOLUTION ....... 1 86

XL EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA .... 208

XII. FORCES IN CONFLICT 233

THE FIRST TIME
IN HISTORY

THE
FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

i

HOW RUSSIA IS "DIFFERENT"

I HAVE had typhus in Russia. Four months o
the first five I spent there were on a sickbed, and
the rest in a dirty, sprawling city in the famine area
where the world was dying. Yet I loved the country
and when my convalescence in England was over, I
wanted to go back. Naturally my friends asked,
Why? Why do you love Russia?

It was not easy to answer. Was it for fine
scenery? There are great mountains and noble for-
ests in Russia, but the scenery I knew was a barren,
curving plain, set with draggled, hungry villages.

Was it for comfort of living? In all those first
five months I never tasted the freshness of cold
^ater, nothing but dull, boiled water even in illness.
I never enjoyed fresh milk, but only boiled milk, or
milk from a can. In my trips out to villages, I slept
on floors of peasant cottages; during my brief days
in Moscow, I carried my water for washing up
three flights of stairs to my room.

When I went to file my telegrams at night in the
Foreign Office, I took a pocket electric lamp with
me, to avoid falling into the holes in the sidewalks

13

14 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

and streets. After my lamp wore out, I felt my
way carefully, for there were no more lamps to be
bought in Russia.

Was it the people I met? In those first months I
knew no big people, I knew nurses and doctors
and relief workers and peasants and serving maids
and minor officials. What was there in these to
make me want to go back?

Picture after flashing picture I remember of those
first days in Russia. The Red Army soldier stand-
ing on the platform at Minsk, barefoot, holding his
rifle by a piece of rope. The Polish official in our
train sneered at him as we passed, but I remembered
that we also in America had had our Valley Forge.

The boy and the girl who entered our train, mem-
bers of the League of Communist Youth, taking col-
lections for the famine. The boy had no hat and no
shoes; under his shirt and trousers of home-made
linen it was clear that he wore no underwear. Yet
he held himself with dignity, presenting proper cre-
dentials from the city. He was asking nothing for
himself, for with his ration of black bread it did
not occur to him that he needed anything. He was
asking for the victims of the famine.

Dunia, the housemaid in the Quaker flat where I
lay ill in Moscow. No beauty of face or form was
in Dunia ; she was squat and shabby, with draggled
shoes and tangled hair. Yet she brought joy into
monotonous days; even the bringing of a glass of
water was a game of friendliness with her. She was
too simple in heart to know much of politics; but
she sang little songs about speculators to herself

HOW RUSSIA IS "DIFFERENT" 15

in the kitchen, and about how the workers' Soviets
put them down.

There was the Cheka worker whom I met on the
railway, going up and down Russia, hunting out
graft and counter-revolution. All his worldly goods
were in his knapsack : a loaf of bread, a teapot, and
under these a couple of handkerchiefs and a pair
of socks. And two hand-embroidered linen towels,
brought from home long ago. I admired them and
he insisted on giving me one. What did he need of
two ? he said.

The little East-side Jew whom I met in Samara,
the heart of the famine, and who went with me as
interpreter to organize village kitchens. Speaking
English with a vile accent and physically most un-
attractive. Then I learned that he was manager of
two little factories which had just reopened, making
doors and windows for the repairing of Samara. He
was a machinist; he was so proud of the two or
three machines he had put together, down in a coun-
try where even plain nails were not to be had.
Proudest of all he was of the wages of his workers,
since he had succeeded in getting the government to
put them on piece work. Fifteen dollars a month
they got, with board and lodging. He himself, as
manager, got rations and lodging, but without the
fifteen dollars. For he was Communist, on Com-
munist wages, which at that time were a few cents
a month, not worth standing in line to collect. His
wife worked also, his children were fed in a govern-
ment children's home; but he was eager and ener-*
getic and happy to be building Russia.

16 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

Puriaieff, chairman of the peasant relief com-
mittee, in the village of Novo Semekino, is another
whom I remember. Is he alive or dead now from
the famine? Tall, and thin and keen, with circles
under his eyes from hunger, he refused my proffered
bread till he knew I had plenty; then he accepted
a chunk to put in his pocket, to divide at home with
his sister and sister's children.

There were red army officers I knew, in training
in the highest military school of Moscow. They
had divided their rations so that every five men were
supporting one Volga child. These children were
all collected in one children's home in Moscow, and
the young officers, who themselves had nothing but
clothes and rations, went over in spare moments to
play with the youngsters.

There is so much horror I remember, and so much
heroism. The young peasant girl of eighteen who
acted as nurse to me in Samara. Born in a German
colony on the Volga, she had lived in America eight
years and learned to speak English. She was secured
to tend me, since everyone else spoke Russian.
Somewhere down in the south she had left a family,
starving; a father, who was a skilled carpenter and
farmer, a mother who was a careful housewife,
brothers and sisters who were waiting to Hear if
she found food. But she had found nothing; the
trains were too crowded; she could not even get out
of Samara ; and now winter had come and she had
no coat to go outdoors. She could only wait for
spring while her family also waited, two hundred
miles to the south in a dying village.

HOW RUSSIA IS "DIFFERENT 33 17

We also waited once, in the Quaker flat in Mos-
cow, waited a whole week for a train that did
not arrive from the famine. A passenger of our
own was on it; it was the fast express from Tash-
kent, delayed for a week by blizzards. Then one
unforgetable midnight I was awakened by voices,
and went hurriedly into the next room to hear what
had happened.

Behind a wall of snow and blizzard they had
waited, unable to move forward or backward, un-
able for a whole day to go out of the train. Their
locomotive went for help and was also blocked in
snowdrifts. Their food gave out and they had not
even water; there was no wood for melting even
the snow. They marched through the night to dig
out their locomotive, and two men died from ex-
haustion.

Typhus appeared and a car was set aside for iso-
lation. Ice-plows came and a train-load of soldiers
dug them out. As they left the famine region and
drew near home, they began singing, the sick ones
from their berths and the well ones stamping up
and down the corridors to keep warm. Silly little
songs, folk songs, songs of revolution. So they
pulled into Moscow, the fast train, the government
express, the train that was specially favored, with
two dead, and twenty in the typhus isolation car
and all the rest of them, sick and well, shouting and
singing.

- These were the things that drew me back to Rus-
sia, which I saw first in its utterly darkest days. The
heroism, the sacrifice, the comradeship, and the joy

18 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

that went with it. The joy of pioneers who, in the
midst of hardship, exult to believe that they are
creating something new.

I, too, had this sense that something new was be-
ing created. Something that had never been before
in human history. I wanted to have a share in it, I
wanted at least to understand it. Was it only the
comradeship and joy of battle that always come to
compensate for bitter times of struggle? Was it
only the fellowship of suffering? Or was it really

something new in the world?
******

When I went back in the summer of 1922, it was
already to a recovering Russia, which week by week
changed rapidly under my sight. In the famine year
when I entered, I brought food and bedding with
me, and prepared for disinfection at the journey's
end. Now, on the fast through trains, there was a
struggling attempt to furnish blankets to those who
Jbad none, though clean sheets were not yet available
for all comers. I received a single sheet in my
sleeping-car compartment ; it appeared to have been
washed but not ironed.

By midsummer all the correspondents were taking
side-trips from Moscow. The Health Department
patrolled the railways well. There were regions
where one could not buy a ticket without inoculation
against cholera, but week by week these regions
were cleaned up and the restrictions removed. You
could go down to Nijni Novgorod to see the world-
famous fair, in a good sleeping-car each way, or, iJ
you chose, by airplane. My friends, Russian as wel]

HOW RUSSIA IS "DIFFERENT" 19

as foreign, were taking vacations to the Crimea and
Caucasus. The Siberian Express had been re-
established and was putting on a dining-car.

In the autumn I went on a trip to the Arctic Cir-
cle, visiting mines and sawmills. The trains in this
far north were slow and crowded and dirty, but they
ran on definite schedule and arrived on time. On
the main line, from Petrograd to Moscow, one could
not ask for better service. I made the trip four
times in six weeks, once in a diplomatic car and
three times in ordinary "cars with soft seats" re-
served for sleeping. In the diplomatic car I had
the luxury of private coupe and lavatory, with tea
served morning and evening by a most comradely
car convoyer, who refused tips but accepted friendly
gifts of cigarettes. Even the ordinary cars now
furnished clean sheets and good 'blankets. There
were eight or ten such cars on the train, running
every night between the two cities.

All over Moscow there was a fury of repairing*
Along the streets I had to turn out on every block
for the repaving of sidewalks, or to dodge the splash-
ing paint from the buildings that were being fresh-
ened. My days of work in the hotel room went
on to the rasping sound of iron on stone, as they
tore up and repaired the hotel corridors. In that
one first summer, from April to August, Moscow re-
paired 100,000 square yards of cobblestone pave-
ments and 10,000 square yards of sidewalks; she
repaired six broken bridges and let contracts for
forty-two others. She doubled the number of
street cars and made line extensions.

20 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

They also planted, a typically Russian touch,
120,000 square yards of flower-beds in the city's
open squares and boulevards. In and out among
these there were children playing, and young men
and girls strolling late into the summer evenings.
On all the street corners were flowers for sale, and
cigarettes and little bread-rolls.

Everyone was rejoicing in having much more to
eat. Week by week, through the summer, the
standard of living improved. I shared an
apartment for three months with people high up in
the Government Publishing House. In June, the
little gifts of white flour and sugar jam, bought
in the American Commissary by virtue of my citizen-
ship, were hailed with shouts of delight and made
the occasion for a celebrating party. By August
these things were tame additions to the food supply,
not worth an extra trip to get. In June my hostess
and her sisters were borrowing my old clothes on
various occasions ; we nearly fought over who should
wear a raincoat of ancient pattern. By August they
were going on vacations to Berlin and had more
clothes than I had,, since they had restocked after
eight lean years.

All through the northern provinces, under the
Arctic Circle, where the cool summer made their
own harvest a total failure, they were yet rejoicing
in having at last enough to eat. Their timber in-
dustry had opened, and the central government had
lent them food in return for the promise of timber,
which they had already cut and were sawing for
the foreign market.

HOW RUSSIA IS "DIFFERENT" 21

By "enough" they meant that at last they had one
good meal a day, about five o'clock, otherwise tea
and bread in the morning and late at night This
was still "enough," anywhere in Russia. Only the
following spring, when I went south through the
Ukraine, did I begin to see such things as eggs
for breakfast "But last year," exulted an English-
woman married to an official in the far north, "last
year we had a piece of bread and one herring as our
daily ration. Now I can give my husband a really
decent meal."

Last year a ration of three pounds of oats per
week kept the workers alive in Karelia; but now
they were drawing regular wages of sixteen pounds
of flour daily, or its equivalent in bacon, tea and
clothes. In the winter they were going on a money
wage. This had already been standard in Moscow
for some months, which was no longer a besieged
fortress sharing its last food, but a city with trade
relations and a market The money wage spread
more slowly to distant provinces, where bread was
still a more useful commodity than money.

Improvements in individual factories were occur-
ring so fast that summer that in June I met a work-
man who had left a certain automobile factory be-
cause they did not give him enough to eat; and in
August I met others from the same factory who had
plenty to eat and were blowing in money on summer
theatres.

I remember the little seamstress who made for
me two coats, a fur coat in the first winter and a linen
coat the following summer. In the winter of the

22 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

famine she charged me with fear and trembling less
than four dollars for making and lining a complete
fur coat. She was so eager to get the work that
she sat up till three in the morning to finish it soon
and get her pay. She was pathetically anxious for
more work and when I told her she ought to charge
more, she misunderstood my Russian and protested
that she would not think of overcharging. She was
on the edge of starvation.

When I visited her four months later she was a
different woman. I asked for a linen coat and she
replied cheerfully that she could do it for me in
a fortnight at a cost of ten dollars. Her room was
full of orders and she did not tremble when she
mentioned her price. Work had come back and a
chance to make a living, with the return of the re-
constructive activities of peace.

So clear was the improvement in everyone's liv-
ing conditions that in the December elections of that
year the Communist Party based their election
speeches on it. They told what their plans had been
and how they had carried them out, and ended:
"Look in your own pay-envelope and decide whether
you are better off this year than last" . . . The
Communists got a larger percentage of the votes
than at any time before. The first session of the
Moscow Soviet, which is a city and state govern-
ment at once, showed nobody protesting against their
programme, as had been the case a year before.
" * The Communist Party was more firmly in power
than ever before, but how much of their Com-
munism was left? In all the details of life, Russia

HOW RUSSIA IS "DIFFERENT" 23

has made a great stride towards capitalism. Wages
are paid in money instead of rations, industry must
support itself without drawing from the government
funds, shops of private trade are open everywhere,
newspapers are full of advertisements, sables and
diamonds of "speculators" appear in theatres and
cafes, and the new-rich secure apartments of several
rooms, while ordinary folk crowd into small bare
quarters.

What was left of the equal sharing of the days of
war? Was it all just a dream, a communism of pov-
erty which failed? Old friends of the Revolution
came back, were shocked at the high prices and fury
of speculation in Moscow, and sighed for the lost
idyllic days of revolutionary fervour and common
division of food. "There is no communism left,"
they cried.

Foreign businessmen came in to negotiate for
concessions. They declared cheerfully that there
was no communism left, nothing but a few tem-
porary hang-overs in the way of government inter-
ference with foreign trade. Foreign correspondents
and relief workers agreed; Russia was tired of com-
munism, they said ; it had failed ; she had made the
first step towards capitalism and was going back
to "normalcy" as fast as possible.

It is admitted on all sides ; there is no communism
in Russia. But the Communists go farther. They
say there never was any communism. They say
they are farther on the road towards it than ever
before ; that they are going towards it step by step
through the decades. They say that the equal shar-

24 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

ing and sacrifice that marked the dark days of war
and famine was not communism at all, but merely
the necessary war tactics of a besieged city.

They say it is only now, with the coming of peace
and the chance to reconstruct, that they are begin-
ning to build communism* They are building ac-
cording to plans discussed widely and known through-
out Russia. It will take years and decades and even
generations; but they expect to hold power in Russia
for all that time toJ^uilcHt. No other governing
party in the world expects to keep power more than
one or two terms of office. But the Communists
of Russia, with elections held yearly, expect to carry
through plans over a generation.

There will be many mistakes, and graft, and in-
efficiency. These things everyone knows; they are
not hid in Russia. Some mistakes will be due to the
backwardness of Russia, the old habits of bribery
and laziness in office. Mistakes will also be due to
the greatness of the job they have undertaken. For
what they are building is something new in history.

That is the claim they make. As a foreigner goes
through the streets of Moscow, or down through
the great plains of Russia, he sees, at first, little to
prove this claim. One marks no outer difference
between Moscow and other cities, except the glit-
tering domes of gold and the exquisite domes of
blue that cut the heavens, and that tell that Europe
is left behind and Asia approaches. The crowds in
tke streets are more Asian in appearance, with cos-
tumes from the Caucasus and from Turkestan.
There are swarthy Tartar faces mingled with Rus-

HOW RUSSIA IS "DIFFERENT" 25

sian; there are crooked, cobblestone streets; there
is the glory of the Red Square and the Kremlin.

In these things Moscow is, as always, different
from Europe. But in other things, the streets are
full of shops with bread and cotton cloth and jewels;
the markets are crowded with peasants selling prod-
uce; there are great banks with men and women
going in to cash checks and draw money. If you
read the papers you notice perhaps that the Sugar
Trust has been profiteering. You are quite certain
that your hotel is profiteering; you know that by the
price it charges for meagre accommodation.

State trusts, private traders, peasants, every-
one is out to make money. So life is everywhere,
so is it here. It is especially so in the life that is
seen by the foreigner; his life is held in a narrow
round of cafes, hotels and business places. He sees
chiefly two classes of people: government officials,
frequently bureaucratic and tangled in red tape; pri-
vate profit-makers seeking special privilege and con-
cessions, making money in legitimate and illegitimate
ways. He hears rumours of graft and sometimes
runs across it Russia, he concludes, is still a back-
ward, semi-Oriental land, lazy, ready to be cor-
rupted.

Yes, Russia is all that. But as you live longer in
Russia, and begin to meet workers and students and
managers of industry, you notice other things. Not
so obvious, but very important.

I went from Moscow to Petrograd. I looked
out of my car window on the way and saw a train
of cars, newly painted, shining cars in olive green.

26 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

On the side of those cars, in addition to the usual
number, was a design and a motto, with words about
the First of May.

Those cars were made by the car-builders, not
in their ordinary working-time, but on Sundays and
evenings and holidays. They were made as a free
gift by Russian workers for the needs of Russian
Railroads. They were presented to the govern-
ment at a May-Day festival. As long as they last
they will go "up and down the land, carrying pas-
sengers, and shouting aloud to everyone who sees
them that the railroad workers cared enough about
transport to make these cars for nothing, as a pres-
ent in a celebration. . , .

Is there any other land in the world where that
could happen? As I go through the streets of Mos-
cow I see also occasional street-cars, decorated with
gorgeous paint and many mottoes. "Red October"
is the name of one of these cars; "Lenin" is another.
These also were free gifts from the street-car work-
ers to the city of Moscow.

Another unusual incident happens. A group of
weavers from a textile factory suddenly decide to
make a call on Trotsky, the head of the army. They
present him with a banner. They say to him :

"To our dear comrade Trotsky: You with your
bayonet guard the gains of the revolution, while we
with our shuttles weave the shining web of social-
ism." . . . Then they give him a pay-book and pay-
number with the remark: "The workers of this
factory enter you up, Comrade Trotsky, as a red
weaver, and bring you your pay-book and pay-num-

HOW RUSSIA IS "DIFFERENT" 27

ber." Trotsky embraces and kisses the delegates.
Thereafter he is Honorary Red Weaver of that
factory; his shift of work is done by glad volunteers
in turn, and his wage envelope is turned over to the
children's home in which the factory is interested.

There is nothing new that citizens should pay
tribute to a popular military leaden But that they
should think they honour him by making him a
"Weaver,'* that seems like something new. That
they should promise to weave with their shuttles
the web of socialism, that indicates that they think
they are doing something. Something besides just
making cotton goods in a factory. Something that
other workers, elsewhere in the world, don't think
they are weaving.

Another incident. The biggest newspaper in
Moscow holds a contest, running for many weeks,
to determine who are the best managers of industry
in Russia. Imagine that for a moment in New
York, and you will see how strange it is. A news-
paper contest to see whether Rockefeller or Gary
or some small factory-manager in Pennsylvania is
the "best director." The letters come in from work-
ers under these managers. Other workers answer
back, and discuss for and against the efficiency of
their boss.

In the end there are twelve who are chosen. A
banquet in Moscow is given in their honour. They
receive the "Red Banner of Toil" from the govern-
ment, because they have done so much to help build
Communism. The workers' letters also reveal a

28 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

few especially bad managers ; these are investigated
and two of them are fired.

This is something new in industry; but equally
striking are the standards used by the workers in
judging their directors. It shows what is demanded
of factory managers in Russia.

u Our factory was only working part-time,'* writes
one worker. "Once it stopped for eleven months
altogether; after that it produced only half of pre-
war. Then Archangelsk, he came. The workers
say of him : 'He runs forth like the wind, blowing
away disorganisation.' With just words he en-
thused and united us. He introduced order. He
rapidly brought production to 120 per cent, pre-
war.

"Comrade Archangelsk does not spare his physi-
cal or mental energy for his factory workers. For
ten months we see that every day our life becomes
better. He repaired housing and the bedrooms of
the workers. He repaired the bath-house. He re-
paired and painted the roofs of the factory and the
workers' houses. He improved the co-operative
stock-farm. He has arranged courses of general
instructions for the factory youth, and himself lec-
tures on technical questions."

Here is another prize-winner, manager of a mine
in the Donetz. His workers write of him : u He re-
ceived the mines in bad condition, condemned to de-
struction. He brought electricity four miles through
frozen earth and operated the machines by it; he
replaced the horses by an electric railway. Thanks
to him we averted destruction and even increased

HOW RUSSIA IS "DIFFERENT" 29

output, and thus started the gas and coke ovens and
chenycal mills." ... Is there any other land in the
world where they talk so poetically of mining?

Uhanof, manager of the great Dynamo works
in Moscow, was another prize-winner. His work-
ers wrote: "When Comrade Uhanof says it, the
workers know it will happen. He creates an at-
mosphere not of slave-like drive, but a critical, busi-
nesslike attitude of brotherly responsibility. * . .
When the new economic policy was started, he said:
'Not a single spider will get into Simonovka/ He
organised with us a co-operative tea-room and din-
ing-room and bakery and grocery. None of these
private profiteers can flourish out our way/'

Workers who write thus about their bosses are
something new. The fact that they write at all is
new; the standards th$y apply are new. These
standards indicate that the workers and the direc-
tors are working together to accomplish something
which all of them want, something not primarily
concerned with wages or hours or the usual matters
of conflict in industries outside Russia. What is this
goal they strive for together? It is clear from the
comments. A rebuilt industry; increasing produc-
tion; order and organisation and eificiency; based
on these, a good life and education for the workers.
Yes, and something more. The crowding out of
all the private business men, through co-operative
groceries, bakeries, tea-rooms.

The workers and these bosses are evidently
leagued together to build up state-owned industry
and co-operative industry and to compete out of

30 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

existence private business. They are trying to do
it by work. It is the same thing that the weavers
meant when they promised to weave with their shut-
tles the shining web of socialism.

Who were the bad bosses? The ones who got
fired on account of conditions exposed by their work-
ers? One of them was manager of a railway yard.
His workers wrote : 'Tor ten months of his manage-
ment 2,500 more tons of oil were used than needful;
healthy locomotives decreased twenty-five per cent.;
accidents increased threefold. Workers began to
fear him, saying: 'The union seems unable to protect
us from this man.' . . . Nothing was done by him to
increase production ; nothing was repaired. He gave
his attention to the whims of the specialists; he
talked of taking the children's home and the day
nursery to enlarge the size of their private apart*
ments. . . . He took no interest m education. For
two years and a half he did nothing to improve the
life of the workers.*'

These are the tests that damn or commend a man
in Russia. They are sane tests of a world that is
building; beside them the tests passed in the rest of
the world seem utterly insane. Where else but in
Russia would the greatest daily in the country give
columns of space for months, where else would dis-
cussion go on hotly across thousands of miles of
cities and mines and factories, not about sensational
sins and crimes in high life, but about men of whom
it is said: "They are bringing order out of chaos.
They are making life better for the workers round

HOW RUSSIA IS "DIFFERENT" 31

them. They are capable of organising their fel-
lows, for the conquest of the world."

Week after week, as you mix with the common
people of Russia, you find other ways in which life is
different. The workers in mine and factory are
criticising not only bosses, but the methods of indus-
try and its relation to government As you go into
their meetings, you discover that they have the sense
of being able to change this, and that they are taking
an interest in it. The men who sit in government
come to the weekly meetings of the factory that
elected them (for election in Russia is by working
groups, not localities), and explain to their constitu-
ents what they are doing. Any time in the year they
may be recalled, if the meeting does not like their
actions. A new man Is chosen and sent in their place
any time in the year. This is one of the ways of
keeping government close to the actual will of the
workers.

Peasants also I saw, thousands of them coming
up to Moscow to visit the great Agricultural Exposi-
tion. They came free of charge on the government
railroads and municipal street-cars ; they were housed
and fed free of charge in the co-operative houses
of groups of city workers. They went to the Peas-
ants' House and found there reading rooms, baths,
agricultural information and a legal aid department
to connect them with the government. This also is
something unknown outside Russia.
r Every city factory and government department
adopts some country village to which it acts as big
brother, sending down lecturers and teachers and

32 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

books and information. A group of students of my
acquaintance adopted a certain township, and in
summer went to live and teach throughout its vil-
lages, sharing with the peasants the knowledge they
had gained.

The students of Russia are a chapter by them-
selves. The universities are jammed with young
men and women, not those who can afford leisure
and a college course, but those who are chosen by
unions and government departments as especially
capable and needing special knowledge. They come
for training for jobs already known and go back to
use their knowledge for purposes desired by their
fellow-workers.

In the summer the students go but on vacation
trips which cost nothing and which are planned for
the good of the country. They visit coal mines, and
the coal miners go to Moscow to visit the students.
They make surveys .of villages and escort trains of
peasants to the Exposition. They go as guests to
little Republics in the heart of Asia. The little
Republics give them horses and food, and they give
in return the first maps and geographies ever known
in those uncharted regions.

All these things are incidents, seeming at first dis-
connected. But after a time you see that they are
all part of a vast organised Life that is coming slowly
into being. It is a life which has nothing to do with
the profiteers ; it scorns utterly their life and stand-
ards. It is bringing up a new generation to scorn
these things also.

I talked to a wealthy woman in a summer resort

HOW RUSSIA IS "DIFFERENT" 33

near Moscow. A new-rich, bejewelled creature, who
displayed, towards the end of her talk, a real pathos.
She began by damning the government that taxed
her highly. She ended almost in tears. "The worst
is," she said, "the way our children leave us. My
daughter has joined the Communists. It took her
three years to do it. They made it very hard for
her, as she was the daughter of a bourgeois and they
doubted her sincerity. But she stuck to it and joined,
and now she will not live with me any more. She
has no use for all our ways of living."

There is a lot of "mess" in Russia. Ordinary dis-
comforts of life, the rotten inefficiency of the heat-
ing system in winter, offices tangled in red tape,
crudities of every kind. There are plenty of things
to shock, profiteers and gambling dens and bootleg
whiskey and every rotten thing there is anywhere
in the world.

But it is the only place in the world where I get
a feeling of hope and a plan. With hundreds of
thousands of people living for that plan and dying
for it and going hungry for it> and wasting them-
selves in inefficient work for it, and finally bringing
a little order out of chaos for it. America seems
cheerful and inconsequential after it Europe, the
insane nightmare of Europe, seems impossible to
endure.

What goes on now in Russia is much more stupen-
dous than anything which went on under the name
of Revolution in those hectic days when Russia was
the land of everything good or bad according to
your point of view. In Russia when they speak of

34 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

the Revolution, they don't mean one grand and hor-
rible unheaval; that was merely the "October Over-
turn,' 7 the taking of power. Now comes the using
of power to create a new world through the decades.
There have been many revolutions in history, each
with its tragic dignity, its cruelties, its power re-
leased. But never has there been a great organisa-
tion, in control of the economic as well as of the
political resources of a nation, planning steadily
through the prose of daily life a future embracing
many lands and decades, learning from mistakes,
changing methods but not aims, controlling press
and education and law and industry as tools to its
purpose. . . This is Common Consciousness in
action, crude, half-organised and inefficient, but the
first time in History.

II

THE COMMUNISTS' NEW PLAN

IN the nations of the West they speak of the new
economic policy as Russia's return to capitalism. In
Russia they call it "the new road to communism."
It is a road that they know will take them many
years. Already in two years they have advanced
farther than they hoped when they began.

All over Russia the Communists know the plan
and their share in it. On the shores of the Black
Sea I sat in the gorgeous vineyards of the Crimea,
sweeping down under the August sun to the sparkling
waters* A watch-patrol of the vineyards sat beside
me and explained the reason for his job. Once these
grapes belonged to the palace of a grand duke ; now
they belong to the people. They are turned over
to the Board of Health for its sanitariums in the
Crimea, where the responsible workers of Russia,
worn out with eight years' war and revolution and
famine, come to be made over for work that is yet
to do. The watchman told me that he was guarding
the grapes for the people, for the saving and
strengthening of lives that were especially needed in
Russia.

On the Arctic shores of the White Sea I talked
with Rimpalle, organising mica mines and quarries
of feldspar and quartz on a diet of potatoes and

35

36 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

gravy and tea and bread. "I figure," he said, "that
up here so near the border and the propaganda of
the White Finns, where the peasants are so ignorant
and will never produce enough food from their poor
soil, it was needed to have an industry to give food
to the people."

In Moscow I talked with the manager of an auto-
mobile factory, which struggled painfully along for
want of capital and a few needed machines. I asked
if he could not get a little capital from the govern-
ment or even from foreigners. "Not yet," he said.
"Automobiles are not matters of first necessity.
Tractors and trucks come first and need any capital
available."

They all know the plan for* the rebuilding of
Russia towards communism. It changes from day
to day in details ; they discuss and plan the changes.
In principal outline it has been fixed clearly for the
past three years.

During the first hot years of Revolution, one could
hardly speak of a plan. "Our acts in those years
were dictated," says Trotsky, "not by economic good
sense but by the need of destroying the enemy. Dur-
ing a war I blow up a bridge to prevent a White
Guard advance. From the point of view of economic
good sense, that is barbarism. From a political and
military point of view it is necessity, and I should
be criminal if I did not blow up the bridge in time."

"Why did we take over the banks and the indus-
tries by a great ipass nationalisation, before we were
capable of running these things," he asks. "Because
these things were being used to destroy us ; the banks

THE COMMUNISTS' NEW PLAN 37

were financing the counter-revolution; every shop,
every office was a centre for them. Economic good
sense would have taken over only the industries we
could manage ; hut if we had followed this plan, we
would not have survived to celebrate now the fifth
anniversary of our Revolution.

"We had to concentrate on elementary problems :
to keep up, even if half-starved, the workers' state;
to feed and clothe the army, defending us on the
front ; to feed and clothe the city workers who sup-
plied the army."

This was not a joyous time. They speak of it
now as the period of military communism; but it was
not the kind of communism that anyone wants again.
They seized the peasants' grain to feed the cities and
the army; they divided it equally at first, to keep
everyone alive. Industry already had broken in the
long collapse before the Revolution; they created a
centralised apparatus to see that at least the war
needs of supplies and munitions were met. It was
an insufficient amount, but enough so that they won.

"The policy of seizing the peasants' grain led to
a cutting down of agriculture. The policy of equal
earnings led to a low productivity of labour. The
policy of centralised bureaucratic management of in-
dustry prevented the efficient use of equipment and
working force." . . . No, I am not quoting from
the opponents of communism, though these are pre-
cisely the most far-reaching criticisms they have
made; I am quoting from Trotsky 1,

"The whole policy of war communism was forced
by the blockade, by the regime of a military fortress,

38 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

with disorganised industry and exhausted resources.
. . . The military victory which was impossible with-
out this severe policy, at last allows us to exchange
it for measures of economic good sense. Here is the
origin of the new economic policy."

What are these measures of economic good sense,
in the plan for achieving communism? That the
State shall take over all that it is capable of running,
beginning with the basic resources of the land. That
step by step it shall build up state-owned industries,
each of which makes profit and puts it back into
development, keeping always the central control in
the hands of the people. That in the lesser indus-
tries and retail trade, which the State is not equipped
and perhaps will never be best equipped to handle,
co-operatives of peasants and workers shall be en-
couraged to fill the gap. That wherever all these
methods are insufficient, since Russia is backward
and organisation is slow, private business shall be
encouraged to come in on temporary leases, long or
*hort, according to the nature of the business. This
Orivate capital shall be allowed plenty of chances for
profit, (but never the final ownership of basic re-
sources.

The State-owned industries, organised in great in-
terlocking trusts, run themselves meantime for
profit, trying, just as the great trusts try in every
land, to compete smaller private business out of ex-
istence and to get control of the entire field of their
industry. They put their profits back into expan-
sion, except such part as is needed for the gradual
raising of wages. These wages are settled by col-

THE COMMUNISTS 3 NEW PLAN 39

lective agreement with the trade unions which are,
next to the government, the strongest organisation
in Russia. These trade unions are entitled to know
all the inner secrets of the business; any citizen is
entitled to know, for it is a public affair. The trade
unions know how much profits the Textile Trust has
made; they know what they can demand for next
year's wages.

But they do not demand that all the Textile
Trust's profits shall be used to increase wages of tex-
tile workers. For they are equally interested in
seeing the Textile Trust expand, until all of the tex-
tile industry of Russia is owned by the State. There
are also other interests to be considered; the peas-
ants, for instance, want cheaper cotton goods.

Shall the profits of the Textile Trust be used to
expand the business, or to advance the wages of tex-
tile workers, or to reduce the price of goods to the
peasant? As Russia slowly struggles to her feet out
of the ruins of war, it is the Communist Party that
decides these questions, enforcing its will then
through the government apparatus and also through
its influence in the unions, yielding now a little to
this group and now a little to that, so that all of
Russia may rise together.

Last fall, for instance, the peasants were raising
a bitter cry. The state-owned industries, starting
with no capital at all, and having to pay for new
machinery out of income, were charging all the traffic
would bear, in order to get on their feet. For a
year the government favoured the industries, letting
them have their way. Then the reports came in;

40 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

some of the big State trusts, selling necessities, had
made as high as 200 and 300 per cent in dividends.
The peasants complained that they had to give six
times as much grain for a yard of cloth as prewar.
. . . Promptly the order went forth: "Cut the price
of State-made goods thirty to sixty per cent., ac-
cording to the industry." The price was cut in a
week; the following week sales to peasants increased
eighty per cent.

It is a constant day by day planning, to bring the
country forward as a united whole, helping the in-
dustries that are weak, and when they grow strong,
making them contribute to the common life. For
although the State trusts of Russia are exactly like
capitalist trusts as we know them, in matters of
profit-making and organisation, there is this final
difference. When the reports come in at the end of
the year, the stockholders to whom report is made
are the State; the disposal of those profits and the
next year's policy is a public affair, publicly discussed
and decided. The unions in every industry are as
much interested in increasing production as the man-
ager is, for it will return to them partly in increased
wages and partly in the glory of having it known to
all that their industry has advanced and is helping
Russia.

N This is not communism, no. They call it State
Capitalism, which means that it is capitalism con-
trolled and owned and directed by the State. They
say that in the midst of a capitalist world with which
they must do business, and in a backward country
technically unskilled and unorganised, it is as near

THE COMMUNISTS' NEW PLAN. 41

to communism as they can go for the present. They
say it is the first step towards communism; that these
industries; owned by the State will expand, settling
their labour questions with the strong trade unions
and their marketing questions through the co-opera-
tives, and that these groups together, influenced from
within by the Communists in all of these organisa-
tions, can develop and guide the growing industry
of Russia, shaping it year by year, in accordance with
new knowledge and experience, to be of service, not
to a few capitalists, but to all the people.

And meantime, while the State holds the basic
resources in its hands, renting out some of them for
development and getting them back in the end organ-
ised and improved, the schools and the press and the
social resources of the land shall be used to train a
new generation, not lazy and ignorant and self-
centred like the old generation, but technically keen
and socially accustomed from earliest days to co-
operative labour. So that a generation hence, when
Russia has developed industries and mines, the re-
sources of all the people, there will be a new genera-
tion fit to run these things for the common good.

That's the Plan. What are their resources and
how are they succeeding? The rest of this book is
an attempt to answer that question. Here are a few
facts.

Five years ago, in the darkest hours of the Revo-
lution, Russia offered to the world on February 4,
1919, the following conditions by radio and con-
firmed them later in April to the unofficial American
representative, Mr. Bullitt:

42 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

(1) Recognition of all past debts;

(2) turning over of raw materials as guarantee
for loans ;

(3) concessions at their choice;

(4) territorial concessions in the form of military
occupation of some districts of Russia by the
Entente of her Russian agents. "--;? -

All this she offered, in return for being let alone.
What is her present position? She has recognised
no debts and seems unlikely to except for value re-
ceived in the shape of new advantages; she is giving
no deposits of raw material to anyone to hold; she
is growing more and more reticent in the question of
concessions; as for military occupation, she is not
likely to admit any foreign armies. Her lands have
reached again to the port of Vladivostok; her influ-
ence stretches down into Asia. In relation to foreign
pressure, she has grown stronger year by year.

Within her own borders, the State has control of
the following resources :

1 i ) All the land belongs to the State. It is rented
out to the peasants through their village govern-
ments in return for a tax on their harvest They
have permanent right to use and to pass from father
to son, but no right to sell or mortgage. Land
rents cannot be made a source of profit or exploita-
tion.

(2) The land and buildings in the cities belong
to the municipal governments, who rent them out and
run their city budget from the proceeds, repairing
the ravages of war first, and then expanding the

THE COMMUNISTS' NEW PLAN 43

cities and cutting down rents for the workers. The
public utilities are also publicly owned.

(3) The railways, about forty thousand miles of
line, are also the property of the State. They are
used, as the Workers* Government decides, some-
times to make profit towards their own expenses,
sometimes to build up a struggling but necessary in-
dustry by low freight rates, sometimes to bring tens
of thousands of peasants on free trips to an Agri-
cultural Exposition in Moscow, or to take thousands
of students on free trips all over the land.

(4) All industrial enterprises and properties be-
long legally to the State, which may run them itself
or lease them out to private operators. Four thou-
sand of the largest establishments are operated
directly by the State, employing one million workers ;
four thousand of the smallest, employing eighty thou-
sand workers, have been leased, but even of these
half are run by co-operatives or workers' organisa-
tions, and only half by private capitalists.

( 5 ) Private capital is employed mostly in trade.
A year ago at the end of 1922, it was estimated that
thirty per cent, of the internal trade was in private
hands, fifty-five per cent, in the hands of State or-
ganisations and fifteen per cent run by co-operatives.
Now the co-operatives have increased at the expense
of the private firms; co-operatives handle about
twenty-seven per cent, of internal trade, private busi-
ness men somewhat less than twenty per cent.

(6) Foreign trade is entirely in State hands.
Extremely high protection or absolute prohibition of
imports may be used to bring into life some new

44 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

struggling industry in Russia which the State desires.
For instance, English coal has recently been shut out
of Petrograd for the first time in history, in order
to stimulate the coal industry of the Donetz. In
the end this will prove uneconomic, as the Donetz
is too far away to supply Petrograd continuously;
but the temporary stimulant is needed to bring up
production and reduce mining costs. A rigid policy
against imports has given Russia in one year's time
a favourable balance of trade; ninety million gold
roubles more exports than imports. This gives the
State capital for expanding industry; but at any
moment, if it should be decided that she has enough
capital and wants cheap goods for the peasants, she
could reverse this policy. No "private interests 55
have anything to say about it; the "Big Interests 55
are all in State hands.

In fact, there are not at present as many "private
interests 5 * in Russia as the Communists would really
like to see. For the State has not nearly capital
enough to develop Russia rapidly, and is extremely
willing to give private capital chances to assist
in development, as long as those chances do not
threaten the ultimate public ownership of public
resources. Feeling secure of the ultimate sources of
power, the State offers to private capital little mo-
nopolies and contracts more sweeping than are even
allowed under competition in capitalist lands.

I talked with Jigalko, chairman of Concessions,
in the Ukraine. He told me they wanted foreign
capital to make tractors ; the State was prepared to
donate factory buildings and a certain amount of

THE COMMUNISTS 5 NEW FLAN 45

equipment and selling stations all over the Ukraine,
He would have preferred American capital, as their
technical organisation was better, but he had no
means of contact with America, so he was considering
offers from German and Czecho-Slovak firms.

"Will the lucky firm have a monopoly of tractor
making?" I asked*

"Not necessarily," he answered. "It depends on
the terms of the contract If we should find a firm
making a satisfactory tractor, with enough capital to
put behind rapid development and to supply all the
growing needs of the Ukraine, and if they would go
into partnership with the State on some satisfactory
basis, we furnishing buildings and selling apparatus
and they furnishing technical ability and working
capital, obviously, in such a case, it would be best
to have a monopoly, thus avoiding the waste of dupli-
cate selling stations and duplicate repair stations and
repair parts all over the country." . . . That was
the kind of a chance offered to private capital. Mo-
nopoly contracts in fields where conditions made it
wise to avoid duplication.

Another form of contract with private capital
much favoured is the agreement with the Barnsdell
International Corporation for drilling oil-wells in the
fields of Baku. The government oil company,
Aznepth, remains in control of the fields; the Barns-
dell Company furnishes machinery and drills wells
for a proportion of the oil. They are doing this
in a proved oil-field, producing the most valuable oil
in the world, extremely rich in machine oils; they

46 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

expressed themselves to me as quite satisfied with
the co-operation they received.

""As for the small business men," said the presi-
dent of a government bank to me, "they are almost
as free as they are in any country. In the United
States, also, their ability to flourish is limited by the
great trusts, which encourage them as long as they
contribute to its profits. Standard Oil can encourage
independent companies who patronise its pipe-lines ;
but it destroys any who threaten its control. Our
State trusts do the same. They have not capital
enough for all the expansion they need. Private
capital can make contracts to supply them with what
they need or for new development in partnership
with the State or on leasehold contract with the
State. * But all the force of state industry and state
banks and political government is organised to fight
an attempt of private capital for ultimate control."
In its relation to private capital, Russia is far
more independent to-day than a year ago. During
the summer of 1922 there was a mad hunger for
capital. I went around with an American business
friend, and saw the dozens of chances offered him.
Here was a youth from the Educational Productive
Association, representing five million of the youth of
Russia, organised for Physical Training. "Our head
office in Moscow," he said, "supports itself by con-
cessions from the government. We have the mo-
nopoly for supplying sporting goods for Russia."

It was a staggering monopoly, with a market of
a million young people. They were making money,
though terribly in need of capital for expansion.

THE COMMUNISTS' NEW PLAN 47

They wanted money especially for a little concession
given them by the city of Moscow, the running of
auto-busses in the streets. The street-car system of
Moscow was terribly crowded, and their one little
auto-bus was coining money. It would pay for itself
in a single summer. But they wanted some maker
of auto-busses to go into partnership with them and
supply a dozen busses. They would furnish gasoline,
chauffeurs and management; the city would take
shares and give them a monopoly, since they would
then be able to expand rapidly and furnish better
transportation for Moscow. . . . The auto-bus com-
pany has now, after a year, many more autos; but
the city street-car has expanded faster than anyone
hoped ; it has built twenty-five miles of new lines and
added hundreds of cars; if the city gives monopo-
lies now, it will demand a bigger share in the returns.

Another scheme I heard, a young mechanic in-
terested in electric light bulbs. They were being
made by a government factory in Petrograd, and the
government department stores contracted to take all
the output. They could only make 2,000 a day, for
their machinery was largely wrecked; two hundred
thousand dollars would equip them again to produce
100,000 a day.

They would gladly have taken in private capital
as partner; if private capital was not to be found,
then some day in a year or two the government would
find the money. Meantime, this young man wanted
to manufacture the metal parts for those bulbs,
bought now in Germany. Seven or eight young
mechanics, clubbing together, offered their time for

48 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

the business ; they needed two or three thousand dol-
lars for dies and preliminary samples. They were
promised a contract for all their output. If they
could start now on a small scale, then when the big
factory expanded, they also could expand. Of course
some day the state electric light industry would have
money enough to handle their end of the job also,
and would want to buy them out on its own terms.
But that time was a long way ahead; if they made
satisfactory metal parts for the bulbs, the state elec-
tric light industry would prefer to use its income for
other expansion.

A man that I know came into Russia with $5,000,
and got a contract for running correspondence
schools in Russia. He could have had a monopoly
contract, but wisely refused it, trusting to his ability
to satisfy the Department of Education. He num-
bers his pupils now by tens of thousands. He was
given free of charge a six-story building well located
in Moscow.

Those were the chances going begging in 1922, in
the mad rush to reconstruct Russia, and the painful
lack of resources. No one now could get a building
on such terms. But fortunately for Russia, the few
who had courage to take advantage of these condi-
tions were those who wanted to help Russia, rather
than to drive hard bargains. The correspondence
school in question uses all its profit from private
pupils to finance large non-profit-making schemes of
education. It does most of its work on contract for
the Board of Education or the All Russian Trade ,
Unions, accepting from them guarantee against loss

THE COMMUNISTS' NEW PLAN 49

and payment of costs. Thus it flourishes and
expands; if it had had a different attitude it would
never have taken the chance when it did, nor prob-
ably would it ever have aroused enough trust to get
the contract.

That was the summer when Russia went to Genoa
and The Hague, prepared to give almost anything in
return for credits. Her industries and agriculture
were so ruined by war, revolution and famine, that
she doubted her own ability to stagger to her feet
without foreign help. No nation in Europe had done
so ; she was more backward than any. She was pre-
pared to go very far in concessions.

Never again, I think, will there be such a hunger
for foreign capital as in that summer of 1922. It
was an incoherent desire; it did not know how to
make itself plain. It was still mixed with suspicion
and doubt; foreign business men came and tried, and
found no point of contact and went away again. But
the desire was there, almost desperate in its hunger
for reconstruction quickly. But swiftly, as the sum-
mer advanced, the State industries began to improve,
and began themselves to furnish capital for some of
the needed expansion. They began to speak of "put-
ting harder terms to foreign capital."

To foreign capital it will not seem that the terms
are harder, but only that they are more definite.
For the real business chances of Moscow never
reached foreign understanding at all. Too many
misconceptions lay between, too much impatience -on
the part of foreigners, too much suspicion on the
part of Russians. Life now becomes dearer and

50 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

more definite. There will be good opportunities for
investment for many years to come in developing
Russia, better thought out and better planned and
surer. But the chance to get buildings and farms
and monopolies for nothing, if one would only take
them and use them to rebuild Russia, these chances
are no longer so recklessly offered. Since that time
there have been two fair harvests; since that time
State industries have acquired self-confidence.

What is the ultimate control behind these State
industries, to prevent them from coming under pri-
vate control in the end? How is the government
organised? What are its ruling forces? I went
myself to several Moscow elections.

Voting is not by district and by ballot, but by
factory meeting or village town-meeting. Elections
in i f oscow went $n* for an entire week, each factory
choosing the time most convenient for it. .The work-
ers voted on factory time; practically all of them
voted.

I went with the employes of the Foreign Office to
their voting. Since it takes five hundred workers to
elect one delegate to the Moscow Soviet (which in
turn sends its delegates to the All Russian Congress) ,
and since the Foreign Office did not have enough
employes to be entitled to a representative, they com-
bined with the State Bank and several little factories
in the neighbourhood. They all marched together
to a central hall, two thousand in all, entitled to four
representatives.

At the entrance they were checked off by a man
acquainted with all of them. Inside the hall they

THE COMMUNISTS 3 NEW PLAN 51

sang the International, and then heard reports. A
man from the Communist Party made the first
speech, telling what the last year's programme of
the government had been and how far it had been
fulfilled; what next year's plans were, in taxes and
water supply and city improvements and regulation
of wages. The crowd determined how long he
should speak; they voted him twenty minutes at first,
but grew interested and extended the time. The rank
and file were obviously in control of the meeting.

Disappointment swept the crowd when the chair*
man announced that no opposition candidate had
declared himself. "How dull," said everyone*
"This is the first year there has been no opposition*
Can't they even give us a debate?" Nominations
from the crowd were asked for, but none were f cyr th*
coming. Several questions wer~ asked, and r>./lies
given ; then the communist programme was adopted,
followed by the adoption of the candidates, and they
all went home.

The factories that had an opposition bragged
about it. "We had the best election in town," said
the Amo factory. "Three different parties and lots
of attacks. A Social Revolutionary got up, and de-
nounced the government for failing to keep its prom-
ises. 'Two years ago they promised you a new
world,' he said. 'Now they offer you a better water-
supply and a few more electric lights.* There is
some interest in that kind of election." . . . But
here also the Communists were chosen. Such were
elections all over Moscow, more like the choosing of
delegates from a labour union to a central council,

52 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

or the returning of tried officers in a commercial club
by unanimous consent after a year's satisfactory
work.

How do the Communists keep the power in these
elections ? How would the workers throw out the
Communists if they didn't like them? Where would
dissatisfaction express itself first? The Commu-
nists know* all the tricks of politics that are known
in any country; the control of press, of election
boards, of political machinery. In the elections
themselves I could not detect any atmosphere of com-
pulsion; they asked questions freely and went out
satisfied. I have no doubt that, when necessary, the
Communist Party uses all the various means known
in politics for keeping itself in power. But these
means do not work forever in other countries ; the
opposition strengthens and at last supplants the gov-
ernment. In Russia the opposition grows less with
each new year ; old parties dissolve and beg for peace.
The Communist control goes farther back into in-
dustry and life than any mere political trick or com-
pulsion.

It is a marvellous organisation, unlike any party
known in history. It is a dictatorship of half a
million Communists over one hundred and thirty
million people./ Yet it has organised itself to keep
in power for a generation, by studying the desires
of all the people, over thousands of miles of country,
and by supplying those desires, as far as it finds it
necessary, moulding them always a little further in
the direction of its aim.

There are millions of votes cast each year for the

THE COMMUNISTS' NEW PLAN 53

Communists, but the people casting those votes do
not rank as Party Members. For to be a Party
Member is something far more than voting. It is
to be organised for life in a compact unit whose pur-
pose takes precedence over every other interest. You
are a Communist first and everything else after-
wards. You are on call always, to go wherever you
are sent throughout Russia.

Those half million Communists are scattered
throughout the country, at strategic posts of indus-
try and government. Every large factory, every
notable village, has its Communist nucleus. If any
factory had no Communists, some would be sent
from Moscow to take jobs there. They do the work
of ordinary workmen, but they are expected to work
harder than anyone else, to be examples of loyalty
and energy, to keep forever in touch with public
opinion in their place of work, to know the needs of
the workers and explain to them the purposes of the
government. They are expected to take the initiative
in extra work nights, or Sundays, or for famine
emergencies. They may not always live up to these
expectations, but if they don't, they may be thrown
out of the Party on complaint from a non-party
worker. They are expected to secure and hold po-
litical leadership by constant knowledge and dili-
gence in public affairs.

.In every factory the Communist group holds
weekly meetings. The policies of government come
down from Moscow to be discussed here and the
result of their discussion goes back to the centre in
organised fashion. ... I attended, in the Donetz

54 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

Basin, a district meeting of the Communist Party.
It had been decided in Moscow in the Central Exec-
utive of the Party that the main government prob-
lems for the year were (i) the reconstruction of
heavy industry ; (2) the relation of the many nation-
alities in the soviet federation; (3) the cleaning out
of bureaucracy, inefficiency and red tape in the State
machine. High and important Communists discussed
these things in the papers ; the discussions went out
to every factory group and were repeated there;
they were talked over with non-party workers. Then
came the district meetings.

Four or five hundred men and women filled the
hall in Red Lugansk, a mining town in the Donetz
Basin. Miners and employes of the health depart-
ment, workers from locomotive factory and enamel-
ware factory; managers from these places also, since
they also were Communists. I was there with Presi-
dent Rakovski of the Ukraine, but he made no speech
till evening; he was there getting his orders, not
giving them.

Hot were the criticisms passed of the government.
The manager of the locomotive works arose : "For
a year I have induced my workers to keep going on
low wages and hard conditions by appealing to their
loyalty to the Revolution. For a year I have told
them how Russia needs locomotives. We brought
production up to thirty-five new locomotives in our
plant this year. But the first of those thirty-five,
finished a year ago and launched on the tracks with
a celebration, is still in the yards. Someone in Mos-

THE COMMUNISTS 3 NEW PLAN 55
cow forgets to take away those thirty-five locomo*

tives."

"Perhaps you charge too much," shouted a voice
from the hall. "What do your locomotives cost?"

"How the hell do I know?" came the answer.
"That's some more of this damned bureaucracy. I
know everything that goes on in my plant I know
I have reduced by thirty per cent, the number of
hours required to build a locomotive. But my coal
comes from a mine ten miles up the valley and neither
the manager of the mine nor I know what I pay him.
These little things are a matter of bookkeeping in
Moscow."

That was the concrete stuff they were talking
about, with wrath and freedom. They were demand-
ing more local autonomy and less red tape. They
made suggestions, concrete ones, about getting it.
At the close of the day they elected delegates to go
to the regional congress at Bakhmut, centre of the
coal region. From here the delegates went on to
Kharkov for the Ukrainian Congress of the Party;
from Kharkov, without returning, by special train
to Moscow for the All Russian Party Congress which
decides the programme of the government.

Thus in one month's time the problems of the
State went forth to every factory and mine and vil-
lage of importance, and the answers rolled back,
gathering definiteness as they came, to be worked
into the Party Programme on which the government
would act for a year. Then the delegates went back,
to factory, mine and village, to explain why they had
adopted just this programme and no other.

56 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

That is the way the Communist Party is organ-
ised for action, and for keeping in touch with the
wishes of the people. Equally important is the way
its individuals are disciplined and chosen.

It takes from six months to three years to get into
the Communist Party; You state in your application
the kinds of work you are fit for. You go into regu-
lar classes and meetings to fit yourself for various
forms of service. You take military training; you
attend discussions on economics and international
affairs and internal problems of Russia.

You also go under discipline of the severest kind,
which enters right into your pay envelope and the
kinds of work you are allowed to do. You cannot
make money for yourself by trading, or by exploit-
ing the work of another. You must be, usually, in
state service, either in state industry or government
office. If you get a wage higher than a certain sum,
which was once almost nothing, but is now nearly
fifty dollars a month, you must divide the surplus
with the party Treasury, which is used for the sick
and dependents of the party. If you get even as
low as fifteen or twenty dollars a month, you may
find it attacked by famine assessments or- other emer-
gencies, by party vote. I know women and men who
gave their wedding rings to the famine, because it
was voted by the local branch of the party.

A Communist friend of mine held two jobs, in
order to make ends meet in his family, which con-
tained two children. He worked at one in the day
and another in the evening. He got from both of
his jobs, which were responsible positions in the gov-

THE COMMUNISTS' NEW PLAN 57

ernment, a total wage of fifty-five dollars a month.
At that time the Communist basic wage was twenty-
five dollars ; it has since risen, as the general standard
of workers' living rises. He had to give fifteen of
his fifty-five to the party. * But if he needed extra
help for his children or sanitarium care for himself
in illness, he was entitled to go to the party schools
or the party sanitariums. The party is like one
solid family, pooling its resources and uniting its
forces.

This organised force is always mobilised for
action; it can be cast at a word into any part of
Russia. When shock troops were needed to stiffen
the battle-front, when men are needed to stem typhus
epidemics, or to fight famine, or to increase produc-
tion in some ruined factory or flooded mine, or to
clean up some plague spot deadly to touch, Com-
munists are mobilised and sent to these jobs. Week
by week the Communists I know receive orders to go
on certain evenings to give lectures to unions or fac-
tory groups, or to give certain Sundays to commu-
nity work. If Communists are lax in their duties,
they may at any time be "cleaned put" of the party.

There was a great "cleaning*' at the time the new
economic policy was introduced, in order to get rid
of those who might corrupt the party under the new
money system. Any worker or peasant, whether
Communist or not, might bring charges against a
Communist that he was doing things unworthy a
party member, that he got drunk or profiteered or
was rough with workers under him. The hearings

58 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

were open; if the party considered a member a draw-
back to them, they threw him out.

Less spectacular cleanings go on from week to
week. I have met men, in the past two years in
Russia, who were causing chaos, who were playing
politics, who were destroying efficiency by their petty
personal preferences. I have felt at times utterly
hopeless of the department in which they worked.
And then, after six months or a year, I have sud-
denly heard that these men had been cleaned out of
the party, and retired to jobs of unimportance. Not
all of them yet; there are plenty who ought to go.
But there is a constant force within the party fight-
ing for the purity of its ranks.

If a Communist commits a crime against the Re-
public, the penalty is greater than for an ordinary
man. Graft in office, which in others might be
merely the bad habit of ancient Russia, is in him
treason to the Revolution. Communists have been
shot for graft in office.

Half a million men organised under such terms
a^re scattered across Russia. North of the Arctic
laircle, south of the Caucasus, east of the Volga I
^ found them, in timber industry, in little provincial
towns, a far-flung group sent out to be ministers
of finance in little republics or saw-mill workers
labouring to increase production. They are no an-
gels or supermen; they can be suspicious and hard
to deal with and inefficient. But they act according
to one programme. Their loyalty is cemented by the
cause they work for, by impossible dangers and hard-
ships already endured. They know the job they are

THE COMMUNISTS' NEW PLAN 59

on, and their part in relation to Russia and the world.
The Communists in the oil industry know quite well
the importance of oil in controlling the world's com-
merce. The Communists who gave their lives in
famine-fighting did so knowing that agriculture was
the basis of Russia. The Communists on low wages
in the schools know what depends on the education
of the youth for achieving the goal they have set.

I met one man who had organised an army in
Siberia, and was now dying of tuberculosis in a
small provincial town, but still working on against
the famine. I knew another, a young boy who spent
four years in Hungarian prisons, and whose heart
would never be well from the tortures he had had
there ; he was in the far north building roads where
the open-air life might keep him alive a little longer.
There is not one of them who has not lived for
months on black bread and soup of rotten, frozen
potatoes and kept on working at high pressure.
They have few material possessions; they are ready
at a day's notice to go where they are sent for the
R/evolution. Last fall there were complaints that
many Communists in Moscow were growing self-
important and "living like bourgeois" and getting
out of touch with the common people; the arm of
the Central Committee reached out and transferred
them to jobs in Turkestan and Siberia and little pro-
vincial towns.

Why should anyone enter a party which demands
such discipline, such giving up of all private com-
fort and individual choice? For the fun of ruling
Russia; for the fun of building an empire and recon-

60 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

structing a nation ; for the pleasure of creating some-
thing new in the world. Anyone who will give up
private interests in order to manage public affairs
can do it in Russia. They choose themselves by
these hard and simple tests.

Behind the Communist Party comes the Commu-
nist Youth, equal in numbers to the adult party.
Trained already from childhood to act together and
to look upon public service as the great end of life.
Behind them are the Young Pioneers, boys of ten to
sixteen, who already have no memories antedating
the Revolution.

This is the Communists' new Plan and the ma-
chinery they have to put behind it. Many more
details of that machinery will be discussed in this
book. Can they succeed? Or will private capital
grow stronger and reach out for political power and
secure it?

That is for the future to reveal; it depends, and
Russia knows it depends, on the rest of the world.
At present, her existence in a capitalist world de-
mands agreements with private capital, honestly
kept; she is making and keeping such agreements;
she is running banks and industries on that basis.
Before her stretches a long year by year fight in the
economic field between state capitalism which hopes
to become communism, and private capitalism which
hopes to become dominant.

Into that struggle enter all the forces known to
man : the gold in the banks of America, the nation-
alist uprisings in India, the grasping of French im-
perialists for the Ruhr, the persevering labour of

THE COMMUNISTS' NEW PLAN 61

unknown Communists in the mines and factories of
Russia. The forces on the one side are organised
by the biggest powers of world finance; the forces
on the other by the Communist Party of Russia,
which is itself no negligible power.

"There is no guarantee of success written in the
stars," said Trotsky. "Success depends on careful
planning and relentless * carrying through of plans.
Failure is always possible, either pn the military or
the economic front, if we are stupid. A social revo-
lution is a very dangerous thing."

*As, for instance, the shutting-down of unprofitable plants,
even at the cost of temporary dislocations of unemployment.

Ill

THE BATTLE-FRONT OF INDUSTRY

"How are we going to make our steel mills go?
And our mines? And our railroads?" These ques-
tions are on everyone's lips in Russia. The workers
discuss them in union meetings. The heads of indus-
try discuss them publicly and then confer with the
workers. The managers of the coal industry confer
with the coal miners' union and work out a joint
programme for industry; then they all go to Con-
gress together to ask for what they want.

All questions of war and army and foreign affairs
were completely dropped out of the discussion at the
Tenth All Russian Congress of Soviets. Trotsky
and Chicherin did not even make reports. The Con-
gress was hearing reports about industry and agri-
culture and finance and education. Even Trotsky
said to me : "If I get the army matters in good shape
soon, I may give some time myself to coal and steel."

Imagine American workers raising the question in
their unions : "How are we going to save the Steel
Trust? What can we do to help Standard Oil?"
. . , Imagine our Secretary of War remarking:
"Now that we have peace on our hands, I am invited
to go to Pittsburgh and help them organise the Steel
Trust"

. . . This will give an idea of the difference between

62

BATTLE-FRONT OF INDUSTRY 63

the two countries. In Russia these industries are
government property and everyone expects to benefit
from their improvement, especially the workers em-
ployed in them.

I sat in late December a year ago In a Conference
of Industries and Transport in Moscow and heard
several hundred representatives from all parts of
Russia tell their tale of woe. It was as if Gary and
Morgan and Rockefeller and the National City
Bank, with hundreds of lesser industrialists, should
hold an open conference, before Congress opens, to
decide what they want the government to do for
industry.

In Russia these conferences are quite open, for
they are matters of public policy, in which the indi-
viduals present have no personal profits to make,
except the wage of some fifty dollars a month which
they draw from the State. Yet they were much the
same type of highly trained personnel one might
expect to find in the management of industries every-
where. Of the 274 men on the highest boards in
the Department of State Industries, under which the
meeting was held, 204 had had university education*
Before the Revolution, seventy-five had been higher
technical managers, and fifty-one had been upper
administrative personnel in industries. They were
no novices discussing industry; they were men of
experience.

They would afford to speak more openly than any
similar group anywhere in the world. If they wanted
railroad rebates, they could demand them openly*
They would probably get them, if it was a question

64 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

of saving some important but struggling industry.
. . . When they had made their programme, they
combined with the labour unions to present a united
demand of Industry to Congress. That is how in-
dustry works in Russia to-day.

Fuel spoke first in the conference. Coal and Oil
and Wood are under one management in Russia,
which is responsible for seeing that the state indus-
tries and railroads get enough fuel. Fuel told its
tale of trouble and achievement for the past yean
It was a story typical of all Russia's industries.

All of Russia's industries were bled white by the
war. In America and some other countries, the in-
dustries made money from the war; they can even
afford to wish for another one. The government
gave them contracts and paid for their work in cash,
raising the cost of the war by loans which the next
generations will have to pay.

Russia had, after the Revolution, no credits and
no way of raising war loans. Yet she had three more
years of war on many fronts. She took the cost of
this war day by day out of her industries. She
ordered munitions and supplies, and the loyal indus-
tries, which were now state-owned, produced these
things. The State, in return, gave no money, for she
had none ; she gave food for the workers, and raw

material when she could find it. She asked her in-

'i b,,

dustries to make the same sacrifice that soldiers
make on the Jront, to give everything they had

without return. , She pooled all the resources of the

,***''

country, the grain of the peasants, the labour of

BATTLE-FRONT OF INDUSTRY 65

the city workers, the raw materials which still ex-
isted, and used them for national defence.

As the war and blockade continued, the food sup-
ply lessened. Raw materials gave out and were
madly requisitioned from anywhere they could be
found. Machinery wore out and they went on work-
ing with partial equipment which is a wasteful way
of working. Profit did not count; the wrecking of
industry did not count. What counted was war ne-
cessity and saving the Revolution.

No country in the modern world has ever taken
the cost of a long war out of day by day labour.
Russia did it, and left industry ruined. But she has
this advantage : she acquired no war debts. Whether
she may some day acknowledge the debts of the Czar
is another matter; for three years of war following
the Revolution, there are no debts even claimed by
anyone. The cost was paid by the industries and
peasants and workers of Russia as they went, some-
times willingly, sometimes under compulsion. This
gives an idea of the strain the Russian industries
endured, in addition to the upheaval caused by revo-
lution.

Over two years ago, Russia's industries went on
a peace basis. The war no longer needed them;
they were allowed to try to become self-supporting*
They were still state-owned, in the sense that the
State was ultimate stockholder; but they were to be
run on a business basis, and not merely to serve the
army. They were to produce and sell and build
themselves up from the proceeds. That is the in-
dustrial aspect of the new economic policy.

66 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

The government gave what it could spare of cap-
ital and raw material to start them. But this was
little. The peasant market was non-existent because
of the famine. The workers were hungry, the ma-
chinery worn out. They had only one asset, the hope
that if still, out of the ruins, they could produce
something, it would not be taken away for the needs
of war. They could sell it and pay their workers
and repair their machinery.

That, very simply, was the new policy in industry.
But it could not start at once. Many departments
of the government, schools, army, foreign affairs,
could not be self-supporting. There were no taxes
yet except the grain tax of the peasant, and this was
needed for the famine. So still the various govern-
ment departments kept on ordering things from the
state industries, and both sides knew that there was
no money to pay. Seventy million dollars' worth of
products were taken by the government from indus-
try in that first half of 1922, without making any
return. Not till October of that year, fifteen months
after the new policy was decreed, did all government
departments reach the stage of paying for the things
they ordered. The loyal industries bore the strain,
in order to pull the whole country to its feet. Even
under this burden, they began to move forward.

Fuel was the first industry to bear the burden of
the transition from war communism to self-support
Every industry in Russia needed fuel, and none of
them yet had money to pay for it. So fuel was
given free, long after everything else except food
was paid for.

im-JbKUNT OF INDUSTRY 67

The miners of the Donetz and the managers of
the mines kept on producing coal and giving it to
Russia, in return for bare rations of black bread.
There was ghastly famine to the east; there was dire
need of coal for railroads, since even under the best
conditions the transport of enough food to the Volga
was an all but impossible problem. The rfiiners of
the Donetz kept on; but their own food gave out
and thousands of them went to the farms to keep
from starving.

Their delegates came up to Moscow to the Cen-
tral Congress of Soviets, saying: "We work waist-
deep in water. Can't you give us means to repair the
mines ?" In their union halls, all over the Donetz,
they put up their list of Heroes, the men who col-
lapsed at work and were carried away, only to return
to the struggle after a few days' rest. They also
posted lists of Deserters, who quit because it was
hard.

That was the way they mined coal on the Donetz,
through years of war and of famine and the first
year of peace. When I visited the mines myself,
early in 1923, there was already a different story. It
was still bad, from any standard of decent living.
Production was less than half prewar, which meant
that the expense of the product was almost doubled;
to the injury of all industry. Wages were very low
and not always paid in time. Housing was in shock-
ing condition ; even before the war it was very bad,
and the civil war had destroyed one quarter of the
houses. There were cases in the Donetz of fifteen
workers in a single room.

68 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

All these things were duly noted and denounced in
the soviet newspapers, which do not hide unpleasant
facts. But there was already a note of hope in the
Donetz. The year before the complaint had been
about food, made in the form of protest meetings
and near-riots. Now everyone had enough to eat
There were no more protest meetings. The com-
plaints went in orderly manner through unions and
factory committee and press, and were eventually
attended to in slow Russian fashion.

I walked through mine corridors where men were
working, miners who bragged that a year ago this
part of the mine was flooded, and had now been
reclaimed by the energy of the new manager. I saw
red banners proudly displayed in factories, "for the
fulfilment of production programme." * I talked even
with American miners who had worked one year on
the Donetz and were not anxious to go back to
America. 3 Life was harder here, they said, but more
secure. No strikes, no unemployment; everything
settled by union agreement. They figured that in a
few years more "it would be a pretty good country
for a worker.' J . . Three million dollars had just
been appropriated for housing construction.

The Conference of Industries, which I heard a
year ago in Moscow, covered the highly significant
months of this transition. From October, 1921, to
May, 1922, the problem of Fuel was to get paid for
the coal they produced, without wrecking industry
by their demands.

The coal still went on government order to the
necessary industries, to the railway famine transport

BATTLE-FRONT OF INDUSTRY 69

and other desperate needs. For a time the govern-
ment permitted the Coal Industry to sell five per
cent, of its output, and use the money for necessary
supplies for the mines. Even this five per cent, could
not be got to market, for the railways were choked
with the free fuel for more necessary industries.
Soon the railroads began to charge freight for the
fuel which was being given away. They needed the
money for locomotives. But Fuel grew desperate.

At last, on the first of May, 1922, a year after the
new economic policy had started in law, all free fuel
was abolished by decree, confirmed by the highest
authority of the State. Even then the producers of
fuel, who had waited so long for their pay, put the
interests of the State before their own. "We must
adopt a policy of flexibility and firmness," said
Smilga, chief of the Fuel Administration, "because
a sudden and disorderly demand for payment, with-
out reaching agreement with our chief customers,
would bring an upheaval in industry and transport."

During the summer, when coal cost 700,000 rou-
bles to produce, they had to sell to the railways for
400,000. In the autumn, when the first good harvest
came, thousands of miners deserted to the villages
to get something to eat. The mines could not hold
them, having no money. But the crisis was not as
bad as the year before. In that worst year they
reached zero of net production, mining in the worst
weeks only enough coal for the miners' own needs;
but in 1922 they never fell below 300,000 tons per
month, of which half was clear.

By October, Fuel was being paid in full for its

70 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

product Even a small subsidy came from the State
to reconstruct the mines. It was possible to pay real
wages, and this brought back the miners. The out-
put of coal went up steadily; 483,000 tons in Sep-
tember, 633,000 in October. Now, a year later, it
is a million tons a month, forty per cent, of prewar.

This was the tale of Fuel, an industry which, in-
stead of enriching itself from the war, bore on its
shoulders the burdens of the country and was now
painfully emerging. None of the reports mentioned
the earlier and even more difficult days, when the
oil was for nearly two years in the hands of the
British and the coal mines were held and wrecked
'by Denikin,

In those terrible days of utterest need, when Mos-
cow and Petrograd had for two winters no fuel, and
the industries were closing and the people freezing,
the engineers of Russia tore up important railway
lines and laid them again, building little spurs into
the heart of Russia's forests, dragging out wood,
recklessly, wastefully, in the last desperate effort to
save transport and send the armies to the front.

But these dark days did not come into the report,
for everyone in Russia knew them, and already they
were more than a year in the past. So Smilga merely
concluded his survey by the cheerful statement that,
in spite of the struggle for payment, they had man-
aged in one year to put the industries and railroads
back on mineral fuel, keeping wood only as emer-
gency reserve. That was the year's achievement.

After Smilga had spoken for Fuel, Kogan-Bern-
stein arose to tell the tale of the Railroads. He cast

BATTLE-FRONT OF INDUSTRY 71

an ironic glance at Smilga. "Fuel boasts," he re-
marked, "that in October they at last began to re-
ceive full payment for their coal. I am aware of
this. They did it by attaching our credits in the
State Bank ! Now the metal industry wants to do
the same. So we are paying in full for fuel and
metal and owing everyone else. Some of our work-
ers have received no wages for three months. They
are getting one-third the wages of a coal miner; they
can't live on it Even if you get out the coal in the
Donetz, our transport is in such condition that we
may not be able to remove it.

"We have a harder task than the mines or indus-
tries, for they can close unprofitable establishments,
but we have to keep the whole line running. We
have no working capital, yet we have to give credit
for freight while we haul it. We need a subsidy
from the State to replace some of the equipment
damaged by war. We also demand the right to
charge half the prewar rates."

That" was their modest demand. Half the prewar

rates! The replacing of a little of the wrecked

equipment! When Russia took over her railways

/to operate for the winning of the war, she did not

promise them six per cent, return on a high valua-

tion and agree to replace all damages, as America

V^did. She wore out their locomotives and tore up

their tracks; the civil war blew up their bridges.

Then, when the war was over, she gave them what

she could in the way of locomotives, and asked them

to 1 become self-supporting as rapidly as possible,

72 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

"but don't charge too much for freight rates, or you
will injure the industries of Russia." Under this
command the railways were struggling ahead.

Before the war, czarist Russia gave the State rail-
ways a billion roubles yearly from its budget. After
the wreck of war and revolution, the railways asked
the Department of Finance to allow them seventy-
five million gold roubles ; they got only thirty mil-
lion. Yet, with practically no working capital, with
roads and rolling stock largely ruined, they had
achieved thirty-three per cent, of prewar transport.
The year after, as they were allowed by an improv-
ing Russia, to charge higher and higher rates, as
the industries grew to afford them, the railroads
showed spectacular improvements in bridges and
stations and fundamental repairs.

Iron and Steel told their story after the Railroads.
It was a catastrophic tale. These industries need
the heaviest capital; they receive orders only when
other industries prosper and buy machinery. They
were still only four to seven per cent, of prewar,
barely working at all, in the basic production of pig-
iron and sheet-iron and steel. But the locomotive
works were starting, and swinging rapidly ahead to
fair production. The government had placed or-
ders for 508 new locomotives and repairs on 1,800
old ones.

As for the lighter industries, they were making
few complaints after the first year of peace. Cot-
ton and woolen goods, sugar and rubber, glass and
paper, tobacco and matches, chemicals and leather,
i they had definitely gone ahead. They did not

BATTLE-FRONT OF INDUSTRY 73

need such enormous credits ; they could sell directly
to the peasant market; even in the year of the fam-
ine there were a few people who could buy.

These industries made the change from the old
war communism to the new policy of self-support,
joyously and with success. Rubber goods were al-
ready invading the foreign market, maintaining the
old reputation of Russian rubber. Matches were
underselling Swedish matches in Europe. Sugar
was especially jubilant, announcing that its produc-
tion in one year had increased five-fold ; and the cost
of sugar had been reduced from the famine price
of sixty cents a pound to nearer ten cents.

It did not take an industrial expert to see cotton
goods increasing in Russia. When I first entered,
I saw Red soldiers barefoot In summer. Six months
later I saw peasants in the markets with rags around
their feet in dead of winter. A year later everyone
was shod and clad, at least in the central cities.
The shops were full of goods, produced by the Tex-
tile Trust, good in quality, at about world-market
price.

Even these lighter industries endured difficult mo-
ments. Cotton goods sold for the first nine months
of 1922 below cost of production; no one could
afford to pay more, for the harvest was not yet in.
Only in the autumn of the year did the price of
clothing, reckoned in bread values, pay for the mak-
ing of textiles. Meantime cotton had drained the
supplies of raw materials by selling below cost in
order to keep industry going. Even under this
strain, it reached two-thirds of prewar production,

74 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

and faced then a desperate need of credits; thirty-
five thousand tons of raw cotton were needed from
abroad and five thousand tons of raw wool from
Australia, for an industry which had just begun to
pay and must wait for yet another harvest before
reaching security.

In the spring especially, Russian industry feels
the need of credits. This is the time of depression
in industry, when the peasant wants goods, but is
unable to purchase. In that first summer of the new
economic policy, factory after factory closed down
or ran on part time in the summer, though they were
producing goods sorely needed. A large factory
making agricultural machinery in the Ukraine, for
instance, reached the end of its raw material, and
was unable to buy more, so it closed down, though
the eager peasants placed orders for months ahead.
Not till after harvest could they pay for those or-
ders; and no one meantime had credit to carry on
production.

Credits! For a whole year Russia, in her con-
ferences with the outside world, could think of noth-
ing but credits. Either loaned to the peasants' co-
operatives to enable them to place orders, or loaned
to government industries to enable them to sell on
time payments. The security seemed so sound to
the Russians, the demand for the goods so solid
and tremendous. They could not understand why
everyone outside Russia talked about the past and
about political considerations, when they wanted to
make ploughs and plant seed.

Little by little they realised that they must depend

BATTLE-FRONT OF INDUSTRY 75

on their own efforts. All that first year they were
afraid their efforts would be insufficient. But the
Industries went to the Congress of Soviets with
their cry for help. The Communist Party declared
that Industry was the next great battle-front of Rus-
sia.

That is the way they take up problems, in war
language. First there were the war fronts, to north
and south and east and west; next there was the
Famine Front, and all the nation's forces were mo-
bilised against it. After the first good harvest came
the battle-front of Industry, with Education looming
as the next front of the future, to be faced after the
second good harvest.

That second good harvest has come in the autumn
of 1923. The industries have begun to make their
report. The provision trades have paid high divi-
dends, as high as 200 and 300 per cent The cloth-
ing industry also is prosperous. Textiles, which
serve the direct market only in part, have smaller
dividends; other industries of still remoter connec-
tion with immediate sales, are breaking even. But
now for the first time, iron and steel have begun to
awaken, for the lighter industries have prospered
and have begun to buy machinery. In place of the
two great furnaces in the Donetz, six have opened,
four of which have not run for six years; in the
Urals also is similar progress.

Not all the State Industry is yet self-supporting;
for repairs are heavy and many industries cannot
yet begin to work at full power for lack of a market.
Somewhere between two and three per cent, of next

76 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

year's State budget will be used to pay deficits in
State Industries. But it was plain this last autumn
that the battle-front of Industry had been taken and
that they could hold it and fortify it. Even without
help from any foreign land.

And at once the order went out : "It is time to
cut prices." Already the peasant was clamouring at
the high cost of articles manufactured by the State
Industries* His complaint was just. For a year's
time the government had favoured the industries,
allowing them their will In the matter of prices.
Now they were strong enough to take a little more
of the burden, so that the peasant could buy ma-
chinery and clothing. Prices of manufactured ar-
ticles were cut thirty to sixty per cent.

Thus, struggling step by step, have the industries
of Russia advanced. Outsiders say carelessly that
the improvement in Russia has been due to the in-
troduction of capitalism. The Russians say it has
been due to the first two years of peace. They say,
in addition, that capitalist industry could not have
survived the strain which their industry survived^
and could not have rebuilt itself, as they did, without
outside aid. They say that any capitalist state, suf-
fering eight years of war and blockade as they did,
would have been long since beaten, and turned into
a colony of English and French imperialism. They
say that their power of resistance and recovery lay
precisely in what little communism they have, in
the rigorous control maintained by the State over
all its resources, and in the loyal devotion of work-

BATTLE-FRONT OF INDUSTRY 77

ers to a State and an industry which they consider
their own.

It has been an almost incredible thing to watch,
this revival of industry. I have gone into factories,
and found hopeless waste and inefficiency. Book-
keepers who did not know how to bookkeep, sup-
plies unaccounted for, the simplest devices of labour-
saving unused. I find every principle of efficiency
violated by men who do not know better, or who
know but do not care, or who make personal profit
out of graft and destruction. I have said again and
again that it was impossible for such an industry to
succeed ; and I have come back a year later to find
it increasing production and paying dividends.

Why? I know only two reasons. Russian in-
dustries have no debts to pay to the past and they
have no labour troubles. These are the assets they
have brought out of their revolution, to set against
the great losses of disorganisation and destruction.

I shall not discuss the question of past debts in
the industries ; it leads into the controversy over the
return of private property, on which the Russian and
foreign point of view will never agree. Let me
give merely two examples of the concrete way these
questions stand in Russia.

Down in Kharkov I visited a great plant making
electric motors. Before the war it belonged to a
German Company. The czar seized it at the out-
break of war and reorganised it under a French
Company, which continued to make motors. The
Bolsheviks seized it after the Revolution, and ran

78 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

it themselves, still continuing to make motors. To
whom, if to anyone, shall it be returned?

The case of the Moscow street-car line is more
typical. It belonged before the war to a Belgian
company. The long strain of war and revolution
reduced it to ruin, till no cars ran on its lines for
many months. The cars themselves were wrecked,
the right of way damaged. Every Russian consid-
ers that this was the fault of the Entente for finan-
cing war against Russia. The Entente considers, of
course, that it was the fault of the Revolution.

At any rate, the car-line was wrecked; it was not
running. Then bit by bit, after peace came, the
workers of Moscow rebuilt it again. They tried to
get foreign loans at Genoa and The Hague to re-
build such necessary properties ; they offered to deal
first with all previous owners, but they asked for a
new basis. They got no foreign capital. They
built it out of their own hunger, by going on low
wages ; they built new cars by working on Saturdays
and Sundays. And they feel, all the workers of
Moscow, that that car-line is theirs. It does not
even occur to them that anyone else has a shadow
of claim to it. It is only the diplomats of Russia,
somewhat experienced in foreign ways of thinking,
who even know how to discuss such a claim. If I
should say to a street-car conductor in Moscow:
"Do you know this line belongs by right to some
Belgians?" he would have no idea what I was
talking about.

All of the industrial properties of Russia, what-
ever their past ownership, went down step by step

BATTLE-FRONT OF INDUSTRY 79

under war attrition to ruin, and were built up step
by step by the loyalty and sacrifice of the workers.
The foreigners say the revolution ruined them; the
Russians say it was done by war (Denikin, Wran-
gel, Kolchak, Yudenich) which foreign nations
helped finance against them. But neither side can
question who it was that rebuilt them.

The loyalty of the Russian workers to their in-
dustries, on what is it based? Why are there
practically no strikes in Russian industries? (A few
small ones occurred, in the whole of my stay in
Russia and were settled in favour of the workers.)
Politically, the workers own the government, and
know it. Industrially, every State industry makes its
agreement with the labour unions, and these agree-
ments give to the unions very large powers.

I visited a factory in Kharkov making electric
motors. They told me if I wished to know about
technical matters, I should see the Manager, but if
I wanted to know about the life inside the factory
I should visit the Workers' Committee. These are
union representatives, chosen by the factory work-
ers; they have offices in the plant. They have
charge of all questions of personnel; they are con-
sulted in hiring and firing. On the day of my visit
they were stamping little street-car passes for the
men, and arranging the apportioning of apprentices
among the workmen of the plant. They handle the
social insurance and the workers' education, though
these things are paid for by the factory.

An, amount equal to a certain part of the pay roll
had to be put into a fund for education; another

80 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

amount went into a fund for health. In the factory
was a library, and a workmen's club which sub-
scribed to newspapers, getting them cheaper in
bundle orders. There were seven school-rooms,
used every evening for classes for the workers.
There was a kindergarten in the yard for children
of women workers, and a women's clinic to handle
maternity cases. In the city of Kharkov itself I
visited a charming Maternity Hospital, run entirely
by social insurance funds for the wives of factory
members and the women workers in the factories.
This whole system of social care, which other
countries consider their final luxury, is considered in
Russia the first essential. It is a first cost on in-
dustry; it is managed under committees of workers.
It is determined by their union contracts, and so
highly is it esteemed that it comes even before the
raising of wages.

The whole of the worker's life is built around his
factory. His voting is done through his factory;
his membership in the Communist Party, if he joins,
is achieved and maintained through the Communist
Committee in his factory. His union membership
is again first through the Factory, and then the In-
dustry. His co-operative, from which he gets
cheaper food and clothing, is organised by the work-
ers of his factory, and perhaps has a shop on the
premises. . . . And he sees how, week by week, as
the production of his factory improves, more and
more wealth pours into schools for apprentices, and
lecture courses and sanitariums; perhaps the in-
dustry of which he is a part is already speaking of

BATTLE-FRONT OF INDUSTRY 81

renting a villa on the blue shores of the Crimea, for
workers who have suffered especially under the
strain of war and famine. And if, for a time, the
profits of his factory do not come back at once in
a better life for him, but are diverted by state order
to expand the business or reduce the cost of goods
to the peasant, then this policy also is publicly ex-
plained to him, and he can see quite clearly that his
temporary sacrifice is not for the benefit of some
private enrichment, but Is going in certain definite
ways to build up Russia, and make life even better
for him in the future. That is the result of an open
conduct of industry, by an industry which, having
.nothing to hide, can afford to be open.

In the motor factory of Kharkov, I asked the
chairman of the Workers' Committee who was
finally responsible for the efficiency of the plant,
the Workers' Committee or the management. "Both
of us," he said. "We are responsible for eliminating
friction among the workers, but of course we could
do nothing without a good technical manager* For-
tunately, we have a good one." In that very answer
he indicated a sense of proprietorship all the more
striking because so unconscious.

"The ultimate responsibility rests," he added af-
ter a moment, "neither with the Workers' Commit-
tee nor with the Manager, but with the Communist
group in the plant. Some of these are in the man-
agement, and the rest are scattered as workers
through the plant. They have no direct control, but
theirs is the moral responsibility of making State
Industry succeed. They are especially strong in this

82 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

plant; that is why we are working so well. They
are the group that see our relation to the rest of
Russia; they are the ones who are making the Revo-
lution." . . . And again I realized, as I did so often
In Russia, that the Revolution was not a sudden
event in the past, but a long process to be achieved
through the decades.

In the songs of the young people of Russia, a
new attitude towards industry is clearly seen. In-
dustry is not mere making of goods; it is the mak-
ing of the future. They are "weavers of the shining
web of socialism," they are "blacksmiths beating out
the keys to happiness." This feeling is not by any
means universal ; there are hard conditions, and low
wages, and grumblings. But the feeling appears ; it
grows.

I went two years ago to the opening of the
Kashira Electric Power Station near Moscow. It
was a tremendous event After the night of war and
famine, the first notable achievement of peace.
Begun in the darkest hour of the Revolution, fin-
ished through the days when even a single electric
lamp was not to be bought in Moscow. I had hunted
the whole city of Minsk to buy a Ford spark-plug
and obtained only second-hand ones. And through
these months of impossible lack, with half-starved
workers, a great power station had been built, sup-
plying Moscow with power, first link in the electri-
fication of Russia.

"Why did you use such heavy iron beams across
your doors?" a friend who was with me asked the
engineer in charge. "Why did you use wood casings

BATTLE-FRONT OF INDUSTRY 83

for your turbines?" . , . The engineer laughed.
"Do you think we chose our materials?" he said.
"We took whatever we could find in Russia." So
the electric station had been made, not on credit and
with choice of materials, as in other more favoured
lands, but out of whatever could be found, and paid
for by day by day effort. There was this advantage
in such a mode of building; it belonged without
debts now to the people.

Thousands of Moscow workers poured out into
the country on that great day of the opening, with
red banners from their factories which would now
know the benefits of Kashira power. The orchestra
of the Great State Theatre furnished the music.
The highest economic official of the Republic pre-
sided. An old blind peasant poet, led by a young
boy, stood in working clothes to improvise an ode
on the Triumph of Labour over Chaos. The chief
engineer and twenty ablest workmen received the
Red Banner of Labour, the highest industrial honour
of the State. The front pages of all the newspapers
were full of Kashira, blotting out foreign politics,
blotting out all other news.

For these are the achievements that Russia prizes
as triumphs.

IV
THE MONEY POWER IN RUSSIA

Two years ago when Russia again began to use
money and to need a gold basis for purposes of
foreign commerce, the State Bank opened with ten
million dollars worth of paper roubles, rapidly
falling in value. In three months' time, the value
of the rouble had dropped to one third. Yet at the
end of the year the State Bank had twenty million
dollars in gold in its vaults*

It is a romance of the money power in Russia.
Unlike most such romances, it is simple to under-
stand, for it takes place openly in the sight of all
the people. The ways in which banks control in-
dustry, the conflict between financial and industrial
capital, these things which elsewhere are shrouded
in the mystery of secret conferences of the big in-
terests, are in Russia matters of public policy,
known in the workers' unions, discussed hotly in the
press.

For more than a year Russia has been, for all
practical business purposes, on a gold basis. The
government makes its budget in gold ; the industries
keep their accounts in gold. The workers are paid
on a basis more stable even than gold, a "com-
modity rouble" reckoned in terms of the cost of
living. The actual cash handed to them is partly in

34

THE MONEY POWER IN RUSSIA 85

gold value, partly in paper roubles which continue
to drop slowly in worth. But all savings, all
amounts in hand larger than five dollars, can be
kept in stable currency.

I myself saw the gold reserve of the State Bank
a year ago. President Scheinmann said I was the
first foreigner to see it The store-rooms were lo-
cated in the well-lighted first floor of the bank, pro-
tected only by iron bars at the windows and the bank
guards. The plainly dressed, matter-of-fact clerks
broke the seals of the bags at the president's words
and poured out heaps of gold coins on the table.
I took in my hands bars of gold worth ten thousand
dollars each. I saw also high piles of English five-
pound notes and smaller piles of American paper
money.

"You have made all this gold in one year from
paper?" I asked President Scheinmann in wonder.
"Not at all," he answered quickly. "But from
( the resources of a great nation."

"How did you do it?" I asked. He was quite
willing to explain, for his job does not depend on
secrecy but on public service.

"We loaned money, for instance, to the Timber
Trust. We gave them paper roubles, which they
used to pay all their bills in Russia. They exported
timber to England. They paid us in English pounds.
They paid us not only the loan with interest, but
part of their profits. Sometimes as much as half
of all they made I The fur industry also has been
very profitable, making as much as 200 and 300
per cent, in export trade. On all of these profits

86 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

the State Bank demanded its share, for making the
first loan."

I gasped at this. "No wonder the State Indus-
tries call you a robber," I said, "when you make
terms like that"

President Scheinmann smiled. "It is a question
of public policy. The next Congress of Soviets may
decide on a different method. At present we are
building up a gold reserve for Russia."

These were the cold, hard tactics of the State
Bank, It set out to make all the money it could,
and it did not conceal the fact. At the end of the
first year it had twenty million dollars in gold; at
the end of the second year one hundred and twenty-
five million, half in gold and half in negotiable assets
as sound as gold. And this was only part of the
Bank's success.

In matters of organisation the Bank also started
with nothing. Two years and a half ago, when I
first went to the Volga, there were no branches of
any bank anywhere in the provinces of Russia. The
Central Bank in Moscow had no foreign connections.
It lacked public confidence, since the State was paying
tills either not at all or in worthless paper roubles.

Within a year there were 158 branches of the
State Bank throughout the provinces of Russia;
there were foreign connections with most of the
countries of Europe. Twice in that first year they
tried to open an account in an American bank, but
the American Government confiscated the money.
Only many months after Europe was dealing di-

THE MONEY POWER IN RUSSIA 87

rectly with Russian banks did it become possible
to send money between Russia and America.

In January, 1922, the Bank received only 599
drafts from foreign countries, and its connections
throughout Russia were so poor that half of these
could not be delivered, but were returned to the
sender. Within nine months delivery was being
made on ninety-seven and one-half per cent, of the
drafts, of which some 30,000 had been received.

On these drafts also; the Bank pursued its * f rob-
ber policy." It demanded ten per cent, of the face
value for payment in gold. Or it paid in paper
roubles at an "official" exchange rate below the
actual value. It built itself up into power at the
expense of everyone who did business with it; it
was ruthless about it, openly ruthless. It had to
make money at once ; it could not afiord to wait as
the usual bank in capitalist countries. For it had
no capital at all, nothing but paper roubles. It
was getting its capital day by day, out of its business
transactions.

Even out of the fall of the rouble the State Bank
made money. There is a private semi-legal ex-
change where men speculate in the sale of dollars
and pounds and roubles. Here also the State Bank
had its agents, sometimes known, sometimes un-
known. No tricks of high finance were alien to it.
With its superior knowledge it could unload dollars
or pounds to force down the price, and buy in again
till it increased its reserve. It could not prevent
the rouble from falling, for roubles were being
printed for State needs, uncovered by gold. But

88 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

the State Bank knew beforehand when the money
was to be issued; it knew what transactions were
under way in the big industries. It speculated with
its knowledge on the Black Exchange; the little
private traders who gambled there sometimes lost
and sometimes won ; the State Bank always won.

So, little by little, it built up its gold reserve. The
workers of Russia rejoiced, as the gains were an-
nounced in the papers, for it was their gold reserve;
it was needed to make their industries stable. When
they received a remittance from some friend in
America, and had to pay ten per cent, to cash it,
they grumbled a little ; but their less lucky comrades
laughed and told them they owed that much to the
building of Russia. And when dollars jumped up
and down on the Black Exchange, the workers
laughed: "I wonder what the State Bank made
on that transaction."

The rise and fall of the dollar caused no such
sense of insecurity in Russia as it causes to-day in
Germany. For their wages were reckoned in solid
values ; they were good for so much food and cloth-
ing. Their rooms, with light, water and heat, were
controlled by the municipal governments with due
regard to the condition of the workers. The price
of foreign goods in dollars meant little to them,
for Russia was not dependent, as Germany is, on
food from abroad. The fall of the rouble became,
for the Russian people, as the State Bank increased
in strength, little more than an indirect tax on the
money in people's pockets.

As the gold reserve increased, the Bank began

THE MONEY POWER IN RUSSIA 89

issuing bank-notes. Chervonetz is the name, an an-
cient Russian word for "gulden." It signifies red
gold. These notes have better backing than those
of any money system in the world, even better than
American Federal Reserve dollars. One-third of
their value is covered by gold, one-third by Ameri-
can or English money, and one-third commercial
paper on goods in process of export or trade. Only
a year ago they began to print these chervonetz;
now they have issued one hundred and twenty million
dollars worth. The law allows them to issue two
hundred and fifty million dollars worth, with a gold
backing of only twenty-five per cent. ; but so far they
have not availed themselves of this privilege, fearing
depreciation.

Why, then, does the government of Russia keep
on printing paper roubles? Because one hundred
and twenty million dollars is not enough cash for the
business of Russia. And because the government's
yearly bills are bigger than its taxes. To cover this
deficit money must still be printed, and this money,
which is not backed by gold, goes steadily down.
But this money is now only the small change of
business. Month by month, the budget of the State
comes nearer to an exact balance ; month by month,
also, the supply of gold money increases. In an-
other year there will probably be only "good
money" in Russia. She will be the first country in
Europe to go completely on a gold basis.

I asked President Scheinmann what his training
was for managing the State Bank of Russia. He
laughed. "My job before the war was being a

90 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

revolutionist ... I am still a revolutionist," he
added. "My assistants were formerly bankers and
financial experts of the old regime in Russia, They
put their financial knowledge at our disposal, for
they are naturally interested in seeing any bank
where they work prosper. I am personally inter-
ested, because as long as we must deal with foreign
capitalists, our gold reserve is a source of stability
and power."

We went to the dining-room where two thousand
bank employes received each afternoon their main
meal free. Everyone from president to scrub-
women dined there. "Do the workers in the bank
have anything to say about the bank's policy?" I
asked.

U A11 conditions of labour are settled by agree-
ment with the union," he answered. "This dining-
room, the organisation of work, the rights of the
workers. But the workers of the bank have noth-
ing to say about the financial policy of the bank.
That is settled by the workers of the nation."

I went from the bank to a Conference on Industry
and Transport, where I saw the other side of the
picture. They were denouncing the robber policy
of the bank. They were trying to build a united
programme for industry. But factory after factory
was closing for lack of credits, while the State Bank
asked two, three, four per cent, a month for loans.

"It isn't only the amount they ask, but the way
they ask it," explained one of the heads in the De-
partment of State Industries. ."The control of the
bank over industry is very intimate. This control

THE MONEY POWER IN RUSSIA 91

should be in the hands of men who have a policy
for rebuilding industry, instead of merely a policy
for making a gold reserve. The bank should serve
industry, not industry the bank."

It is the old conflict that goes on everywhere in
the world between industrial and financial capital.
I had heard of it in the difficult columns of financial
papers, but it never seemed clear and human till I
saw it in Russia, where the heads of business and
of banks alike can speak plainly, with cards on the
table, since no private interests are at stake. I
learned in this conference what the control of the
money power in industry really means, in the inti-
mate details of business.

The state-owned industries of Russia had organ-
ised a new bank, the Industrial Bank of Russia. Its
stock was held by the industries, the railroads and
the department of foreign trade. It was to be a
bank to serve industry and build up a united pro-
gramme for state-owned production.

"There is two hundred thousand dollars now in
Germany,'* they gave as an example, "to the credit
of the Clothing Industry of Russia. It was de-
posited by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of
America. Now, we do not touch this money in Ber*
lin, but because it is there, we give permission to
the Textile Trust, which is also state-owned, to buy
half a million dollars worth of wool in Australia.
At the same time we order the Textile Trust, in
return for this loan, to begin at once turning over
doth to the Clothing Trust. Thus we build up a
united state-owned industry. We can do this be-

92 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

cause we are the bank where all these trusts do
business.

"Suppose the miners in the Donetz Basin want
clothing. They cannot pay at once, they must buy
on installments. The mines of the Donetz ask us
for credit, and we give it to them. Not in the form
of paper roubles, but in the form of clothing for
their miners. We can do this because we have
power over the Clothing Trust which owes us
money. We tell the Clothing Trust to send miners
overalls to the Donetz and to wait three months for
payment. They can afford to do this because we
make the Textile Trust give them cloth. The Tex-
tile Trust can give them cloth because we allowed
them to order raw wool from Australia. And all
of this we did on that one deposit of credit in a
bank in Berlin.

"We tell the mines of the Donetz that they must
give coal to certain factories which produce enamel-
ware cooking-dishes. And we order those factories
to send $25,000 worth of cooking-dishes to the great
Fur Fair at Irbit, Siberia, to trade for furs. These
furs we allow the Fur Trust of the government to
have, and they send them abroad and pay our bank
back with money in London.

"That is the intimate control which a bank has
in industry. The State Industries of Russia think
that this control is too intimate to be placed in the
Department of Finance, interested in building up a
gold reserve. We think the united front of the
state-owned industries is more important even than
the gold reserve, and that the money power should

THE MONEY POWER IN RUSSIA 93

be in the hands of the Department of State Indus-
tries, who will use it to strengthen the relations be-
tween the various state-owned factories and trusts,
till they grow strong and complete and capable of
crowding out private capital altogether."

"We must be able to dictate." They both said it
openly. Both the State Bank and the State Indus^
tries said it. 'The money power dictates, and we
want that power."

"We must be able to dictate," said the State Bank
"We will impose our will on every separate indus-
try and get from it what we can. Thus we build
up a surplus to be used as the Congress of Soviets,
the workers' government of Russia, shall desire."

"We must be able to dictate," say the Indus-
tries. "For since our goal is a socialist state, we
must strengthen Industry and not the Political
Bureaucracy. The State as Organised Industry
must flourish and the State as Bureaucracy must
wither, till it handles only minor functions of mu-
tual protection. Both administrative and financial
power must be concentrated in Industry, which again
is under the control of the workers. Thus we shall
work out a united state-owned industry, the basis f o*
socialism."

So they discuss the conflict, hotly and openly. Li
all these discussions there is one thing that never is
suggested. No one thinks of giving the Money
Power of Russia into private hands, as it is given
in every other country in the world. Which of the
various state departments shall hold it, that is the
only question.

94 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

Every factory, every peasants' co-operative, every
mine in Russia is hungry for credit, and the things
which credit means in our capitalist world. For
a long time to come there will be sharp discussion as
to which of many pressing needs shall first be satis-
fied, which of different state departments shall be
first strengthened and given power.

The gold reserve, or the united front of industry,
for which shall the Money Power be used? . .
"It is," said Trotsky to me, "a technical question o
great importance, but not a question of final prin-
ciple/' . . . The workers in their unions, the Com-
munists in their weekly meetings, discuss this ques-
tion, this conflict between financial and industrial
capital, as simply as I have told it in this chapter.
They have learned by such open discussion, what
the Money Power Is, and what intimate control it
has over industry and life. They may discuss in
which state department it shall be lodged, but they
do not dream of putting it, as other nations do, in
private or foreign hands.

"Just as Morgan and Rockefeller and Gary, for
all their individual differences, can combine to resist
demands of the workers," laughed the head of a
State trust to me, "so you can be quite sure that if
any little scrap arises between Russia and foreign
capital, we and Comrade Scheinmann of the State
Bank will know how to act together. ... If we
didn't," he laughed again, u we are both under the
same final boss. The Communist Party would
make us."

THE STORY OF RUSSIAN OIL

IN the great Oil Duel going on in the world to-
day, making and unmaking boundary lines and em-
pires, Russia holds the balance of power. She in-
tends to develop her reserves for the benefit of her
own people and not for the pleasure or prestige of
any foreign nation. Foreign nations intend other-
wise.

That is the story of Russian Oil, a story of
struggle, beginning six years ago and destined to
continue for a generation, a day by day struggle
for control. This struggle was the big economic
fact behind Genoa, behind The Hague, behind Brit-
ish, French and Italian intrigue in the Near East.
It is even the story behind the Turkish conflicts.
Kemal Pasha explains the reason for the struggle
for the Dardanelles, "This control is important
because of Russian Oil."

One technical invention after another has brought
Oil to a commanding position in the world to-day.
The nation controlling Oil controls the seas and
commerce of the world. The United States is to-
day producing the greater part of the world's oiL
But she produces wastefully, exhausting her re-
serves; within twenty years, at this rate, she will

95

96 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

have none left. The pleasure automobiles of Amer-
ica may have exploded into the air the oil on which
control of the seas depends.

England has been more far-sighted. She saw
that without reserves of oil, the British Empire
was doomed. By financial power and political in-
trigue, by conferences and by armies, she has se-
cured control of a large part of the oil reserves in
the world. And now, on the horizon appears So-
viet Russia, who has more oil than anyone else.

The fields of Baku alone, in the part already
worked and known, have a greater reserve than all
the United States. Seven to eight billions of bar-
rels is the lowest calculation of the oil still obtain-
able here. There is perhaps as much again in the
peninsula around Baku, untouched and unworked.

North of Baku lies Grozny, a smaller field, but
producing the best benzine in the world. It has oil
so heavy in paraffin that the wells have been closed
down to wait for adequate refineries. In Pennsyl-
vania they call it paraffin oil if it has two per cent,
paraffin; but Grozny paraffin oil has six to eight per
cent. It is so stiff that they cannot pipe it, except
in the midst of midsummer. It is so rich that they
cannot use it.

In the great mountainous desert beyond the Cas-
pian lies another oil district, the Ural Emba, dis-
covered shortly before the war and little prospected.
Fifty separate oil fields are known to exist in that
80,000 square kilometres of waste country, in-
habited by nomad tribes and belonging without con-
test to the Russian government. Only two of these

THE STORY OF RUSSIAN OIL 97

fields have yet been opened, but already a billion
barrels of oil are known to exist in Emba. In the
end it is expected to prove even richer than Baku;
and Baku is richer than the whole United States.

That's Russian Oil! No wonder England sup-
ported Denikin's army when she thought he had a
chance to secure this prize. No wonder she aban-
doned him when he lost Baku. No wonder Stand-
ard Oil and Shell watch each other like hawks in
their moves with Russia, so that the reported deal of
Krassin with Shell was the bomb that wrecked the
Genoa conference. The press of England still
takes disproportionate interest in the little Soviet
Republic of Georgia. Georgia is important as the
port through which the oil of Baku reaches the
outside world.

There are two stories of Russian OiL The story
of stocks and bonds and paper control, which goes
on in Paris and London with occasional episodes at
San Remo, Genoa and The Hague; and the story of
workers and engineers in Baku, who never saw a
stock or a boni They are stories of two different
worlds, and to each of them the other world is
unreal and unknown.

Outside Russia, the great ones of earth have
played with the paper control of the oil fields. Eng-
land and France have signed treaties agreeing oil
what they would do with Russian OiL English rep-
resentatives have visited America, to agree on a
joint programme between Shell and Standard Oil,
and thus avoid friction between two great nations.
, 4 *They are fighting over the hide of the Bear, and

98 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

the Bear is not yet killed," remark the Russian news-
papers with cheerful cynicism.

The repeated, bitter demand from America and
England for the recognition of "private property"
in Russia has much to do with Russian Oil Pri-
vate property is quite secure to-day in Russia; and
even regarding the foreign property damaged in the
past, Russia offered at Genoa to discuss compensa-
tion for all foreigners who had actually lost money
by her revolution. The foreign diplomats refused
this basis of settlement; they demanded, not "com-
pensation for losses," but complete return of prop-
erties.

What was the difference in meaning between these
two phrases, which seem the same to the average
citizen ? This, that after the revolution had seized
the properties, their Russian owners, escaping to
Paris, sold the stocks and bonds for a song.* Stand-
ard Oil and Shell are assumed to have bought large
blocks. If the fields are restored, they get cheaply
properties worth billions. If Russia gives only
"compensation for losses," they will get nothing for
these securities which they bought, in speculation,
after the Revolution had declared them valueless*

The engineers and oil workers of Baku have never
laid eyes on these paper shares that claim to own
them. When I ask them if it is Shell or Standard
that now claims title, they answer: "How do we
know? We live in Baku."

In Baku was a story of battle and devastation.

*See "Oil/' by DeLacey, for accounts of speculation and po-
litical intrigues in Paris.

THE STORY OF RUSSIAN OIL 99

Turkish and Armenian massacres. Revolution and
counter-revolution. And through it all, the heroic
struggle of hungry, half-clad engineers and workmen
against floods that rose to overwhelm them, and
fires that burned great gushers, and spying and
sabotage of managers, and against the slow attrition
of war and blockade and famine. They have seen
the wells go down in production until it was feared
they would be lost to the world under the waters of
the Caspian. They have seen the tide turn and pro-
duction climb upward, slowly, very slowly, but ac-
cording to definite engineering plan. With the first
coming of peace the change came. Now, after two
years, they feel secure of the future*

I have spent two weeks in Baku. It is desolate,
and as fascinating, as hell.

Three and a half days southward from Moscow,
across the fertile fields of the Ukraine and beyond
the Caucasus, just over the borders of Asia it lies,
on the hot blue waters of the Caspian. An ancient
Tartar town, with a thousand years of history be-
hind it; the ruins of the old Khan's castle and
mosque still stand on Baku hill. Up the narrow
streets in the Tartar City the Mussulman women
toil, drawing their veils across their faces with one
hand and balancing heavy water-buckets with the
other. At their feet lies a city brilliant with electric
lights, full of giant refineries where a hundred
streams of machine-oils pour constantly, day and
night, winter and summer. Here is a modern power
plant larger than any in Europe, sending current out
to operate the distant fields. Here is modern indus*

100 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

trialism on a foundation of primitive Asia ; workers
whose dialects have hardly been reduced to writing,
operating rotary oil-drills fresh from, America.

As far as eye can see from the hills of Baku there
are oil fields. I drove through them day after day.
Oil fields on every horizon, forests of black shining
derricks against blue skies or blue water, or in the
smoky hollows of the hills. There is no green thing,
for the mocking blue of the Caspian is salt; the only
fresh water in Baku is brought from a hundred
miles away, and is barely enough for drinking. So
there are no trees in this desert country, except in
one central spot, the beautiful Villa Petrolla, built
for the high officials of the Nobel Oil Company to
Eve in, and now occupied by four children's homes.

Under my feet I could hear the rumbling of a
gusher, expected hourly in Bibi Eibat oil field, an-
nouncing its coming half a mile below the earth.
Not far away is another famous gusher, which has
delivered oil continuously for seven years, at a mil-
lion barrels a year. From other derricks sounds the
rattle of chains, as the rotary oil-drill, newly
brought from America, whirls its way through sand
and gravel hundreds of feet below. And down
through the greasy dust of the fields creep little
rivers of oil, olive-black with a green lustre, flowing
towards the great reservoirs.

All the oil comes at last to the city of Baku, to
the great refineries on the Bay. Here are pipe-
lines leading to docks, and ships loading and unload-
ing. Here is the largest refinery in Russia, once
owned by Nobel, handling over a million barrels a

THE STORY OF RUSSIAN OIL 101

month and turning out eighty different kinds of oil
products, benzines, kerosenes, machine oils, paraffins.
The diamond white of twenty different weights of
benzine pouring, pouring; the many-toned machine
oils from golden to deep brown; the great vats of *
soapy oil, milky green in colour, followed by vats of
"washed" oil, of a dead, dull slate; the black olive
in pools and reservoirs of sluggish mazut, refuse
still useful for fuel.

An industrial oil city, modern, mechanical, ruth-
less. In it live children orphaned by famine, and
veiled women of the East, and men, Russians and
Tartars and Persians and Armenians and the tribes
of Central Asia who have not yet learned to read
and write but who can produce oil for rebuilding a
nation.

In the centre of Baku are the offices of Aznepth,
the government oil trust, operating all the fields.
The oil king of the district is Serebrovsky; it is he
who has brought order out of chaos. He works
twenty hours daily; he lives in two rooms up an
iron stairway from a back court, a harder, bleaker
life than tenement workers live in New York or Lon-
don. His wife is dying of tuberculosis; it was lack
of milk and eggs that slowly starved her. Only one
little part of the price of rebuilding Baku.

There were 150 oil companies operating in Baku
under the reign of the czar. The chief of them all
was Nobel, a Swedish-Russian company, in which,
even before the war, it was rumored that Stand-
ard Oil had bought control. Nobel had shares in
many minor companies; he put forth fingers of trade

102 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

all over Russia in depots for the selling of oil, con-
trolling the machinery of distribution.

When the Revolution came, Gustave Nobel called
together his upper employes in Petrograd and gave
them instructions before his departure. They were
to remain in R,ussia and keep close to oil, sending
out secret reports through Finland to Paris, In
the wars of intervention they acted as economic
spies. Using their knowledge of oil, and a show of
friendliness, they secured high posts with the Soviet
government, which was making use of any experts
not openly hostile. One of them became manager of
oil for the Petrograd district; another was in the
college of technical management for all Russian oil.

They were the heads of a conspiracy that reached
all over Russia, sending out weekly reports to Wran-
gePs Paris office, and receiving money from abroad.
They held themselves ready, when the time came,
to paralyse the oil industry and thus destroy Rus-
sia, burning up oil fields and oil reserves if neces-
sary. This was the type of sabotage that Russia
faced in every important industry. These oil spies
were caught in the end by the Extraordinary Com-
mission and condemned to be shot; but they were
not shot, for they were foreigners.

While conspiracies like this raged through Rus-
sia, and while in Paris was a riot of speculation
widows and orphans and demi-mondaines staking the
cost of bread or the price of lust for shares of Rus-
sian oil the Baku oil workers themselves were
cut off from Russia by a ring of steel Armed force
after armed force seized the wells and the country

THE STORY OF RUSSIAN OIL 103

round them; for four long years there was no set-
tled life or peace.

The workers of Baku had always been revolu-
tionary, since the uprising of 1905. It was in Baku
that Krassin built an underground printing plant, the
largest producer of illegal literature in Russia. . . ,
When the revolution came in 1917 the Baku workers
took over the local government and declared the
oil the property of the nation. There was very
little conflict. The owners of Baku were thousands
of miles away. Ninety per cent, of the lands belonged
to the czar, and he was gone for months. The next
owners were foreigners who had leased the lands;
and they were abroad. Most of the local managers
remained in the fields; they were engineers, chiefly
Russian ; they kept on with their work.

The first change made by the new control
in Baku was a reorganisation of the fields* The
150 little companies, each with dozens of litde
claims scattered through many fields, were wasting
the oil. They were competing with each other,
trying to shift the floods to their neighbours, trying
to bore their little claims all round the edges to
drain their neighbour's oil. The engineers and work-
ers knew that such competition was criminal; since
there was now only one owner, the government, they
organised the wells into eight great districts, under
one central management in Baku. The lesser engi-
neers remained in the districts; the higher engineers
managed from Baku. The Oil Workers Union had
its representatives in the management, in charge
of supplies and personnel.

104 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

Immediately war struck them. The Germans,and
Turks came down from the north and established
themselves in Tiflis, centre of the Caucasus. The
English troops came up from Persia. The great ones
of earth were bent on a race for Russian Oil. The
old Russian army was breaking into wandering
bands and going home; it was an army of tired,
hungry peasants, to whom the revolution meant
only a chance to rest and eat on their own home
soil

Race and religious feeling ran high in the oil
fields, stimulated by so many opposing armies. The
Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries declared the
Soviet regime pro-German and set up a counter-
revolution with the aid of two Cossack bandits, call-
ing the British to help them. Under the encourage-
ment of British advance, the Armenians massacred
25,000 Mohammedans in the town and fields of
Baku. The English came in, took possession, and
led forth from, jail twenty-seven Communists who
had previously governed Baku. They took them
across the Caspian as prisoners and shot them down
in the desert. Thus blood and iron ruled in Baku.}

Swiftly the Turks retaliated for the massacres
begun by the Armenians. Within two months they
swept down into Baku from the north, while the
English retired towards Persia. The Turks then
massacred 30,000 Armenians. A month or so later
came the armistice of the great war, and England
told Turkey to clear out of Baku, as part of the
price of defeat All these shifts of power took place
in a single year, and oil production dropped from

THE STORY OF RUSSIAN OIL 105

60,000,000 barrels in 1916 to 24,000,000 in 1918,
the year of conflict.

For a year and a half the British held Baku, shar-
ing control for a time with some Italian troops, as
the Versailles treaty and the Supreme Council jug-
gled with spheres of control in the Near East, but
regaining exclusive control again. There was a fic-
tion of an independent Azerbaijan government,
which existed mainly for the purpose of being cor-
rupted. No accounts indicate that it was very
popular or had much independence.

When I visited the Caucasus, I found strong anti-
British feeling. Engineers who were by no means
fond of the Soviet government, said to me: "But
at least the Bolsheviks freed us from the British.'*
The officers of the Russian czarist fleet which had
helped the British, began to grumble at the regu-
lation which demanded of them a British visa to
enter Baku. "Have we fought with our Russian
brothers who went to school with us in the naval.
academies, 5 ' they said, "in order that British should
give us leave to enter a Russian port?"

The oil fields were declared private property
again. There was a year* and a half of relative
peace. But oil production continued low, at
28,000,000 barrels. There were strikes, suppressed
by tanks and armed force. The Russian market,
to which most of the oil must go since the pipe-
line to Batum and the outside world carries only
kerosene the Russian market was cut off by a ring
of steel, and behind that ring Russia was fighting
f ofc, her existence* The oil tanks of Baku filled to

106 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

overflowing, and in the earth storage reservoirs the
oil spoiled from long contact with the soil. Oil
clogged the sands and ran into the sea. And the
floods in the unworked areas crept onward.

Somewhere, in the secret places of London and
New York, there are people who know why the
British government gave large credits to Nobel,
based on future expectations, but allowed the smaller
companies to go to the wall. The rumours in Baku
said that the Anglo-Persian Company, controlled
by the British government, had bought up shares
of Nobel as the price for its aid, and was corner-
ing the oil for England. The little companies were
mined; they were selling out cheap. Somewhere in
London and New York it is known who bought
tHm. When Litvinoff, in The Hague conference,
asked for a list of the "creditors" to whom Russia
must "restore property," it was this that he meant.
The French newspapers denounced him for his im-
pertinent curiosity.

Meantime, while Britain sat secure (more or less)
.in Baku, the armies of Denikin, financed by British
gold and helped by the American Red Cross, drove
northward, threatening the very centre of Russia
during that darkest year of 1919. They captured
the Grozny oil fields, where nine great gushers
burned as the result of civil war. The gushers
burned on for a year and a half, consuming wealth
enough to pay one-fourth the annual state budget
during the extravagant days of czarist Russia. This
was one of the minor losses of civil strife.

Then, in the fall of the year, the R|ed Army

THE STORY OF RUSSIAN OIL 107

gathered strength, slowly organised out of broken,
starving bands into one united control. Month by
month through the winter Denikin was hammered
back and when another spring came, the oil work-
ers of Baku knew that the red soldiers were near
on the borders of Azerbaijan. Promptly they re-
volted again, calling on Soviet Russia for aid.

It took less than an hour for the government to
change hands. The red troops came down the rail-
road, took possession of the oil fields, declared
them national property, and have held them ever
since, from the 2Oth of April, 1920.

Some day the writers of historic romances will
tell the tale fitly, how the half-fed, half-clad work-
ers of Russia brought a fleet of cruisers and destroy-
ers a thousand miles overland through the heart #f
Russia, to take possession of the Caspian Sea. From
Petrograd up the Neva, through a chain of lakes
and canals to the upper Volga, and down the great
channel of Russia to the Caspian that was the un-
heard of path they followed. It was an impossible
feat only one of many impossible feats done in
that year of exhaustion by the besieged Russians.
The British forces around the Caspian were com-
pletely routed. Their army in northern Persia was
scattered and fled southward, expecting from week
to week the announcement of a Soviet Persia. But
Russia preferred Persia as a friendly buffer state;
she drew her armies back, holding only the Cas-
pian.

The oil fields were again in the hands of the
Baku workers what there was left of them.

108 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

The thirsty Russian market drank the oil reserves
with speed. The storage tanks opened northward
and the tank steamers on the Caspian, spurred on
by extra food for the workers, made record deliv-
eries. But oil production sank still farther. Drills
were lacking, and machinery, and ropes and clothes
and shoes and food. Exhausted Russia, struggling
now against the combined attacks of Wrangel and
Poland, could absorb the Baku oil with joy, but
could give nothing back to the Baku workers. The
floods crept onward; it seemed that the oil fields
would be lost altogether to the world.

"We are at the lowest point yet reached,' 5 cried
the Fuel Administration in warning. "In January
we had 1,779 wells, only half the normal number.
By September we had only 845. The floods take
now the nature of a tempest. Over ninety per cent,
of the liquid got out is water. There are 40,000,000
to 50,000,000 tons excess water in the district. The
whole Baku fields, richest in the world, are threat*
ened with ruin."

And then came peace. But with the peace, the
greatest famine the world has known. Yet
famine was less disorganising than war. The block-
ade was broken; the most necessary material could
be bought abroad. Even during the year of the
great drought, Russia's industries began to improve.

The engineers of oil drew up a plan, a month by
month programme for reconstructing the fields. It
was a plan to rebuild the oil district out of its own
resources. Gradually, slowly, repairing machinery

THE STORY OF RUSSIAN OIL 109

in old wells, digging new ones, buying equipment
piece by piece as there was money.

It takes a long time and much capital to build
an oil district. Wells must be dug, hundreds of
wells, for months before returns come in. The
average life of a well is five years; most of the
Baku wells wore out in war-time. Wells not stead-
ily worked fill slowly with water, requiring long,
wasteful labour to bail them free again. During
that first year of peace, Russia was eager to grant
concessions in oil fields. She doubted the strength
of her oil workers to reconstruct them again.

But step by step for two years and a half the pro-
gramme has been fulfilled. Baku has produced 122
per cent, of the programme demanded, Grozny 103
per cent, and Emba 115 per cent. The oil workers
are doing better than the engineers had expected.
Millions of dollars worth of oil and oil products
have been sold abroad already, and the proceeds
put into new wells and new equipment. One hun-
dred and fifty-seven new wells were being dug when
I was in Baku. By 1925 they will reach normal
production and will then go forward to surpass pre-
war.

"Within the next five years," says Krassin, chief
of foreign trade in Russia, and himself an engineer
of prominence trained in the Baku district, "our
export of oil will without doubt exceed the prewar
export."

The difficult, conflicting demands of the year of
transition to the new economic policy in oil, are
shown picturesquely in the letters of complaint sent

110 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

by Serebrovsky to the newspapers of Moscow.
Under the regime of "war communism" Russia took
the oil without payment, supplying the workers, as
far as she was able, with food and clothing.
Under the new policy, industries were to be self-
supporting, but the division line between industries
was not yet worked out. For a year and a half, dur-
ing the transition period, many great government
departments wished to finance themselves from Rus-
sian Oil.

The oil industry itself possessed at first no legal
right to sell oil, but was forced to turn its product
over to the All-Russian Co-operatives, or the De-
partment of Food Supply, or the Department of
Foreign Trade. These organisations, struggling
under severe emergencies, sold the oil and used the
proceeds, not to re-equip the oil fields, but for other
pressing needs.

Bitterly caustic was the appeal sent by Serebrov-
sky on behalf of the oil workers of Baku, printed
early in 1922 in the Moscow Isvestia. "Who doesn't
want to trade with our oil, anyway? Only the dead
ones. But nobody wants to remember that we who
produce it need food, shoes, clothes, everything. We
must beg for the right to exchange a couple of
poods of oil for poods of flour. We shiver at the
very mention of the Department of Foreign Trade.

"Then they begin to tell us how much better a
concessionaire could manage the oil fields. At this
we really grow wild. Of course the concessionaire
is great and we are pitiful. He can sell his oil and
from us they merely take it away. He can clothe

THE STORY OF RUSSIAN OIL 111

his workers, and we have to persuade them that
they are clothed. He can bring from abroad every-
thing that he requires, while to us they promise
now for the third year reservoirs, generators and
electrical equipment He has money and credit, while
we have't a dead cent except rusty kerosene cans.

"But the impudent thought suppose the Con-
gress should make us equal in rights with the con-
cessionaire. And should tell the Department of
Finance not to take away the little money we have,
and the Food Commissariat not to take our oil
for nothing (for money we'll give it gladly) and
the Department of Foreign Trade to let us sell oil
abroad for ourselves and not for the benefit of
the Department of Foreign Trade. . . . Then our
trading department would put forth fingers in the
same way that Nobel had it. Part of our production
we'll give to the State we also are loyal state peo-
ple but we'll keep enough to buy what we need
for the industry.

"Give us the rights of the concessionaire and
you will need no other concessionaire than the Baku
workers."

Out of these conflicting claims in the industries
of Russia a coherent plan was gradually built. The
oil industry is now organised as an independent unit.
Under the Department of National Industries comes
the Fuel Administration; under the Fuel Adminis-
tration comes the oil management, appointing the
chief engineers for the three different oil districts.
These engineers have absolute control of produc-
tion, subject to the labour agreement which they

112 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

make with the Oil Workers Union. That is the
simple organisation for the production of oil.

The sale of oil is equally simple in form* Each
of the three great districts selects directors in an
oil syndicate, which controls the marketing of oil
in Russia. The Fuel Administration in Moscow
appoints the chairman. They have branches all
over Russia for the sale of oil. Thirty per cent,
royalty goes to the central treasury of the State;
the rest returns to the oil industry. But the oil
industry itself is an organ of the State, an inde-
pendent self-sustaining organ whose profits in the
future shall be used as the people of Russia deter-
mine. For the present those profits are to rebuild
the industry and to improve the life of the Baku
oil workers.

Wages in Baku are still low in money. When
I visited that city in April, 1922, they ranged from
$6 a month for apprentices to $40 a month for the
highest engineers. Now they are doubtless much
higher; for all over Russia wages have been going
up rapidly. The low money wage marked the time
of transition from rations to money; Russia had
as yet little money to pay with. At the time of
my visit there were no more free rations, but a
worker with family secured his basic food supply
through the oil workers' co-operatives for about
$3 a month. The buying was done on a large scale
by the oil company, which helped finance the co-
operatives as they struggled to their feet.

In addition to wages, the union contract called
also for free lodging, free fuel, free water and

THE STORY OF RUSSIAN OIL 113

electric light. Hundreds of new houses were going
up in Baku to relieve the over-crowding. In indi-
vidual standard of living, the secretary of the union
told me, in such things as clothes and furniture and
housing they had not yet reached prewar. But
in social opportunity, in chances for culture and
education and fellowship and hospital care in ill-
ness, they were already infinitely better off than be-
fore.

Education, health, the entire social life of the
workers was also temporarily financed by Aznepth,
the government oil company. The first demands
of the unions were not for higher wages, but for
large funds set aside for joint social progress and
protection. Aznepth was required by union "agree-
ment to put an amount equal to thirty-two per cent,
of its wage scale into hospital, school and other
social funds. The schools for the oil workers' chil-
dren had grown from twenty-two to sixty-two ; there
were fourteen kindergartens where none had existed
before ; a dozen day nurseries and fifteen homes for
famine orphans. Eventually, these would be taken
over by the school authorities of Baku; but until
those authorities were strong, the oil company or-
ganised and financed them.

For the older workers there were 121 classes for
reading and writing, and twenty-five libraries. There
were eight factory schools where apprentices work
four hours and study four. There was a technical
university where a simple Tartar oil worker, study-
ing his way upward from the first course in reading,
might finish at last as a qualified engineer. There

114 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

were thirty workers' clubs, each with its stage, dance
hall and entertainments. During my visit they were
giving entertainments to raise money for the Ger-
man workers on the Ruhr. They didn't think of
themselves as paupers ; they had built already a flour-
ishing social life.

They have control of their Jives in certain ways
unknown even to American workers. The problem
arose, about the time of my visit, of cutting down
an office staff which was too large for the oil in-
dustry. Ever since the Revolution, Aznepth had been
carrying the weight of all the office workers of the
old oil companies ; they were not needed in the new
reorganisation, but neither could they be fired with-
out serious suffering. Now the time had come when
the union agreed that they should be dropped. The
question which workers should be dismissed was
handled by a committee of three the manager,
the secretary of the union, and the president of the
city government. The manager's task was to save
the most efficient workmen; the union secretary
protected the heads of families; the president of
the city council planned, as far as possible, for trans-
fer of these workers to jobs in public services. There
was no reckless slashing of the payroll, without re-
gard to the human lives involved.

Thus, step by step, the oil workers and engineers
of Baku are rebuilding the oil industry, and making
it the foundation for a wholesome community life,
and for a reserve of power for Russia. Under
this new form of organisation, what chance has

THE STORY OF RUSSIAN OIL 115*

foreign capital in Russian oil? Many chances for
making money; no chance for controlling politics.

I have been present at many discussions of con-
cessions. They may take many forms. Over in
Ural Emba are new fields waiting development ; the
concession I heard planned for Ural Emba required
a capital of $30,000,000 for wells and storage and
pipe-lines, before any returns would come in. Within
ten years the profits would be tens of millions, and
the contract might run for thirty years.

In a new field like this, a foreign company would
be allowed independent rights of development But
only a big company could handle a field like this.
"We will not allow the methods that have wrecked
American oil fields," said the chairman of the con-
cessions committee to me. "We will not permit a
host of little companies, competing with each other,
and wasting the oil. We demand that a concession-
aire shall have enough capital to develop the dis-
trict properly, with all the pipes and transport nec-
essary. This, in the Ural Emba, is $30,000,000 for
first investment. ... In fields where great gushers
are to be expected, we demand that the concession-
aire provide adequate storage tanks, that the oil
may not be wasted. He must provide protection
against fires and floods. He must have a plan for
working the whole field rationally. Sound oil com-
panies, wishing to develop an industry, can make
big money from 'Russian oil But wildcat companies,
interested in quick returns on a little capital, to make
a showing and sell out to the public for these our
leases offer no inducements."

116 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

Smaller companies, unable to develop a whole
field from their own capital, can take other forms
of concessions in Russian oil. The Barnsdell Inter-
national Corporation, at present working in Baku,
is an example of a contract much favoured by Rus-
sia. The American company brings in machinery
and administrative ability and digs wells on a con-
tract with Aznepth, receiving for its work a per-
centage of the oil. The members of the company
whom I met in Baku told me they had been received
with tremendous enthusiasm.

When foreigners go to Baku or to other conces-
sions in Russia, these are the conditions that they
meet: government managers, over-worked, wearing
themselves out in building a new Russia; workers
who are still on low wages but who are politically
independent, economically well organised, full of the
purpose that industry shall increase in wealth and
raise the general standard of living as it increases.

These managers hail with joy a capitalist
who comes as partner to make industry more ef-
ficient. These workers greet happily the thought of
American methods and American standards. But
neither managers nor workers want men who dabble
in politics, or attempt to make of them a subject
nation, as has been done throughout history with
the peoples of undeveloped lands.

Meantime the owners of stocks and bonds in the
old Russian oil companies, speculate with their paper
control in Paris and London, and demand that the
wells be given back to them. They do not realise
that most of the wells they owned have long since

THE STORY OF RUSSIAN OIL 117

died under the floods of the Caspian. And that
to resurrect those companies again would be as im-
possible as unscrambling an omelet.

For the great forces of life, that sweep forward
by months or by ages, wiping out cities and civilisa-
tions and building new ones, have carried the work-
ers of Baku into a different world. They have seen
a half dozen armies of occupation. They have seen
massacres of tens of thousands. They have fought
back floods and fires. Half-starved and with bare
hands in place of equipment, they have begun the
rebuilding of a wrecked industry. And now, when
there is again hope in Baku, and peace, and increas-
ing production, wrought through the agony of body
and brain they have not the faintest idea of re-
turning the wells to the nations whose armies helped
wreck them. They are building for the future in
Baku and not on the past.

VI
THE BREAD BASKET OF EUROPE

"THE Russian peasant may be ignorant and poor
and starved at present, but he has a darned sight
better prospects ahead of him fchan any farmer in
the world, when once he gets going." . . . Such was
the startling judgment pronounced in my hearing by
a group of American farmer boys who had been
working all summer in the famine area of Russia.

Some of them had travelled half across Siberia,
and down for many days into the Bashkir Republic.
They had seen the Russian peasant and Russian
agriculture with the eyes, not of politicians, nor of
revolutionists, nor even of city workers, but with
the eyes of North Dakota farmers appraising the
greatest wheat-lands in the world.

They did not ignore the terrible famine from
which the peasant has hardly yet emerged ; nor the
lack of equipment and livestock, the illiteracy, the
painfully primitive methods. They were not envy-
ing the Russian peasant's present condition, but his
chance for the future. The ills he endures are those
which education and machinery will cure. His
prospects are based on the resources of his land,
the new land laws, and the new human being pro-
duced by the Revolution*

From the middle of Europe to more than the
118

THE BREAD BASKET OF EUROPE 119

middle of Asia it stretches, this country of great
dry plains. For thousands of years, before the
earliest dawn of history, it has been the home of
the great nomad races, who swept across its easy
highway from the north of China even to Rome and
Spain. It is still the last stronghold of these no-
mads, and holds in its sweep many races that have
not yet settled down to agriculture, and much black
soil that has never felt the plough. Yet it is flat
and easy to farm, rich earth that produces abun-
dantly. It has one drawback, aside from the tem-
porary ones which the disorganisation of man has
created, it is very dry. The average rainfall is from
ten to twenty inches in the summer six months. One-
third of the years are "bad" years under the primi-
tive methods of cultivation, which lack all means
of moisture conservation. The peasant ploughing
is late and shallow; he turns the soil over late in
June and lets it dry out before planting. Every
few years there is a famine. The greatest famine
in history is barely over.

In good years it has been the bread basket of
Europe, in spite of primitive methods of cultivation
and transport. From the labour of its illiterate
peasants have arisen thousands of snugly built vil-
lages, and hundreds of little towns with gold-domed
churches, and many million-dollar grain elevators
along the railroad tracks. The population through-
out the European section is more dense than Amer-
ica's middle west, comparing rather with Ohio and
western New York. This population has supported
itself and a hierarchy of nobles by scratching less

120 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

than half the arable land with home-made ploughs,
and reaping the results with hand sickles and cart-
ing the grain to market in springless carts over
scores of miles of dirt roads.

If once there is machinery, if once there is knowl-
edge and organisation, if once they are freed from
the drain of war here in this region where millions
died last year of hunger, there need be no hunger
in the world.

"You must not think," said a young girl who be-
fore the war was heiress to a large estate near Sa-
mara, but who is now travelling from village to
village working for the government, "you must
not think that our disorganisation is produced by
the Revolution. Russia never was organised."

I have travelled myself as far north as the Arctic,
and as far east as the Volga ; I have slept in peas-
ants' houses and attended the meetings of their
committees and Soviets. But when I met these
American farmers in Moscow I realised that I had
grown too accustomed to European standards to
see the Russian farm lands freshly. I tried to see
this bread basket of Europe through their eyes,
the eyes of the most highly-trained farmers in the
world, the large scale machine farmers of our own
great plains.

"The first thing I saw in Latvia," said Harold
Ware, leader of the group, "was a man pulling a
plough and a woman guiding it. This was our first
introduction to European agriculture; not one of
us had known that peasant farming was like that

"The boys all said: 'Look at the onion patches!'

THE BREAD BASKET OF EUROPE 121

They meant the little peasant plots of grain, which
were then six inches high in early spring. They
were such small plots, divided into so many sec-
tions, that our boys from the grain-fields of Dakota
laughed at them as onion-beds.

"From that time we saw throughout Russia a
terrible poverty in equipment. There were home-
made ploughs with a piece of sheet-iron for a mould-
board; and we were used to the chilled steel, highly
polished mouldboards of the tractor ploughs that
get a surface just like glass. Once in a while a
peasant would show us with pride one of these little
German ploughs with their straight iron shares;
well, we'd have to admire, but we knew we wouldn't
have taken one of those things for a gift.

"We saw in Libau warehouses stacked with this
type of plough, made before the wan Clear across
Siberia we saw, here and there, this same German
type, which had been copied and made by a Russian
factory. Very old-style things, and even of these
there were only a few. Most of the ploughs were
home-made. We began to wonder if the most
immediate help to Russia, instead of our tractor
ploughing, wouldn't be to give them a lot of good
walking-ploughs for one or two horses, and scatter
them over the land. They need them by millions,
sold on easy payments to the peasants ; and it would
certainly save the horse-power that is so scarce.

"Later in the season we saw the harvesting; prac-
tically all of it was done by sickle. I don't believe
we ever had that stage in America ; it must have
been before the days of the Pilgrim Fathers. We

122 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

started with scythes, and went on to cradles and
reapers and binders, and now the big modern com-
bination machine. But in Russia we saw only
sickles, and once in a long time a reaper. These
last were mostly idle for want of horses or for lack
of a few repairs that the peasants did not know how
to make.

"In the summer when we were ploughing with
tractors the women were reaping alongside us with
sickles. We told them that next summer they
would not need to bend their backs when we came
with modern threshing machinery from America to
reap their grain."

The estate near Perm on which the American
farmers did ploughing last summer belonged before
the Revolution to an absentee prince. He collected
its revenues through an agent There were no
buildings and no machinery on the estate ; the meth-
ods of agriculture were not better than those of the
surrounding peasants. In fact, it was the nearby
peasants who did the work, according to the ways
they knew and with no instruction. They obtained
their own land from the prince, and in return had
to work an equal amount of his land. The small
plots, the three-field system, the hand tools, were
merely transferred from their own land to his.
The prince did nothing to develop the estate, he
merely exploited his monopoly of land.

When the Revolution came there was no sudden
upheaval here among the peasants. But the agent,
feeling no longer at his back the protection of the
czar's army, grew frightened and left in the night.

THE BREAD BASKET OF EUROPE 123

There was no special date when any land was "taken
over." But the following spring the peasants, in-
stead of planting the estate for the use of the prince,
planted it for themselves. Not all of it; they had
neither strength nor seed for all; each man picked
out little patches of good soil that he remembered
and established squatters' rights by ploughing there.

It happened this way in many places in Russia.
In other places there were owners dispossessed by
violence and well-managed estates, with well-bal-
anced live-stock, split up and ruined by division. But
there were also many informal takings over of land,
as the peasants did at Toikino near Perm. After
a time the central government began to pass land
laws. It passed a law making all large estates the
property of the government, only to be subdivided
by due process of law. But the government was
occupied with war and the peasants did pretty
largely as they chose.

Even this past summer there were little patches
of rye growing all over the large estate, planted by
the peasants on land which belonged to the Soviet
Farm, and which was now legally the property of an
organisation of miners, to be run to produce food
for the mines. As long as the miners were unable
to use the land the peasant right held good. Ability
to use and improve land is the test imposed now,
even by the formal land laws, as it was to some
extent in America's early homestead laws. *

But if the taking over of the land was in many
cases without trouble, the later fortunes of the
peasants were not. In almost every section of this

124 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

vast fertile land there has been war, repeated again
and again. The requisition of livestock first by the
czar, through three years of fighting, and then by
Kerensky; the sweepmg of armies, Kolchak in the
east, Denikin and Wrangel in the south, the Poles
in the west, the forces of Yudenich to the north,
these things left the villages and fields desolate.

The old peasant woman who led the singing in
Starashemya, in the government of Perm, could look
out across the fields every evening at sundown as
she came home from toil, and see the trench where
her son was killed fighting. A Russian-American
fanner, who went to visit his old village near Kiev,
came back to tell that his four sisters had all lost
their husbands, and that there was no young man
in the village. One of these places was in the
northeast and one in the southwest of Russia ; death
was in all places alike.

The first effect of the war was to disorganise agri-
culture still farther, by the drafting of men, the
requisition of cattle, the wearing out of machinery
and implements. Then came three years of drought,
ending in the dryest year known in history. The
Bread Basket of Europe was reduced to emptiness.
The peasants fled by hundreds of thousands and
died by millions.

A year ago it seemed that this whole fertile sec-
tion of Europe and Asia might be reduced to a des-
ert. But to-day the tide has turned. There have
been two average harvests; there has been terrific
nation-wide effort, helped by much foreign relief. In
one year the government gave seven hundred thou-

THE BREAD BASKET OF EUROPE 125

sand tons of seed grain for the areas which had none.
Twenty-five million dollars worth of agricultural
credits were also advanced by the government in
this most difficult year to btfcj? agricultural machin-
ery. For two years the food tax in the stricken
area was remitted, and half a million orphans were
taken care of by the children's homes of the over-
burdened land. America also carne to the refuge
and fed eight million people.

Great fights went on all summer against pests
and parasites, which came upon the fields after the
famine. Eight million acres were occupied by lo-
custs and an equal number by a small ground ani-
mal called sooslik. But the peasants, mobilized
under experts from the Department of Agriculture,
fought the locusts with flaming oil, burning whole
fields of vegetation and pests together. There are
still locust eggs on millions of acres and the fight
starts again in the spring.

But at least there is food in the land again, not
much, but enough to give hope. So it is possible
now to take a brief survey of the Bread Basket of
Europe and ask what its prospects are.

Horses throughout Russia are now only forty
per cent, of prewar, reports the Department of Agri-
culture to Congress. In the famine area the total
number of cattle is thirteen to twenty-five per cent,
of prewar ; in Siberia it is thirty per cent.

Over against this is the report that last autumn's
planting of grain was twenty-six per cent, higher
than the preceding year, in spite of the grievous lack
of implements and livestock. This was due to the

126 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

tremendous efforts of both peasants and govern-
ment, encouraged by the better harvest.

So much for material conditions. But the real
hope for the future lies rather in the changed spirit
of the peasant, made possible by the changed condi-
tions under which he holds his land and governs his
country.

It is universal testimony that the peasants are
all interested in machinery now, whereas before
the war they were superstitious about it. A mechanic
from Tambov, who before the war worked for the
International Harvester Company, says that he
used to drive into villages which had never seen an
automobile. "The old men and women would
come out with their ikons," he said, u to take off the
curse of my coming. A tractor would have been
even worse in their eyes, because a tractor tears
up the earth."

And now these same peasants are learning to run
tractors, and asking how they can get them. Forty
of them were trained by the American Tractor Unit
this summer. "They learned as well," said Ware,
"as an American farmer would. They sent delega-
tions from seventy to a hundred miles to see our
machines. Yet they used to believe, the old peas-
ants told me, that machinery poisoned the earth. If
I had gone into their villages with tractors before
the war they say I might have suffered violence."

The peasants are interested in all sorts of new
inventions. The same mechanic from Tambov tells
of a scythe that a peasant brought to him, ask-
ing for a new one. "He had no idea the old one

THE BREAD BASKET OF EUROPE 127

could be repaired, but I fixed it in five minutes by
acetylene welding and reground the edge. He looked
as if he had seen a miracle done by Jesus Christ.
Next day they came from all over, bringing all their
old implements to be mended."

A new status has come to the peasant with the
Revolution, and a new self-respect. His village
soviet is a centre from which word goes up to Mos-
cow, and to which news comes back. Men of his
own kind, from his own village, are sent by him
up to the capital to sit in the All-Russian Congress
and pass the laws. And they come back and explain
what they have done, and if he doesn't like it he
recalls them.

From one end of Russia to the other the villages
are after one pattern. There is a central street,
without curbing or definite bounds, merging at each
end into the road that runs to the next village. The
houses open, not on the road, but each into its own
barnyard, where the livestock and the implements
are housed at night Somewhere outside the village
is the common pasture where the village herdsmen
look after all the cows together, and farther away,
often many miles, are the lands which the peasants
farm.

In every village is one house which is known as
the Soviet House. Here are all records of births
and deaths and property; here meet all committees
and officials. Whenever I have come into a village
and called to the first small boy, he has directed me
to this house for all my information. And the whole
village turns out and crowds into the building or at

128 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

the approaches to know what the news is and to
express itself on it

If you ask them to form a committee they do it
with, common voice. There is no balloting and
counting of bare majorities; there is usually a unani-
mous decision. Again and again I have formed
famine relief committees in less than an hour, merely
telling the entire village group what sort of work
was to be done and what different kinds of people
were wanted on the committee, and receiving in
reply one name after another, almost always by gen-
eral voice or consent.

Even in the midst of starvation these villages dis-
played a surprising ability to organise their own
life. In September, 1921, when the famine was only
a month old, I visited seven villages, one after the
other, and found in each a self-help committee and
a kitchen already built for the feeding of hundreds
of children, lacking only the food. This had been
done because President Kalenin told them that food
would come from Moscow and also perhaps from
America and that the villages which were organised
and ready would first be fed.

It was a great trip which Kalenin made at the be-
ginning of the famine to bring order out of the
chaos of fleeing peasants. He sat in the midst of
the villagers and the old women told him their com-
plaints against the drought, the tax-collectors and
the government. It was no easy optimism he gave
them. "Thousands of you must die," that was his
iron message. "If you organise and fight some of
you will live, but if you make no struggle, you will

THE BREAD BASKET OF EUROPE 129

all perish." That was the message to which the
peasants of Russia responded, staying in their vil-
lages and planting their grain and organising their
kitchens while yet they were eating grass and bark
and clay.

And now Kalenin, the president of Russia, him-
self a peasant, receives daily in his office hundreds
of peasants, who come from all over Russia to bring
their problems to Moscow. He refers them to the
proper departments, he writes little orders for them,
he ties them up with the central machinery of
Russia.

All over the land there have sprung up "Houses
of the Peasants," where information of farming and
village life and government is given out. In Mos-
cow the House of the Peasants has 400 beds and
many baths, hospital and disinfection service, read-
ing room and library and theatre, and exhibition of
agricultural machinery and models of barns and
village fire-fighting equipment. An information
bureau connects the peasants with the official insti-
tutions; a legal bureau gives them information on
land laws ; a trade bureau takes care of their sales
and purchases.

There are twenty such Houses of the Peasants in
the main cities of Russia, and there are hundreds
of smaller houses in the smaller towns. The Ukraine
alone reports four hundred Houses of the Peas-
ants, which combine the function of hotel and
information bureau and educational institution.

Scattered throughout the land are two or three
thousand soviet farms, old estates which are takea

130 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

over directly by the government, and not divided
among the peasants. At present these are mere
stations for emergency food production, little bet-
ter than the peasant lands around them, but as
peasant production returns to normal these soviet
farms may naturally become the agricultural experi-
ment stations of Russia.

But it is the new law of land that really makes
the difference in the peasants' outlook. Not that
he has so much more land than he had before,
although it is true that a million acres were given
by the revolution to the peasants of European Rus-
sia alone. His holdings increased from fifty to one
hundred per cent, but even now nearly half the
lands of Russia are in holdings which give less than,
three acres for each person in the family. Twenty
acres or less is the holding of the vast majority of
Russian peasants. But this is distinctly more than
he can work at present, in the absence of livestock
and tools.

The new land laws ensure him his holding as long
as he works it. It can neither be sold nor mort-
gaged; it belongs ultimately to the government; the
peasant has the right of perpetual use, which can-
not be taken from him by any misfortune. In return
for this he pays a food tax, amounting to somewhat
more than one tenth of his crop.

It is a rather complicated affair, this food tax,
taking into account the size of his holding and the
number of children in his family, the crop condi-
tions in the township and the amount of his live-
stock. A man with a very small holding and poor

THE BREAD BASKET OF EUROPE 131

harvest and no cattle may escape payment alto-
gether, while a man who has more than seven acres
for each member of his family and many cattle and
a fair harvest may have to pay as high as one-fifth
of his grain crop. But for the average peasant it
is ten to fifteen per cent.

The laws also provide that each village may de-
cide according to what method the land is to be
farmed, the old communal system, the individual
farm or a system of co-operative large-scale farm-
ing. The old communal plan is very wasteful; it
had a certain primitive justice to recommend it, for
it gave to each man his share of the good land, the
bad land, the hilly land, the swampy land, the near
land, the distant land. He might have as many as
twenty-seven tiny plots of land, widely scattered;
it may have been fair, but it was highly inefficient.

Redistribution of land in the interests of efficiency
is rapidly taking place. In some villages individual
farms may come in, but the system the government
encourages, and for which it advances credits, is
large-scale, co-operative farming by machinery. The
peasant is accustomed to the idea of a common pas-
ture. Even the land which they farmed so pain-
fully by strips was common property, redistributed
from time to time, but separately worked because
of the nature of their implements. It is not diffi-
cult for them, with modern machinery, to think in
terms of a common grain field.

Great grain fields, operated by whole villages in
common, shipping their products by government
railways and warehouses direct to the large govern-

132 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

ment industries, and receiving goods in return
through the peasants' co-operatives, this is the aim
of Russia. It needs education, it needs machinery,
it needs organisation, but these are the only things
it needs. It does not need to batter down any pri-
vate interests that stand in the way. That is why
those American farmers said that the peasants of
Russia had a better chance than the mortgaged
farmers of North Dakota or the tenant farmers of
the South or the agricultural migratory workers who
follow our harvest in the West.

Machinery will come more quickly in Russia than
it came in the American West. In place of a hun-
dred years it will be only a decade from sickle to
modern threshing machine. This means that the
migration of population from farms to cities, which
in America took a century, will be hastened in Rus-
sia and will greatly strain her capacity for adjust-
ment.

Yet Russia desires this shift of population to de-
velop her industries, both those she has had in the
past and those she has never yet had. If Russia
receives credits, if she is able to develop her heavy
industries, to produce machinery and manufactured
articles, and to absorb the peasants displaced by ma-
chines from the farms which will then be too small,
then there will be a normal and self-contained ad-
vance towards prosperity over the whole of the
country.

Russia's trade then with the rest of the world
will be under no abnormal pressure in any particu-
lar kind of commodities. Her interest will be in

THE BREAD BASKET OF EUROPE 133

internal expansion, which will absorb her energies,
as the energies of America were absorbed in west-
ward expansion during the century when she was
the self-contained and non-aggressive example of
peace and prosperity to the world.

If R|ussia gets no credits, then, as one of her fore-
most leaders said to me, "We shall starve ourselves
and export our grain to Europe. Even this year,
in spite of our own hunger, we are exporting a little
because we have such need of manufactured goods.
Next year we shall export more. We shall then
become competitors of the American farmers in the
grain markets of the world. We shall be forced to
do this out of our very poverty unless we have the
credits to develop industry and to consume our own
surplus in building up a self-sustaining and many-
sided nation."

VII
HOW MOSCOW KEEPS HOUSE

A CITY which runs its street repairs and its hous-
ingr>its sewers and bridges and car-line under one
Department of Community Housekeeping, and
makes it pay for itself without taxes, that's Mos-
cow in 1923. "We have to do it," said Sovietnikof,
head of the department, to me, "We haven't any
other income. We have to make ourselves self-sup-
porting under the new economic policy."

The rents from the shops and market booths come
into the city treasury, for all these things since the
revolution are municipal property, and buy
120,000 square yards of flower beds in parks and
boulevards for the delight of the populace, and pave
100,000 square yards of cobblestone pavements, and
are used to repair the water works and the gas
works and the broken bridges, even out in the coun-
try on the roads which the peasants use when they
drive into market.

As for house rents, the city does not expect
much money from these as yet. All that it asks is
that house rents shall pay for repairs on the ruined
buildings and so reconstruct the city again into a
good place to live in for the millions of inhabitants
who have poured in since the war. So house rents
are calculated by house committees and depend on

134

HOW MOSCOW KEEPS HOUSE 135

the kind of job you work at and the size of your
income, so that the working man is undercharged
and the "nep-man" is overcharged with more than
his proportion of repairs.

That's the way the City of Moscow, as well as
other cities of Russia, keep house under the new
economic policy.

I came to the Department of Community House-
keeping hy a long, hard, roundabout way. I was
hunting a room to live in, for rooms are very scarce.
You can get them, theoretically, in various ways,
but all of these ways are hard. I ran into three
kinds of people in my search, greedy speculators,
complaining aristocrats, and working people.

My first greedy speculator was a pretty woman
with a pleasant smile. She looked like a comfort-
able boarding-house keeper, not a greedy speculator
at all. She offered me a kitchen, made into a bed-
room, for twelve dollars a week, with tea in the
morning and dinner at night. It was the cheapest
thing I had found in the expensive city of Moscow,
so I grabbed it.

"I shall have to see the House Committee," she
said, a trifle uneasily. My friend explained after we
left.

"Those rooms belong legally," she said, "not to
that woman, but to the city, which farms out its
rights to the various house committees chosen in
each house. This woman has gained her rights by

136 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

buying out previous tenants, but after all, they had
only the right to live there, not the right to sell.

"As soon as she admits to the House Committee
that she has extra rooms, they have the right to move
in tenants from more crowded quarters without pay-
ing her any rent at all. However, no doubt she
has friends on the committee or she wouldn't be go-
ing into this business. I think you'll get your room."

But I didn't. Not because the House Committee
objected, but because the woman learned that I was
an American and began to raise her prices. When
it reached twenty dollars for the first week, subject
to change thereafter, I gave it up. "I shall have
no safeguard at all," I complained to my friend.

"On the contrary, it is the woman who will have
no safeguard. If once you move into that room
and register your name and occupation with the
House Committee she cannot put you out. You can
refuse to pay her any rent at all, and her only re-
dress is to take out the furniture. The furniture is
legally hers, but the room is not. Your legal rights
are better than hers if you once get in. You are a
worker and she is a speculator. You can deal direct
with the House Committee, paying their nominal
rent of fifty cents a month, if once you establish
a residence.

"She knows all this and that is why she cannot
make up her mind what she wants to do. She is on
dangerous ground, speculating in rooms which are
not legally hers." Later J met some of the larger
speculators, who had obtained legal rights direct

HOW MOSCOW KEEPS HOUSE 137

from the city by making repairs. But that is a
later story.

Four flights up, across the hall, I learned, was
a room which was to let for the summer. I went
to inspect it. It was inhabited by complaining
aristocrats.

It was a large room, once beautiful, but now
jammed from wall to wall with furniture and look-
ing like a second-hand junk shop. Wardrobes shoved
against wardrobes, divans, beds, desks, dishes, and
at least a dozen gilt chandeliers piled in a corner.
Over all was an atmosphere of dust.

The lady reclined on the divan and spoke in
French. She complained that the room was badly
crowded, but what could she do. Once the whole
flat was hers, properly furnished. Then the un-
speakable proletariat moved in from the gutters and
only allowed her to keep one room. She kept the
largest and piled in it all her furniture. Surely she
would not let those creatures use her furniture.

So she had camped down in the midst of her
possessions, living in a horrible mess of luxurious
dirt. She had never learned how to clean house, and
she could not afford a servant. She half boasted,
half complained that she never had cooked a meal
in her life before the Revolution. Now she had a
kerosene primus, set in the midst of the room on
a marble-topped table. She was in terror even of
this little stove for she did not understand Its flam-
ing. She was an utterly useless person, trained for
a kind of culture that no longer exists in Russia.

I let her waste my time four days, so desperate

138 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

was I to secure any kind of a room. She changed
her mind hourly, according to the rise in railway
fares to the place she wanted to visit. In the end
I gave up in despair.

Then a friend brought me hope, "I know a
woman," he said, "who lives in the Metropole. She
has two rooms and her husband is away in Berlin.
I think she would take you in."

Would she ? She did it as casually as she would
offer a drink of water, without even seeing me. She
was a busy Communist, working in a government
office. Her room was merely the place where she
dropped down to sleep occasionally; she had not
two minutes time to give to the choosing of a room-
mate. "Come round between nine and ten to-mor-
row," she sent me word, "and I'll give you a bed.' 1
Thus casually I came to live in the Metropole, the
hotel used by the All Russian Central Executive
Committee to house its employes. "The house of
officialdom," said my newspaper friends. "Take
note how these bureaucrats live." I took notes.

My hostess welcomed me with a hurried, friendly
smile. The auto was waiting to take her to the
office. "You can have the bed in this room," she
said, "and the table in the other room to work on."
I sat down on the bed and struck it with a hard
bump. I lifted the mattress and found I was sitting
on boards, with a thin straw-mattress laid over them.
Such was her bed also; it was the only kind of
bed I found in the Metropole. The springs had
long since worn out and been replaced by rough
lumber. Nobody in the Metropole had time to

HOW MOSCOW KEEPS HOUSE 139

think about beds ; they were too busy running Russia.

I looked for a place to hang my coat. There was
neither wardrobe nor closet. I watched to see where
my hostess hung her clothes, and found it, four
nails driven behind the door of the inner room. She
saw the direction of my gaze and caught my inquiry.
Swiftly she picked up a hammer and drove in two
more nails for my clothes. I winced as the iron
bit into the fine hard wood in what was once one
of Moscow's best hotels. But she had her job to
think of, more important than a bit of woodwork.
She hurried to the automobile and was carried away.

It was after midnight when she returned from
the office. She drew up a chair to the table, turned
on a desk-lamp and began to work some more. She
was somebody's assistant, high up in the government
publications. They had gone on the new economic
policy and were making feverish advance in pub-
lishing books. It was after three o'clock when she
went to bed.

So began my life in the heart of officialdom in
Moscow. I began to understand why she offered
me only a bed and table. It was all she herself
asked of life. Her bedtime averaged two o'clock
in the morning, her working time all the rest of
the day. Some evenings there would be a little relax-
ation, a group of comrades, sitting around the table,
drinking tea and discussing the problems of Russia.
All her life revolved around her job.

The plans for meals were very sketchy. Some
time in the morning a barefoot peasant woman
brought us a samovar and we had tea. Some time

140 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

in the evening we came in and rustled for food for
ourselves. Any friends were welcome to the flat
to sleep or to eat If someone got there first and
consumed the bread we ate something else or did
without till next day. After a time I learned to go
to sleep at night, leaving the doors wide open, and
never knowing how many people would be occupying
our two rooms in the morning.

The clothes I hung behind the door were bor-
rowed by anyone who needed them. My suitcase
was "communized" for a trip to Petrograd. But all
of their possessions were also at my disposal. These
things were the trappings of life; what one wore,
or ate, or where one slept did not matter. What
mattered was the job of building a new world out
of ruins.

This had been their life for five long years, with
hardly a moment for rest War to the north and
war to the south, war to the west and famine to the
east; civil war in the streets of Moscow. These
were the folks who had the day-by-day job of keep-
ing the country going. Their lives had become one
long round of emergencies.

I will admit that I found them too strenuous. I
loved them, but I began to hunt for a room where
I could sleep. "You can buy one from a specu-
lator," said my friends. "There are many places
advertised in the papers."

That was the orthodox way of getting a room,
for people who had money. Private business men
with capital secured ruined buildings on contract
from the city, holding them a term of years in re-

HOW MOSCOW KEEPS HOUSE 141

turn for putting in capital repairs. They did not
rent these apartments, for they wanted quick turn-
over on their money; they sold the right to move
in. After that you paid merely the usual rents
of Moscow.

Many European cities have systems like this since
the war as a means of keeping "rents" low for the
ordinary population which cannot pay, while charg-
ing high prices to the newcomers who have money.
I found that a room in Moscow would cost me three
or four hundred dollars, unfurnished. I could stay
there for several years with only a nominal rent.

But I did not want to stay for several years and
the price was too high for a short stay. "How are
the workers of this city living?" I wondered. "They
cannot be paying such prices." So I went to visit
a workers' commune and found the first "home"
where I really wanted to live in Moscow.

Besides the houses which are managed by house
committees and which are occupied by all varieties
of people, making their own semi-legal arrangements
with each other ; and besides the houses which are
leased on contract by speculators, and sold at high
prices; and besides the houses which belong to
government institutions, and are reserved for their
employes; there are also workers' communes.
These are the favoured places.

The workers of a single factory or a single de-
partment may secure a house just as the specu-
lators do, on contract from the city. But the city
favours them by giving them the houses that need
the fewest repairs. They also have their house

142 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

committee^ who look after current expenses and
divide these among the inhabitants. But the prob-
lem is simpler, since the income and social inter-
ests of all the occupants is similar. They do not
attempt to make profit; they merely apportion the
monthly cost of running.

The Amo Commune, which I visited, was a large
house of 300 rooms, once an old ladies' home, then
an army headquarters* Now it belongs for ten
years to the workers of the Amo Automobile Fac-
tory, who repaired it.

It took one hundred men five months to do the
job, working after hours, and all day Sundays. The
woodwork had been hacked up for firewood and
the heating and plumbing arrangements were badly
smashed. They got materials from the govern-
ment before the new economic policy came in, for
the Amo is a government factory. They got some
furniture from the Communist International in re-
turn for letting them use the house for foreign dele-
gates for a time. Now it all belongs to workers of
the Amo.

I went through room after room, spacious, well-
lit, well-ventilated. These auto-workers had better
quarters than any downtown hotel at that period
in Moscow, though now the hotels have improved.
I saw the three-room Russian bath in the basement,
a real luxury, like a Turkish bath, only wetter. I
also saw many American bathtubs, and sighed with
envy, for I had been unable to get a bath in a tub
for two months.

There was a large kitchen and dining room where

HOW MOSCOW KEEPS HOUSE 143

seventy-five of the single men chose to Hire a cook
and have meals in common. There was also a much
larger kitchen, with oil-burning ovens kept at- steady
heat, in which families cooked their meals, taking
them back to their rooms for eating. It was planned
like a great food factory. I longed to keep house
in the Amo.

There were clubrooms, with a stage on which
their dramatic club gave plays, or to which they
invited artists from the Grand Theatre, hired for
the night. They had dances every Saturday. They
had a schoolroom for the younger children, with two
teachers furnished by the city; the older children
went out to more specialised schools.

The manager of the Amo, a Communist, lived also
in this commune, getting wages hardly more than
his men. On the ground floor were forty children
from the Volga, supported by the Amo workers out
of their own rations, playing in the garden and go-
ing to school with the Amo's children. It was a
many-sided life, co-operatively managed. I wanted
a room there, but I could not get one, because t
was not working in the Amo plant

"What rent do you pay?" I asked a young ma-
chinist as I glanced around his spacious room, about
sixteen by twenty feet in size.

"Last month," he said, "it was about three and
a half dollars, but that was unusually high, for we
bought fuel oil for two months ahead, which is one
of our biggest items. Every month the house com-
mittee pays the bills, light, water, fuel, repairs,
insurance, and tells us what we owe."

144 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

"How about ordinary rent?" I asked.

"We have the house for ten years, because we
repaired it."

"But don't you pay any taxes? How does the
city run if you don't pay taxes?"

"We pay for light and water," he explained.
"When we ride on street cars we pay for those.
What else does the city need money for? A few
central expenses. It has other property that pays
for those."

"Streets and sewers- and sidewalks," I suggested,
trying to think of the things that cities have to pay
for. "Oh, well," he laughed, "when we need a side-
walk we'll have to pay for it and divide that also
among the workers. But we haven't bought any
sidewalks this year."

And so it was that I came to visit Sovietnikof, the
man who runs the Department of Community House-
keeping of Moscow, to get the explanation of all
these various ways of keeping house. Under him
come the cars and the streets and the bridges, the
lights and water and the repairing of homes.

"All these things pay for themselves," he told
me. "They have to. They even make a surplus
which is used for more improvements. Moscow
is badly run down by the years of war and must
be rebuilt. Our department has to do it. We have
no money so we have to pay as we go. And we have
not been doing so badly."

HOW MOSCOW KEEPS HOUSE 145

They are not They are doing very well indeed.
I noticed myself how well the cars run. Streets
and houses were being repaired all over the city.
The open squares were full of flower beds and chil-
dren playing. I wanted to know how it was done.

"Our car-line," he said, "is our biggest income
and also our biggest expense. Last month we took
in $675,000 and spent $650,000 on the cars alone.
We have grown since January when we only had
290 cars, which broke down often under the strain
of carrying six million passengers that month; now
in July we have 457 cars, in much better repair, car-
rying easily fourteen million passengers in a month.
We have repaired and reopened 13,289 metres of
old car-line and built three miles of new extension.
We have repaired sixty-four crossings and 100,000
square yards of roadbed. We have repaired the
communal houses where our car workers live and
have re-equipped the Sokolniki car barns for making
capital repairs." This was in the autumn of 1922.

All this was done on a car fare which ranged
from three to five cents, according to the variations
in exchange. Double fare was charged at night
after ten o'clock for "luxury traffic." On the other
hand, factory workers got special tickets with their
wages at one-third the ordinary fare. The Moscow
cars are nearly always crowded because the whole
city is crowded. The Petrograd car line has a harder
task to pay its way, for it covers more territory with
fewer people.

Before the war the street cars of Moscow were
owned by a Belgian company. This was one of the

146 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

pieces of property which Belgium wanted restored
at The Hague. But the City of Moscow, which
feels that it practically rebuilt the line out of ruins,
has no intention of returning anything.

Sovietnikof told me of other city improvements.
Thirty thousand miles of sewers and 1,800 wells
cleaned, for the improvement of city sanitation. The
city filter re-established. Capital repairs made in the
gas works, where the war had wrecked alike factory,
office and living quarters. Another large central
building, which had been blown up by anarchists
during the civil war, was being rebuilt.

They had appropriated $400,000 to relieve unem-
ployment which resulted when the famine drove
thousands of unskilled peasants to Moscow. These
men were given work cleaning or repairing the cen-
tral part of the city and carting away the broken
"buildings. The unemployed, incidentally, get all
municipal services free, including light, rent and
transportation.

For the repairing of workers' communes they had
appropriated $800,000. "Moscow is still seriously
overcrowded," said Sovietnikof, "and our housing
situation is very bad. Our whole policy is to place
as little burden as possible upon the toilers. We
charge, for instance, only half as much for light and
water as these things cost us, and make up the deficit
in other ways."

"How?" I asked. "That's what I want to know?
How do you get your money?"

"From rents of shops and market-booths," he
answered "That is our biggest revenue, if you

HOW MOSCOW KEEPS HOUSE 147

leave out the car-line, which pays its own way. Our
biggest expense is for city sanitation and county
roads."

"I see," I remarked, and then paused. For I
did see, very suddenly. There had been a revolution
in Moscow; I had almost forgotten it in this dis-
cussion of income and expense. The city buildings
belonged to the city. In spite of ruin and war, no
wonder they could make money on their rents alone.
But it made me gasp to think how much rent a city
would make which could take over its buildings while
they were still undestroyed and fit for use.

"How about house rents?" I inquired, beginning
to see a chance of unlimited income.

"Not yet," he answered "We don't get much
from house rents. The workers are poor and the
houses badly broken. All we ask of our house rents
is that they shall repair the houses."

Moscow suffered not only war and privation, and
the blowing up of buildings by heavy artillery. Worst
of all, she had two fuel famines in the dead of a
Russian winter, when the bridges leading into the
city were blown up or broken. Even food trains
arrived with such difficulty that every day big signs
in. front of the Moscow Soviet announced the posi-
tion of the food trains, so that the people might
know whether they would have food next week or
not As for fuel that was quite impossible.

The people of Moscow crowded in as few rooms
as possible, tearing up doors and window frames and
floors of other rooms for fuel. Water pipes broke
all over the city, spoiling plastering and the remain-

148 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

ing woodwork. Army detachments were quartered
here and there; for three years typhus raged in the
city.

In the Metropole, where I lived, they were mak-
ing new kitchen shelves from the first wood available
for such purposes for eight years. All Moscow
needed such repairing. And from June of last year
till winter-time so much repairing took place that
the city was unrecognisable. The general plan for
repairing the city came under Sovietnikof s depart-
ment. He told me about it.

"The Moscow Soviet owns 24,300 houses. (A
house in Moscow is a large apartment building,
sometimes a combination of several buildings around"
one central court.) Five thousand of these, which
were too small to bother with, having less than six
apartments in them, were turned back to the dwellers
to use as they saw fit.

"Large houses are rented to government institu-
tions or workers' communes. They pay for these
by putting in repairs and hold them for a term of
years. We especially favour the workers' com-
munes, wishing to establish good living conditions for
them. We have put 1,100 of the best-conditioned
houses of the city at the disposal of such communes.
Sometimes the city even advances the money for re-
pairs on long-term loan, without interest, and in the
profound hope that it will never have to be repaid.

"Houses that are much ruined and for the repair-
ing of which we have no capital, we allow capitalists
to repair, giving them the use over a term of years.
We do not give them as good terms as we give to

HOW MOSCOW KEEPS HOUSE 149

the government or the workers, but they can make
very good profits. They must give the city' ten per
cent of the floor space as a sort of permanent rent,
to use for city workers; the rest they can rent for
any amounts they choose.

"We have let thirty-six such contracts, covering
nearly two hundred houses, with forty to two hun-
dred apartments in each." This was in August; a
few months later the demand for buildings had so
increased that the city was charging cash down for
buildings. Several foreign firms had come in and
were making money, but most of the capitalists were
Russians.

"Between these two extremes of workers' com-
munes and capitalist houses, come the mixed houses,
inhabited by the many kinds of folks who happen to
be living there. These are an administrative prob-
lem which we leave to the house committees, merely
prescribing certain general laws for the protection
of workers. Thus a worker cannot be put out of
his room, even for non-payment of rent His wages
can be attached, but if he is unemployed his rent
is free. He cannot be charged more than a certain
low sum, fixed in proportion to his wages."

"These mixed houses present many problems
which are handled in various ways. For instance,
there may be a wealthy business man, a minor Soviet
employe, a teacher and a bootblack, among the
hundred dwellers in a given house. They cannot
all afford the same improvements and repairs. So
perhaps they arrange matters by letting the business
man have a five-room apartment, in return for re-

150 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

pairing the central heating for the whole establish-

ment."

The house committees apportion the rent among
the different dwellers, often charging a "speculator"
four or five times as much as a manual worker for
the same kind of room. There is real conflict going
on between the various elements the class war
carried right into the home. For space is so des-
perately scarce still in Moscow that it is a problem
who shall have it, the man with the largest fam-
ily, or the man with the largest bank account.

The housing regulations favour the workers.
Quite fancy prices are charged for "extra rooms"
which give to any family more than one room per
person. This is the weapon used to secure fairly
equal crowding, for the city is still in such straits
that whole families occupy single rooms. In order
still further to strengthen the position of the work-
ers, the city government tries quite frankly to have
them control the management of the house com-
mittees.

In the last three months of 1922, to meet the
housing shortage, the Department of Community
Housekeeping -announced a requisition of one-tenth
of all floor space. The house committees were given
the task of deciding which rooms should be placed
at the disposal of the city, and compressing the in-
habitants into the remaining rooms. There were se-
cured in this way 12,657 rooms which were at once
redistributed.

In the 10,151 rooms of which report was made
iy the end of the year, 23,668 people were accommo-

HOW MOSCOW KEEPS HOUSE 151

dated, more than two in a room. Over half of the
rooms went to workers, the rest to university stu-
dents, Soviet employes and municipal employes.

The policies and plans of the Department of
Community Housekeeping are constantly develop-
ing, not only in Moscow, but all over the land. Early
in 1923 two conferences were held in Moscow, con-
sisting of delegates from all Russia. One was a
conference of water and sewer departments, and
one of street car systems. They discussed various
technical matters, and questions of administration.

Should each municipal utility be self-supporting
and keep all its own funds, or should they all be
pooled in a common city treasury? The street cars
insisted on complete independence; the water de-
partments were not so sure; they preferred to run
on a budget, and get what they needed from the
city treasury, turning over all surplus funds for gen-
eral use.

Should workers be given preferential rates for
water and light, as Moscow had done during De-
cember? The water departments declared against
this, saying that it was too difficult technically, and
would bankrupt them financially. But the street cars
declared that the system whereby factories bought
large blocks of tickets in advance at one-third rates,
was not only good for the city but for the finances
of the car system as well, since it gave them a cer-
tain basic traffic to reckon on, and encouraged rid-
ing.

Quite possibly both were right, for the nature
of the two utilities differ. What works for street

152 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

cars may not necessarily work for water and light.
But the discussion shows how, under the new eco-
nomic policy, Russian cities are working out their
standards, with free discussion by the technical men
concerned, unhampered by any past. In the end
the City Soviet decides, or, beyond the city, the
All Russian Congress of Soviets, if the question is
one of national policy.

They may decide to run street cars on one plan,
and water departments on another. They may de-
cide to have these all in one department, or sepa-
rately. They may even give leases to private capi-
talists or to organisations of workers. They can try
first one way and then another, and do anything
that proves most efficient, and most useful to the
city. They discuss these things from both financial
and social points of view, and sometimes they say
frankly that the financial point of view must pre-
vail this year, till the city is in better condition,
but that as soon as they can afford it, they will
lower costs and change methods.

Whatever plans they adopt, and whether the
changes be great or little, the cities of Russia own
all their city facilities, including their buildings, and
can do with them what the people choose, to im-
prove the whole life of the city. I asked Soviet-
nikof : "What will you do when the city is repaired,
and all these buildings that have been given out to
private people or workers' communes come back to
you in ten or fifteen years, in first-class shape? Will
you rent them then for large sums?"

"I do not know what the policy will be then/' he

HOW MOSCOW KEEPS HOUSE 153

answered. "It will depend on many things. We
might charge good rents, and see that the workers
get enough wages to pay them. But this would not
be done unless our industries are by that time in
condition to do it. We might, on the other hand,
give rents practically free, as a convenience for our
citizens. But this would be inadvisable as long as
the world at large remains capitalist, for too many
people would make profit out of our free rooms.

"It will all depend on the state of our general
advance towards socialism. We can do," he said
confidently, "whatever we may choose at the time."

VIII
THE WAR WITH ALCOHOL

HAS Russia gone back to vodka? The rumours
fly this way and that way. You hear them in the
cafes of Moscow; on January first, they say, the
state monopoly opens and vodka becomes legal.
There is a secret mobilisation of empty bottles and
corks, so that the State can get them cheap and
undersell all competitors I

Rumours and whispers like this leak out to the
world. Sometimes in very official guise, such as a
decree about the state wine trust or a license to
make cherry liquor. And questions are constantly
arriving in Moscow, from temperance organisations
all over the world, who want to know the facts.

"Has Russia gone back to vodka ?" I asked
Semashko, the people's commissar of health. He
is the "Pussyfoot Johnson" of Russia, the man who
runs the anti-alcohol propaganda. He does it as
an official of the government which has pronounced
against drink.

"Certainly not," he told me. "We shall never go
back to vodka. What is more, we shall go forward,
as soon as we are financially able, and forbid even
the wines that are now allowed,"

"Has Russia gone back to vodka?" I asked a
154

THE WAR WITH ALCOHOL 155

jovial American, who had been doing the cafes of
Moscow in late December.

"Gone back," he laughed. "You can buy it in
every cafe."

"But is it legal?" I persisted.

"Not so you could notice it," he said. "A billion
roubles was the fine he paid the restaurant owner
where I got mine last week. They raided his place ;
I go somewhere else now.

"You've got to hand it to these Moscow police,"
he went on. "They do a neat little job. We were
sitting in a little private room and we told the waiter
to bring it along and make it plenty 'krupki 1
(strong) . He made it krupki all right, so that we
had to sip it And there we were with the stuff
on the table when bang goes the door, and in comes
a hand and grabs our glasses and pours the stuff
into a big bottle.

"I didn't have a chance to hide my glass and I
thought I had experience in that game. They could
even give pointers to the New York police. They
had the evidence all right."

"What did they do to you?" I asked

"To us? Nothing. Just took our names from
our passports and jotted them down. It was the
restaurant man that got it. He had to pay a billion
roubles.

"They are edging up on it all right. It has to be
done on the blind, as we used to in Kansas years
ago. The waiters now protect themselves by bring-
ing it hidden in a napkin and stand holding the door
while you drink it. You have to gulp it down right

156 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

away; it's not as much fun as it used to be. But
you can get it, you can get it anywhere. "

There you have the different sides of the ques-
tion, which are, after all, not contradictory* For
Russia is in a state of struggle with the drink ques-
tion, a struggle which sprang almost full grown
into existence in the last two months of 1922.

Before the war, in the Russia of the czar, vodka
was a state monopoly and brought in a large part
of the state budget. The peasants bought it in the
little State shops, and then, going outside, struck the
tops off the bottle and drank it. You could see
them in lines, all drinking at once; the temperance
posters were full of such pictures.

But when the war came, with its vast increase
in expenses, met chiefly by loans from the Entente,
the proportion borne by vodka was not so important,
while the demoralising effect of the drink became
still more noticeable. As a war measure the czar
abolished vodka, but allowed the finer grades of
alcohol which were consumed by the richer sec-
tions of society.

Everyone knows how the Revolution smashed the
wine cellars of the czar, and poured the wine into
the gutters. It is not so well known, perhaps, that
this act was not a mere protest against wine, but
an act of desperate self-defence, in order to pre-
serve discipline in Petrograd.

"We should have preferred to save the wine and
sell it abroad," said Trotsky to me, "for it was
valuable stuff. But it was a definite policy of the
counter-revolution to try to create disorder and

THE WAR WITH ALCOHOL 157

anarchy and wreck the discipline which we were
seeking to establish. That kind of thing is dan-
gerous in a revolution. It starts with the dregs of
the population, but it draws in next the less stable
of the workers, until a whole population is cor-
rupted.

u The men who wanted that wine were so mad
for it that even machine guns would not keep them
back. So the comrade in charge turned the machine
guns on the bottles and destroyed them. The wine
rose to the tops of his hip-boots so that he was
wading in it. He used to be a drinker himself
before he became a Communist, and it hurt him to
see that good wine destroyed. But it was necessary
to preserve order in Petrograd."

Red soldiers have described to me how, in march-
ing through the Ukraine, they unearthed and de-
stroyed hundreds of private stills manufacturing
illicit booze. But these also were not measures
against alcohol as such; they were measures for
preserving order in war-time.

With peace came relaxation of tension. Vodka
and all strong liquors over twenty per cent, alcohol
content were still prohibited, and the scarcity of
grain through famine acted also as an automatic
prohibition. But wines were allowed; they were
manufactured by a state trust from the grapes of
the Crimea and the Caucasus.

Then suddenly in autumn of 1922, a fair harvest,
with the increase of grain in the villages and of
money in the cities, let loose an epidemic of boot-

158 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

legging. This is the form of the struggle in Russia
at present

I talked with Semashko about it. No one could
have looked less like a violent propagandist on
any subject A little short medical man, with a stubby
beard, he received me in a large, well-lighted office
in the Health Commissariat, in that central section
of Moscow which is reserved for government build-
ings. He never raised his voice, he put no passion
and hardly any emphasis into his remarks.

I have heard men say of him: "There'll never be
booze in Russia as long as there is Semashko- But
it was clear that to him alcohol was not a question
of exclusive interest It was one of the problems
of public health. It was bad for people; it must
be got rid of. Just as simple as that.

"In our campaign against drink," he said, "health
is our only aim. Alcohol is bad in any form. In
some forms it is worse than others. We can't do
everything at once, so we start with the worse forms.

"If we have a typhus epidemic, and insufficient
doctors, we don't bother to invent new quarantines
for measles. So we are not bothering with wine
and beer yet, because our worst enemy is samagonka,
this vile illicit drink that is being made so widely
now in Russia. It is against samagonka. that our
main attack is at present

"Wine is not a worker's or peasant's drink; it is
too expensive. It makes a show in the cafes of
Moscow and it brings in money to the government.
But only the profiteers and the rich can buy it It
is not undermining the health of the masses of the

THE WAR WITH ALCOHOL 159

people. So it is not so dangerous as samagonka."

That is the cheerfully cold-blooded attitude in
Russia. They want to safeguard the health of the
workers and the peasants. If the profiteer ruins
his health, they are not so much concerned. "But
wine also must be stopped eventually," said Se-
mashko. "As soon as we can afford the means for
handling it. One thing at a time."

The fight just now is with samagonka. You hear
little in Russia of general questions of total absti-
nence, or liquor as a moral problem. But all the
papers are full, even on the front pages with "The
War on Samagonka." The police have special weeks
of raids and clean-ups. Letters with specific accusa-
tions are printed. And the courts are full of cases.

In the month of December there were 2,412 raids
in Moscow, of which 1,175 were successful. In the
first ten days of January, the police carried out a
special ten-day campaign, concentrating on boo^e.
They made 1,846 raids in those ten days, three-
fourths as many as in the whole month of Decem-
ber; and found evidence in 782 cases.

Strong and picturesque and definite are the let-
ters of complaint that come in from workers all
over Russia to help on the fight. "Smolensk is an
ocean of samagonka," writes one. "They are even
using their co-operatives to buy extra-size kettles.
The village named 'Good Inn' has apparatus to
distill a ton at one time and is supplying booze over
the border to the provinces of Gomel and Briansk.
There are cases of police protecting it"

Another writes with stinging irony from Rostov in

160 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

the far southeast of Russia. "There is a chemical
drug trust here with a factory named Veritas which
manufactures a good and gladly drunk eau-de-
cologne ! But this method is not of great significance.
Eau-de-cologne after all is a drink for intellectuals I
We are chiefly interested in what is used to poison
the peasant and worker. That is bootleg. It spreads
solely through negligence.

"I myself can point out that in Rostov near the
car barns there is a 'Black Sea 1 where the workers
leave the greater part of their earnings. A similar
institution is in the second house from the water
supply station on Donskoi St. If these addresses
are known to me, are they not known to the local
police?''

That's the way they carry on fights in Russia,
by giving names in the papers. These names fre-
quently lead to arrests and prosecutions.

Trials of bootleggers are interesting affairs,
especially now that the feeling of the public is
aroused on the subject. Here is a typical case. Two
women sit in the tribunal of judges who hear the
evidence that is something new since the revolu-
tion. The bootleggers plead guilty; they were
caught with the goods. But they make the excuse
of extreme poverty.

This is a recognised plea in the courts of Russia.
If you can prove that you have committed a fault
under pressure of dire need, you can hope for more
mercy than if you have done it for profit. But the
working-women in the audience show scant mercy
to the bootleggers.

THE WAR WITH ALCOHOL 161

"Critical financial position," they jeer in the inter-
mission. "You should see how he dresses his family
on the money he gets out of my man. And how
he used to get drunk and ride round in isvostchiks
and shout."

"I hope those devils get it," says another woman*
"The accursed ones." And the bootleggers got it.
A year in jail for the smaller fry and three years-
for one ring-leader who was up for the second
time.

"The valuable thing," writes a correspondent to
the Prcwda, "is that the campaign is developing
from the depths of the factories and mills. From
here start the protests and the plans, from here
it goes into the Soviets and the press. The work-
ers understand what drunkenness means at present
and are raising the alarm. This is our greatest
guarantee that the struggle will be successful but
this is not enough; we must have drastic action by
the state apparatus."

The war with drink, like everything else in Rus-
sia at present, is not a thing by itself, but is tied up
with the ideas of the Revolution. The bootlegger
is denounced, not merely as a lawbreaker, but as
a man who profits in the misery of others. The ad-
vocates of strong drink, when they venture to ex-
press themselves, are hotly denounced, not merely
as mistaken, but as "counter-revolutionists, poison*
ers of Russia!"

In the summer, when bootlegging was first begin-
ning to be noticeable, a professor named Oserof
published a long article in favour of a return to the

162 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

state monopoly of vodka, or even to private trade
in liquor under high taxation. He used the argu-
ments familiar in all countries among advocates
of drink, and a few drawn from the bankrupt con-
dition of Russia.

"You have alcohol already illegally," he said.
"Why not legalise it, control it and make money
from it?" He pdinted out that the government of
the czar in 1912 made over $300,000,000 net profit
from vodka, and that Russia is in dire need of money
to stop the fall of her rouble, to start her ruined
industries and even for the cause of education against
alcohol. He spread alluring prospects of what could
be done in the state budget with the money from
vodka.

Promptly the official organ of the Communist
party, Pravda, retorted in a hot article entitled "This
Shall Not Rass." They called Oserof a counter-
revolutionist. They called attention to the fact
that he had opposed the "drunken budget" for-
merly under the czar; he was advocating it now,
they said, in order to ruin the workers' and peas-
ants' Russia.

"Now after our long strain of war and famine,
when national health is at a low ebb, legalised al-
cohol would be infinitely more dangerous than it
was before," they declared. "He proposes to get
rid of the bankruptcy in our budget. But he would,
drive that bankruptcy into the bodies and minds
and souls of our people. The party cannot over-
look such suggestions even in the conversational
stage. We understand what you have in view. We

THE WAR WITH ALCOHOL 163

have made many concessions because of our pov-
erty, but such a concession as the surrender of
our national soberness you will not get. This shall
not pass."

The position of the government is clear. But
how is it to be enforced? That is more difficult.
There are no special dry squads. In the pressure
of many other emergencies, drink has not been iso-
lated as a special problem. Until the past winter
it has not seemed a great enough emergency to de-
mand special attention.

The Health Commissariat is in charge of prop-
aganda and organising public sentiment against
strong drink. Its health centres, scattered all over
Russia and only a few miles apart, are charged
with notification of cases to the proper authorities.
But the Health Commissariat has been fighting for
four years the greatest epidemic known since the
Middle Ages, the plagues of typhus and cholera,
against which it had no medical supplies and insuf-
ficient doctors.

The army has its own organisation for fighting
drink, under its "Political Department" which han-
dles all questions of education and recreation and
general cultural development of the soldiers. The
general police are charged with enforcing the law
among the civilian population, and the State Politi-
cal Department in its investigations into smuggling
and graft and spying, is also supposed to unearth
illegal alcohol.

"I closed down the biggest cafe in Archangel,"
said one of the employes of this department, "not

164 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

for selling vodka, but for selling ordinary wine to
such an extent that people were constantly coming
away drunk. Yes, we have power to do that, even
if the wine in itself is legal."

But the bootlegging wave this past winter made
evident the need for more organised action. This
is taking place now in a temporary way in the spe-
cial raids by the police. One-fourth of all court
cases in Moscow are bootlegging cases. More cor-
related action may be expected as general organisa-
tion improves in Russia.

"The enforcement of this question is too scat-
tered," said Trotsky to me in a conversation late
in December. "It is no longer sufficient merely to
prohibit ; we must organise both repressive and edu-
cational measures. We must get together the rep-
resentatives of health and police and army, who
are handling the question now, and form a joint pro-
gramme." I learned later through other sources
that he had called such a committee together.

"We must consider what we are able to enforce
at present with our present means. In the scattered
villages, where the peasants are making it at home,
it is impossible to use repressive measures on every
house. But this industry develops like other indus-
tries. Very soon some man, richer and shrewder than
the others, begins to make it for sale. He becomes
a petty exploiter of vice, a corrupter of his village.
The children and the women hate him for taking
their food by debauching their men folk.

"Men like this we can arrest and punish. They
are more dangerous than ordinary home-brewing

THE WAR WITH ALCOHOL 165

peasants and fewer in number, with public senti-
ment already somewhat against them. They are
the weakest spot in the enemy's ranks and can be
attacked with our present resources. As our strength
in organisation grows, we can carry our repressions
farther.

"But no repressions will solve the problem at
the root. The basic cause is the emptiness of the
peasant's life and this must be filed by higher stand-
ards of culture^ by education and recreation and
wholesome social life! 9

An echo of this sentiment I heard again and again.
Every article in the papers that demanded "war on
the bootleggers," demanded also the raising of the
general cultural standard as the final weapon.

I talked with Antonov Avseyenko, under whom
come the problems of drink in the army, where
they are treated as part of the problem of educa-
tion and health and general culture. He showed me
all the correspondence and orders issued on the sub-
ject during recent months.

There seemed to be widespread interest in the
question coming from all parts of Russia. Here
were men in a distant regiment who wrote objecting
to their commander because "he gets drunk." Here
was a group of communists in a Petrograd regi-
ment who voted to expel from the party any man
found drunk.

Here were local men organising anti-drink senti-
ment by mock trials of bootleggers in which the
evils of alcohol were discussed. "How drunkenness
causes defeat,'* was the subject of "episodic conver-

166 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

sations" and story-telling in soldiers' entertainments.
"I give a description of the camp of the 'whites'
and how they got licked because they boozed,"
writes ohe correspondent.

The orders sent out from headquarters were that
"commanders must take part in men's clubs and have
evenings of entertainment, inviting in the families
and making a home atmosphere." Large quantities
of books and lectures and plays on the subject of
alcohol were furnished, but even more emphasis
seemed to be laid on "sports, wholesome games and
general culture" as a means of combating the evil.

There was swift repression also. Some officers in
a distant regiment gave a wine banquet to celebrate
the anniversary of the revolution. They called in
common soldiers to wait on table and clean up after-
wards.

Word of it reached Trotsky. He promptly de-
posed the commander of the regiment and the com-
mander-in-chief of the division and the two commis-
sars, for allowing such conditions to exist in the
army. He ordered them brought before court-
martial. The announcement of this punishment and
the reasons for it were printed in the papers and
read in every regiment. Those reasons were not
merely that officers got drunk, but that they did it
in a way which injured the morale of the army
and the relations between officers and soldiers. Drink
is not treated as an individual fault in Russia, but as
a social injury 1

"The individual drunkard," says one of the
many articles now flaming in the official press, "is

THE WAR WITH ALCOHOL 167

a sick man, even perhaps a lost man. We should
treat him with pity, though our pity need not pre-
vent repressive measures against him in so far as
he is a menace. But it is the man who traffics
in drink that must be attacked. For hirfi there should
be no mercy. If there isn't law enough, we can
make some more. What are we Bolsheviks for?
We have not yet lacked strength to punish crim-
inals/'

That's the state of the war with alcohol in Rus-
sia. It is a war with bootlegging, widely demanded
and supported by public opinion, leading to a large
number of raids and fines and closing of restaurants
and imprisonment of owners. But it will be a long
fight, for Russia has many problems and small re-
sources, and concentrates on special problems only
as they become unusually acute.

Drink is attacked as a problem of public health
and national morale, rather than a question of in-
dividual morals. Repressive measures are occasion-
ally quite severe and public demand is growing to
make them even more stringent. But there is also
universal agreement, in every article one reads and
every official one talks to, that the final solution
can come only by substituting an interesting cultural
life for the lower pleasures of drink.

As for state manufacture of vodka, about which
rumours from time to time arise, the words of Lenin
himself laid down the government's attitude. When
the new economic policy was under discussion and
the question was raised in the conference of the Com-
munist party how far they were prepared to go in

168 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

making concessions to the peasants, Lenin outlined
the policy as follows :

"Whatever the peasant wants in the way of ma-
terial things we will give him, as long as they do
not imperil the health or morals of the nation. If
he asks for paint and powder and patent leather
shoes, our state industries will labour to produce
these things to satisfy his demand, because this is
an advance in his standard of living and 'civilisation/
though falsely conceived by him.

"But if he asks for ikons or booze these things
we will not make for him. For that is definitely
retreat; that is definitely degeneration that leads
him backward. Concessions of this sort we will not
make; we shall rather sacrifice any temporary ad-
vantage that might be gained from such tonces-
sions."

IX
DO THE JEWS RULE RUSSIA?

RUSSIA, less than ten years ago the notorious hell
of oppression for Jews, is now for them the freest
land in the world. From the terrors of pogroms,
from the humiliation of restricted residence and de-
nied education, confined to a Pale of Settlement
away from the great capitals, they have gone straight
to posts in government and high industry and to
sharing on equal terms all opportunities of life. In
Minsk they form sixty per cent, of the university
students; in Odessa thirty per cent. In governing
ranks they are sprinkled through every department.

They are even going into agriculture and forming
thereby an almost new chapter in the world history
of Jews. Before the war there were barely twelve
thousand of them on the land in Russia. "My
father," said Trotsky to me, "was one of those rare
exceptions, a Jewish peasant. In only a few places
in south Russia were Jews allowed to hold land."
But now, freed from all restrictions, and facing in
the little towns the competition of co-operatives and
government trade, sixty-four thousand have settled
on the land in the past two years, in forty-four colo-
nies and one hundred and ninety co-operative farms.

Into coal mines and steel mills where they never
worked before they have been driven by economic

169

170 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

pressure, and drawn by new opportunity. All down
the Donetz basin of iron and coal you find them:
over one hundred in the great electric works near
Kharkov; one hundred and twenty in the pipe factory
at Mariupol; scores dotted through Jusufka, the cen-
tre of steel. In none of these places did they hold
a single job before.

The main shift of Jewish population has been the
rush to the capitals > once prohibited places of resi-
dence except to merchant princes and men of high
education. Moscow before the war had perhaps
five thousand Jews; now she has between two and
three hundred thousand. Kharkov, a much smaller
city, has perhaps the same number. In the disor-
ganisation of life after the civil war, they could not
make a living in the little towns; they came to the
capitals and found chances to get rich quickly, such
as were seldom offered to any race before.

A world of trade from which their competitors
had vanished, that was what the Jewish petty
trader found in Moscow. Foreign business men and
Russian managers had fled before the Revolution.
There was left an unskilled population amid the
chaos following war. Private trade was suddenly
made legal. But there was no big capital anywhere,
either in the state or private business; for the first
year of the new economic policy, it was the para-
dise of petty traders.

Who was so fitted to succeed in such a world as
the Jews? Developed by years of petty trading in
the crowded little towns of the Pale of Settlement.
With wide family connections, insuring always some

DO THE JEWS RULE RUSSIA? 171

contact with government on the one hand and with
the chances of money-making on the other. With
relatives in America sending food packages through
the American Relief, and relatives in Germany offer-
ing goods for sale. In that first year of newly or-
ganising business, when mutual suspicion and lack
of acquaintance made all trading operations difficult,
who could operate as quickly as they?

The new-rich profiteers in the capitals, their fam-
ilies flooding the summer resorts, and ninety per cent
of the speculators seen exchanging dollars and
pounds and roubles on the Black Bourse, are Jews.
If any new wave of anti-Semitism arises in Russia, it
will be because of this group, small in proportion
to the whole Jewish race in Russia, but unduly promi-
nent and aggressive. Yet these Jewish profiteers
have no power. Socially they are despised, not as
Jews, but as "nep-men" (profit-makers) by the rul-
ing Communist group. They are taxed mercilessly
by state and city. They pay many times the rent
of a worker. They rent automobiles for Sunday
joyrides at seventy dollars the day; rarely can
they own automobiles, since import of pleasure cars
is through the government and is severely restricted.

When men outside Russia claim, as they often do,
that "the Jews rule Russia," it is not of the Jewish
profiteer they are speaking, but of Jews in the ranks
of government I have followed their trail into
many regions and departments. They are scattered
everywhere, but they have exclusive control of noth-
ing. They are combined with Russians ; they work
with Russians. Nowhere is there in Russia such

172 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

definite rule of Jews in any department of state busi-
ness or government, as exists in America, for exam-
ple, in the theatrical trust, the clothing industry and
the department stores. Everywhere they intermingle
with Russians; they even intermingle often in mar-
riage, which was never legal before the Revolution.

That is the really astounding fact about the Jews
in Russia, far more astounding than actual rule
would be. Only eight years removed from the Pale
of Settlement, only three years from pogrom ter-
rors, they are showing signs of more complete
amalgamation with the population, especially in the
ranks of governing Communists, than anywhere else
in J:he world. This is the cementing done by the
pllt)Iution and the present passionate desire for re-
building. Whoever can help is gladly taken; it is
not even asked if he is Jew or non-Jew,

So little is the question raised that I found it hard
to discover, in my search for Jews in high posts of
government, which persons were of this race and
which were not. I asked Trotsky about Jews in
the higher branches of the state. 'There are two
of us in the Council of People's Commissars," he
said with a smile. "Dovgalevsky, the commissar of
Posts and Telegraphs, and myself. " Later, in dis-
cussing finance, he corrected himself: "I forgot;
there is also Sokolnikoff, Minister of Finance. You
see, I never counted them up as Jews before.**

An acquaintance of Dovgalevsky told me later
that he was not a Jew, and when I replied that
Trotsky said he was, he answered : "Possibly then
... I didn't know it" There was this difficulty

DO THE JEWS RULE RUSSIA? 173

throughout in tracing Jews in government. In the
Communist ranks, they are not thought of sepa-
rately.

I went through one commissariat after another
with Trotsky and checked up the leading men. Agri-
culture, he remembered four members of the pre-
sidium, all Russians. Health, there was Se-
mashko, a Russian, assisted by Soloviof, a Russian,
Education, four Russians and one Jew formed the
presidium. The department of National Industries
had a collegium of nine; one of them was a Jew.

In Finance they become suddenly prominent
Sokolnikoff, Commissar of Finance, and several bank
presidents and members of banking staffs. Yet here
also many higher posts were held by Russians work-
ing together with the Jews. Food, Justice, Social
Welfare, these departments are headed by non-
Jews. The State Planning Board is run by Krji-
janovsky, a Pole, and the State Railways by Djer-
jinsky, also a Pole. Thus are all races mixed in
the government of Russia.

Suddenly come two departments in which many
Jews are prominent, not at the head, but in respon-
sible posts. Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade.
Chicherin, Commissar of Foreign Trade, is indeed
Russian; but Utvinoff, chief of western affairs, and
Weinstein, head of the Petrograd office, and Roth-
stein, chief of press bureau, and a host of others are
of Jewish origin. In Foreign Trade Krassin, the
chief, is Russian, but his first assistant and his pri-
vate secretary and large numbers of his office staff
are Jews, I asked one of the office force how many

174 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

Jews there were in Foreign Trade. "Quite a num-
ber," he answered, "but not as many as there used
to be on the office force of the Communist Interna-
tional, where I worked before. All concerns that
deal with foreign nations employ many Jews, since
they speak many languages."

Here was the obvious reason for the predominance
of Jews in the government departments that come
in contact with foreigners. They are good linguists
and have lived much in foreign countries. Their
presence in those departments which first meet the
visitor gives an impression of a great predominance
of Jews in government, which is not borne out by
the other, and larger, departments dealing with in-
ternal affairs. . . . There were, incidentally, large
numbers of Jews in the office staffs under the Amer-
ican Relief Administration, and for the same rea-
son of linguistic ability.

There is one section of Russia where the Jews
are indeed ruling, and that is in the old Pale of Set-
tlement which was so long their only place of resi-
dence. All through White Russia and the western
edge of the Ukraine down to Odessa. In White
Russia, among 6,614 civil servants employed in all
departments of government, 2,030, or nearly one-
third, are Jews. In the last two sessions of the Cen-
tral Executive Committee of White Russia (the high-
est governing body), they formed thirty-four to
thirty-eight per cent, of the entire assembly.

Here then is Jewish rule, in the very districts
where so long they were herded together for more
easy oppression. But there is a very simple reason

DO THE JEWS RULE RUSSIA? 175

for this predominance in government. More than
half the population of the towns in White Russia is
Jewish. In Minsk, the capital, they form between
fifty and sixty per cent, of the population; in the
smaller towns, the proportion is even larger. The
peasants, it is true, are White Russian. But illiterate
peasants do not furnish civil servants.

The most noticeable, and at the same time most
astounding, feature of Jewish life in Russia is that
they are in all ways equal to the rest of the popula-
tion. "There is less social discrimination than any-
where in the world," said several members of a Jew-
ish relief organisation to me. They may enter all
jobs as freely as any other people, and no more
freely. Therefore in places where they form a large
element of the population, they also form a large
element of the government In departments where
their knowledge of language and contact with foreign
nations is useful, they form large proportions of the
office staff. To many other high posts they rise, as
individuals, because of individual, not racial quali-
ties. There is no rule of the Jews, but there is
equality and freedom.

To this equality and freedom the Jews have come
through a purgatory of torment. No people in all
war-suffering Europe, from Belgium to Turkey, en-
dured such continuous hell. Thousands were hanged
as spies along the frontier when the World War
started. They were naturally suspects, an alien
people speaking a strange tongue in the war zone.
They were driven by whole towns from the war
districts. In 1915 came the Great Retreat of the

176 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

czar's armies across Poland and White Russia, driv-
ing millions of the population before them and burn-
ing the towns behind them, to leave a desert for the
advancing Germans. This great retreat was across
the Jewish Pale of Settlement; the peasants who
travelled that "Way of the Cross, " dying in thou-
sands by the roadside, were White Russians; the
townsmen were Jews.

In this great retreat of the World War they were
swept along by a common misery. They exhausted
the water-springs with their thirst and poisoned
them with their numbers. They died of cholera and
typhoid and unrecorded diseases. They were car-
ried far into the Volga grain lands, hitherto for-
bidden to them; and after five troubled years they
were swept forth again by famine.

Even worse horrors were reserved for the Jews
of the Ukraine and South Russia. There were years
of civil war ; and civil war always meant pogroms.
For the czar's policy regarding the Jews had been
this. They were allowed to live chiefly in the towns
of a certain large area where the surrounding country
was inhabited by alien races of peasants, Ukraini-
ans, White Russians, who also must be kept in sub-
jection. The Jewish town population traded with
the peasants, profited from them and depended on
them: The inevitable economic conflict of town and
country, under the oppression which made the pov-
erty of both, was sharpened by racial lines and re-
ligious prejudice, and by political pogroms ordered
by the government. The same division of Jewish
towns and non-Jewish peasants may be seen to-day

DO THE JEWS RULE RUSSIA? .177

in Poland; it does not lead to mutual kindness.
Thus imperial Russia kept alive antagonisms among
her subject peoples, lest they should unite to gain
their freedom.

After the fall of the czar, civil war swept back
and forth through the Ukraine for three years.
Bands of bandits and more organised bands of troops
plundered the country; one and all killed Jews.
Petlura, Wrangel, Makhno, Denikin, the Poles fol-
lowed each other. The Red Army did not commit
massacres of Jews, but this in itself was a new dan-
ger; for after a retreat of the Red Army the po-
groms redoubled, on the ground of "criminal as-
sociation with the Bolsheviks."

An orphan child I know lost his father in this
manner. The man was reading in his home when
the Poles summoned him. Smilingly he reassured
his wife: "This is a regular army, not a bandit
band," he said. "See, I leave my book open to
read on my return." He was shot against a wall
with his brother and son who chanced to accompany
him; his wife went crazy.

There were thirty-three thousand murders more
or less like this one, of unarmed citizens, without'
pretence of open warfare. There were whole towns
mercilessly destroyed without a trace. There were
five thousand women who admit to being violated;
how many fail to admit it will never be known. Only
fourteen towns in the whole Ukraine escaped po-
groms; eight hundred and nineteen separate places
suffered, some of them many times.

The life in a typical Ukrainian town during this

178 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

period was described to me by one of its Jewish
citizens. "Ekaterinoslav," he said, "was one con-
tinuous pogrom. First Petlura held it and then
Makhno; each side killed Jews, claiming that they
helped the other side. Under German occupation
it was quiet; but then Petlura came again and after
him the Bolsheviks. Then came the Volunteer Army
and began plundering. When we complained to the
authorities they mocked us, saying : 'Have you not
yet been wiped out for your criminal association with
Bolsheviks ? Think yourself lucky/

"Then Makhno came again and did not massacre
us, but only burned two blocks of our store build-
ings. When the Volunteers returned, they could
not forgive us for not having been slain by Makhno ;
it showed, they said, our criminal sympathies. They
announced a real butchery this time, but we suc-
ceeded in buying them off with all that we had.
After that came the Soviet Government, which did
not humiliate the Jews as Jews, but took away the
property of all the bourgeoisie. The Jewish bour-
geoisie was ruined, iut the rest of the population
readjusted itself. Then came famine, epidemics,
cannibalism. . . ."

That is the grim tale of the road by which the
Jews of Russia passed on their road to freedom.
Like a great broom the pogroms scattered them
ov$r Russia. Some of them returned with the com-
ing of peace and order ; thousands never returned*

Three Jewish agricultural colonies near the little
town of Farstow are building themselves again after
being completely wiped out by Denikin. The Joint

DO THE JEWS RULE RUSSIA? 179

Distribution Committee lends them seed. They
creep by heavy wagons home from the towns to
which they fled; they sleep under the wagons in the
fields, and plant the grain which will yet build for
them new homes.

In one Ukrainian town is a building where three
hundred and forty Jews were enclosed and mur-
dered by local peasants stirred to frenzy by a teacher,
who was later executed by the Soviets for his deed.
The house stood gaunt and dreadful for several
years, till the local population asked the state gov-
ernment for permission to destroy it, "since it pains
our consciences and keeps alive the ghosts of the
murdered. 1 '

1 ' What you have done, you have done," came the
answer. "You may not destroy the building.
Make of it rather an orphans 1 home for the children
of those you murdered." ... To this both Jews
and Gentiles protested that it would be sin to raise
children in such a house of hate, with such memories
of death. So it became an adult trade-school, at-
tended largely by the Jewish population.

Thus, all over the Ukraine, the simple folk are
living down old hatreds even in a few years* An
orphan asylum of Jewish children, whose fathers
were slain in pogroms (there are a hundred thou*
sand such orphans) was recently adopted formally
by the local Red Army company of Ukrainian peas-
ants. At the celebration of adoption, the solcfiers
stood in ranks before the home, taking solemn oath
to defend with their lives these children and pro-
tect them from all harm. Yet it was their fathers,

180 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

j-*

stirred up by invading armies, who slew the fathers
of those children.

Many of the scattered Jews never returned to t)he
towns from which they were driven. They mixed
with the wider life of Russia and are rising in that
life to power. Here is Rafael, an ignorant shoe-
maker who developed qualities as an administrator.
He was made head of a school district in Moscow
and succeeded so well that he is now school director
for the whole Moscow province and has notably
reduced illiteracy.

Here is Golzman, former carpenter, now head of
the Electrical Industry of Russia. He was the man
who worked out the first plan for the tariff, highly
important during the reorganisation of industry on
a money basis. . . . Here is Bogorachoff, once
tailor in New York, now general manager of the
Clothing Syndicate of Russia. He discussed with
me the mixing of Jews and Russians in the industry
with which he was familiar.

"I am a Jew," he said, "but the rest of my board
are Russians. Of the four Trusts comprising our
Syndicate, the Moscow and Petrograd Trusts have
each one Jew on their boards and the rest Russians ;
the Kazan and Nijni Trusts are all Russians. Three
of my factory managers in Moscow are Jews, and
fifteen are Russians. However,' 7 he smiled, "most
of the assistant managers are Jews."

That's amalgamation, not control. In the New
Russia Jews and Russians are mixing. In this is
great promise of strength for the future. For if
one can speak at all of difference in race charac-

DO THE JEWS RULE RUSSIA? 181

teristics, the Jews and Russians are well adapted to
supplement each other. The Jews furnish an ener-
getic, organising strain which will go far to make
good the loss of thousands of foreign managers who
organised Russia before the Revolution.

Take the way they combine in a trade union. I
visited a labour headquarters. The president was
Russian, large, simple, honest, solid. A typical peas-
ant type, obviously a manual labourer for years; you
could not ask a more reliable fellow for guiding a
meeting. . . . Near him sat a little Jewish girl,
cross-eyed, intense, nervous. She was the spark that
made the machine go. The big fellow took too long
to get into action. But if you asked the little girl
a question, rat-tat-tat, out came the answers like
a machine-gun. She alone would tear an organisa-
tion to pieces with her nervous intensity; she lacked
the poise of the Russian. But also, he lacked her
speed.

In this speed is an element of aggression which
can arouse prejudice. Down in the hall of the unions
in Moscow I found an inscription scrawled on the
wall by an irritated workingman: "Why is it that
all our leaders are Russians, while the fellows who
boss us are Jews?" it said with keen discrimination.
Racial feeling is not dead yet, even in Russia.

But it is more nearly dead, I think, than anywhere
else in the world. In these same unions, the pre-
sidium of the All Russian Trade Unions is composed
entirely of Russians; but the Cu\todel, which pre-
pares the trade union literature, is largely Jewish*
A man who prepares correspondence courses for the

182 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

unions tells me that it is a Russian who discusses
policy with him, and a staff of Jews who prepare the
courses.

Thus are they mixed everywhere. The common
job of making a new land draws them together.
New and sharper conflicts cut across old racial and
religious lines. In the Communist Party, of course,
the mixture is most complete, and the sense of race
difference least Here the fiercer flames of revolu-
tion have hurned racial distinctions to ashes. In the
fight for their common goal there is neither Jew
nor non-Jew*

By actual statistics, gathered over a year ago after
the party "cleaning," the Jewish members formed
seven per cent, of the party. In the country as a
whole Jews are less than three per cent, of the popu-
lation, hence they may be said to have twice their
share of party memberships, which is not surprising
in view of the vast number of peasants who are
non-communists, and among whom the Jewish ele-
ment is also small. ... It is interesting to note, in-
cidentally, that Jewish men form less than five per
cent, of the men in the Party, while Jewish women
are nearly twenty per cent, of the total number of
communist women. Are they politically more awake
than their Russian sisters? Or are they wives and
sisters of pogrom victims ? Or is this poetic justice
for their special humiliation under the czar, when
Jewish girls were forced to take the yellow ticket
of the prostitute in order to live and study in uni-
versity towns?

Suddenly, as you list the committees of the Com-

DO THE JEWS RULE RUSSIA? 183

munist Party, you discover one high centre of Jewish
rule. The Political Bureau, highest centre of all
for planning and policy, on it Trotsky, Kameneff,
Zinoviev and Radek, all Jews, are balanced against
Lenin, Stalin, Bucharin and Ryckoff, who are non-
Jews* Here is a half-and-half control; here is a
citadel on which the charge can really be based that
the Jews rule Russia. But how far are Communists
of this type any longer a peculiar race or nation?

No Red Army soldier thinks of Trotsky as a Jew;
they adore him as revolutionary leader. Few of the
workers of Moscow think of Kameneff as Jewish;
his characteristics as communist administrator have
long since overborne any race characteristics^ This
governing group makes laws which punish Zionism
as counter-revolution, and debars its books, because
of its emphasis on race and religious distinctions* At
the same time they allow, for the first time in his-
tory, law courts conducted in Yiddish to serve the
needs of the uneducated Jewish population in cities
like Vitebsk. Just as they also allow law courts
in other languages for the needs of other non-Rus-
sian-speaking populations.

These Communist Jews discuss race characteris-
tics with philosophic detachment; one even finds
among them, occasionally, a curious anti-Semitism.
"I am against the Jewish race," said one young Com-
munist Jew to me, discussing the profiteers, "be-
cause it is a danger to socialism. It is too much de-
voted to individual accumulation and personal com-
fort. It does not, in general, do basic labour, but
exploits the labour of others. For the future prog-

184 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

ress of humanity, it is more harmful than useful,
and must be absorbed in other races." . . . Such
criticism, voiced by a Jewish Communist, to whom
Communism was far more than any question of race,
is but an extreme example of a widespread detach-
ment of spirit. In the governing ranks of Russia,
Jews are free to rise to any position. Already, there-
fore, they begin to lose the partisan sense of race.

New conflicts appear in Russia, neither racial nor
national but economic, developing their own lines
of cleavage. There is no such bitterness in Russia
between Jew and non-Jew, as there is between fathers
and sons within the Jewish race itself. Young Jewish
factory workers demand and secure old synagogues
for social clubs and university dormitories ; between
them and their fathers is a harsher division than
any racial line which still exists.

Young Communists of Jewish race hold anti-re-
ligious processions through the streets of the ortho-
dox on holy festival days, and are sometimes beaten
up by their outraged elders. Such a parade in the
tobacco centre of Kremenshug provoked a riot, and
order was restored by Ukrainian police. No such
bitter conflicts take place now in Russia between races
and nations, as occur between young and old, the
past and the new.

Race prejudice, of course, is not entirely con-
quered. It exists noticeably among old members of
the educated classes, who see the new profiteers pass
them in standards of comfort. It exists also among
the religious peasants, and somewhat, though less,
among the workingmen, who carelessly begin to iden-

DO THE JEWS RULE RUSSIA? 185

tify Jews and profiteers. In the governing Com-
munist ranks, it is non-existent. In general, in Rus-
sia, the Revolution with its new tasks and new free-
doms have killed race distinctions more completely
than anywhere else in the world.

Whether prejudice will again revive depends
largely on the Jews themselves. Already those who
become aggressive speculators arouse animosity;
those who sink themselves in the task of reconstruct-
ing Russia are taken as comrades, since they act as
comrades. Only if the Jews as a race should become
identified with one group or the other, and this is
unlikely, will the conflict again assume racial lines.

X
THE CHURCH REVOLUTION

A REVOLUTION is tearing the Russian Church
asunder. This most ancient, most conservative
form of Christianity is shaking with the same throes
which six years ago shook the most ancient feudal
form of government in Europe. The struggle is
just beginning.

I have seen gaunt old priests, with long white
beards, grasp the front of their black robes and tear
them open at the chest in revolt against ritualism*
crying : "What are these ? Nothing I Nothing I It
is the heart beneath that counts."

I have seen flashing young priests, with dishevelled
auburn beards and eager eyes, declaring: "The hour
of our liberation has struck. The same class strug-
gle goes on now in the church that went on in the
State. We, the priests, will win the same inde-
pendence from our hierarchy that the people of
Russia won from the czar."

The conflict between church and state precipitated
the church revolution. When the Soviet Govern-
ment reached out to take church treasures for the
famine, that started the explosion. But that was
not the only cause of the explosion. Deep down, in
the great mass of the Russian priesthood, discon-
tents had slumbered for years.

186

THE CHURCH REVOLUTION 187

The Russian church is facing at one big crisis
three problems which occupied three centuries in
the church of western Europe. The Reformation,
the doctrine of Evolution, the social emphasis of
Christianity; all these questions, which in the west
developed through many generations, are faced to-
day by the Russian church at once.

Peasants still pray to saints' relics to protect them
from evil. Communist young people tell them that
there is no God, since evolution disproves Him.
That is the crude condition in which the fight begins.

I remarked to a Communist friend, an English
girl living now in Russia, that it seemed to me a pity
to attack religion. "You don't understand what re-
ligion is in the villages," she answered. "When I
first came to Karelia, I washed some clothes in a
bucket I found in the house of a peasant; and by so
doing I brought eternal ill luck on that family-
Nothing that she can do will ever make her house
the same again. . . . That is her religion; it is
charms and evil, and magte. It must be blotted out
of the hearts of the people."

Between these two extremes stand the great bulk
of Russian people. They are loyal to their Revolu-
tion ; and also to their Church, They are bewildered
in these new ideas that are crowding upon them. It
was in an effort to save both loyalties that the New
Church Movement began.

There was also a class revolt within the church.
For a hundred years the Russian Church has known
two types of priesthood: the white clergy, who mar-
ried and lived among the people, but could never

188 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

rise to high positions; the black clergy, or monks,
from whom bishops and all high dignitaries of the
Church were chosen. The white clergy were igno-
ra-xt and suppressed; close to the peasants, but spied
upon by the upper hierarchy. There was a gulf be-
tween these two groups, but the lower group was
powerless.

Then came the Revolution; and the gulf was
widened. The upper hierarchy of the church be-
came the stronghold of counter-revolution. Tik-
hon, the Patriarch, openly denounced the soviet
power as Anti-Christ, by implication encouraging the
peasants to rebel against it. Armed nobles impli-
cated in revolt, found refuge in monasteries, and
Tikhon was charged with conferring priesthood upon
such men in order to protect them. When the
armies, of the counter-revolution advanced, led by
Denu ' -, Kolchak and Wrangel, priests went to greet
them and bless their armies. After several years
of soviet rule, a group of Russian Bishops, meeting
in exile, proclaimed a Romanoff as the lawful czar
of Russia.

Early in its existence the Soviet Government
passed a decree separating church and state com-
pletely. As a result of this decree, church marriage
was no longer legal; the civil ceremony alone was
.valid. The village schools, till then largely under
Church domination, were declared state schools, and
It was forbidden to teach religion in them. Almost
incidentally, as part of this law and a means to its
enforcement, it^as forbidden to teach religion to
any organise^" groups .of young people under

THE CHURCH REVOLUTION 189

eighteen. As a matter of fact, Protestant Sunday
schools flourish both in Petrograd and Moscow,
with the knowledge of the authorities. I asked
Krassikof, the official of the Department of Jus* "70
for dealing with church law, why these Sunday
schools were allowed.

"The exact form of the law is being somewhat
reconsidered," he told me. "It was passed at a
moment when the church was openly fighting the
Soviet Government; its purpose was to take the
children out of the priest's control and do away with
this old form of education which was mainly learn-
ing the cathechism. As we at present interpret the
law, Sunday schools are not really schools, but a
form of children's worship, with a little instruction
in morals added. There is no law against anyone
indulging in any form of worship that suits him."

The Soviet Government, as a government* ^akes
no interest in religion, as religion* Any maa is free
to follow the dictates of his conscience. Many sects,
in fact, are freer now than in the days of the czar,
when differences from the Orthodox Church might
be punished as heresy. I visited a nunnery on the
banks of the Volga, where a group of women kept
bees and an orchard. The Mother Superior still
remembered the years she had spent in prison for
deviation from orthodoxy. Now, under the Bolshe-
viks, she was allowed to worship as she chose. But
her fate was not greatly improved, for already the
local Board of Education was stretching out its
hands to take the nunnery, to use for a children's
home.

190 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

For the new laws on property affected the church
as well as all property owners. The land and build-
Ings now belonged, legally, to the government, to
be used in whatever way seemed to it most needed.
They could not dispossess the nuns without giving
them lodging elsewhere; but the School Board
claimed that buildings capable of housing five hun-
dred orphans were being wasted when used by a
small group of fifty nuns. They wished to transfer
these nuns to another half-empty nunnery, quite
oblivious of the fact that the two different sects
might tiate each other. With the government offi-
cials, it was a cold-blooded question of housing facili-
ties; to the nuns, no doubt, it seemed religious
persecution.

From time to time news goes out to the world
of the seizing of church buildings by the government.
I questioned Krassikof, and I myself visited many
of these church buildings. The general law regard-
ing church buildings in Russia provides that, like all
buildings, they are the property of the municipality.
The former worshippers, to the number of twenty
persons, make out a request to the municipality for
the use of the building; it is granted to them without
rent, a concession to the church which is not made
to any other organisation in Russia. But they are
bound by their contract to use the building for re-
ligion only. If they use it to conceal property of
exiled nobles, or to agitate against the government,
they lose their right to it Several churches have
been closed because illicit stills for the manufacture
of liquor were found on their premises. One such

THE CHURCH REVOLUTION 191

church in Moscow had afterwards been secured from
the city by a Young People's Communist Club, whose
atheist mottoes affronted the sacred pictures.

Down in the Caucasus I had heard rumours of
wholesale closing of churches. I found that these
were churches listed in Baedeker as "garrison
churches, " maintained by the czar's government for
the use of the army. The new government, in which
church and state are separated, is not maintaining
churches for its soldiers. In law, it regards church
buildings as property of the state (as indeed they
were also in the days of the state church) , to Ije used
by any group of the community that can best utilise
them. In practise, however, church buildings have
been less diverted from their former owners than any
other class of large buildings in Russia.

The first, and perhaps the only, open clash be-
tween church and state, took place over the question
of church property. The state won, and the church
was split in two. For the state chose, very shrewdly,
to open the fight on a moral issue, in which already
a large section of church sentiment was on the side
of the state.

Five months before the government reached out
to seize church treasures for the famine, there were
priests and congregations who urged the giving of
this gold and jewels. "It is impossible to beautify
buildings with opulence when under their walls peo-
ple die of famine, our brothers according to
Christ," said one prominent priest openly.

The taking of church treasures for the purposes
of the state was no new thing in Russian history.

192 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

For centuries the gold and jewelled crowns and
robes and pictures were used by the czars as their
reserve treasury for national emergencies. In 1727
church treasures were used to build a canal; in later
years for ships and ammunition and horses. In the
recent World War, Archbishop Nicodeme advocated
taking the treasures of the Uriev monastery for the
needs of Nicholas Romanoff. Even after the World
War, the Greek Church, which is affiliated with the
Russian, saw its treasures taken by the Greek gov-
ernment for an imperialist war against the Turks*
Archbishop Nicodeme advocated the seizing of
treasures with the words: "The history of the
church teaches us in difficult years to sacrifice all
our property. It is our duty to give up these
treasures which have for us but a temporal signifi-
cance." . . . Now the same argument was made,
with much greater reason, for the needs of the
greatest famine of history, to save the lives of mil-
lions of Russian Christians.

At last, on February 23, 1922, the All Russian
Central Executive Committee issued a decree that
the local city governments should appoint commit-
tees to collect from the churches all treasures not
needed for worship. Tikhon, the Patriarch, op-
posed. He called upon the priests to protect their
treasures. A few responded and stirred up active
resistance. Then soldiers came and took the treas-
ures amid showers of stones. Priests who stirred
up such opposition were tried; many of them were
condemned to death, but not many of the sentences
were executed. The morale of the opposition was

THE CHURCH REVOLUTION 193

so low that instead of open refusal and martyrdom,
many priests chose the easier way of stealing the
treasures and trying to ship them out of the country.

The government played no favourites. Not only
priests were condemned for "stealing" treasures
destined for the famine. Nineteen men in the jewel
vaults of the Treasury Department were also found
guilty of stealing treasures and were shot. Estho-
nian couriers, bearing off treasures in diplomatic
cars, were seized and imprisoned. The government
was grimly determined.

Except where resistance was made, the gathering
proceeded in due order, usually under the supervision
of the local priest, who watched the committee pry
off jewels and remove gold ornaments, and weigh
and list and pack the objects. Lists were published
frequently in the papers, as a guard against graft
The treasures listed in Isvestia, up to June 16, 1922,
covering fifty states and separate governments, gave
744 pound weight of gold, 628,635 pound weight of
silver, 35,000 diamonds and emeralds, 120 pounds
of pearls, 43,711 gold pieces, and 773 trinkets of
diamonds and pearls weighing 980 pounds.

At once, with the publication of this list, appeared
the announcement of train-loads of grain from Fin-
land, arriving at Perm and Orenburg, bought with
the first sale of church treasures. There was no
further protest about sacrilege. The great Russian
Church, which had been relied on by the counter-
revolution as the main organised opposition to the
Soviet Power in Russia, split in twain, helpless, at
the first encounter.

194 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

For the church itself was not unified. "It is our
shame that we should have waited for compulsion,'*
said priests openly from their pulpits. "In a coun-
try suffering untold horrors, famine, cannibalism,
corpse-eating, the Christian community should have
been the first to give all that it had." . . .

No great mass movement arose at Tikhon's call
to oppose the government. Instead, three priests
from the lower orders went to Tikhon and told him
to lay down his power. "The church can no longer
function with you at its head," they said bluntly.
"We must have peace with the state, and you are an
irritation," In the end they wrung from him a
paper whereby he retired until the next church con-
gress, which should judge between them. These
priests created a Council of Ten, and prepared to
capture the church machinery before the congress
should occur. To this end they called first a nation-
wide conference of progressive clergy, to reconstruct
the church in modern form. It was known as the
New Church or the Living Church.

Long before the New Church Congress met, the
issue of church treasures passed into oblivion. A
month before it had been a real issue, but a month
is ancient history in Russia. New and graver issues
took its place.

It was a gathering such as could only be found in
Russia. Sweeping robes of black and grey and
brown; sweeping beards of white, short beards of
grey, rebellious beards of auburn; silver chains
around their necks on which hung holy pictures. Out
of the Middle Ages they came, bowing and chant-

THE CHURCH REVOLUTION 195

ing. Yet this was the group that was planning
church revolution.

On the first night I saw them perform the service
of blessing the conference at the great Church of
the Saviour. Hundreds of candles cast dim lights
across vast distances. Gold-robed dignitaries made
strange motions full of ancient religious meaning.
The voices of choiring priests, flooding the high
vaulted darkness, were more penetratingly sweet
than any music I had ever listened to.

The next day I saw these same priests gathered in
the Third House of the Soviets, formerly a priests*
seminary, now the property of the government, used
for conventions. Karl Marx, Lenin and Trotsky
looked down from the walls. In front of the meet-
ing was a crude altar, made of an arm chair covered
with a white sheet, and surmounted by a picture of
Christ. A chalice, a crucifix and a candle placed on
the sheet, by these was the room of Karl Marx
made into a religious place. In front of the altar,
grouped around a table covered with a red cloth,
sat the priests who had called the conference.

From Archangel on the north to the Crimea on
the south, from Petrograd to the far reaches of
Siberia, the priests in the hall had come. What did
they want? A dozen things at once, in one con-
fused jumble. Some wanted to abolish ritual, others
to abolish monks, others talked of primitive Christ*
ianity and priests who worked on the soil, others
about abolishing paid masses for the sick, others
about allowing priests and monks to marry on the
same terms as other citizens, others about peace with

196 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

the government, others about the class struggle in
the church. Some declared that Christianity and
Communism were one, and that it was the fault of
the church that the Communists had turned atheist
Others said: "The government is infidel, but it
graats freedom of conscience. At least let us live
in peace with it as loyal citizens."

The climax of the revolt from the standpoint of
church custom, was the making of married bishops.
Sixty-one bishops were deposed by the conference;
and among the priests appointed in their places, there
were five of the lower "white clergy" who had wives
still living. These five men said solemnly that they
must "take counsel." Not only with their God, but
with their families at home, whom they were thrust-
ing into the vanguard of the attack which society
reserves for innovators in marriage.

From the standpoint of the outside world, the
chief innovation was that the New Church swung
solidly behind the government as loyal citizens. It
deposed bishops who were disloyal, on the ground
that they were constantly bringing the church into
trouble. It approved the taking of treasures for
the famine. It talked even of excommunicating
Patriarch Tikhon for the harm he had done the
church in bringing it into conflict with the state.
Threats of hell and excommunication were the
weapons used on both sides for more than a year.
It was no gentle church quarrel; it was revolution*
The new group itself was, however, far from
united. Antonin, one of the early leaders, stays in
my mind as a tragic human figure. The man who

THE CHURCH REVOLUTION 197

started a revolt and could not stay with it He was
a monk himself, a man of the dominant order. Years
ago he championed liberalism in the church; he in-
troduced changes in the ritual, speaking in Russian
instead of old Church Slav, so that the people might
understand the service. For these innovations he
was exiled to a monastery, from which afterr-ten
years, the revolution set him free.

He was an old man in body, but a fighter in
soul. His hot words, from his pulpit in Moscow,
almost caused riots against him. He denounced
Tikhon unsparingly. "If the Patriarchate has suf-
fered and suppressed itself," he cried, "it is because
it was in overt opposition to the government The
government knows that the church abroad lives and
breathes monarchism. Everything that was dissatis-
fied in Russia grouped around Tikhon. He ruined
himself because he fell under the influence of the
black hundreds."

When eleven priests were condemned for resist-
ing the government in the matter of church treas-
ures, Antonin urged the church to sue for pardon.
The government postponed sentence, awaiting this
sign of loyalty. But the upper hierarchy of the
church refused to petition a "godless government."
Antonin appealed alone, and saved the lives of six.

"Those forty bearded priests who turned their
backs," he cried next Sunday in church, "they were
the murderers. And you, my audience, who howled
down my appeals for pardon, you murdered those
men. You showed yourselves as impenitent active
enemies of the government. If you had shown self-

198 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

control and sense, those priests would not be to-
day in hell."

. That was the fighting quality of Antonin. His
life was threatened; he received also letters of high
praise, calling him the chosen one of Christ. "It
' is not far when in the Church of the Saviour in gold
letters on marble shall be written your noble name
as a fighter for the faith." Few men have the glory
of calling forth such adoration. Yet in a few weeks
it was over. The conference that he called and
at which he triumphed, left him a broken, disil-
lusioned man.

I visited him in his cell in the heart of Moscow.
I saw him coming across the cobbles, leaning on
the arm of a woman. People drew near to kiss his
hand and lie made on them the sign of the cross.
He had been made that day Metropolitan of Mos-
cow; the common folk looked on him as a great
spiritual leader, who would make it possible for
them to be loyal citizens and also loyal churchmen,
to serve God without giving up their Revolution.

He lived humbly; up a narrow iron stairway from
the monastery garden, through a smoke-blackened
kitchen we went into his narrow vaulted cell. He
hung his coat on a nail behind the door, and called
for tea, drinking it without sugar or milk from a
blue enamel mug, tearing off a piece of dry bread
from loaves given by the faithful. He told me the
story of the new church movement, of which he
was still acknowledged leader. He ended in bitter-
ness and pessimism. "We are deposing sixty
bishops; this is not peace, it is conflict. I fear great

THE CHURCH REVOLUTION 199

splits in the church. . . . There is even feeling
against me, because I am a monk. It is a rebellion
of white priests; there is no holding them."

He was leader of a great revolt, and already it
refused to be led by him. He went from his cell
that day to the last session of the conference, and
voted against one innovation after another. He op-
posed married bishops; the traditions of monkdom
still held him. But the young priests from the prov-
inces, whom he himself had summoned, swept on
beyond him. They made him Metropolitan of Mos-
cow; but on every concrete issue they voted him
down.

There was no hesitation or bitterness or pessi-
mism among these young priests, fresh from the
provinces and the common people. They talked of a
dozen great changes to- be made at once. The country
monasteries were to become toiling brotherhoods;
the city monasteries hostels for the poor. Saints*
relics, "the holy bones/ 1 were to be given to muse-
ums. The church was to be modernised at once*
Priests were to work with their hands and become
citizens of the soviet republic. They would even,
eventually, abolish ikons and have nothing but primi-
tive Christianity.

"We of this congress are the eagles/' said a young
priest from the Ukraine. "We go forth to bring
freedom to our brothers." His eyes flashed with
joy as he said it He felt himself one of the chosen
in a great movement. He was not shaken by any
fear of splits; he was not entangled in any loyalty
to the past. Nor was he aware at all of the tragedy

200 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

of that bowed figure, sitting a few feet away, the
Metropolitan of Moscow, still the head of the con-
ference. For he was young, not old; he was one
of a thousand comrades, not a lonely questioning
soul. He was on the crest of the Revolution, sweep-
ing forward with power. , . .

Such were the faiths and hopes with which the
New Church started on its year of agitation among
the people. Their plan was widespread discussion,
ending at last in a great Church Congress, demo-
cratically chosen from priests and people, represent-
ing the highest church authority and capable of
passing legally the reforms they desired. They did
not intend to call this Congress until they believed
they could control it.

Nearly a year followed before the Church Con-
gress was called. It was a year of bitter strife in
the church. A dozen new groups emerged, advocat-
ing different reforms; Antonin seceded and formed
a less radical movement. In the signing of the serv-
ice in Strasny Monastery he caused a sensation, by
refusing to kiss Krasnitzky, leader of the extreme
group. To the words "Christ between us," he did
not reply, as is custom, u He is and shall be," but
answered: "There is no Christ between you and
me." He explained next Sunday to a meeting of his
adherents: "I can still co-operate with him in an ad-
ministration, but I have no spiritual contact with
him."

Out into every province went the waves of the
congress, and telegrams came back announcing that
this or that side had been "liquidated." I found

THE CHURCH REVOLUTION 201

church rows going on in the far north, in remote
villages. In Saratov half the churches were "new
church" and half were "old church." The dead
Tolstoi took an interesting part in these squabbles.
He had been excommunicated long ago by the Ortho-
dox Church ; he was restored to honour by the New
Church, and excommunicated again by Antonin's
group, because he had disbelieved in the virgin birth
and the resurrection of the body.

At last came the Great Church Congress, in the
summer of 1923. I was present. What local pres-
sures had been used to secure delegates I do not
know; but I can testify that it was composed of
bona-fide priests and laymen from all parts of Rus-
sia. It was split in many sections, but it maintained
an organisational unity, and elected a Highest
Church Council representing various factions. It
approved the appointing of married bishops. It
ordered that relics should be taken from their wrap-
pings and exposed to the people that they might
know what these relics really were; but it refused
to go to the length of donating the relics to museums*
Education of the superstitious peasant must be
gradual*

The only group not represented in the congress
was the Tikhon faction ; for Tikhon was on trial for
high treason, and no one ventured to sustain him.
The Congress abolished the office of Patriarch, de-
claring for a democratic form of church govern*
ment. They declared Tikhon unfrocked and de-
posed. They were far more bitter against Tikhon

202 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

than the soviet prosecutors were ; these latter took
the trial as a mere routine.

Then suddenly Tikhon himself made peace with
the government. He issued an open confession in
which he declared that, brought up all his life as a
monarchist, he had sincerely opposed the Soviet Gov-
ernment over a space of years, and acted against it.
History had decided against him; he accepted the
separation of church and state, renouncing all fur-
ther opposition.

Tikhon was set free; he began preaching and
drawing large crowds. He refused to recognise the
actions of the Church Congress ; he was seen at once
to be a power. Both sides appealed to the law
against each other; but the law was cheerfully in-
different. Tikhon was now a loyal citizen; the gov-
ernment's quarrel against him was ended as long as
he remained so. What happened in church organisa-
tion and theology was not the affair of the state.

The war between church and state, as such, is
over. The. ground is thereby cleared for the war
of ideas. The Russian Church, that most ancient
form of organised Christianity, is suddenly face
to face with modern life. Will it be reborn, or
will it perish?

In this war of ideas, the Communist Party is defi-
nitely anti-religious. As a government, it makes
no distinction between loyal citizens on any ground
of faith or unf aith. A man may belong to any church
or none, and still hold office in the government,
exercising all the rights of a citizen. But he cannot
join the Communist Party if he gives open allegiance

THE CHURCH REVOLUTION 203

to the church. Men have even been expelled from
the party "for religious observances," by which has
been meant that they had a church marriage. For
party membership is based on acceptance of certain
views,,/ among which a materialistic conception of
human history is one.

The distinction between party action and gov-
ernment action is a fine distinction, not always ob-
served. The law of the state, for instance, forbids
the schools to preach either religion or irreligion,
but zealous Communist officials down in the prov-
inces make their own interpretation of this law. One
director of education in a province of Russia told
me with joy how he had compelled his teachers, in
the week before Easter, to give a series of lectures
on the crimes of the church against science. Strictly
speaking, this is not an attack on religion; but given
in the week before Easter, there was no doubt of its
intent. When I repeated this incident to a higher
official in Moscow, he deplored it but said that time
would correct such undue zeal.

The Young People's Communist League is the
chief organ of attack against religion. Some of its
methods are extremely crude. On Christmas, in
1922-23, I saw an anti-religio\is procession In the
streets of Moscow, held by the Young Communists.
They carried puppets of all the gods of the past,
from Osiris to the Virgin Mary; they marched to
the Red Square and made a funeral pyre of the
gods. On their banners were slogans such as have
been known in western civilisation since the days of
Ingersoll, declaring that man has made God in his

204 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

own image. They had pantomimes of corrupt
priests, blessing with one hand and taking money
with the other.

Twelve days later, on the anniversary of the
Baptism, I saw hundreds of thousands of men and
women packed inside the great Church of the Saviour
in Moscow, reaching even to the river below, where
the priests broke the ice and sprinkled the crowd
with water, and men and women crossed themselves
and made prayers. There was a much larger crowd
here than at the procession of Young Communists.
The government took no part on either occasion. It
is rumoured, however, that some of the older Com-
munists passed word to the younger enthusiasts that
the methods of their procession were too crude to
be effective. The procession was not repeated at
Easter.

The atheism of the Young Communists is, how-
ever, no mere negative attack. It has in it an element
of joy and triumph and freedom which indicates what
an oppression of the human spirit the church has
been in the past. I met a young Communist couple
with two children. "The older child was baptised
in church," they told me, "and named with a saint's
name. But our young daughter is called Freedom.
Because when she was born we were free and knew
that there was no God."

A young mother of my acquaintance watched her
baby die in a little hut in the country, from tuber-
culosis acquired under hard conditions of living.
Month after month the child wasted away, and at
last the day came when the father bought a plain

THE CHURCH REVOLUTION 205

pine box in the village and nailed it himself, and
took it on a cart to burial. "It was a new grave-
yard," said the mother to me, smiling. "A beautiful
new field with clean white daisies. I did not have
to put my baby near the church." It was quite clear
that the church was to her only oppression of spirit.

I visited an exhibition of posters from the Young
People's Communist League. "Our most popular
lectures," they told me, "are those on natural science,
because of the campaign against religion." I ex-
amined the poster announcing these most popular
lectures, to see what they meant by attack on re-
ligion.

"Man's Conquest of Nature" was the theme of
the series. The first lecture was the Harnessing of
Wind and Wave ; it was illustrated by cartoons of
wind-mills, and sailboats. The series of lectures
went on, through electricity and radium ; there was
a whole lecture on Edison, the boy who rose to be-
come a great conqueror of nature. There was a
lecture on Human Speech and the Printing Press,
discussed as forces which knit together a human so-
ciety, and enable man to conquer the earth.

Suddenly it was quite clear what the Young Com-
munists meant by atheism. One could not read
even the titles of the lectures without a sense of joy-
ous triumph. Man was no longer the tool of the
high gods in heaven, placating them with ritual and
prayers and submission; tossed at their will to suc-
cess or destruction. Man, Organised Man, was
destined conqueror of nature. Science and Co-op-
eration are his tools.

206 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

This is the joyous, positive faith that goes forth
to attack the ancient church of Russia from the
Communist Youth pouring into the villages, scof-
fing at the holy bones of saints, declaring crudely
that God was an invention of the rich to keep poor
men from revolting. Under the momentum of their
attack the older priesthood stands bewildered, igno-
rant of modern science, unarmed with any weapons
of defence.

The New Church is an attempt to save religion
in Russia, by adopting modern science and the social
revolution, and reconciling these with Christianity.
It has in itself unmistakable religious fervour, which
accepts the new hopes of communism and calls them
Christian. I remember, after many months, the
prayer of Archbishop Yevdokim, calling a blessing
on the Soviet Revolution, while the great throng of
hearers murmured in answer: "Pravilna, pravilna,
it is true, it is true,"

"Ages pass. All powerful Time puts its mark on
everything. Everything moves forward. Human
society changes, its thinking processes, habits and
needs. Only the czar's autocratic Russia did not
change. In it, as before, a small band violated the
will of the people. The long suffering millions
groaned in slavery. New and new thousands, des-
pairing, went down prematurely to death.

"I am ashamed infinitely of the past. We, the
priests, have enslaved millions, and kept them in
darkness. Kept them in terrors, in a sea of needs
and fears. I do not know another crime in history
that can compare with this. . . .

THE CHURCH REVOLUTION 207

"Great Russian people, my heart, my brain, my
conscience commands me to bless the day of your
emancipation. Blessed be the days of the October
Revolution that broke the bonds of your slavery.
Let the priests call everyone to labour. Tell them
that by common toil we shall transform Russia into
one of the most prosperous lands in the world. Joy
shall fill the Russian land and the banner of Free-
dom shall wave over it forever."

Such is the moral fervour of the church reformers
of Russia. They stand between the joyous, aggres-
sive atheism of the Young Communists and the deep,
mystic fatalism of the ancient Russian village, seek-
ing to live in the world of to-day and yet to save
religion. They are raising funds for educating the
village priests in the doctrines of evolution and nat-
ural science. With the capitulation of Tikhon to
the decree of separation of church and state, and his
promise to refrain from attacks on the government,
the conflict passed out of the realm of politics
into the realm of ideas. As such it will go on for
at least a generation.

XI
EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA

SOME delegates of the Usbek "nation" came to
Moscow. "We want a teachers' institute," they
said. It is a prosaic demand, but it covers the wild-
est romance of education that perhaps the world
has ever seen.

You have never heard of the Usbeks? Neither
have I! Neither has anyone else except a few
anthropologists who study the half-wild tribes be-
tween Europe and Asia. Some eight or ten of these
people, doubtless sons of privileged chieftains, once
penetrated far enough into the world to learn Rus-
sian and receive a higher education. It isn't sur-
prising that you and I missed meeting those eight
or ten.

In the days of the czar the Usbeks had not discov-
ered the alphabet. It follows that they had no text-
books. No one, since the world began, even learned
to read and write in Usbek. But then came the
Russian Revolution.

Now there is an Usbek alphabet, reduced to sim-
ple Latin characters by learned philologists in Mos-
cow in conference with those few Usbeks who knew
Russian. There are textbooks in the Usbek language
and schools in the Usbek villages. When the Us-
beks send to Moscow for a teachers' institute, the

208

EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA 209

education authorities take it as a routine of business,,
instead of the gorgeous romance that it is.

For Russia is crammed with such romances. The
Usbeks are only one of a dozen petty nations that
received alphabet and schools since the revolution.
There are the Seranie, a Finnish tribe in the far
north near Archangel. There are the Kuktschi, a
savage tribe in the Caucasus. And the Migrel and
the Lazen and the Imeretiner, and half a dozen
more. I write these names with joy, for I want to be
the first person to put them into English. " Unless,
some anthropologist or British secret service man
has beaten me, I think this is their first appearance.

In the Russia of the Revolution, there are schools
carried on in sixty different languages, and text-
books printed in all of them. Some ten or twelve
of these languages had first to be reduced to writing.
This programme of teaching the new citizens of the
Soviets is based on a definite programme of equal
chance for all races. "Shall we multiply universities
in Moscow before we give village schools to the
Bashkirs?" is the way they put it.

Nor are these alphabets only for minor tribes*
which cannot count in Russia's history. When I
was in Baku, the world 1 s greatest oil-district, I vis-
ited dozens of schools and kindergartens. I talked
with eager young men who were back from organis-
ing village schools among the Tartars. The Rus-
sian workers, they told me, had nearly all learned
reading and writing. But matters went slower with
the Tartars, who make up half the oil workers of
Baku. Their language had no modern alphabet^

210 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

only an ancient literary Arabic with little relation
to daily speech. Until after the Revolution, this
vast population of Tartars was unlettered. Now
they also have a new alphabet and are fast learning
to read and write. This is a fact of importance
in the oil history of the future, for the oil of Baku
is not so far removed from Persian oil fields to the
south, and the connection between the two is by
means of these Mohammedan peoples.

One hundred and sixty million copies of textbooks
were issued by the Government Publishing House in
Moscow, in the five months from April to August,
1923, for the job of teaching Russia. This Gov-
ernment Publishing House is the largest publish-
ing house in the world. It prints books of every
kind, but by far its largest output is school text-
books.

They need this enormous number of books (more
than one per person in Russia, more than fourteen
for each of the twelve million childr.en in the schools)
not only because old books are worn out, but
because the whole system of education is new. Even
textbooks on mathematics are rewritten, to conform
to the new mode of teaching.

Is there a communist mathematics, I asked in
.amazement They explained patiently. Their idea
is modelled more on the Dewey ideas of education
than on anything else we know in America. Every
new book by Dewey is grabbed and translated into
Russian for consultation. Then they make their
4>wn additions.

"We call it the Work School," said a teacher to

EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA 211

me. u We base all study on the child's play and his
relation to productive work. We begin with the life
around him. How do the people in the village get
their living? What do they produce? What tools
do they use to produce it? Do they eat it all or
exchange some of it? For what do they ex-change
it? What are horses and their use to man? What
are pigs and what makes them fat? What are
families and how do they support each other, and
what is a village that organises and cares for the
families?"

"This is interesting nature study and sociology?"
I replied, "but how do you teach mathematics?" He
looked at me in surprise.

"By real problems about real situations," he an-
swered. "Can we use a textbook in which a lord
has ten thousand roubles and puts five thousand out
at interest and the children are asked what his profit
is? The old mathematics is full of problems the
children never $ee now, of situations and money
yalues which no longer exist, of transactions which
we do not wish to encourage. Also it was always
purely formal, divorced from existence.

"We have simple problems in addition, to find
out how many cows there are in the village, by add-
ing the number in each family. Simple problems of
division of food, to know how much the village can
export. Problems of proportion, if our village has
three hundred families and the next has one thou-
sand, how many red soldiers must each give to the
army, how many delegates is each entitled to in the
township soviet? The older children work out the

212 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

food-tax for their families ; that really begins to in-
terest the parents in our schools.

"Physics and chemistry and all forms of science
start very early and very simply. What is the earth
into which seed is put? What different kinds of
earth are there? What effect does water have and
where does the rain come from? By the third year
we try to make trips to factories and understand
the beginning of collective industry.

"For our second main endeavour is to teach the
child collective action. We are frankly trying to fit
him to build a socialist state. The schools are our
next battle-front for communism. We have our
self-governed school community, in which teachers,
children and janitors all have equal voice. It de-
cides everything, what shall be done with the school
funds, what shall be planted in the school garden,
what shall be taught If the children decide against
some necessary subject, it is the teacher's job to
show them through their play and life together that
the subject is needed."

That's the programme, a dream of advanced
education such as the world has not yet seen. And
the reality, shows half-savage tribes which have
never had an alphabet, and thousand-mile stretches of
backward peasants who never learned reading and
writing. It is a typically Russian combination: a
gorgeous plan and an utterly backward people, and
a handful of young enthusiasts who intend that the
thing shall be done.

How are they managing it?

Last year in Russia proper, not counting the

EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA 213

Ukraine, 120,000 teachers out of a total of 150,000
took special courses to prepare themselves for this
new form of school. They have to take these courses
or lose their jobs to the new teachers who are being
turned out of sixty new pedagogical institutes all
over the land. For the older teachers, to save them,
are three to six weeks' institutes with discussions,
written tests and essays, held in three or four places
in every province. Professors come from Moscow
and Petrograd to hold them; all teachers must at-
tend at least once a year.

They are a motley crew, these teachers. I talked
with a group of them who were visiting Moscow on
a five days' educational tour. This also was pro-
vided free of charge for half the teachers in the
Moscow district; the other half would come the
following year. Old gaunt men in threadbare
clothes, old women wistfully eager to keep up, thin
tall youths who had long outgrown their scanty
clothing, energetic intelligent young women, just
the job lot of teachers as the Revolution found them,
trying to make themselves over to fit the new world*
They were going through big city institutes of learn-
ing, biological museums, physics laboratories. I
asked them what chances they had to learn.

"This visit to the city," one girl told me, "and
the Teachers 7 Institute for six weeks, and the Heck-
er American Correspondence Courses."

That is another romance, those correspondence
courses. A Methodist preacher from the East Side
of New York was fired by the idea of educating
Russia through correspondence courses on the

214 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

American plan. He hoped first to enter with the
Y. M. C. A. and spent two years with them organis-
ing courses. But America failed to recognise Rus-
sia and the Y. M. C. A. could not enter, so Dr. Julius
Hecker, in the year of the famine, came over to
Moscow with $5,000 and got a contract to run cor-
respondence schools. He counts his pupils now by
the tens of thousands.

His is not a profit-making concession, though he
received free from the government a large building
and much assistance. Most of his work is done on
contract for government or labour organisations.
The Department of Education desires courses for
teachers, or the Trade Unions wish courses for fore-
men. He works them out, sells them at a price fixed
by the organisation in question, at or below cost to
insure widest use; and receives subsidies from the
organisations to cover his losses.

Help of all kinds to educational projects is offered
by the government, which knows it has not means
enough to do the great job quickly. A committee on
which I worked received the offer of a large estate
on the Volga, if we could raise $5,000 for agricul-
tural machinery and equipment, and build thereon
a self-supporting children's colony, learning modern
agriculture. The local authorities even offered to
support the children free till the first harvest pro-
duced by their labour put the institution on its feet
But poor though they may be in money and anxious
for assistance, one thing the educational authorities
insist on, that neither religion nor capitalist ethics
shall be taught in the schools.

EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA 215

"The teacher must know how to teach nature
study without God, and tell fairy-tales without the
benevolent rich lord," said a man in the Central De-
partment of education to me. I laughed, for I had
seen the scheme at work.

Down in the Ukraine a teacher was telling a fairy-
story of Grimms, yes, they still have fairy-tales,
but strangely modified. It was the industrious goose-
girl who marries a prince. Obviously in modern
Russia a marriage with a prince does not include
"they lived happily ever after/ 1 The teacher related
the marriage as a fall from grace; the goose-girl
was tempted and abandoned honest work, and was
supported in a palace on money stolen from the com-
mon people, her early friends I

But the children refused such a shameful ending I
They liked the goose-girl, so they had her refuse the
prince and marry a coal miner who rose through
ability and industry to be "red director" for the
state mines of the district! The ending invented
by the children is now adopted for the fairy-tale of
Grimm^

Like everything in Russia, education went through
its period of utter breakdown and confusion: In
the days of the czar the village schools were church-
controlled. In the cities were expensive gymnasiums
and real schools for the sons of the upper classes*
In the last few years before the war the larger cities
introduced some free city schools for sons of smaller
officials who could not afford the gymnasium. But
children of manual wprkers had little chance to
learn.

216 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

During the Great War many larger city schools
were taken over as hospitals and for other war uses.
This use continued also during the civil war and the
great epidemics. The new school authorities tried
at once to get the buildings, but against the demands
of war and disease there was little chance.

"We had some horrible experiences as a result of
these war-uses," said a member of the school-man-
agement to me. "In Smolensk we took back a high
school that had been a hospital for venereal diseases.
We had no soap nor disinfectants; the blockade of
the Entente kept these things out. We cleaned as
well as we could with water. But soon they came to
me : What shall we do ; the children are coming down
with syphilis' ? So we had to close the building."

These frightful times are past; for two- years
there have been soap and disinfectants in Russia,
and a most energetic Board of Health. But the
famine also brought hardship to the schools. I
visited a school building in the village of Novo
Semekino, near Samara, in the early autumn of the
famine. Tiny, primitive, with one room holding
perhaps forty children, it had been built in the days
of the czar. With the revolution came zeal for
education, and the year before the famine it was
working three shifts. One group of children came
in the 'morning, another in the afternoon, and a
group of adults in the evening.

All over Russia I met similar expansions of
school buildings, before the famine. But now the
building in Novo Semekino was shut, for the school
master had fled to get food. All through the

EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA 217

famine districts this happened. I went to seven
villages organising kitchens; in three the school-
master had gone; in the four where the school
teacher remained (they were usually self-sacrificing
young women who stayed longer than the men), we
saved them by making them managers of the A. R. A.
food kitchens. But they no longer had time for
teaching.

During that terrible winter I talked with Lun-
archarsky. "Education has been strangled by the
famine," he said. Half a million children in orphan
homes came upon the budget of the school authori-
ties. The State went on the new economic policy;
in place of supplying everyone with food, including
teachers, it was trying to make ends meet and ac-
quire a gold basis. There was no money for educa-
tion; the schools began closing.

Other difficulties also came, incident to imposing
a new form of education on teachers who knew noth-
ing about it and who were still vaguely antagonistic.
"I must admit," said a Communist to me, "that the
results were funny. Even our friends had to say:
'What kind of schools are these?* The teacher took
the idea of work by the children, but nothing more.
The schools were sometimes merely places where
the children sawed the wood and washed the floors
and got a little food."

But even in those darkest days one thing was
noticeable about the children's homes, which from
the beginning were the stronghold of the new educa-
tion, supplied with the best teachers, since the chil-
dren were continuously there. They might be hua-

218 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

gry; they might be without pencils or books, but
they were self-reliant little communities. I have
visited scores of them, sometimes far from the
railroad, when the matron was absent in the village
and the two teachers had not yet returned from
town where they went in quest of food. Four or
five of the children conducted me through the build-
ing with courtesy and utter absence of self-conscious-
ness, showing me kitchen and bedrooms and an-
swering my questions about menu and order of the
day as well as a teacher could have done.

This was part of the basic policy of the new
schools after the revolution. Self-government, self-
help, self-management in common activity began
from the first, even when there was nothing but
a meagre bread ration to manage.

I visited a home in Samara where waifs cast away
in the streets had been gathered. First these chil-
dren were assembled in large "collectors" to be dis-
infected and quarantined and then organised into
regular children's homes. That was theory. In prac-
tice there was no soap for the collectors, and no
change of lice-infested clothing; the famished chil-
dren died in huge proportions. But a score of "regu-
lar" homes had really been organised in a few weeks*
I visited one of them.

Only five weeks removed from the streets and the
hell of the over-crowded collector; but already or-
ganisation of life was plain. The children had little
to eat, but all were in classes studying. They
greeted me sincerely as I entered, informally com*
ing over to meet me.

EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA 219

"What do they study in the first class?" I asked.
"Reading and writing?" . . . "No," smiled the
teacher, "in the first class they learn to speak Rus-
sian. They come from a dozen different tribes,
speaking different dialects; they must first learn to
understand each other. In the second class we have
story-telling from Russian history and literature and
the children learn self-expression. In the third class
they learn reading, each from a different book, since
we have no textbooks. Only the highest group can
yet learn writing; we have just six pencils in the
school!"

Those were famine conditions. Yet the children
in this school, just learning to speak to each other,
had their School Council for self-government which
received a gift of chocolate I sent them, duly elect-
ing a representative to come and get it and furnish-
ing her with proper papers of authorisation. They
divided the chocolate fairly; they also divided fairly
the day by day labours of the school, the floor-wash-
ing, bed-making, kitchen assistance. This fair,
friendly division of labour is considered the corner-
stone of education as citizens of a future socialist
commonwealth.

For two years, while the education budget was so
scanty, volunteer organisations came to the assist-
ance of the schools. The slowly opening factories
ran schools for the young apprentices and adult
courses for workers. The education fund, fixed by
law and union agreement for every industry, was
diverted by vote of the workers to subsidise ordi-
nary children's schools. In Baku the entire school

220 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

system was supported out of the budget of the Oil
Industry. They were proud of their achievement;
in the czar's days there were twenty-two schools and
no kindergartens; now there were sixty-two schools
and fifteen kindergartens, and 121 classes in reading
and writing for adults.

The direct management of schools by industries
was only temporary. Workers' committees, unions,
government departments, every form of organised
life was called on for help in those days, lest educa-
tion should go down. But with the first good har-
vest in Russia the days passed when Lunarcharsky
must complain to the Congress of Soviets that his
teachers were driven even to prostitution to get a
living. Teaching is not yet a high paid profession,
but it is above the reach of hunger. And through
even this time of bitter need, fifteen to twenty thou-
sand new schools have been opened in Russia, not
counting the Ukraine.

Teachers are on the privileged list for the many;
educational chances which Russia now ofiers in pro-
fusion outside the regular form of the schools. I
met in the great Agricultural Exposition in Moscow
a teacher from Gomel who had come up to see new-
methods of farming. He was not a communist, but
an "intellectual" who had fled to the villages to get
food, during the hard winters of the revolution. His
criticisms of the soviet government had been many,
but they were drowned now by appreciation of the
free excursion.

"Never since the world began," a teacher said

EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA 221

warmly, "has any government set out to give such
chances for culture to its people."

He came to town with a trainload of six hundred
others, mostly peasants but with a liberal sprinkling
of village teachers. The railroads and street-cars
gave free transportation. The Exposition Com-
mittee gave a dollar "spending money." And the
workers' organisations of Moscow took the country
people in as guests, giving them board and room and
guides from their own scanty wages. He himself
had stayed at the house of some Map Makers, and
learned about the making of maps.

The pittance he received as village teacher sup-
ported him meagerly enough in the village, but
would never have paid a trip to Moscow. Tens
of thousands of peasants, village officials and teach-
ers, received similar free trips last summer to the
Exposition. In May of this year the Exposition
opens again, as a permanent free school for peas-
ants. This kind of popular education, through mix-
ing of peoples, excursions, exhibitions and visits, is
tremendously popular in Russia.

Since the first days of the Revolution, "propa-
ganda trains" on the railroads, and "propaganda
ships" on the Volga have carried to the people the
messages of the new government. Many of the new
schools had hardly anything to read at first except
posters against Denikin and Wrangel. Mixed with
these, and gradually superseding them, as political
enemies faded into the past, were vivid posters show-
ing illiteracy as the next great enemy of the nation;
illustrations of tractor farming; information about

222 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

diseases of cattle. Ignorance, dirt and disease, and
the old fashioned farming methods were not gently
reproved as in American exhibitions, as injurious to
health and efficiency; they were denounced in war
terms as enemies of the nation, traitors which
sabotage our advance, "the next war-front we must
conquer/'

The "Baby Weeks" which proved popular in
America have leaped across the tamer people of
Europe, finding their second home in Russia. Dur-
ing an entire week in Moscow I was attacked by
young collectors of donations for child welfare;
while cheery posters of marching babies demanded
mothers' milk, fresh air and freedom from flies. In
the art of graphic cartoon and picture the Russians
have little to learn from any people. They think in
cartoons and exhibitions much more than in chilly
statistics. They work in drives of public enthusiasm
much more readily than in the prosaic organisation
of every day.

Thus, at the time when public education was
strangled for lack of money, the army made itself
into one great school for soldiers ; the trade unions
organised 2,300 teaching centers and threatened ex-
pulsion from the unions and threats of unemploy-
ment for those who neglected this chance to learn to
read. The army, drawing peasants from illiterate ,
villages, is now one hundred per cent, literate, which
is more than can be said of the French army. The ;
trade unionists are going from bench and machin e,
through strenuous three-year courses in the Rabfac? \

EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA 223

which I shall tell about later, straight into the
universities.

In summer the university students go in great
bands from city to city, on educational tours which
cost them nothing. The railways furnish free trans-
portation; in the cities the students of Moscow ex-
change rooms and rations with Petrograd students
who have gone to Moscow. Twenty youths of my
acquaintance went on a two months' educational tour
to the Altai mountains, between Russia and Central
Asia. They were accompanied by four professors,
a geographer, a geologist, an economist and an
anthropologist; they were entertained by the local
republic, and gave in return for their food and horses
new maps of a region that had never before been
explored.

In dozens of ways the lack of money is made good
by the enthusiasm of the people. A trainload of
students from Moscow was going to visit the coal
region of the Donetz; on the way the engine broke
down. The students promptly divided themselves
into three groups and held three sets of continuous
lecture courses for the local people, one for the
children, one for the peasants, one for the railway
workers, telling them all the new things they had
been learning in their university. There is a tre-
mendous will to acquire knowledge and to spread it,
which breaks down all hindrances.

The great Agricultural Exposition last summer
was a final climax of this popular education, through
the mixing of peoples. From every part of Russia
the peasants came, and each found his own village

224 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

typically represented. The high two-story house of
the north, where the heat from the animals below
rises to warm the family; the many types of log
cabins of the middle timber regions; the southern
houses of straw and mud plaster; the round tents
of nomads made of felted camel-skin, all these
modes of living were faithfully reproduced, with
their living inhabitants still installed in them.

In the festival pavilions gathered groups of many
nations, in national costumes with national dances
and songs. When they went forth over the Ex-
position Grounds they could see, in the midst of
buildings of a score of soviet republics, a great re-
lief map of Russia, fashioned in the earth itself,
showing the treeless tundras of the north, the vast
timber belt, the steppes of the south, the rivers and
mountains to the farthest seas.

Not a single tribe, however ignorant, lowly and
wild, was displayed contemptuously, as we in
American Expositions show the Igorrotes. The
spirit of the Exposition was: "Behold the kinds of
folks we are in this great country. 1 ' But over
against all actual dwellings was set, in criticism of
all alike, the display of the model village, with com-
munity building for school and library and hospitality
and recreation. The new state industries were
shown, their products, their hopes and achievements;
the co-operatives were featured; new methods of
agriculture, of soil drainage, of better seeding and
cultivation, filled dozens of buildings.

What the Exposition does as one great event had
been carried on continuously for over a year in

EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA 225

"Peasants Houses" in every city and township cen-
tre. The chief of them is in Moscow, a big hotel
with beds for several hundred peasants, with baths
and disinfection for clothes, and first aid, and read-
ing-room and club rooms. It receives peasants com-
ing to Moscow with complaints or demands from
villages throughout Russia; it furnishes them with
a Legal Aid Department which connects them with
every part of the government; with a motion picture
and lecture hall on agricultural methods, with a
first-class exhibition of animal and plant diseases,
modern methods of churning and baking, model
specimens of farm products from different regions.

The communist government of Russia knows, and
knows fanatically, that its entire future depends on
the way the young peasants grow up and the ideas
they acquire of co-operation with one another and
with the city workers. Lenin himself started over
a year ago, a movement now known as "Smichka,"
which means "friendly co-operation." Its purpose,
is to bring close relations between workers and
peasants.

This was the idea back of the hospitality shown
by Moscow workers to the exposition visitors, out
of their own wages. The idea goes farther. Every
large factory, every government department,
chooses some village to which it acts as Big Brother.
The Foreign Office of Moscow has under its wing a
village some sixty miles from Moscow. The high
diplomatic officials may be summoned any day to
go down to the village and explain the relations be-
twecn Russia and England. When the villagers

226 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

come up to town, they find information and help in
the union headquarters of Foreign Office employees.

These Big Brother relations are as serious and
permanent as a formal adoption; they are assumed
by mutual agreement and involve definite responsi-
bilities. They are a revelation of the possibilities
of education and cultural help without money.

Not far from Moscow is a Musical Children's
Home, where education specialises in music and
dramatic art A musician from the United States,
sitting beside me at a concert by these children, said
that no private school in America contained such a
collection of voices. They were chosen for musi-
cal talent from tens of thousands of children in
children's homes in Moscow. They have for their
Big Brother patron the Grand Opera Artists who
come down to entertain the children with concerts
and instruction.

Students in Moscow who came from the province
of Smolensk, chose a large township of Smolensk to
which they act as big brothers. In their summer
vacations they go in organised groups to teach the
villages the latest knowledge of the city. When the
peasants come up to Moscow, the students are hosts
and guides.

The university students are a story by themselves.
The whole university system has been changed by
the Revolution. There are personal tragedies here;
my secretary, a girl of good family, had been wait-
ing for two years hoping to get into the university.
Education in Russia is a class affair; trade union
representatives, communist party members, children

EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA 227

of workers and peasants get preference. Private
persons wishing education can also enter, but the
number is limited and the cost high.

There is reason for this discrimination. The State
pays the bills, and regards the universities as organs
of the State, to train as rapidly as possible the lead-
ers needed for a new Russia. Education is a State
gift, not to be had for mere wishing, but given to
those whom some recognised organisation wishes
to have specially trained. The Foreign Office selects
and sends some promising young man to learn Asiatic
history; the Railways send picked young workers to
learn engineering and transport problems. The
universities are regarded as a tool for building and
developing Russia.

They have more students than ever; Petrograd
indeed has fallen from fourteen to six thousand;
Moscow remains the same ; the provincial universi-
ties, Kazan, Saratov, Yaroslavl, Perm and many
others have tripled, more than making up for
Petrograd. But they are filled, not with young
people acquiring culture, but with students taking
special courses for special needs of the State.

So the various faculties undergo great changes.
Theological sections, once important, are now no
more* In the Crimea, existing in loneliness on a
small pension, is a learned man who spent sixty years
specialising in Church Law, The rights of bishops,
the rights of priests, all these he knew thoroughly.
Now Jbie is told by a ruthless government: "The work
of your whole life, is nothing. 11 Many personal

228 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

tragedies are scattered through Russia of men pro-
ficient in things which no longer exist.

The Faculty of Law is smaller, and quite made
over. Private property as its basis, has been super-
seded by community rights. Feudal powers and
estate titles are thrown in the waste-basket. State
officials no longer have to be lawyers. New laws
need a few new lawyers, but not so many as before*

History and Economics, here the change was
greatest and wrought most upheaval. It was not all
done by fiat from above ; it was done also by conflict
with student groups who had helped make the Revo-
lution. Here is the hot field of conflict between old
czarist dictatorship and new Marxist dictatorship.
Before the revolution there were perhaps not three
professors in Russia who ventured to advance an
economic interpretation of history; now, if they
would hold their jobs, they must learn as fast as
may be, to be Marxians. The havoc has been great
in these faculties.

Even Mathematics notices a change. The old
scholastic discipline interests no one ; applied mathe-
matics for the engineering problems of Russia is
the demand of these state-chosen students. Litera-
ture, in the old days it required interminable
browsing in church archives in the original Slavic
tongue. "Now," says an energetic student, "Push-
kin and Lermontov are good reading, but who wants
to know the church fathers/*

Education becomes practical and vivid, the hand-
maid of immediate work. It loses in academic
flavour; it gains in application to modern problems*

EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA 229

The greatest increase in higher learning has come
in technical institutions. Agriculture, mines, elec-
tricity, these flourish, developing new branches.
Into these pour not only young people of university
age, but adult workers, skilled in trades, graduates
of the Kabfacs.

The Workers, Faculties, or Rabf acs, form the one
completely new organisation in Russian education.
They are a temporary expedient; when all of Rus-
sia's youth is educated, they will not be needed. They
are a short-cut for especially gifted workers to the
chances of higher learning.

I talked with a mechanic in the Amo Auto Factory
who had received the chance to enter a Rabfac. For
years in America he had wanted higher education,
but had never been able to secure it. Now his union
was paying his way for three years' intensive study
in preparatory technical courses ; on graduation from
the Rabfac, he could enter the highest engineering
colleges.

Three-fourths of the students now entering the
Medical School of Kharkov are Rabfac graduates.
Soldiers who learned to dress wounds in the war,
or were pressed into hospital service in typhus epi-
demics; they acquired a taste for being a doctor.
They passed preliminary examination, proving that
they could read and write and had general intelli-
gence* They were recommended by their organisa-
tions as serious in purpose. Then they spent three
grilling years in a Rabfac preparing for the uni-
versity.

The old professors groan that these students

230 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

break down high academic standards. The new pro-
fessors retort that they bring energy and purpose.
Let no one suppose that the Rabfacs are amateur
easy courses. "I never knew what work was in my
life," said a university man to me, "till I saw these
Rabfacs. They are awkward in mind; they lack
habits of study; they go at it bitterly, relentlessly.
Day by day they grow thin and worn, their features
are pointed with hunger and work."

Such is the grim determination of the modern stu-
dent world in Russia. I remember a young girl
who slept occasional nights on my sofa. She had
fought at the front in the Polish war and shown
signs of leadership; it was decided that she was
worth training for her country, so she came to the
university.

She spent her evenings giving political and civil in-
struction to factory groups. She slept anywhere she
could, having no room in the over-crowded city.
She shivered one day in the snow, and when I loaned
her a sweater, remarked that "since she was frozen
at the front, she didn't seem able to stand cold."
She laughed as she related how she and another stu-
dent, in the hard years of civil war, had been refused
admission to a cafe because they were barefoot
Such silly bourgeois standards, these cafes 1

I remember the morning when she woke in my
room, converted to the doctrine of open windows.
"It's the first morning I haven't a headache," she
said cheerfully. I remember the afternoon when she
said: "I feel so queer to-day. I have no stomach-
ache. It must be the cornflakes and milk you gave

EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA 231

me instead of that heavy black bread." She had
continuous headache and stomach-ache ; she was worn
out nervously by her years at the front. She studied
till she broke and went to a farm to work, and came
back to study to breaking point again.

Another girl I know, who went as nurse to the
Volga famine at the age of sixteen. She had typhus
and typhoid and smallpox all in succession, in a hor-
rible overcrowded barracks lying two in a bed. She
woke from delirium to feel her partner's dying strug-
gles beside hen She rolled fainting out of bed while
the woman died above her. She herself was so far
gone that the doctor said: "Put her with the. dead
ones," by the merciless rule that reserved the scanty
care for those who still had a chance. Yet she re-
covered; she has continuous stomach trouble from
eating substitute straw bread after typhoid. But
she walks six miles a day to study at the university.
And in the evening, after she has helped get dinner
and wash dishes in the house where she works for
board and room, she sits down, pale and smiling, and
turns off page after page of music, her own compos-
ing, for which she has shown unexpected talent. It
is not plaintive and sad, her music, like the old Rtas-
sian folk-songs; it has a touch of rollicking defiance.

It is magnificent ; it is terrible. Lots of them have
tuberculosis and neurasthenia. Lots of them have
died, and lots more are going to die. The youth of
a nation does not go through eight years of war
and revolution and blockade and famine without
paying. Each young life had its struggles with hun-
ger and cold and disease that the youths of our

232 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

land never know, . . . They don't take themselves
sentimentally, so perhaps we needn't either. They
count themselves as a group that will carry on at
the cost of many members. They storm the heights
of knowledge wastefully, as trenches are taken in
battle*

For the heights of knowledge are recognised as
the next great battle-front of Russia. They speak
of the "front" of Education. They are not cheer-
ful casual college boys; they are an army setting
forth to conquer. The greatest stretch of territory
on earth lies before them. Its mines and forests
and rivers and farms undeveloped challenge them.
Its hundred and thirty million peasants and nomad
tribes speaking sixty different languages, call to
them. . . . They intend that they, the youths of
this generation, shall build of this raw land and this
backward people the first socialist commonwealth in
the world, in advance of any nation,

It is a purpose as terrific as battle, demanding the
same disciplined yet reckless valour. They cannot
wait, for Russia cannot wait They intend to hurry
history*

XII
FORCES IN CONFLICT

A YEAR ago last summer I sat with a group of
Russian friends on the porch of a little summer cot-
tage thirty miles from Moscow. They were "re-
sponsible workers 1 * who had gone down to the coun-
try for the week-end to rest, a teacher, the man-
ager of a publishing house, and the head of a cor-
respondence school.

Sweeping downward from the cottage were flour-
ishing fields of rye, the rye which they all hailed as
"Comrade Harvest who comes to save us." On the
heights across the valley was a school, organised on
an estate that once was used for relaxation and ex-
periment by a seller of drugs in Moscow, Now it
teaches a hundred young men and women the grow-
ing of drugs ; they were almost ready to graduate
their first class, and send it out through the prov-
inces to organise similar farms to raise for Russia
the needed drugs which failed so sorely during the
blockade. The school is largely self-supporting from
the plants it produces.

It was a scene of peace and contentment, but based
on very simple living. Food was not yet plentiful ;
the harvest was still before us, not yet realised. In
the morning we picked wild strawberries on the up-
land and in the afternoon we ate them with tea from

233

234 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

the samovar and black bread from Moscow, with the
luxury of butter and honey from the nearby school.
Then suddenly I threw a bomb into the discussion
of plants and bee-raising. "If you let in American
capital, as you all want to, won't it strangle your
new-born communism before it grows up ?"

The discussion lasted for hours. It resumed after
supper; it resumed on the train to town. For this
was the vital question for Russia's future. "Where
is the new economic policy leading, towards capital-
ism or communism?" And a secondary question,
but one of great importance : "What shall be our
relations with America?"

They were not talking of political recognition;
they were little concerned with what happens at
Washington. They were thinking of economic in-
terpenetration. For Russia desires economic con-
tact with America more than with any other nation.
America is to her the ideal of efficiency. Every fac-
tory dreams of "American machinery and methods";
every government department wants an "American
office system." It is not primarily trade that she
expects from America, for the two great nations
produce largely the same products. She wants in-
vestment of American capital and American organ-
isation of industry.

In the end they said to me, laughing: "We have
no communism yet. We will get it out of the pock-
ets of your American capitalists. Where else but
in America have you the real bases of communism?"

I stared at them in astonishment and they laughed
again. "We don't mean that you have the will to

FORCES IN CONFLICT 235

communism in America. Nor that you are going
to have communism soon there; certainly not. But
you have the only basis on which communism can
be built machine industry, standardisation of prod-
ucts, speed. You have the communist operation of
industry, that is to say, your industry is operated
in common by large masses of interdependent work-
ers. But you have not the communist control of in-
dustry; those workers have nothing to say about
the product they make or the jobs that determine
their lives.

'Tour operation of industry, that is what we
want in Russia. We are a backward people. Our
industry and agriculture are primitive. But we have
the will to communism which you have not. We
have workers awakened by the Revolution which
you have not

"We do not wish to get our development slowly
with the nations of Europe. We want to buy it
quickly, where we can get the best. Where else is
that but America? We want your organisation of
industry and your mass production. We will pay
high for these things."

"But our organisation of industry is the highest
advance of capitalism," I said, puzzled.

"How else," they smiled, "than on the highest ad-
vance of capitalism can communism ever be built?
You have perfected the machinery and organisation
of production; but you let them be controlled in the
interests of a few. We shall control them in the
interests of all the workers."

"Will you be able to do this?" I asked. "Do

236 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

you know how strong these capitalists are? If
Rockefeller leases a section of your oil lands, how
much communism will he allow near him ? Do you
know the means of control as these men do ? Do
you know how the money influence can penetrate into
government, and into the subtle influences of all
men's thought and desire?"

"We must see that the Communist Party remains
a party of workers," he answered, "and clean out
bureaucrats and white collar men."
It seemed to me a totally irrelevant answer.
"Can't they buy up your officials?" I asked, "as Big
Business has often done in every land in the world?"

"No individual official has privileges to sell," they
answered, "unless they are confirmed by the highest
power in the State, which is under the control of the
Party."

"Can't they corrupt a majority of these high
bodies ? I know these men have been tested by prison
and death. But Big Business has done that, in every
government"

"These men can all be transferred by the Party,
or shot for graft, which in such high Communists
would be treason," they answered. "Our discipline
is so rigid that their wage and income is known;
ill-gotten gains could not be long concealed."

"Can't they subtly influence whole groups of lead**
ers by power and place, as we see so often happen?
So that these leaders use personal prestige to keep
in office, yet gradually lower their standards to admit
personal wealth and consequent corruption ? We are
talking of money on a large scale, such as has handled

FORCES IN CONFLICT 237

easily the governments of backward lands, money
which may even come in the form of development."

"That is why," they said, "we must keep our Party
a party of workers, never dominated by bureaucrats
and officials. The interests of a permanent gov-
ernment official might in time become the same as
the interests of a foreign capitalist. But the inter-
ests of the workers of Russia, never. Their pres-
ent interest lies in rapid development and suggests
a partnership with foreign capital to secure it. But
their interest will never lie in giving ultimate control
to private capital. The workers of Russia will never
sell out; as long as we keep our Party disciplined
and clean, we are safe."

"But cannot this little group be completely over-
whelmed by the forces of world capital?*'

This led to a discussion of the resources of both
sides, the external position of Russia, the awaken-
ing of Asia, the breakdown of Europe, the psycho-
logical influences operating under the new economic
policy.

Externally, Russia has grown every year stronger
since the Revolution, She has reached the Pacific
again with the departure of the Japanese from
Vladivostok. Every day strengthens her influence
among the exploited nations of Asia. Towards
Europe and Western Capitalism, her position has
grown steadily stronger. Each year she has offered
less as a price for recognition. Each year she has
made more favourable trade agreements.

We passed to the internal conditions of Russia.
The state ownership of land, of railroads, of Indus-

238 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

tries that are basic, of banks and foreign commerce.
"We ourselves determine what terms we will sign
in concessions, " they said. "Profit we will grant,
but not perpetual ownership of our resources. If
foreign capital fulfills these terms, .it can make
money. If it evades the terms agreed on, and tries
to seize what we have not granted, the power of
the State is in our hands to enforce our law."

"But cannot the whole mind of your people be
affected? Already among many of them the desire
for profit is taking the place of state service. Al-
ready there are gorgeous banquets of profiteers, and
luxurious apartments which the mass of the workers
cannot dream of? Will not the wish for these
things gradually affect your whole population, so
that each man tries to advance at the expense of the
others?"

"Yes, 11 they said, "there is that danger. Every
man wants the good things of life, and ought to
want them* But which do your men in America
want most with their money, luxury or power?"

"They want both, of course," I considered, "but
the strong men, the organisers of big industries,
prefer power to luxury. It is the weakened second
generation that spends time on gilded pleasures.
The strong men have no time for such childishness ;
their joy is in managing the great forces of indus-
try."

"With you in America," they said, "the path to
luxury and to power is the same. Money is the
gate to all that a man desires, to comfort, pres*
tige, social prominence, even to intellectual oppor-

FORCES IN CONFLICT 239

tunity. Only an altruistic fool in America would
fail to want personal wealth.

"We have organised things differently in Russia.
The private capitalist may buy luxury with his
money, but he shuts himself off from power. Our
universities, our social judgments are prejudiced
against him. He has no voice in government. Even
the rent of his apartment is decided by a committee
of poorly paid workers. He has no social standing,

"The men, on the other hand, who put their energy
into building up state industry, may rise very fast
to power, if they have ability; for we are short of
trained men. They can become presidents of banks
or managers of oil districts or organisers of rail-
roads. They get, in that case, very little money;
but this does not cause them to lose social prestige.
On the contrary, they are the big men of Russia,
whose ideas are discussed in the newspapers, and
who plan with their fellows the development of a
vast Republic of free workers, from the Baltic to
the Pacific, from the Arctic Ocean to the warm
waters of the south. They even have in mind the
dream of World Revolution, in which all countries
will some day follow what they have begun, and all
history will look back on them as founders of a new
epoch* Which, under these conditions, would your
young men choose ?"

"Any man whose work is worth having," I said,
"would choose the building of such a Republic."

"No," they answered. "There will be plenty
choosing luxury and personal comfort, and their
work also is worth having. These men will do the

240 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

petty trading and the development of little indus-
tries, filling in the gaps between the great State in-
dustries, stimulated by the hope of quick turnover
and profits. They will make profits and enjoy ease.
But they are not the kind of men who do big things."

I was still confused. "But may not all these
things be reversed," I asked, "so that in the end
money buys both luxury and power as in America?"

"For that," they said, "we hold the press and the
schools and many other weapons,"

The press and the schools, these are no mean
weapons. There are in Russia no advertisements
urging young men to impose their "power of will"
on others, for the sake of their own desires. There
are no short stories preaching the gospel of bluff.
There are many daily papers, with a wide variety
of political and economic news from all parts of the
world; there are hot criticisms of the government,
and discussions of art. But there is no fashion page,
no spectacular divorce-suits, no scandals about pic-
turesque rich men in the papers, unless sometimes
an announcement of the number of cafes closed in
a raid for vodka. \ There is nothing m the press '
to make anyone wish riches ; the butt of the comic
papers is the private profiteer/;

The educational system is also a weapon, state-
planned, to make the next generation efficient in
serving the people. In the earliest grades they exalt
labour and community service. In the children's ^
homes they are taught, first of all, to share equally
with^the others. I The higher ch'antfcs of learning
and^technical training are given by preference to

FORCES IN CONFLICT 241

young people chosen by trade unions or government
departments or the communist party itself; the
whole atmosphere of these institutions scorns pri-
vate greed and exalts public service. '

"These are the weapons we have," they said.
"The power of the State is in our hands, and the
lands, and the national resources, and the basic in-
dustries, and also the press and the schools. Our
task is a double one : to develop the resources of the
nation as rapidly as we may, in the interests of all
the people. And at the same time to train a new
generation in technical knowledge and in the habits
of co-operation, fit to manage our resources better
than we can do, fit to build a co-operative common-
wealth which we cannot build, because we lack both
the large scale industry and the necessary habits of
mind.

"The technical knowledge, the large scale in-
dustry> these we want from America, If your capi-
talists bring us these, we will pay them well, and let
them go home with their gains. The final purpose,
we ourselves will furnish. It is of course not cer-
tain that we can do this; nothing in the world is
certain. But we know the dangers ; we are organised
to do it"

* ******

So they were planning a year and a half ago in
Moscow, and for a year and a half, as I went up
and down Russia, I found that everywhere the Com-
munists understood this plan. The Communists
charged with improving organisation in the coal
mines, thought of all technical advance as a step

242 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

towards communism. The men who were slowly'
bringing a little order out of chaos, in textile mill,
, in finance, in house repair, in locomotive building,
in transport, believed that the Party would use their
new achievement towards its plan. The men and
women who were battling to secure pencils and paper
for impoverished schools had not lost sight of the
ultimate end of education, to train citizens who
might build a co-operative commonwealth.

And now, as I leave for America, the land of my
own people for three hundred years, already I can
look back over the past two years in Russia, and
count many steps in the building.

When I went to the far north a year ago, to visit
the mica mines of Karelia, I found a little group of
half a dozen men struggling to open a new state In-
dustry. Their bookkeeping did not tally; their sup-
plies were unaccounted for; their bookkeeper was as-
signed to wandering jobs up and down the coast,
and could not tell me what he had received or what
he had given out or to whom. They were selling
quartz and feldspar to Petrograd on such a highly
protected market that they charged many times the
cost of the same material in New York. I said:
'These are heroic people, but their industry is on an
utterly unsound foundation." . . , Now, after a
year, I learn that they borrowed a million gold
roubles from Moscow, organised their mica and
feldspar and quartz more efficiently, and have
already within a year paid back the loan of that
million.

A year ago they were boasting that the State Bank,

FORCES IN CONFLICT 243

starting with ten million dollars' worth of paper
money, had achieved a capital of twenty million in
gold. Now they are issuing chervonetz to the
amount of one hundred and twenty million, all prop-
erly covered. A year ago they were proud of- five
hundred new locomotives which had begun to restore
transport. Now they have two thousand new loco-
motives, of which fifteen hundred are in reserve.

^Two years ago they had the greatest famine of
history; last fall they exported over three million
tons of grain. Two years ago there were no ex-
ports at all; now they have again reached one-third
of prewar export, and even achieved, last year,
a favourable balance of trade, exporting ninety mil-
lion gold roubles more of goods than they purchased
abroad. In Moscow thirty-five kilometres of new
street-car line has been built out of street-car earn-
ings; every building in Moscow begun before the
war and interrupted by eight years of upheaval, is
now either finished or under contract. ,'

Russia goes steadily forward, for she has a rich
country, economically self-sufficient. And Russia has
been through bankruptcy; she admits no debt to the
past She has the disadvantages of a bankrupt; she
finds it hard to get credit. But she also has his ad-
vantages, that what she now produces, she can keep.
| She alone in Europe has broken with the past and
based her plans on the future!

In Russia they have started with wrecked build-
ings; but they owe no rent to any landlords. They
began with ruined railroads and war-devastated
fields, but they owe no mortgages or interest. They

244 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

start with bare hands on bare earth, but what they
raise is their own. These facts lie behind all Rus-
sia's discussions with the rest of Europe. Not
lightly, nor without compensating advantages in
credits, will Russia give up her immunity from debt
She has before her the sight of Germany, and is in
no haste to follow.

^Germany has skilled workmen, a tradition of hon-
esty in public office, the most orderly, thrifty and
industrious people in the world. Yet she slips stead-
ily down into ruin, dragging Europ'e with her. She
has no strength to save herself, being tangled in a
net of war obligations which cannot be untied;
which may, perhaps, be cut some day, if she has
anything sharp enough to cut it 1

Russia has inefficient workmen, traditions of graft
md mismanaged industry, a mediaeval system of
agriculture, and a war which lasted twice as long
as Germany's war. But the day after the wreck-
ing of war ended, the energies of peace began. For
nowhere in Russia was any payment to be made to
the past

*******

I have seen in these two years a many-sided con-
flict I have seen graft honey-combing whole depart*
ments. On the Murmansk line most of the sleep-
ing compartments were pre-empted by train officials,
who exacted little bribes in addition to the regular,
fare, before they surrendered them. In the trans-
port of goods from textile towns to Moscow, the
way was sprinkled with little tips to station officials
"for writing the papers on time," or "for NOT de-

FORCES IN CONFLICT 245

taching the car from the train." Private merchants
were handing money to workers in the Housing De-
partment, to secure favoured locations quickly.

And again I have seen sudden announcements in
the papers that such and such officials had been at
last caught red-handed in graft and were being
brought to trial. I have read of sentences of im-
prisonment for minor graft, and even of death sen-
tences for high officials who persistently undermined
the state by this corruption. I have gone back a
year later and seen new men in the offices.

During these two years I have seen certain small
officials install themselves comfortably, and en-
trench themselves in bureaucratic methods. And I
have also seen how the Control Committee of the
Party, organised a year ago on a suggestion of
Lenin, for reorganising the state apparatus, has
reached out and taken officials from Moscow, and
sent them out to the provinces, <f or no other reason
than that they were living "too much like bour-
geois," and getting out of touch with the common
people.

So the struggle goes on; such are the forces in
conflict

Once before, a hundred and twenty-five years ago,
there was a War for Independence which we called
the American Revolution. Before the echoes ^of it
died completely away, through the decades that fol-
lowed, the western hemisphere was set free from
the dominance of Europe's imperialism. That was
a by-product merely of our separation from Eng-
land The Russian Revolution is a much vaster

246 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

thing. What effect will it have in the freeing of
Asia from foreign domination, as one of the by-
products of its struggle? That is another one of
the energies unloosed by Russia which will play
its part in the conflict.

America and Russia, these two great countries
have the main world tasks in the next generation.
They are so much alike, and yet so different; each
has what the other lacks.

America also began with vast lands of great rich-
ness. She drew to herself because of these opportu-
nities the most venturesome and energetic. sons of
earth. From their effort, on the large scale made
possible by her untouched resources, she developed
large scale production and efficient operation as has
no other nation. Her sons go back to the lands
that sent them, carrying speed, short-cuts and the
sense of organisation.

America began her vast expansion with definite
theories of liberty and democracy. She believed in
the right of each man to seize for himself freely the
resources of nature, and to compete with others to
keep what he found. ', It was the belief in those times
that so might be secured the greatest happiness of
the greatest numbed

A hundred years went by. History has a way
of reshaping our plans. The westward sweep of a
great people was not without result Something
came into the world because of America. Not the
simple, democratic dream of our fathers, based*on
access of every man to the resources of nature, But
a vast, complex industrial civilisation, the most en-

FORCES IN CONFLICT 247

ergetic and efficient on earth. Only when I, look
back at America from the disorganisation of Eu-
rope, at our compact, neat offices, our labour-sav-
ing bungalows, our easy-running machinery of indus-
try and life, do I realise what America adds to
mankind's chances of comfort Not the ultimate
gift of happiness to man, but one more weapon to
achieve it, the weapon of swift production and effi-
cient organisation, useful for good or for ill, but a
new power in the world.

Now, more than a hundred years after, Russia
starts also on a vast expansion, with fresh energies
unleashed by Revolution, over the last unoccupied
lands of the world. Resources greater even than
America's were, in forests and mines and rich black
soil. She appreciates American methods as no other
nation in Europe appreciates them; for she also has
large lands undeveloped, and space for great organ-
isation. She sees clearly in American methods the
means she needs toward the future she desires. The
other nations of Europe are entangled in conflict
and undecided in direction; but Russia is ready to
build. She knows what she wants and why.

She starts, not as America did, on the belief in
individual access to the wealth of nature, but on
the principle of collective ownership of all natural
resources, and collective operation as fast as she can
organise it She believes that common planning and
common ownership is the road to the greatest jus-
tice and the happiness of all

What will fifty years show? Or a hundred?
What unexpected pitfalls await her around the turns

248 THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

of the decades ? Surely the pioneers of America did
not expect the America of to-day, either in its great-
ness or in its disillusions. What unexpected disil-
lusions await the next generations in Russia, that no
one now can foresee? Some disillusions there will
be always. No communism in daily struggle, or in
achievement, can be quite the same that it seemed
in its first dream. Better perhaps, or worse, but
certainly different.

There is one thing Russia has already, and it is
something new in history. She has a large and or-
ganised Party of Workers, with control of vast re^
sources, planning their future social order day by
day. Working it out in detail by discussion and
action. She has behind this group the Young Com-
munist League, and behind them the Young Pioneers,
ready to be absorbed into the planning. As long as
this group lasts and maintains its character, what*
ever new things await around the turns of the road
will find it ready, to advance, to retreat, to move
sideways, to work the new event into their plan*

This is Common Consciousness in action, the first
time we have seen it. We see its awkward begin-
nings, but it may be as great in its effect on evolu-
tion as was the change from animal to man. That
earlier change meant that at last there was a creature
who could plan for a future, refusing present im-
pulse for something he wanted later, viewing life as
a whole and not as a series of disjointed moments.
Individual man does it yet very poorly, after the
lapse of ages ; but the fact that he does it at all has
enabled him to conquer the world.

FORCES IN CONFLICT 249

Now at last is also a social and economic organism
which can plan its own future, viewing life as a co-
operative whole and not as a series of individuals
competing. The thing that impresses me most about
the Communists in Russia is not their self-sacrifice,
but the ease with which they take the state-wide point
of view, unconscious of self-sacrifice. They do not
think it strange that they should put their whole lives
at the disposal of a Party, in plans for a future they
will never live to see. They do not think it heroic
any more than a man who refuses an alcoholic de-
bauch because he has work he prefers to accomplish,
prides himself on unusual virtue. Such a man thinks
not that he is heroic, but that he is sensible. The
Communists I meet who are giving their lives for
the Revolution, think not that they are heroic, but
that they are doing the sensible social thing* *

This is something really new. There have been
many revolutions ; there have been many nations that
have acted and felt as a unit under transient emo-
tions of wartime. But never has a great society in
control of a nation, organised persistently and with
common mind, the energies of peace.

Such a Common Consciousness, in control of
power and working out a common goal, this is all
we shall see of Communism in our generation. But
who, ten years ago, could have hoped to see so much?

THE END