The obvious truth is that Soviet Russia, like the
United States, Great Britain or Mexico, is a mixture of
good and bad, of noteworthy accomplishments and dis-
tressing failures and a sincere striving for future better-
25
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United States, Great Britain or Mexico, is a mixture of
good and bad, of noteworthy accomplishments and dis-
tressing failures and a sincere striving for future better-
25
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Soviet Union - 1952 - Soviet Civilization
S.
embassies for both valuable social
contacts and news tips, are likely to see to it that what
they write is not offensive to the State Department and its
diplomatic representatives. This consideration has loomed
larger and larger in recent years because of the Passport
Division's tendency to refuse or revoke the passports of
Americans who are critical of U. S. foreign policy. If many
American foreign correspondents become dependable pro-
pagandists for their country's foreign policy, that fits in
well with Secretary of State Dean Acheson's encourage-
ment of what he has described as "total diplomacy. "
American newspapers revel in printing, over and
over again, the most fantastic rumors so long as they are
calculated to fan anti-Soviet sentiment. During the sum-
mer of 1946 there were repeated dispatches in the press
that the Soviet army was shooting long-distance rocket
bombs over Sweden and other European countries. As
these rumors multiplied, reports came in that rocket
missiles had also been seen flaming through the night in
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
France, Greece and Italy. Editorials began to appear
denouncing these new acts of "Soviet aggression. " On
September 24, William Henry Chamberlin, who had
often posed as a scholarly authority on Soviet affairs,
wrote a perfectly serious article in the New York Journal
American in which he charged that the Red Army had
been firing the bombs from a base on the Baltic Sea and
thereby threatening world peace.
On October 2 the whole mid-summer's madness col-
lapsed when some Swedish astronomers issued a statement
that the so-called rockets were meteorites pure and simple.
It was further pointed out that the annual meteor showers
usually reached their climax during August just when
the rocket rumors were at their peak. This entire episode
constitutes an excellent example of how easily mass fear
and hysteria of an anti-Soviet character, when stimulated
by an unscrupulous press, can spread. It pointed to the
possibility of an uninformed and gullible public becom-
ing so aroused over a false and cooked-up charge of Soviet
aggression that actual war might result.
Of course the most horrendous mistake of all result-
ing from American ignorance and prejudice concerning
Soviet Russia -- and one that was completely exposed by
events -- occurred over the crucial matter of Soviet resist-
ance to the Nazi invasion in World War II. During those
early summer days of 1941 when Hitler's mechanized
legions surged over the Soviet border with the supposi-
tion that they would smash the Russians in a brief blitz-
krieg, the press and public opinion in the United States
overwhelmingly supported the idea that the Germans
would win decisively within three weeks or six weeks or
three months at most. The Nazis, as several commentators
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? OH EVALUATING SOVIET RUSSIA
put it, were going to slice through the Soviet defense "as
a knife through butter. "
In March, 1941, Mr. Walter Lippmann had said, in
his column "Today and Tomorrow" in the New York
Herald Tribune, that the Nazis would find the Soviet
Union "easy to conquer and well worth conquering. "
By September he had changed his mind and with some
asperity wrote: "In the first days of July . . . it was the
almost unanimous conviction of our staff officers that the
Germans had already broken through the Russian de-
fenses and disorganized the Russian army, that a gigantic
Russian military disaster was in the making, that the
Russian regime would collapse and be replaced by one
under German control, and that Hitler would have
finished with Russia at the latest sometime in Septem-
ber. "8 Only a handful of American observers held with
me that the Soviets were strong enough to resist Hitler
successfully and ultimately to defeat him.
Coming back to the theme of American facilities for
learning about the Soviet Union, I contend that in spite
of everything, reliable information concerning that coun-
try is and has been available in the United States. A few
American newspapers publish the texts of official state-
ments by the Soviet Government. There are frequent
news stories about conditions within the U. S. S. R. which,
however angled they may be, cannot conceal altogether
the progress that the Soviet people have made. The big
news services -- Associated Press, United Press and Inter-
national News Service -- as well as a paper like The New
York Times, have their own correspondents in Moscow.
Weekly journals of opinion such as The Nation and the
New Republic contain special reports and analyses of real
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? SOVIET CIVILTZATIOH
value concerning Soviet affairs. And monthlies such as
Harper's and The Atlantic Monthly occasionally run
good articles about the Soviet Union.
For nineteen years, 1932-1951, the illustrated month-
ly Soviet Russia Today, the only American magazine
that has concentrated entirely on the U. S. S. R. , provided
a mine of information regarding Soviet affairs under the
able editorship of Miss Jessica Smith. In 1951 it became
the New World Review, covering not only the Soviet
Union, but also the Communist countries of Eastern
Europe and the Far East.
For twenty-five years beginning in 1926 the recog-
nized center of information and research on Soviet Russia
in the United States was the American Russian Institute
of New York City, with its scholarly quarterly, The
American Review on the Soviet Union. At its head-
quarters there was readily available to students, writers
and the general public a large collection of books, period-
icals and clippings relating to both Tsarist and Soviet
Russia. Since the Institute's demise in 1950, its valuable
collection has been acquired by the Library for Inter-
cultural Studies. American Russian Institutes continue
to function in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The vigorous National Council of American-Soviet
Friendship, through its meetings and publications, has
also done much to spread knowledge of the Soviet Union.
For this crime of attempting to make known the truth
about the U. S. S. R. the Attorney General of the United
States, granting no hearing and possessing no justification,
put the National Council on his list of "subversive" or-
ganizations. The Council contested this listing by bring-
ing suit; and in April, 1951, the U. S. Supreme Court
ruled that the Attorney General must present in court
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? OH EVALUATIHG SOVIET RUSSIA
adequate reasons for listing the group as subversive and
thus crippling its activities.
For many years the Soviet Embassy in Washington
published the semi-monthly U. S. S. R. Information Bul-
letin, to which anyone could subscribe and which printed
a great deal of useful official data emanating from Soviet
sources. The Soviet Government, however, is bound by
its agreement not to attempt the spread of propaganda in
the United States; and this is a major reason why it does
not, like so many other foreign governments, maintain
a general information bureau on American soil. The
British Library of Information, for instance, with head-
quarters in New York City, has been in existence for
more than twenty-five years and has branches in three
American cities. Its annual budget comes to approxi-
mately $1,000,000.
The American counterpart of the Soviet Embassy
Bulletin was Amerika, a colorful illustrated monthly
about life in the United States published, beginning in
1944, by the International Information Administration
of the U. S. State Department. Amerika was sold on
news-stands in the big Soviet cities and reached a top
circulation of 50,000 copies. In July, 1952, the State
Department closed down this magazine and simultane-
ously ordered the Soviet Embassy to discontinue publica-
tion of the Bulletin, with its circulation of 15,000, and
any supplementary pamphlets and periodicals. The
American Government took this latter step as a retalia-
tory measure on the grounds, primarily, that the circu-
lation of Amerika had fallen to 13,000 due to restrictions
imposed by the Soviet Government. But there was no
proof that the Soviet authorities had directly intervened
in the manner charged. And the action of the Truman
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
Administration seemed neither wise nor conducive to
international understanding.
Also tending to refute the claim that a solid, Soviet-
erected Iron Curtain keeps the people of the U. S. S. R.
from learning the truth about the United States was the
publication in Moscow in 1946, in a second edition of
90,000 copies, of a Soviet handbook on the U. S. A. entitled
The United States of America, first issued in 1942. Edited
by a group of four Soviet scholars, this 576-page work
included an elaborate statistical and analytical survey of
American geography and economy, sections on American
history, government, the armed forces and foreign pos-
sessions, and a summary of the American cultural scene.
There were occasional errors in the statistics, but on the
whole the figures were substantially accurate. The volume
did not attempt to compare the U. S. A. and the U. S. S. R.
Its severest criticisms were reserved for the American
press. As Paul H. Aron of the Sarah Lawrence faculty
wrote in the scholarly American Slavic and East Euro-
pean Review: "The over-all picture of our country which
a Soviet citizen would derive from this book is distinctly
favorable. . . . The book can in no sense be classified as
anti-American propaganda, and the dominant note seems
to be one of impartiality. "9
So much printed material comes into America from
the Soviet Union that in 1948 the Library of Congress
started to publish each month a substantial document
called Monthly List of Russian Accessions. This itemizes
under seventeen different section headings, ranging from
Fine Arts to Medicine to Political Science, the publica-
tions received by the Library itself and a group of co-
operating public and university libraries in the United
States. A typical copy of this List, the issue of January,
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? ON EVALUATING SOVIET RL/SSIA
1952, contains no less than 621 Soviet items -- 453 for
books and monographs, 168 for periodicals.
In February of 1949 the Joint Committee on Slavic
Studies, appointed by the American Council of Learned
Societies and the Social Science Research Council, began
weekly publication of the Current Digest of the Soviet
Press. Its headquarters is near Columbia University in
New York City. This Digest translates, prints in full or
condenses the more important articles and news items
from over forty of the leading Soviet newspapers and
magazines. These include the two most authoritative
dailies, Pravda (Truth), leading organ of the Communist
Party, and Izvestia (News), official organ of the Govern-
ment, as well as periodicals concerned with some special
field, such as The Whistle, newspaper of the railroads;
Red Star, the army daily; Labor, organ of the trade
unions; Culture and Life, dealing with the arts; Soviet
Music; Soviet Education; Problems of Philosophy; and
the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, dealing with the
Russian Orthodox Church. This Current Digest of the
Soviet Press, presenting every week an enormous amount
of information and opinion from Soviet sources, alone
disproves the charge that an impenetrable Iron Curtain
prevents foreigners from knowing what is taking place in
the Soviet Union.
American colleges and universities, since the United
States and Soviet Russia fought as allies against world
fascism, have increasingly expanded curriculum facilities
for teaching the Russian language and have established
numerous courses of a general character on Soviet affairs.
Pioneering in the Soviet field was Cornell University
with its Intensive Study of Contemporary Russian Civil-
ization during the summer semesters of 1943 and 1944.
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
Professor Ernest J. Simmons, outstanding authority on
Russian literature, was the Director and moving spirit
of this Intensive Study, which included five basic courses:
The History of Russia and the Soviet Union; Soviet
Government and International Relations; Soviet Eco-
nomics; Soviet Social Institutions and Life; and Soviet
Literature.
Professor Simmons later became head of the Depart-
ment of Slavic Languages at Columbia University and
helped to initiate Columbia's new Russian Institute,
modeled after the Cornell experiment and set up on a
permanent basis in 1946 with the aid of a $250,000 grant
from the Rockefeller Foundation. Other educational
institutions such as Harvard, Leland Stanford, Yale and
the University of California have developed in a some-
what similar fashion staffs concentrating on Soviet civili-
zation.
Serious students wishing to learn about Soviet affairs
under competent direction can find plenty of opportunity
today in America. And writers on the U. S. S. R. continue
to be overwhelmed by the amount of factual material
on the subject. In general where there is a will to under-
stand the Soviet Union, there is a way.
3. Some Standards of Judgment
It is not necessary to be an expert on the subject of the
Soviet Union in order to have sound opinions about that
country. It is my contention that the average literate
person in America can, through judicious reading, listen-
ing and thinking, reach valid judgments concerning
Soviet Russia, Great Britain, China, Spain or almost any
other foreign nation. Since the First World War and
even more since the Second, the American voter has
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? OH EVALUATIHG SOVIET RUSSIA
needed a considerable understanding of United States
foreign policy and world affairs, in order to cast his ballot
intelligently in elections that involve issues of foreign
relations. What I am saying is that to do this he does not
himself have to be an international expert, either in rela-
tion to the U. S. S. R. or other lands or the world as a
whole.
The objective study of Soviet affairs, like the study
of anything else, requires reliance on the method of
reason in seeking out the facts and in reaching depend-
able conclusions. The method of reason implies not only
great diligence in distinguishing the true from the false,
but also a comprehensive evaluation. In line with this
approach, I wish to suggest a few general propositions
which it is well to keep in mind in attempting adequately
to assess Soviet life. These propositions are closely inter-
related and are to some extent overlapping, but each
bears on distinguishable aspects of the subject.
First of all, I believe we should recognize the simple
point that Soviet Russia is neither a heaven nor a hell.
The U. S. S. R. is such a controversial topic and evokes
such passionate reactions that many Americans tend to
think of that vast country in terms of either all black or
all white. The fanatical Russia-haters maintain that the
Soviet Union is a veritable hell on earth; the fanatical
Soviet-worshippers maintain that it is paradise itself
finally come into being on this terrestrial globe. The
intelligent and common-sense approach does not fall into
either of these extremes.
The obvious truth is that Soviet Russia, like the
United States, Great Britain or Mexico, is a mixture of
good and bad, of noteworthy accomplishments and dis-
tressing failures and a sincere striving for future better-
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
ment. The U. S. S. R. is an enormous country of continen-
tal dimensions with an immense population and a thou-
sand and one different aspects of development. Yet num-
berless Americans have gone to the Soviet Union and
apparently seen nothing but the defects of the socialist
system in process of evolution there. They return to the
United States and write exaggerated books or articles
depicting Soviet Russia as one horrible bottomless pit
of grinding poverty and grueling dictatorship, economic
inefficiency and human misery.
Some of their observations have a factual basis, but
they neglect entirely to give the other side, the positive
side of Soviet life which has resulted in such tremendous
achievements over the third of a century since 1917.
Unfortunately the altogether negative picture that such
observers give of the U. S. S. R. has been eagerly seized
upon and accepted by the majority of the people in the
United States and other capitalist countries. This biased
and false viewpoint has been the prevailing one outside
of Soviet Russia and has been responsible for an infinite
amount of misunderstanding.
On the other hand, there are those Americans who
visit the Soviet Union and seemingly have an eye only
for its good points. They come back to the United States
and, forgetting or overlooking the many and serious
shortcomings of the new Soviet civilization, talk as if the
Russians had already achieved the millennium. Now
these observers who insist that Soviet Russia has become
some sort of Utopia are not only unrealistic; they are also
more Russian than the Russians, who themselves are
often extremely critical, particularly in comments in their
press, concerning conditions within their country.
The enthusiasts who believe that the long-sought
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? OH EVALUATIHG SOVIET RUSSIA
heaven-on-earth of human hopes and ideals has come
to pass in the Soviet Union present a one-sided viewpoint
and also build up false expectations. They stimulate
others to visit the U. S. S. R. with the notion that they will
find there the practically perfect state. When these others
make the trip, they see that existence in Soviet Russia
is still pretty difficult, that living standards are quite
low and that the Communists are a tough-minded group
of revolutionaries hard on both themselves and others.
Frequently the paradise-seekers, with their religious
psychology, become quickly disillusioned, leave the
U. S. S. R. with their naive hopes blasted and forthwith
take a bitter, anti-Soviet attitude. On their return to
the United States they find a ready market for articles,
books and lectures which denounce the Soviet Union
and all its works. This pattern repeats itself again and
again; and it is easily discernible in the very titles of
anti-Soviet best-sellers such as Assignment in Utopia by
Eugene Lyons and The Dream We Lost by Freda Utley.
It seems to me that in order to avoid the extremes
which I have been describing, we ought to take a middle-
of-the-road position which gives honest consideration to
both the defects and virtues of the U. S. S. R. For instance,
I believe that Soviet Russia, for various reasons that I
shall comment on later, still lags lamentably behind the
United States in the development of civil liberties and
political democracy, notwithstanding grave American
shortcomings and backslidings in these fields. On the
other hand, the Soviet Russians have forged far ahead
of America in the establishment of ethnic equality and
racial democracy among the many different minority
nationalities and races that live within the far-flung
borders of the U. S. S. R. Anti-Semitism and other forms
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATIOH
of racial prejudice and discrimination have almost en-
tirely disappeared in Soviet Russia. It would be possible
to make a number of other comparisons between Ameri-
can and Soviet life, some of them favorable to the U. S. A. ,
some of them favorable to the U. S. S. R.
It is folly to be either completely condemnatory of
Soviet civilization or completely uncritical of it. Specific
criticisms of Soviet institutions and policies are often jus-
tified; what we must object to are general obsessions
about Soviet Russia resulting in denunciation of practi-
cally everything Soviet and an automatic finding that the
U. S. S. R. is always wrong. Through the jaundiced eyes of
the Russia-haters what ordinarily would be regarded as
a virtue is interpreted as a vice when it manifests itself
in Soviet life. These fanatics, when during World War
II Soviet troops demonstrated signal bravery in fighting
the Nazis to the death and in refusing to surrender even
in the most impossible circumstances, claimed that this
showed Stalinist contempt for human life and for the
worth of the individual.
Again, in a book, Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority,
published in 1951, the author, Miss Margaret Mead,
stresses the present re-establishment of parental author-
ity in the U. S. S. R. as compared with the early years of
the Revolution; and then surprisingly treats this unsur-
prising development as an undemocratic introduction
into the home of dictatorial attitudes which "bear a closer
resemblance to Stalin's relationship to every Soviet citi-
zen. "10 Yet I had thought that "Honor thy father and thy
mother" was a precept valued throughout the world and
not considered altogether outmoded even in democratic
America. Miss Mead also makes the remarkable sugges-
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? OH EVALUATING SOVIET RUSSIA
tion that the wily Russians smoke heavy pipes in order
to conceal their facial reactions. Here of course is the
key to the sinister pipe-smoking of Joseph Stalin! So it
is that those who feel psychologically compelled to con-
demn everything Soviet must likewise discover a way of
stigmatizing even innocent personal habits.
This kind of attitude tends to blame all evil in the
sphere of international affairs on Moscow. In this man-
ner the Russia-haters turn the U. S. S. R. into a convenient
scapegoat for the collective sins of mankind; and in effect
assign to it the role of the old-time devil. Professor
Phillip Marshall Brown, formerly of Princeton Univers-
ity provided a good example of what I mean in his letter
to The New York Times on February 2, 1949, in which
he attributed to Soviet Russia not only the troubles
among the Jews, the Arabs and the British in Palestine,
but also the violence and unrest in Indonesia resulting
in armed hostilities between the Netherlands Govern-
ment and the Indonesian Republic. Anyone with a mite
of information knows that seething cauldrons of local
tensions had long existed in both Palestine and Indonesia
and required no Communist intrigue to make them boil
over.
As for Europe and Asia, the blame-it-on-Russia atti-
tude overlooks, among other things, the fact that the
larger portions of these continents are still in the throes
of recovering from the most destructive war in history,
brought about by fascist aggression; and that many
peoples, trying their best to reconstruct their economies
and to remedy ills ruinous to them in the past, have
shown a leftward trend which in some degree or other
would have existed with or without the stimulus of Soviet
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATIOH
socialism. Socialist developments in Great Britain under
an anti-Soviet Labor Government lend support to this
point.
The approach that I am suggesting to the subject of
Soviet Russia gets away from the fanaticism of both the
Russo phobes and the Russo-philes. It weighs both the
pros and cons in the unceasing debate about the Soviet
Union. It attempts to assess the contributions of Soviet
Russia to international peace and to the downfall of the
fascist Axis in World War II as well as its domestic
achievements and failures. In short, this approach calls
upon us to take an over-all view of Soviet civilization
that includes a thorough and honest balance sheet of the
credits and debits in the Soviet ledger.
Secondly, we should take into constant consideration
the extraordinary complexity of the Soviet Union.
The U. S. S. R. is by far the biggest national unit on
the face of the globe, with a total area of approximately
8,597,000 square miles spreading out over two continents.
As a European country alone it is the largest in Europe
and even as an Asiatic country the largest in Asia. It is
greater in size than all of North and Central America.
It covers a territory amounting to over one-sixth of the
earth's land surface. From west to east the Soviet Union
extends more than 6,000 miles; from north to south at
the widest point more than 2,700.
Within its borders there are to be found all sorts of
climate, vegetation and animal life; and an infinite
variety and scope of basic natural resources such as min-
erals, oil, water-power, fertile soil and timber. The old
peasant proverb is indeed true: "Russia is not a country,
it is a world. " Plainly, then, the Soviet regime has been
operating in what amounts to an entire continent
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? ON EVALUATIHG SOVIET RUSSIA
rather than in one nation in the ordinary sense of the
word. The huge proportions and great natural wealth
of the Soviet Union of course carry with them preemi-
nent advantages in economic self-sufficiency and military
defense. But they also create formidable problems of
administration, transportation and general development
-- problems that go far to explain many of the troubles
that the Soviet Government has encountered during its
existence.
Another continuing complexity in Soviet Russia is
that its fast-growing population, approximately 210,000,-
000 in 1952 and outnumbered only by that of India and
China, is made up of over 170 distinguishable races,
nationalities and tribes. The ethnic minorities range
from the Baltic peoples in the northwest to the Ukraini-
ans and Moldavians in the southwest; from the Armen-
ians and the Georgians of the Transcaucasus to the
Uzbeks and Kazakhs of Central Asia; from the Tatars
and Mari of the middle Volga River to the Yakuts and
Buryat Mongolians of eastern Siberia.
The autocratic Tsarist governments oppressed the
national minorities in the extreme, attempting to impose
upon them a strict Russification and to stamp out their
native cultures. The Soviet regime reversed this policy
and established complete ethnic equality. It has had
the task of encouraging the minority languages and cul-
tures while uniting all the different peoples in the im-
mense work of building a socialist economy and state.
The existence in the U. S. S. R. of so many minority
groups, and in 1917 at so many different stages of culture,
has been a serious complicating factor.
Considering both the geographical extent and the
ethnic make-up of the Soviet Union, we see that it is
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
unique in being a great multi-national, multi-racial Eu-
rasian federation that combines European and Asiatic
peoples and cultures. Instead of a cleavage between East
and West, there is a merging of East and West. Marxism
originated in the West, in Germany; but its first actuali-
zation in state and economic forms came in a nation that
fans out from Europe clear across Asia to the Pacific
Ocean and Far East. This East-West union is a fact of
utmost significance and in itself makes the Soviet Repub-
lic harder to comprehend than a purely Western country
like England or France.
These reflections lead us to a further recognition of
complexity. In the Soviet Union there is a unique
merging not only of East and West, but of old and new.
In 1917 one of the most backward nations in the world,
economically and culturally, was Tsarist Russia. It was
hardly modern in any sense of the word. When the Com-
munists took power they immediately set out to establish
something so modern that it had never been tried before,
namely a full-fledged, nation-wide socialist society based
on Marxist principles. Marx had thought that such a
society would probably first come into being in one of
the highly industrialized states like England or Germany.
Instead it happened in the least industrialized of all the
Great Powers.
The Soviet Communists proceeded energetically and
enthusiastically with their unheard-of job, hitching a
powerful twentieth-century automobile engine, as it were,
to an antiquated horse carriage. The strange combina-
tion went ahead by fits and starts, with frequent break-
downs and numerous repairs. Gradually the Communists
succeeded in constructing a fairly adequate chassis for the
engine. The pervasive and dramatic interweaving of
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? OH EVALUATING SOVIET RUSSIA
medieval and modern and ultra-modern in the U. S. S. R.
is a phenomenon that demands the most careful analysis.
Truly the Soviet Union presents a most complex picture.
Continuing with our introductory bases of judgment,
I suggest, thirdly, that we should be aware of the histor-
ical and cultural background of Soviet Russia.
The Revolution of 1917 took place in a semi-feudal
country which had lived under Tsarist absolutism for
some 400 years. Russia had never experienced the pro-
gressive, invigorating influences of a Renaissance and
Reformation, an Enlightenment and Bourgeois Revolu-
tion. It had never gone through anything remotely re-
sembling the long evolution of democracy and civil liber-
ties characteristic of England and the United States.
While the oppressive Tsarist dictatorship, noted for the
number and cruelty of its political persecutions, made
a concession towards democracy by instituting, as a result
of the unsuccessful Revolution of 1905, the Duma or
House of Representatives, this body was soon reduced
to a parliamentary nonentity.
In 1917 approximately 85 percent of the population
were peasants engaged in agricultural pursuits and using,
for the most part, primitive methods. Only in 1861 had
the Russian peasants been legally freed from the old
medieval system of serfdom. Grafted onto an incredibly
inefficient and backward agricultural economy, there was
in 1917 a weak and spasmodically developed capitalist
industry, largely depending on foreign financing and
foreign technical management. The peasants and the
relatively small working class endured an extremely low
living standard comparable to that of India and China.
About 70 percent of the entire people were illiterate; and
enjoyment of the splendid Russian achievements in
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contacts and news tips, are likely to see to it that what
they write is not offensive to the State Department and its
diplomatic representatives. This consideration has loomed
larger and larger in recent years because of the Passport
Division's tendency to refuse or revoke the passports of
Americans who are critical of U. S. foreign policy. If many
American foreign correspondents become dependable pro-
pagandists for their country's foreign policy, that fits in
well with Secretary of State Dean Acheson's encourage-
ment of what he has described as "total diplomacy. "
American newspapers revel in printing, over and
over again, the most fantastic rumors so long as they are
calculated to fan anti-Soviet sentiment. During the sum-
mer of 1946 there were repeated dispatches in the press
that the Soviet army was shooting long-distance rocket
bombs over Sweden and other European countries. As
these rumors multiplied, reports came in that rocket
missiles had also been seen flaming through the night in
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
France, Greece and Italy. Editorials began to appear
denouncing these new acts of "Soviet aggression. " On
September 24, William Henry Chamberlin, who had
often posed as a scholarly authority on Soviet affairs,
wrote a perfectly serious article in the New York Journal
American in which he charged that the Red Army had
been firing the bombs from a base on the Baltic Sea and
thereby threatening world peace.
On October 2 the whole mid-summer's madness col-
lapsed when some Swedish astronomers issued a statement
that the so-called rockets were meteorites pure and simple.
It was further pointed out that the annual meteor showers
usually reached their climax during August just when
the rocket rumors were at their peak. This entire episode
constitutes an excellent example of how easily mass fear
and hysteria of an anti-Soviet character, when stimulated
by an unscrupulous press, can spread. It pointed to the
possibility of an uninformed and gullible public becom-
ing so aroused over a false and cooked-up charge of Soviet
aggression that actual war might result.
Of course the most horrendous mistake of all result-
ing from American ignorance and prejudice concerning
Soviet Russia -- and one that was completely exposed by
events -- occurred over the crucial matter of Soviet resist-
ance to the Nazi invasion in World War II. During those
early summer days of 1941 when Hitler's mechanized
legions surged over the Soviet border with the supposi-
tion that they would smash the Russians in a brief blitz-
krieg, the press and public opinion in the United States
overwhelmingly supported the idea that the Germans
would win decisively within three weeks or six weeks or
three months at most. The Nazis, as several commentators
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? OH EVALUATING SOVIET RUSSIA
put it, were going to slice through the Soviet defense "as
a knife through butter. "
In March, 1941, Mr. Walter Lippmann had said, in
his column "Today and Tomorrow" in the New York
Herald Tribune, that the Nazis would find the Soviet
Union "easy to conquer and well worth conquering. "
By September he had changed his mind and with some
asperity wrote: "In the first days of July . . . it was the
almost unanimous conviction of our staff officers that the
Germans had already broken through the Russian de-
fenses and disorganized the Russian army, that a gigantic
Russian military disaster was in the making, that the
Russian regime would collapse and be replaced by one
under German control, and that Hitler would have
finished with Russia at the latest sometime in Septem-
ber. "8 Only a handful of American observers held with
me that the Soviets were strong enough to resist Hitler
successfully and ultimately to defeat him.
Coming back to the theme of American facilities for
learning about the Soviet Union, I contend that in spite
of everything, reliable information concerning that coun-
try is and has been available in the United States. A few
American newspapers publish the texts of official state-
ments by the Soviet Government. There are frequent
news stories about conditions within the U. S. S. R. which,
however angled they may be, cannot conceal altogether
the progress that the Soviet people have made. The big
news services -- Associated Press, United Press and Inter-
national News Service -- as well as a paper like The New
York Times, have their own correspondents in Moscow.
Weekly journals of opinion such as The Nation and the
New Republic contain special reports and analyses of real
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? SOVIET CIVILTZATIOH
value concerning Soviet affairs. And monthlies such as
Harper's and The Atlantic Monthly occasionally run
good articles about the Soviet Union.
For nineteen years, 1932-1951, the illustrated month-
ly Soviet Russia Today, the only American magazine
that has concentrated entirely on the U. S. S. R. , provided
a mine of information regarding Soviet affairs under the
able editorship of Miss Jessica Smith. In 1951 it became
the New World Review, covering not only the Soviet
Union, but also the Communist countries of Eastern
Europe and the Far East.
For twenty-five years beginning in 1926 the recog-
nized center of information and research on Soviet Russia
in the United States was the American Russian Institute
of New York City, with its scholarly quarterly, The
American Review on the Soviet Union. At its head-
quarters there was readily available to students, writers
and the general public a large collection of books, period-
icals and clippings relating to both Tsarist and Soviet
Russia. Since the Institute's demise in 1950, its valuable
collection has been acquired by the Library for Inter-
cultural Studies. American Russian Institutes continue
to function in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The vigorous National Council of American-Soviet
Friendship, through its meetings and publications, has
also done much to spread knowledge of the Soviet Union.
For this crime of attempting to make known the truth
about the U. S. S. R. the Attorney General of the United
States, granting no hearing and possessing no justification,
put the National Council on his list of "subversive" or-
ganizations. The Council contested this listing by bring-
ing suit; and in April, 1951, the U. S. Supreme Court
ruled that the Attorney General must present in court
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? OH EVALUATIHG SOVIET RUSSIA
adequate reasons for listing the group as subversive and
thus crippling its activities.
For many years the Soviet Embassy in Washington
published the semi-monthly U. S. S. R. Information Bul-
letin, to which anyone could subscribe and which printed
a great deal of useful official data emanating from Soviet
sources. The Soviet Government, however, is bound by
its agreement not to attempt the spread of propaganda in
the United States; and this is a major reason why it does
not, like so many other foreign governments, maintain
a general information bureau on American soil. The
British Library of Information, for instance, with head-
quarters in New York City, has been in existence for
more than twenty-five years and has branches in three
American cities. Its annual budget comes to approxi-
mately $1,000,000.
The American counterpart of the Soviet Embassy
Bulletin was Amerika, a colorful illustrated monthly
about life in the United States published, beginning in
1944, by the International Information Administration
of the U. S. State Department. Amerika was sold on
news-stands in the big Soviet cities and reached a top
circulation of 50,000 copies. In July, 1952, the State
Department closed down this magazine and simultane-
ously ordered the Soviet Embassy to discontinue publica-
tion of the Bulletin, with its circulation of 15,000, and
any supplementary pamphlets and periodicals. The
American Government took this latter step as a retalia-
tory measure on the grounds, primarily, that the circu-
lation of Amerika had fallen to 13,000 due to restrictions
imposed by the Soviet Government. But there was no
proof that the Soviet authorities had directly intervened
in the manner charged. And the action of the Truman
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
Administration seemed neither wise nor conducive to
international understanding.
Also tending to refute the claim that a solid, Soviet-
erected Iron Curtain keeps the people of the U. S. S. R.
from learning the truth about the United States was the
publication in Moscow in 1946, in a second edition of
90,000 copies, of a Soviet handbook on the U. S. A. entitled
The United States of America, first issued in 1942. Edited
by a group of four Soviet scholars, this 576-page work
included an elaborate statistical and analytical survey of
American geography and economy, sections on American
history, government, the armed forces and foreign pos-
sessions, and a summary of the American cultural scene.
There were occasional errors in the statistics, but on the
whole the figures were substantially accurate. The volume
did not attempt to compare the U. S. A. and the U. S. S. R.
Its severest criticisms were reserved for the American
press. As Paul H. Aron of the Sarah Lawrence faculty
wrote in the scholarly American Slavic and East Euro-
pean Review: "The over-all picture of our country which
a Soviet citizen would derive from this book is distinctly
favorable. . . . The book can in no sense be classified as
anti-American propaganda, and the dominant note seems
to be one of impartiality. "9
So much printed material comes into America from
the Soviet Union that in 1948 the Library of Congress
started to publish each month a substantial document
called Monthly List of Russian Accessions. This itemizes
under seventeen different section headings, ranging from
Fine Arts to Medicine to Political Science, the publica-
tions received by the Library itself and a group of co-
operating public and university libraries in the United
States. A typical copy of this List, the issue of January,
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? ON EVALUATING SOVIET RL/SSIA
1952, contains no less than 621 Soviet items -- 453 for
books and monographs, 168 for periodicals.
In February of 1949 the Joint Committee on Slavic
Studies, appointed by the American Council of Learned
Societies and the Social Science Research Council, began
weekly publication of the Current Digest of the Soviet
Press. Its headquarters is near Columbia University in
New York City. This Digest translates, prints in full or
condenses the more important articles and news items
from over forty of the leading Soviet newspapers and
magazines. These include the two most authoritative
dailies, Pravda (Truth), leading organ of the Communist
Party, and Izvestia (News), official organ of the Govern-
ment, as well as periodicals concerned with some special
field, such as The Whistle, newspaper of the railroads;
Red Star, the army daily; Labor, organ of the trade
unions; Culture and Life, dealing with the arts; Soviet
Music; Soviet Education; Problems of Philosophy; and
the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, dealing with the
Russian Orthodox Church. This Current Digest of the
Soviet Press, presenting every week an enormous amount
of information and opinion from Soviet sources, alone
disproves the charge that an impenetrable Iron Curtain
prevents foreigners from knowing what is taking place in
the Soviet Union.
American colleges and universities, since the United
States and Soviet Russia fought as allies against world
fascism, have increasingly expanded curriculum facilities
for teaching the Russian language and have established
numerous courses of a general character on Soviet affairs.
Pioneering in the Soviet field was Cornell University
with its Intensive Study of Contemporary Russian Civil-
ization during the summer semesters of 1943 and 1944.
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
Professor Ernest J. Simmons, outstanding authority on
Russian literature, was the Director and moving spirit
of this Intensive Study, which included five basic courses:
The History of Russia and the Soviet Union; Soviet
Government and International Relations; Soviet Eco-
nomics; Soviet Social Institutions and Life; and Soviet
Literature.
Professor Simmons later became head of the Depart-
ment of Slavic Languages at Columbia University and
helped to initiate Columbia's new Russian Institute,
modeled after the Cornell experiment and set up on a
permanent basis in 1946 with the aid of a $250,000 grant
from the Rockefeller Foundation. Other educational
institutions such as Harvard, Leland Stanford, Yale and
the University of California have developed in a some-
what similar fashion staffs concentrating on Soviet civili-
zation.
Serious students wishing to learn about Soviet affairs
under competent direction can find plenty of opportunity
today in America. And writers on the U. S. S. R. continue
to be overwhelmed by the amount of factual material
on the subject. In general where there is a will to under-
stand the Soviet Union, there is a way.
3. Some Standards of Judgment
It is not necessary to be an expert on the subject of the
Soviet Union in order to have sound opinions about that
country. It is my contention that the average literate
person in America can, through judicious reading, listen-
ing and thinking, reach valid judgments concerning
Soviet Russia, Great Britain, China, Spain or almost any
other foreign nation. Since the First World War and
even more since the Second, the American voter has
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? OH EVALUATIHG SOVIET RUSSIA
needed a considerable understanding of United States
foreign policy and world affairs, in order to cast his ballot
intelligently in elections that involve issues of foreign
relations. What I am saying is that to do this he does not
himself have to be an international expert, either in rela-
tion to the U. S. S. R. or other lands or the world as a
whole.
The objective study of Soviet affairs, like the study
of anything else, requires reliance on the method of
reason in seeking out the facts and in reaching depend-
able conclusions. The method of reason implies not only
great diligence in distinguishing the true from the false,
but also a comprehensive evaluation. In line with this
approach, I wish to suggest a few general propositions
which it is well to keep in mind in attempting adequately
to assess Soviet life. These propositions are closely inter-
related and are to some extent overlapping, but each
bears on distinguishable aspects of the subject.
First of all, I believe we should recognize the simple
point that Soviet Russia is neither a heaven nor a hell.
The U. S. S. R. is such a controversial topic and evokes
such passionate reactions that many Americans tend to
think of that vast country in terms of either all black or
all white. The fanatical Russia-haters maintain that the
Soviet Union is a veritable hell on earth; the fanatical
Soviet-worshippers maintain that it is paradise itself
finally come into being on this terrestrial globe. The
intelligent and common-sense approach does not fall into
either of these extremes.
The obvious truth is that Soviet Russia, like the
United States, Great Britain or Mexico, is a mixture of
good and bad, of noteworthy accomplishments and dis-
tressing failures and a sincere striving for future better-
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
ment. The U. S. S. R. is an enormous country of continen-
tal dimensions with an immense population and a thou-
sand and one different aspects of development. Yet num-
berless Americans have gone to the Soviet Union and
apparently seen nothing but the defects of the socialist
system in process of evolution there. They return to the
United States and write exaggerated books or articles
depicting Soviet Russia as one horrible bottomless pit
of grinding poverty and grueling dictatorship, economic
inefficiency and human misery.
Some of their observations have a factual basis, but
they neglect entirely to give the other side, the positive
side of Soviet life which has resulted in such tremendous
achievements over the third of a century since 1917.
Unfortunately the altogether negative picture that such
observers give of the U. S. S. R. has been eagerly seized
upon and accepted by the majority of the people in the
United States and other capitalist countries. This biased
and false viewpoint has been the prevailing one outside
of Soviet Russia and has been responsible for an infinite
amount of misunderstanding.
On the other hand, there are those Americans who
visit the Soviet Union and seemingly have an eye only
for its good points. They come back to the United States
and, forgetting or overlooking the many and serious
shortcomings of the new Soviet civilization, talk as if the
Russians had already achieved the millennium. Now
these observers who insist that Soviet Russia has become
some sort of Utopia are not only unrealistic; they are also
more Russian than the Russians, who themselves are
often extremely critical, particularly in comments in their
press, concerning conditions within their country.
The enthusiasts who believe that the long-sought
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? OH EVALUATIHG SOVIET RUSSIA
heaven-on-earth of human hopes and ideals has come
to pass in the Soviet Union present a one-sided viewpoint
and also build up false expectations. They stimulate
others to visit the U. S. S. R. with the notion that they will
find there the practically perfect state. When these others
make the trip, they see that existence in Soviet Russia
is still pretty difficult, that living standards are quite
low and that the Communists are a tough-minded group
of revolutionaries hard on both themselves and others.
Frequently the paradise-seekers, with their religious
psychology, become quickly disillusioned, leave the
U. S. S. R. with their naive hopes blasted and forthwith
take a bitter, anti-Soviet attitude. On their return to
the United States they find a ready market for articles,
books and lectures which denounce the Soviet Union
and all its works. This pattern repeats itself again and
again; and it is easily discernible in the very titles of
anti-Soviet best-sellers such as Assignment in Utopia by
Eugene Lyons and The Dream We Lost by Freda Utley.
It seems to me that in order to avoid the extremes
which I have been describing, we ought to take a middle-
of-the-road position which gives honest consideration to
both the defects and virtues of the U. S. S. R. For instance,
I believe that Soviet Russia, for various reasons that I
shall comment on later, still lags lamentably behind the
United States in the development of civil liberties and
political democracy, notwithstanding grave American
shortcomings and backslidings in these fields. On the
other hand, the Soviet Russians have forged far ahead
of America in the establishment of ethnic equality and
racial democracy among the many different minority
nationalities and races that live within the far-flung
borders of the U. S. S. R. Anti-Semitism and other forms
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATIOH
of racial prejudice and discrimination have almost en-
tirely disappeared in Soviet Russia. It would be possible
to make a number of other comparisons between Ameri-
can and Soviet life, some of them favorable to the U. S. A. ,
some of them favorable to the U. S. S. R.
It is folly to be either completely condemnatory of
Soviet civilization or completely uncritical of it. Specific
criticisms of Soviet institutions and policies are often jus-
tified; what we must object to are general obsessions
about Soviet Russia resulting in denunciation of practi-
cally everything Soviet and an automatic finding that the
U. S. S. R. is always wrong. Through the jaundiced eyes of
the Russia-haters what ordinarily would be regarded as
a virtue is interpreted as a vice when it manifests itself
in Soviet life. These fanatics, when during World War
II Soviet troops demonstrated signal bravery in fighting
the Nazis to the death and in refusing to surrender even
in the most impossible circumstances, claimed that this
showed Stalinist contempt for human life and for the
worth of the individual.
Again, in a book, Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority,
published in 1951, the author, Miss Margaret Mead,
stresses the present re-establishment of parental author-
ity in the U. S. S. R. as compared with the early years of
the Revolution; and then surprisingly treats this unsur-
prising development as an undemocratic introduction
into the home of dictatorial attitudes which "bear a closer
resemblance to Stalin's relationship to every Soviet citi-
zen. "10 Yet I had thought that "Honor thy father and thy
mother" was a precept valued throughout the world and
not considered altogether outmoded even in democratic
America. Miss Mead also makes the remarkable sugges-
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? OH EVALUATING SOVIET RUSSIA
tion that the wily Russians smoke heavy pipes in order
to conceal their facial reactions. Here of course is the
key to the sinister pipe-smoking of Joseph Stalin! So it
is that those who feel psychologically compelled to con-
demn everything Soviet must likewise discover a way of
stigmatizing even innocent personal habits.
This kind of attitude tends to blame all evil in the
sphere of international affairs on Moscow. In this man-
ner the Russia-haters turn the U. S. S. R. into a convenient
scapegoat for the collective sins of mankind; and in effect
assign to it the role of the old-time devil. Professor
Phillip Marshall Brown, formerly of Princeton Univers-
ity provided a good example of what I mean in his letter
to The New York Times on February 2, 1949, in which
he attributed to Soviet Russia not only the troubles
among the Jews, the Arabs and the British in Palestine,
but also the violence and unrest in Indonesia resulting
in armed hostilities between the Netherlands Govern-
ment and the Indonesian Republic. Anyone with a mite
of information knows that seething cauldrons of local
tensions had long existed in both Palestine and Indonesia
and required no Communist intrigue to make them boil
over.
As for Europe and Asia, the blame-it-on-Russia atti-
tude overlooks, among other things, the fact that the
larger portions of these continents are still in the throes
of recovering from the most destructive war in history,
brought about by fascist aggression; and that many
peoples, trying their best to reconstruct their economies
and to remedy ills ruinous to them in the past, have
shown a leftward trend which in some degree or other
would have existed with or without the stimulus of Soviet
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATIOH
socialism. Socialist developments in Great Britain under
an anti-Soviet Labor Government lend support to this
point.
The approach that I am suggesting to the subject of
Soviet Russia gets away from the fanaticism of both the
Russo phobes and the Russo-philes. It weighs both the
pros and cons in the unceasing debate about the Soviet
Union. It attempts to assess the contributions of Soviet
Russia to international peace and to the downfall of the
fascist Axis in World War II as well as its domestic
achievements and failures. In short, this approach calls
upon us to take an over-all view of Soviet civilization
that includes a thorough and honest balance sheet of the
credits and debits in the Soviet ledger.
Secondly, we should take into constant consideration
the extraordinary complexity of the Soviet Union.
The U. S. S. R. is by far the biggest national unit on
the face of the globe, with a total area of approximately
8,597,000 square miles spreading out over two continents.
As a European country alone it is the largest in Europe
and even as an Asiatic country the largest in Asia. It is
greater in size than all of North and Central America.
It covers a territory amounting to over one-sixth of the
earth's land surface. From west to east the Soviet Union
extends more than 6,000 miles; from north to south at
the widest point more than 2,700.
Within its borders there are to be found all sorts of
climate, vegetation and animal life; and an infinite
variety and scope of basic natural resources such as min-
erals, oil, water-power, fertile soil and timber. The old
peasant proverb is indeed true: "Russia is not a country,
it is a world. " Plainly, then, the Soviet regime has been
operating in what amounts to an entire continent
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? ON EVALUATIHG SOVIET RUSSIA
rather than in one nation in the ordinary sense of the
word. The huge proportions and great natural wealth
of the Soviet Union of course carry with them preemi-
nent advantages in economic self-sufficiency and military
defense. But they also create formidable problems of
administration, transportation and general development
-- problems that go far to explain many of the troubles
that the Soviet Government has encountered during its
existence.
Another continuing complexity in Soviet Russia is
that its fast-growing population, approximately 210,000,-
000 in 1952 and outnumbered only by that of India and
China, is made up of over 170 distinguishable races,
nationalities and tribes. The ethnic minorities range
from the Baltic peoples in the northwest to the Ukraini-
ans and Moldavians in the southwest; from the Armen-
ians and the Georgians of the Transcaucasus to the
Uzbeks and Kazakhs of Central Asia; from the Tatars
and Mari of the middle Volga River to the Yakuts and
Buryat Mongolians of eastern Siberia.
The autocratic Tsarist governments oppressed the
national minorities in the extreme, attempting to impose
upon them a strict Russification and to stamp out their
native cultures. The Soviet regime reversed this policy
and established complete ethnic equality. It has had
the task of encouraging the minority languages and cul-
tures while uniting all the different peoples in the im-
mense work of building a socialist economy and state.
The existence in the U. S. S. R. of so many minority
groups, and in 1917 at so many different stages of culture,
has been a serious complicating factor.
Considering both the geographical extent and the
ethnic make-up of the Soviet Union, we see that it is
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
unique in being a great multi-national, multi-racial Eu-
rasian federation that combines European and Asiatic
peoples and cultures. Instead of a cleavage between East
and West, there is a merging of East and West. Marxism
originated in the West, in Germany; but its first actuali-
zation in state and economic forms came in a nation that
fans out from Europe clear across Asia to the Pacific
Ocean and Far East. This East-West union is a fact of
utmost significance and in itself makes the Soviet Repub-
lic harder to comprehend than a purely Western country
like England or France.
These reflections lead us to a further recognition of
complexity. In the Soviet Union there is a unique
merging not only of East and West, but of old and new.
In 1917 one of the most backward nations in the world,
economically and culturally, was Tsarist Russia. It was
hardly modern in any sense of the word. When the Com-
munists took power they immediately set out to establish
something so modern that it had never been tried before,
namely a full-fledged, nation-wide socialist society based
on Marxist principles. Marx had thought that such a
society would probably first come into being in one of
the highly industrialized states like England or Germany.
Instead it happened in the least industrialized of all the
Great Powers.
The Soviet Communists proceeded energetically and
enthusiastically with their unheard-of job, hitching a
powerful twentieth-century automobile engine, as it were,
to an antiquated horse carriage. The strange combina-
tion went ahead by fits and starts, with frequent break-
downs and numerous repairs. Gradually the Communists
succeeded in constructing a fairly adequate chassis for the
engine. The pervasive and dramatic interweaving of
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? OH EVALUATING SOVIET RUSSIA
medieval and modern and ultra-modern in the U. S. S. R.
is a phenomenon that demands the most careful analysis.
Truly the Soviet Union presents a most complex picture.
Continuing with our introductory bases of judgment,
I suggest, thirdly, that we should be aware of the histor-
ical and cultural background of Soviet Russia.
The Revolution of 1917 took place in a semi-feudal
country which had lived under Tsarist absolutism for
some 400 years. Russia had never experienced the pro-
gressive, invigorating influences of a Renaissance and
Reformation, an Enlightenment and Bourgeois Revolu-
tion. It had never gone through anything remotely re-
sembling the long evolution of democracy and civil liber-
ties characteristic of England and the United States.
While the oppressive Tsarist dictatorship, noted for the
number and cruelty of its political persecutions, made
a concession towards democracy by instituting, as a result
of the unsuccessful Revolution of 1905, the Duma or
House of Representatives, this body was soon reduced
to a parliamentary nonentity.
In 1917 approximately 85 percent of the population
were peasants engaged in agricultural pursuits and using,
for the most part, primitive methods. Only in 1861 had
the Russian peasants been legally freed from the old
medieval system of serfdom. Grafted onto an incredibly
inefficient and backward agricultural economy, there was
in 1917 a weak and spasmodically developed capitalist
industry, largely depending on foreign financing and
foreign technical management. The peasants and the
relatively small working class endured an extremely low
living standard comparable to that of India and China.
About 70 percent of the entire people were illiterate; and
enjoyment of the splendid Russian achievements in
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