No More Learning

"And so," he said, "I figure in the first place that
they will lose 25 per cent of their turnover from the
machines the peasants return in order to avoid pay-
ing at all. And then I don't think they can afford to
put out a fancy product like those we've seen. As to
their durability and real efficiency, we haven't had
time to judge. We can tell after this season. But as
to sales. Well, all over this country and in Esthonia
and Lithuania they keep turning up, here, one car-
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? 240 FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE
load, there one carload. It is hard to keep track of
them. "
He paused. "At any rate," he finished, "It's no
joke. "
It is just because this topic of the Soviet Union's
sale abroad of manufactured articles is so hotly de-
bated and because the evidence upon it is so likely to
be called in question that the writer has put this par-
ticular report in quotation form and attempted to
render as nearly as possible, a dictaphone account of
these first-hand findings. From another source, but
not first-hand, were obtained more data of interest.
In the first place, as to tractor sales. As far as
could be ascertained only one has been sold. And this,
apparently, will be the only one sold for awhile. Not,
however, because the Latvians did not want to buy
Soviet tractors, nor because they could not be de-
livered, but because Ford has protested against the
sale abroad of a tractor made on his blueprints and
his patents that had been licensed for use in the Red
Putilov factory at Leningrad for the manufacture of
tractors for Soviet domestic consumption, but not for
export. While Ford is still cooperating with the
Soviets under a $30,000,000 contract to supply
plans, engineers and automobile parts for the Nijny
Novgorod plant, it appears unlikely that the Soviets
should ignore his protest against the sale abroad of
Soviet model Fordsons.
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? FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE 241
Very interesting in this respect was the statement
of the salesman in the "Standartlini" store that "we
expect in six months to be selling Soviet automobiles. "
I asked, "Where from? "
"From Nijny Novgorod. "
I objected that the Nijny plant was apparently so
far behind schedule that it was hard to conceive that
they would be producing so soon, much less export-
ing Soviet Ford cars abroad.
"Well," said the salesman, "that's what we've been
told. We've been told to get ready to push Soviet au-
tomobile sales here this coming autumn. Anyway, we
are already selling Soviet sewing machines. "
"Standartlini," the implement sales concern, it ap-
pears, has been granted the territory in the three
border states, Lithuania, Latvia and Esthonia, by the
Soviet Foreign Trade Monopoly for the sale of Soviet
implements. Prices, it is said, shall be fixed at about
25 per cent below rival prices, but prices at which the
Soviet factories sell to the agents shall be such that
agents will still have a profit of at least 25 per cent.
These items of information came at second hand.
Data on turnover and actual prices charged do not
admit of doubt, coming, as they do, from both the
Soviet and their competitors. More difficult, but not
insoluble, is the problem of why the Soviet Union,
that is working so hard to supply its farms with im-
plements and is still spending considerable sums on
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? 242 FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE
the importation of implements, and especially of
tractors, should be exporting these products.
If one wishes to understand this situation and not
merely to dismiss it as too infernally paradoxical, it
is necessary to observe first, that all implements on
sale, despite their number and variety, are compara-
tively small implements suitable for use by individual
farmers on small or moderate sized farms. Even the
tractor and thresher are the smallest types of these
machines.
Now the Soviet Union has gone over definitely to
big-scale farming and on the state and collective
farms tractors of the Fordson size already are being
discarded as too small. On Gigant and Verblud, the
two huge state farms in the Northern Caucasus, they
were even complaining last autumn that ten-ton cater-
pillar tractors were scarcely up to the job of hauling
the batteries of plows or of seeders that they wanted
to use in plowing or seeding as fast as possible, on
fields comprising an area equal to the state of Rhode
Island. But the Red Putilov factory at Leningrad is
geared to turn out only the Fordson type of ten to
twenty horse-power wheel tractors. And the Lujbert-
sky factory, employing 3,600 men and geared for
small reapers and mowers, turned out 100,000 of
each last year.
From these considerations alone it is conceivable
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? FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE 243
that the Soviet authorities might consider it more
economical to sell abroad their small implements than
either to use them at home on farms that need larger
implements or to close the factories that make them or
to remodel those factories for manufacturing the
larger implements suitable for the state collective
farms. From another standpoint also, however, the
Soviet sale abroad of agricultural implements does
not appear so puzzling as at first.
The one big aim of the Five-Year Plan, beside
which all other aims sink into insignificance, is to in-
troduce into the country sufficient of the instruments
of production to be able, after the plan is completed,
to continue the process of industrialization, even if
the outside world should impose a boycott and cut off
the Soviet Union from its present sources of the in-
dispensable, fundamental, first tools of production.
Until these tools are present in sufficient quantity
within the Soviet Union, no consideration, or little
consideration, will be paid to the production of con-
sumption goods. Tractors and agricultural imple-
ments are instruments of production. They are not,
however, the sort of fundamental instruments of pro-
duction, that is, machines that make machines, that
are of most importance in the Five-Year-Plan. As
long, though, as tractors help produce grain that may
be sold abroad to buy the machines that make ma-
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? 244 FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE
chines, tractors are entitled to be regarded as primary
tools of production and, hence, should not be ex-
ported under the Five-Year Plan.
Now, however, the grain market is so depressed
that it appears plausible to reckon the more cash
might be obtained from direct sale of agricultural
implements abroad than could be obtained by the
sale abroad of the grain produced by those agricul-
tural implements. Nor does any of this argument dis-
turb the indubitable fact that the sale of these Soviet
agricultural implements in Latvia, Esthonia and
Lithuania is good propaganda and that, even if there
is something back of the window dressing, it is effec-
tive window dressing.
For American, German and Swedish manufacturers
of agricultural implements it does not make much
difference what motives lie back of the Soviet cam-
paign to sell implements abroad. That campaign has
ceased to be a mere curiosity to the representatives of
those non-Soviet concerns in this country and it is
just as difficult to try to get one of them to "laugh
off" the Five-Year Plan for Agricultural Implements
as it is to try to get an oilman to dismiss the Five-
Year Plan for Oil or a grain man to take the Five-
Year Plan for Grain on the light shoulder.
None of this should be interpreted to mean that it
is the writer's opinion or the opinion of the non-
Soviet agricultural implement agents here that the
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? FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE 245
Soviet Union in the near future is going to flood the
world with manufactured products.
It does appear, however, that anyone interested in
knowing what the Soviet Union is doing, and not in
mere ejaculations of approval or of disapproval, may
find something valuable in this view of the activities
in one small corner in Europe of one branch of the
Soviet economy.
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? CHAPTER XXII
Berlin:
Canada, Rumania, Hungarj7, Jugoslavia, Bul-
garia and Albania have all put down the equivalent
of absolute bans on the importing of Soviet goods.
Crying protests against Soviet "dumping," protests
that crescendoed to a world-wide chorus last autumn,
these six nations took the most rigorous measures that
nations can take. They closed their borders hermeti-
cally against anything from Russia, and the world,
checking off, one by one, their entrance into the
"anti-Soviet front," exclaimed that this was a
doughty blow to the economic expansion of the dan-
gerous new competitor state.
Moscow was once more aroused from chronic to
acute alarm. Fanfares of warning were blown in
every Soviet newspaper, and the proletariat of Rus-
sia and the world was called upon to make ready to
defend "the first workers' and peasants' republic. "
Newspapers elsewhere published headlines "Eu-
rope checks Soviet dumping. " Bankers thought it a
good time to put up the rates of interest on Soviet
notes, and the gentlemen of the "black bourse" added
a modest 5 or 10 per cent to their exactions from
frightened sellers of goods to the Soviet Union. If
246
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? FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE 247
Soviet exports were blocked by six nations, it meant,
did it not, that Soviet trade was in a fair way of run-
ning on the rocks, that Soviet economic expansion
was suffering a check?
It did not.
What it meant was that the Soviet Union, out of
its total exports of $500,000,000 had to find a new
outlet for $1,050,000 worth of goods, that the Soviet
Union had lost one-fifth of 1 per cent of its exports.
To Canada, the Soviet Union, in 1930, sent $500,000
worth of goods; to Rumania, $400,000; to Jugo-
slavia, $50,000; to Bulgaria, $130,000; to Hungary
and Albania, nothing. These, at any rate, were the
official exports of the Soviet Union, officially listed
and entering the country of destination with the
Soviet Union as the country of origin. Indirect Soviet
exports via other countries and the Soviet exports
under false certificates of origin cannot be counted
and would probably continue in an equal quantity
also under embargo bans.
But these were only the actual sales lost by the
Soviet Union to the six nations in question. What
were the potential sales that might have been made;
what proportion of the world's buying power was lost
by the Soviet Union through the determined meas-
ures taken by Canada, Rumania, Hungary, Jugo-
slavia, Bulgaria and Albania? Their total buying
power, as represented by their share of world imports
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? 248 FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE
in 1929, was 5 per cent of the world's total buying
power. The six countries in question imported in
1929 $1,854,000,000 in goods, but the total world
imports were $35,361,000,000. The Soviet Union,
knocking on 100 doors of 100 possible customers,
found but five shut in its face.
Nevertheless, the list of six nations was long enough
to be impressive, and when France and Belgium were
added, with their license systems imposing not em-
bargoes but certain restraints on Soviet imports,
again the world exclaimed that something serious was
being done about Soviet "dumping. " The results of
the French and Belgian license systems and their al-
most complete failure to exercise even a check on
Soviet imports have already been pointed out, but
the total effect of these measures on Soviet exports
has not yet been computed.
This computation, however, shows that if French
and Belgian purchases from the Soviet Union con-
tinue during the whole year under their license sys-
tems as they have developed in the first five months of
those systems the total Soviet exports to those coun-
tries will have fallen off in the case of France by
$5,000,000; in the case of Belgium, by $2,000,000.
Which means that the Soviet Union, losing $7,000,-
000 in exports, will have lost, by reason of the re-
strictions placed by these two countries upon Soviet
trade, a total of 1. 4 per cent of its total exports. These
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? FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE 249
losses from France and Belgium added to those from
the six countries that laid down complete embargoes
would mean that the Soviet Union had lost a grand
total of 1. 6 per cent of all its exports, unless it found
other takers for this amount of goods.
Furthermore, in suffering even a partial restric-
tion on its sales to France and Belgium, the Soviet
Union has suffered a partial restriction on sales to
countries that, important as they are in world trade,
represented only 9 per cent of the world's purchasing
power, or imports of $3,268,000,000 in 1929 out of a
world total of $35,000,000,000. If the Soviet Union,
however, were disconsolate over even so infinitesimal
a setback in its opportunities of trade, the prospect
would appear much more cheerful upon contempla-
tion of England, Germany, Italy, Austria, Denmark,
Norway, Finland, Latvia and Esthonia.
These nine countries present 31 per cent of the
total buying power of the world. In 1929 they im-
ported $11,769,000,000. And these nine countries
not only have not done anything, and are not doing
anything, and most probably will not do anything to
check Soviet imports, bat, by putting the financial
guarantees of their Governments back of trade with
the Soviets, are doing, and probably will continue to
do, everything possible to encourage trade with the
Soviets.
While headlines were large over every accession to
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? 250 FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE
the ranks of those countries that had embargoed
Soviet trade, few, even among those most interested
in Soviet affairs, noted that from year to year, al-
most from month to month, the number increased of
those countries which were guaranteeing Soviet
credit and thus not only expressing governmental be-
lief that trade with the Soviet Union was a profitable
affair good for national economy but expressing, in a
certain sense, their official belief in the solvency of
the Soviet Government and their official faith in its
capacity and willingness to meet its obligations.
Every one of the nine countries named have systems
of export credits, in some cases intended to insure
trade with any foreign country, and in some cases in-
tended to insure trade only with the Soviet Union,
but in all cases operating chiefly to insure trade with
the Soviet Union. These credit guarantees usually
cover 75 per cent of the total amount of Soviet obliga-
tions, insuring sellers of goods to the Soviet Union
that the Government will pay three-fourths of a bill
owed by the Soviet Union if the Soviet Union were to
fail to pay. From these nine countries the Soviet
Union bought in 1930 39 per cent of its total pur-
chases abroad.
This is a generous percentage, it would seem, yet,
curiously enough, the export credit systems of these
nine countries have been accompanied by a much
greater import of Soviet goods into their territories
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? FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE 251
than an export of their goods into Soviet territory.
Whether there is any causal connection or not may
be difficult to establish, but it is interesting to observe
that, whereas these nine countries sold $193,000,000
worth of goods to the Soviet Union in 1930, they
bought from the Soviet Union $340,000,000 worth.
The Soviet Union spent 39 per cent of its total funds
available for purchases abroad on purchases from
these nine countries, but of all the Soviet Union's
sales abroad 67 per cent went to these countries.
An export credit system, granting government
guarantees on the sales by its citizens to the Soviet
Union, may be interpreted in a way as an expression
of good will toward the Soviet Union, or, at any rate,
as an expression of a desire to improve trade rela-
tions. Curiously enough, however, those countries,
that grant such governmental guarantees, enjoy but
39 per cent of the Soviet Union's total purchases and
buy from the Soviet Union two-thirds of all Soviet
Union exports.
However that may be, a more important conclu-
sion from this analysis of Soviet foreign trade is that,
while cries against "Soviet dumping" were making
the World's economic welkin ring and while some ob-
servers noted with satisfaction that Europe was tak-
ing adequate measures, these measures, when added
up, result in the following balance: The Soviet Union
lost 1. 6 per cent of its total exports.
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? 252 FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE
It was effectively debarred from submitting its
goods to 5 per cent of the world's purchasing power.
It was ineffectively debarred from presenting its
goods to another 9 per cent of the world's purchasing
power. It was encouraged to present its goods to 31
per cent of the world's purchasing power, while na-
tions representing 55 per cent of the world's purchas-
ing power did nothing one way or another officially
to influence Soviet trade, but continued privately to
do normal business.
All of the countries that put effective embargoes on
Soviet goods were countries with no diplomatic re-
lations with the Soviet Union, most of them were
countries with long standing political grudges against
the Soviet Union, and all were countries that really
suffered from Soviet exports, not in their home mar-
kets to any important extent, but in their foreign
markets. Special political differences and historical
reasons made it easy for Rumania, Hungary, Bul-
garia, Jugoslavia and Albania to cut off Soviet trade.
In Rumania, the question of Bessarabia has re-
sulted in a permanent state of latent war between the
two nations. One of the world's great rivers, the
Dniester, separates Rumania from Russia. It is not
so wide but that a row boat can cross it in half an
hour.
But so wide are the political differences of the
two countries that a Rumanian citizen who wishes to
visit a relative just across the river, five miles away,
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? FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE 253
has to travel about four thousand miles to reach his
relative's home. Quick-triggered sentries guard the
river on both sides and hardly a week passes without
report of some incautious citizen meeting death in
an attempt to slip across. This risk leads most Ru-
manians to prefer to travel to Berlin and wait there
weeks or months on the improbable chance of getting
a Soviet visum which, when obtained, will permit them
to enter Russia by way of Nigorelye, thence to Mos-
cow and down to the Soviet side of the Dniester River.
The Soviet Union still claims Bessarabia and has
repeatedly declared it will never relinquish the claim.
It was Rumanian until 1812, when Czar Alexander I
seized it for Russia. The Rumanians, therefore, ar-
gued in 1918 that they were only reoccupying Ru-
manian territory when their troops took possession
of Bessarabia. In 1924 a Russian-Rumanian con-
ference was held in Vienna in an attempt to come to
some agreement, but after sharp conflicts the con-
ference broke up without results. The two countries
living now on the worst possible terms have never had
any trade save that of smugglers. The Rumanian
Government's decree last year against imports of
Russian goods was merely a gesture emphasizing this
long established fact.
More threatening to Soviet trade was Rumania's
recent attempt to bar the Danube to Soviet cargoes.
The Soviet Union, however, appealing to the Euro-
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? 254 FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE
pean Danube Commission, established to guarantee
freedom of navigation on that river, obtained a ver-
dict ordering Rumania to open traffic to Soviet boats.
With this decision Rumania lost her only chance ef-
fectively to influence Soviet trade.
Rumania has as many reasons to wish to retaliate
against the Soviet Union as any other country, for
in addition to her territorial quarrel and historical
differences, she has suffered from Soviet competition
in three categories: oil, lumber and grain, the three
largest Soviet exports and the three largest Ru-
manian exports. All this competition, however, takes
place in foreign markets over which Rumania has no
control, so that her efforts at reprisal remain futile.
Hungary's quarrel with the Soviet Union is essen-
tially based on international political reasons in a
country that will never forget during this genera-
tion the five months of its own Soviet regime under
Bela Kun. The so-called "white terror," that for two
years took the place of Kun's red variety, left a
habit of mind that still governs Hungarian views of
the Soviet Union. Hungary went on the principle that
the Bolsheviks had at least taught their opponents
one thing: that by far the most effective method of
disposing of one's enemies is physically to destroy
them. This system effectually removed most of Hun-
gary's domestic "red menace" during the first years
of the "white terror" and, while now there are few
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? FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE 255
death sentences passed on Communists, hundreds
have been sent to prison for long terms during the
last few years. Fear of Bolshevism, and not of Bol-
shevik trade, has been dominant in Hungary's atti-
tude toward the Soviet Union, and the Government's
decree last March requiring licenses for the import
of Soviet goods was also only a gesture confirming
the fact that Soviet trade is virtually non-existent.
Unlike the case in France and Belgium, the Hun-
garian license system operated as a real embargo, for
the Government reports that, since its inauguration,
not a single application has been received for a license
to import Soviet goods. With its license system Hun-
gary, too, had hoped to do what it could to strike a
blow at the Soviet Union out of resentment at Soviet
competition in grain in Hungary's markets abroad.
The sole effect of the license system, however, has
been to eliminate the Soviet purchases of Hungarian
livestock that, in 1930, amounted to $125,000. Mean-
while, Italy, the great patron of Soviet trade and the
patron, too, of Hungary, has been bringing pressure
on Budapest, not only to withdraw the restrictions
on Soviet imports, but to establish good commercial
relations with Moscow. While these efforts have been
going on, Italian dealers manage to ship a considera-
ble quantity of Soviet products into Hungary under
false certificates of origin.
For Jugoslavia, too, it cost no heart searching to
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? 256 FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE
cut off Soviet trade. Historically, Jugoslavia, a de-
voted protege of the Russian Czars, is no friend of
the Soviets. Czarist Russia always backed the Serbs,
backed them, indeed, into the great war. A common
religion ties the Serbians with the orthodox Russians,
but not with the atheist Russian Bolsheviks. These
sentiments rendered Jugoslavia hospitable to Czarist
emigres and Wrangel's army was for a long time
quartered there.
With no official relations of any kind between the
two countries and with almost no trade, it was again
rather a futile gesture when Jugoslavia decreed a ban
on Soviet products. The ban stopped official Soviet
exports to Jugoslavia of $50,000 yearly, but re-
ports from Susak, the Jugoslav half of Fiume, have
it that, through Fiume, Italian merchants send Soviet
goods to at least that value into Jugoslavia, also
under false certificates of origin.
The fourth of the Balkan quintet against Soviet
trade is little Bulgaria, too poor to have much trade
in any case, but too thoroughly frightened of the
Communists within her borders to permit any sort of
contact with the Soviet Union. Albania, included for
the sake of completeness, has an odd reason for not
doing business with the Soviet Union.
Indirectly, the present King Zog owes his crown
to Moscow. Zog's predecessor, pious, pink Bishop
Fan Noli, was about to recognize the Soviet Govern-
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? FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE 257
ment and the great Powers looked with much dis-
favor upon what they thought would be equivalent to
Moscow's gaining a foothold on the Adriatic. Out of
these considerations the Powers gave their permission
to Zog to make a "revolution," overthrow Fan Noli
and set up a kingdom. There is, therefore, no per-
ceptible inclination on the part of Zog to do business
with the Soviets.
This completes the roster of European nations that
have taken any effective measures to keep out Soviet
imports. But in the Balkans alone the loss of the
Soviet Union in these five nations of $1,050,000 in
goods is more than compensated by the Soviet trade
with Greece. The only Balkan nation that has given
diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union, Greece,
buys an average of $2,000,000 worth of Soviet goods
a year and, lacking within her own territory the goods
the Soviet Union has to offer, Greece takes the atti-
tude toward Soviet "dumping" that the lower the
prices, the better for Greek consumers. Her imports
from the Soviet Union are chiefly grain and she is so
glad to get that cheaply, that she raises no protest at
the fact she sells to the Soviet Union only a yearly
bill of around $30,000 worth of miscellaneous prod-
ucts.
When Austria, Czecho-Slovakia and Poland are
taken into consideration, the Soviet trade with these
countries is so large and is growing so rapidly that
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? 258 FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE
the importance of anti-Soviet embargoes in the out-
spokenly unfriendly Balkan states becomes nil. Aus-
tria is one of the governments that guarantee Soviet
credit. Her trade balance with the Soviets is active.
In 1930 she sold $3,000,000 worth of goods to the
Soviet Union and bought $2,000,000 in goods from
the Soviet Union.
Once, and only once, did Austria make a motion
toward restraining Soviet trade. It supplied in minia-
ture a perfect example of the sort of thing that has
constantly recurred in the Soviet Union's commercial
relationships with other and larger countries. Under
the influence of the clerical journals of Vienna,
which in turn, had been impressed by the Vatican's
manifestoes against the Godless Muscovites, the Aus-
trian Minister of Agriculture, a young, enthusiastic
man, suddenly issued a decree forbidding the import
of Russian eggs. The poultrymen and clericals ap-
plauded, but the Soviet foreign trade representative
countered with telephone messages to all Austrian in-
dustrialists, to whom the Soviet Union had given or-
ders for machines, telling them that their orders were
canceled.
Dumbfounded, they asked why. The Soviet repre-
sentative replied, "You don't take our eggs, we don't
take your machines. " In precisely twenty-four hours
the Minister of Agriculture withdrew his ban on
Russian eggs and nothing has since occurred to mar
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? FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE 259
the Austro-Soviet commercial harmony. With full
diplomatic relations, the two countries look back upon
their egg quarrel as one of the most serious of their
differences.
Between the Soviet Union and Czecho-Slovakia
exist formally cool de facto but not de jure relations,
but, commercially, very lively connections. No pro-
test against Soviet "dumping" has been raised in
Czecho-Slovakia because the chief Czecho-Slovakian
imports from the Soviet Union are petroleum prod-
ucts, which compete not with Czecho-Slovakian
products but with those of foreign oil countries.
It is worth noting that the Czech friendship for her
Little Entente ally, Rumania, has not prevented her
from buying Soviet petroleum in preference to that
of her political friend. The Czechs are also grateful
for the fact that the Soviet Union buys about $9,500,-
000 worth of her products, while the Soviet Union
sells about $1,000,000 less per year to Czecho-
slovakia.
Poland, most important of all the countries under
consideration here and quite unique in her relation-
ship to the Soviet Union, deserves a whole chapter.
Suffice it is to say, Poland is the one country in Eu-
rope which, even more than Rumania, is under per-
manent Soviet suspicion and is constantly being
charged by Moscow with plotting war.
Poland ended its last war with the Soviet Union
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? 260 FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE
just ten years ago and the Kremlin has lain awake at
the dawn of every spring, listening to Pilsudski
sharpening his saber. Yet Poland today is discussing
a bill to follow the example of so many European
governments and guarantee Soviet credits, and Po-
lish industrialists are vying with their German col-
leagues in singing the praises of a Five-Year Plan
that bring such welcome orders.
These orders have wrought a marvelous change in
Warsaw's attitude. Since they began, two years ago,
border incidents have ceased and quiet has settled on
the Pripet marshes. Last year Poland sold Russia
$15,000,000 in goods and bought only $5,000,000 in
goods and cheered the active balance.
This year a group of Polish industrialists visited
the Soviet Union and returned with promises of more
orders. Details for the realization of these promises
are being worked out. Meanwhile, cynical Berlin
newspapers, which are not, however, cynical when the
same observations might be made of Germans take
pleasure in relating an illuminating tale concerning
Pan Wierzbicki, director of the Federation of Polish
Industry, Finance and Commerce and leader of the
Polish delegation to view the Five-Year Plan. Pan
Wierzbicki, magnate of parts and a conservative
Pole and with all of a conservative Pole's profound
distrust of the Soviet Union, experienced a conversion
when he arrived in Moscow and found Soviet orders
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? FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE 261
waiting in profusion for his factories. Full of en-
thusiasm, he visited a small Russian village where,
incognito, he attended a conference of peasants dis-
cussing the necessity of ordering machines. Wierz-
bicki, master of the Russian language, joined in the
discussion eloquently. Whereupon as he finished his
speech, the peasants rose as one man and cried, "Let's
elect this comrade chairman. " "Comrade Wierzbicki"
and his colleagues report that the Soviet Union will
buy $20,000,000 worth from Poland by the end of
this year.
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? CHAPTER XXIII
Berlin:
A race, a sweepstakes, is deciding today the destiny
of Europe. The race is between the "tempo" of the
Soviet Union's Five-Year Plan and the "tempo" of
this continent's efforts to organize a United States
of Europe. The Five-Year Plan so far is a length
ahead.
This is the German formulation of the meaning of
the Five-Year Plan for Europe. It is of course not
every German's formulation. It is only one German's
formulation, printed in the most remarkable series
of articles on the Five-Year Plan that has appeared
in the German press since the plan passed its two-
year mark, a series printed in the Berliner Tageblatt
under the pseudonym "Z. "
Herr "Z" whoever he may be, while retaining his
anonymity has achieved among informed circles in
this country an influence that justifies calling his
opinion "the German formulation. "
His anonymity is worth pausing to consider for it
throws a most instructive light upon the German at-
titude toward the Soviet Union. For the fact of the
matter is that no "bourgeois" German can yet afford
to write under his own name in the non-Communist
?
262
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? FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE 263
press of Germany that the Five-Year Plan is suc-
ceeding. That bare admission with no conclusions
and no prophecies is much too great a risk in a coun-
try that has seventy-seven Communists in a Reichstag
of 589 members.
It is much too great a risk in a country whose in-
dustrialists believe they may safely deliver machines
to Russians because Russians won't know how to use
them. It is much too great a risk for a country whose
government since 1922 has based its entire foreign
policy upon the hope that the Soviet Union may grow
strong enough to frighten France but not so strong
that it may injure Germany.
In Italy, in France and in England they all say
today, "Germany is next in line. Let Germany
worry. " Prime Minister MacDonald put it crystal
clear in his recent address to Parliament: "If there
were any trouble Germany would be in trouble, would
be involved and whirling in the maelstrom long before
we either at home or abroad would be involved. "
This Germany knows better than England, France
or Italy, but, as one observer of this country's foreign
policy has said, Germany's answer is, "If my house
catches fire so will that of my neighbor, France. I
want to make friends with my neighbor and go into
partnership with him. But my neighbor is afraid of
me and won't take me into partnership on my terms.
Therefore I will feed this fire on the other side of me
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? 264 FIGHTING THE RED TRADE MENACE
until my neighbor becomes so frightened of the fire
reaching his house that he will make friends with me
and take me into partnership on my terms. I hope
this will happen before the fire really sets my own
house ablaze. "
This simile has flaws and is too simple to fit all the
facts, especially since there are economists, business-
men and statesmen beyond reproach of Bolshevism
who declare that the fire is not a fire to burn down
houses but one to warm world trade. Nevertheless, it
is a simile as good as any other for an explanation of
the intricate relationship between Germany and the
Soviet Union on one hand, and Germany and France
on the other hand. It explains why Germany watches
the progress of the Five-Year Plan more closely than
any other country in Europe does. It also explains
why Germany does not want to admit that the Five-
Year Plan is going ahead too fast and hopes that
France will see the light before the paint on Ger-
many's house begins to scorch.
Finally, it explains why the leaders of German
foreign policy are more disturbed today at the recent
French overtures to Moscow than at all of France's
protests against the Austro-German customs union.
For if France too begins to feed the fire what becomes
of the chance that France may eventually, from fear
of the Soviet Union capitulate to German terms?
Today, too, Germany has an added anxiety. She
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