THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOX
land, in the small population of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, with a much less fundamental revo-
lution, produced generation after generation of conspira-
tors, to whom treason and killing, with lies and deceit,
were only part of what they felt to be a righteous ef-
fort.
land, in the small population of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, with a much less fundamental revo-
lution, produced generation after generation of conspira-
tors, to whom treason and killing, with lies and deceit,
were only part of what they felt to be a righteous ef-
fort.
Soviet Union - 1952 - Soviet Civilization
An old Russian proverb stressed the in-
herent inferiority of the female sex: "A hen is no bird,
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
and a woman is no human being. " Other Russian say-
ings indicate the harsh treatment that women in Tsarist
days were likely to receive: "Love your wife like your
soul, but thrash her like a pear tree"; "Beat your wife,
the food will be tastier. "
The Soviet Government not only reversed the former
Russian attitude toward women, but went ahead of any
other country in eradicating exploitation of woman by
man and establishing full sex equality in all relevant
ways. This means much more than giving women the
suffrage, a right granted even in the United States and
Great Britain only during the past few decades. Soviet
theory and practice extend equality between the sexes
to the relationship between husband and wife, to eco-
nomic and professional activity, to educational and cul-
tural opportunity, and to participation in every form of
political life.
In the 1937 elections 16. 5 percent of the deputies
chosen for the Supreme Soviet of the U. S. S. R. were
women; in both the 1946 and 1950 elections the per-
centage increased to about 21 as compared with less than
2 percent in the United States Congress for the same years.
Hundreds of women are members of the Supreme Soviets
of the Union and Autonomous Republics. All Soviet
judges and jurors are elected; and in 1949 over 39 percent
of them were women. In 1951 approximately 413,000
women were students in higher educational institutions
and comprised more than 30 percent of the student body.
In the same year more than 40 percent of all persons
employed in the national economy were women. Over
383,000 women were working as engineers and tech-
nicians and over 1,000,000 in the public health system,
including 191,000 qualified physicians and surgeons.
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? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
The Soviet policy does not neglect the biological
function of women as mothers, and indeed extends to
mother and child every possible protection. Sex equality
in Soviet Russia has certainly not led to the break-up of
home life; and there is much evidence that it has brought
increasing stability to the family as an institution. The
system of easy divorces characteristic of the early post-
revolutionary years has given way to a tightening of the
marital bond through making divorces more difficult and
expensive; and to an emphasis on building up a psycho-
logically adjusted and permanent family unit. Grounds
for divorce are desertion, mental disease, the sentencing
of one spouse to three or more years in jail and other
weighty reasons satisfying to the People's Courts. Birth
control techniques are legal, but not encouraged.
In any case we must guard against the fallacy of think-
ing that Soviet sex equality, or any other social-economic
reforms in the U. S. S. R. , can automatically solve the com-
plex problems of sex relations and of women's role in
home management. At the same time we are warranted
in doubting whether the exigencies of the cold war justify
the Soviet Government's policy of refusing to allow Soviet
women married to foreigners to join their husbands
abroad.
The Soviet Constitution takes another epoch-making
step forward in the next Article (123), which ensures
ethnic democracy: "Equality of rights of citizens of the
U. S. S. R. , irrespective of their nationality or race, in all
spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political
life, is an indefeasible law. Any direct or indirect restric-
tion of the rights of, or, conversely, any establishment of
direct or indirect privileges for, citizens on account of
their race or nationality, as well as any advocacy of racial
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? SOVIE7 CIVILIZATION
or national exclusiveness or hatred and contempt, is
punishable by law. " The Soviet attitude toward racial
and national minorities within the U. S. S. R. is fraught
with world-wide significance, particularly in view of the
fascist attempt in World War II to foist permanently on
mankind a program of racial prejudice and oppression
and in view of the present distressing minorities situa-
tions in such nations as the United States and South
Africa.
Article 124 concerns the much misunderstood Soviet
attitude toward religion: "In order to ensure to citizens
freedom of conscience, the Church in the U. S. S. R. is
separated from the State, and the school from the Church.
Freedom of religious worship and freedom of anti-relig-
ious propaganda is recognized for all citizens. " In the
old Russia the Orthodox Eastern Church was the official
state church and had a controlling voice in the educa-
tional system. A large part of the outcry against the Soviet
Government's treatment of religion has been due precise-
ly to its taking over a principle long established in the
United States, namely, the separation of state and reli-
gion and of school and religion.
A more friendly feeling between government and
church has recently developed in the Soviet Union for
the reason that the Orthodox Church gave such loyal
support in resisting the Nazi invasion. However, it is my
belief that on the whole there has been true freedom
of worship, despite some local excesses against the Church
authorities in the early years, since the Revolution of
1917. There has actually been more religious freedom
than under the Tsars in the sense that the disestablished
Orthodox Church has no longer been able to persecute
minority Protestant, Hebrew and Mohammedan sects;
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? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
and so all religions under the Soviets have legally stood
on a plane of equality. In a later chapter I shall go into
the details of the status of religion in Soviet Russia. *
The next few Articles cover the controversial topic of
civil liberties in the Soviet Union. Article 125 states:
"In conformity with the interests of the working people,
and in order to strengthen the socialist system, the citizens
of the U. S. S. R. are guaranteed by law: freedom of speech;
freedom of the press; freedom of assembly, including the
holding of mass meetings; freedom of street processions
and demonstrations. These civil rights are ensured by
placing at the disposal of the working people and their
organizations printing presses, stocks of paper, public
buildings, the streets, communications facilities and
other material prerequisites for the exercise of these
rights. " Article 127 guarantees the "inviolability of the
person. No person may be placed under arrest except by
decision of a court or with the sanction of a procurator. "
Article 128 reads: "The inviolability of the homes of
citizens and privacy of correspondence are protected by
law. "
The opening statement on civil liberties obviously
qualifies freedom of opinion by the clause "in order to
strengthen the socialist system. " This definitely implies
that those who are opposed to socialism in Soviet Russia
are not granted the right to express their opposition. In-
dividuals in favor of the restoration of Tsarism or the
capitalist system would quickly get into hot water if they
attempted to express their views. Soviet practice up to
date has gone further and has denied freedom of opinion
to citizens who, even while agreeing that socialism is the
goal, continue to take issue, after a policy decision has
? See p. 121.
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
been made, with basic Communist Party or government
directives.
In his book, The Law of the Soviet State, Andrei Y.
Vishinsky, former Procurator-General (Attorney Gen-
eral) of the U. S. S. R. and since 1949 Minister of Foreign
Affairs, asserted: "In our state, naturally there is and can
be no place for freedom of speech, press and so on for the
foes of socialism. "5 How flagrant a violation of civil
liberties this amounts to becomes clear if we apply the
converse of the principle expressed to the capitalist
United States. Then we would have: "Under the Bill
of Rights, naturally there can be no place for freedom
of speech, press, assembly and political organization for
the enemies of capitalism. "
Nevertheless, Soviet citizens retain a wide area for
the operation of free speech in the determination of
policy, up to the point when a final decision is taken, and
in criticism of the way in which policy is carried out.
Soviet workers have been outspoken in their slashing
criticism of economic affairs, factory officials and govern-
ment bureaucrats. This constant self-criticism in the
Soviet Union has become a well-established institution
and provides hostile foreign writers with a great deal of
ammunition for exposing bureaucracy, inefficiencies and
other defects in the Soviet system. We can express the
situation in this manner: Within a limited yet fairly broad
circle of controversial subjects Soviet citizens have full
latitude of speech, but when they go outside that circle
to question settled government policies or fundamental
Marxist principles, their freedom of speech is drastically
curtailed.
The second part of Article 125 underlines once more
the stress that the Soviets put on the economic implemen-
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? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
tation of civil liberties. What use is freedom of the press
unless printing presses and stocks of paper are available?
What good are constitutional guarantees for freedom of
opinion unless the people have "the material requisites
for the exercise of these rights"? Soviet political scientists
make the claim that in the capitalist countries the work-
ers, especially, do not possess these material requisites
because they lack in general the financial means to hire
printing presses, print newspapers and magazines, rent
meeting halls and buy radio time. Capitalist democracies,
Soviet critics go on to say, talk a lot about the abstract
forms of civil liberty, but do not give those forms sub-
stance in economic realities.
The Communists also argue that in capitalist coun-
tries, although governmental authorities crack down only
too often on freedom of speech, the main incidence of
censorship comes from pressures by private businessmen
and corporations that own and operate at least 95 percent
of the press, the radio, the movies and book publishing.
These prime mediums of communication are slanted
overwhelmingly on the capitalist side of every fundamen-
tal issue and need no government prompting to carry on
a constant campaign against socialist and Communist
doctrines. What this amounts to, the argument concludes,
is that under capitalism there is a pervasive private and
voluntary censorship of ideas which is less honest yet just
as effective as the open government censorship in the
Soviet Union.
The remaining articles in Chapter X are primarily
concerned with the duties of Soviet citizens, such as ob-
servance of the laws, maintaining labor discipline and
taking part in universal military service. Article 131 is
particularly worth quoting: "It is the duty of every
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATIOH
citizen of the U. S. S. R. to safeguard and strengthen public,
socialist property as the sacred and inviolable foundation
of the Soviet system, as the source of the wealth and
might of the country, as the source of the prosperous and
cultured life of all the working people. Persons commit-
ting offenses against public, socialist property are enemies
of the people. "
The new rights of man guaranteed in the Soviet
Constitution show more clearly than any other section
of that document the ideals toward which Soviet social-
ism is driving. Some of those ideals have already been
largely fulfilled. It is no small thing for the Soviet Re-
public to have abolished unemployment and depression,
to have provided social insurance and free medical care
for all, and to have established racial, economic and
educational democracy as well as equality between the
sexes. It is the challenge of such achievements which, as
Edward H. Carr, a British professor of international poli-
tics, shows in his illuminating book, The Soviet Impact
on the Western World, has led to much salutary social
and economic legislation in the West during the past
two decades. These accomplishments of the U. S. S. R. are
either slighted or not mentioned at all in the great hue
and cry which anti-Soviet forces are continually stirring
up.
Naturally those hostile to Soviet Russia concentrate
on its salient weaknesses, such as the state of civil lib-
erties and of political democracy. Any impartial ob-
server of the Soviet scene must admit that the Socialist
Republic limps and lags in these two significant criteria
of a civilized nation. Despotic practices inherited from
Tsardom, the historical Russian pattern of exalting the
community above individual rights, the long tradition --
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? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
fostered by the Orthodox Church -- of the principle of
unanimous agreement on important issues, the domestic
turbulence and hatreds resulting from the greatest revo-
lution in history, the fear and actuality of foreign ag-
gression, and the Marxist theory of proletarian dictator-
ship have all combined to hold back the evolution of
civil liberties and political democracy in the Soviet
Union.
Many people in the Western democracies thought
that the famous Moscow Trials of 1936-38, in which a
number of prominent Communist leaders were convicted
of treason, were a ghastly travesty on due process of law
and were complete frame-ups. I myself, after reading
carefully the voluminous verbatim testimony in the three
big trials -- something which few critics of Soviet justice
have bothered to do -- became convinced that the defend-
ants' sweeping confessions were genuine and that they
were indeed guilty of conspiring with Leon Trotsky and
outright fascist agents to overthrow the Soviet Govern-
ment. Since Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin and the others
firmly believed that Stalin had betrayed socialism both
at home and abroad, they felt justified as revolutionaries
in adopting any methods whatever to get rid of his re-
gime.
At the same time, when fascist plotting under the
direction of Hitler and Mussolini was making such head-
way throughout the European continent, it was too much
to expect that Soviet Russia had become so stable that
there could be no fifth column within it. Actually, many
of those who denounced the Moscow Trials naively
assumed that political progress had been so rapid in the
Soviet Union that it was simply impossible for a con-
spiracy linked with the Fascist-Nazi Axis to find root
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
there. During this trying period miscarriages of justice
occurred, in my judgment, not in the Moscow Trials, but
in the general purges that accompanied them throughout
the country and in which many innocent persons suffered.
Furthermore, the feeling against Trotsky was so extreme
that the Soviet authorities not only condemned him as
a traitor -- which he was -- but took the lamentable and
ludicrous step of re-writing history in an endeavor to
erase from the records all accounts of the leading role
he played in the 1917 Revolution and in the defense of
the Socialist Republic during its initial stages.
In his memoirs of the pre-war years Winston
Churchill makes a most significant comment on the Mos-
cow Trials. He relates that while President Benes of
Czechoslovakia was bickering with Hitler in the fall of
1936, "he became aware that communications were pass-
ing through the Soviet Embassy in Prague between im-
portant personages in Russia and the German Govern-
ment. This was part of the so-called Old-Guard Com-
munist conspiracy to overthrow Stalin, and introduce a
new regime based on a pro-German policy. President
Benes lost no time in communicating all he could find
out to Stalin. Thereafter there followed the merciless,
but perhaps not needless, military and political purge
in Soviet Russia and the series of trials in January, 1937,
in which Vishinsky, the Public Prosecutor, played so
masterful a part. "6
To see the Soviet picture clearly we must also recog-
nize that history shows that far-reaching revolutions have
usually given rise to the most unscrupulous conduct and
to bitter, throat-cutting dissension among the revolu-
tionaries themselves. Sidney and Beatrice Webb give
us the historical perspective: "Even England and Scot-
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?
THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOX
land, in the small population of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, with a much less fundamental revo-
lution, produced generation after generation of conspira-
tors, to whom treason and killing, with lies and deceit,
were only part of what they felt to be a righteous ef-
fort. . . .
"The French Revolution of 1789-95 ushered in a
similar period of conspiracy and struggle, leading to a
whole succession of counter-revolutions, not reaching the
stability of a democratic republic, with its large measure
of personal security and social equality, for nearly a
century. . . . In Russia [which was in 1900 in the matter
of morals and civilization very much where Britain and
France stood in 1700] the pattern of behavior of the
revolutionary conspirators culminated in a bitterness
and mutual antagonism more acute and all-pervading
than in any other example. "7
Especially since the end of World War II reckless
charges have been made that the Soviet Union is a hor-
rible slave state keeping from ten to twenty million
people at forced labor in concentration camps situated
in Siberia and other places. While there is no question
that the Soviet authorities have isolated political prisoners
and ordinary criminals in special work camps, the num-
bers involved have steadily declined in recent years and
have at no time reached the huge totals conjured up in
the lurid imaginations of anti-Soviet propagandists.
The Soviet Government has from its earliest years
prided itself on its method of retraining and rehabilitat-
ing prisoners of whatever variety for a normal life in the
community by giving them useful work to do while im-
prisoned. One of the chief aims of this procedure is to
ensure a good job for the prisoner when he is finally re-
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
leased and to make certain that society does not perma-
nently boycott him for his original offense. Prior to the
Second World War penologists from foreign countries
had frequently praised this Soviet system of curative
work as highly intelligent and effective. Now, with
malice aforethought, the same thing is stigmatized as
"slave labor" as part of an endeavor to indict the total-
ity of Soviet civilization.
These remarks are not intended to negate the fact
that the administration of justice in the Soviet Union
has been biased and harsh towards those considered
enemies of the socialist state; that the Soviet authorities,
relying on an omnipresent secret police, have jailed tens
of thousands of blameless individuals in their periodic
purges; and that Soviet prisons and labor camps have
frequently failed to maintain decent and healthy condi-
tions. In a country where general standards of living have
remained comparatively low, the life of political and
other prisoners is likely to be on a correspondingly low
plane. We can accept as true many of the bitter experi-
ences related by escaped Soviet prisoners without gener-
alizing their reports into a condemnation of the entire
Soviet system of penology.
In 1949 the Soviet Government expelled an American
writer, Miss Anna Louise Strong, as a foreign agent and
a spy without giving her a proper opportunity for legal
defense or even explaining what precisely were the
charges against her. I am glad to say that later, during
1950, my wife and I organized a group of American writ-
ers and intellectuals who sent a vigorous letter on the
Strong case to Mr. Alexander S. Panyushkin, Soviet Am-
bassador to the United States from 1947 to 1952. This
communication urged the Soviet Government "to review
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? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
carefully the case of Anna Louise Strong and to see
whether some mistake was not made regarding her by
the Soviet Security police or other officials in immediate
charge. "8 Nothing ever came of this protest.
Persons like myself, who believe firmly in the Western
ideals of individual liberty and the toleration of dissent,
often as these ideals have been thwarted or betrayed in
the West, have the obligation to continue our criticism of
Soviet institutions insofar as they do not measure up
to true democratic standards.
It would be possible to write a book of considerable
length concerning the violation of civil liberties and
political democracy in Soviet Russia. In fact author
after author has done this very thing, as if the repressive
aspects of the Soviet dictatorship were the complete story
about the U. S. S. R. Yet despite all the legitimate quali-
fications about Soviet political life, the Soviet Consti-
tution itself clearly belongs on the positive side of the
ledger. It is a document that does great credit to its
framers and that presents a grand design of human living
of which the Soviet people can well be proud.
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? CHAPTER III SOVIET ETHNIC DEMOCRACY
1. Soviet National and Racial Minorities
Take the map of the Union of Soviet Socialist Repub-
lics and identify, each with a distinct color, the homeland
of each of the 577 Soviet races, nationalities or tribesT
and you will have an incomparable crazy-quilt of gay
and gaudy hue. For within the sprawling boundaries of
the U. S. S. R. and amongst its population of 210,000,000
there are scattered a greater number of different ethnic
groups, both large and small, maintaining their separate
territories and cultures, than in any other country on
earth. (They speak over 125 different languages and dia-
lects and practice as many as forty different religions! /
Most people outside the Soviet Union still refer to
that country as "Russia. " This is incorrect, since the
Russian Republic is only one of the sixteen main repub-
lics of the U. S. S. R. and the Russians themselves come to
only a little more than half of the total Soviet popula-
tion. A prime reason for Lenin and his associates choos-
ing the official title, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
for the new state was to try to make sure that none of the
minority races and nationalities of the former Russian
Empire would feel subordinate, as in pre-revolutionary
days, to the large Russian majority. The idea implied
in the very name was that all the racial and national
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? SOVIET ETHNIC DEMOCRACY
groups in the confederation would stand on a plane of
freedom and equality.
The Soviet policy toward minorities goes back to the
earliest period of the 1917 Revolution. On November
15, nine days after it came into power, the Soviet Gov-
ernment issued, under the signatures of Lenin as Premier
and Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities, a revolutionary
document entitled, \HThe Declaration of the Rights of
the Peoples of Russia. " This emancipation proclama-
tion for ethnic minorities, unique in the annals of state-
craft up to that time, pledged the Communist regime
to support the following four basic principles: (1) "The
equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia; (2) the
right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination,
even to the extent of separation and the formation of
independent states; (3) the abolition of all national and
national-religious privileges and restrictions; and (4) the
free development of the national minorities and ethnic
groups inhabiting Russia. "1"!
Before many weeks had passed the Soviet Govern-
ment made another significant pronouncement directed
to the Moslem peoples of the former Tsarist Empire.
"Moslems of Russia," it began, "Tatars of the Volga and
Crimea, Kirgiz and Sarts of Siberia and Turkestan, Turks
and Tatars of Transcaucasia, Chechens and Mountain-
eers of the Caucasus -- all those whose mosques and
chapels have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs
have been trampled under foot by the Tsars and oppres-
sors of Russia! Henceforth your beliefs and customs,
your national and cultural institutions are free and in-
violable. Build your national life free and unhindered.
You have a right to do so. Know that your rights, as well
as the rights of all peoples of Russia, are protected by the
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? SOVIET CtVILlZATIOH
Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies. "2
This second declaration indicates to some extent the
complex ethnic make-up of the Soviet Union.
The i largest single ethnic division, which includes
three chief nationalities, is the Slay^ which totals about
150,000,000 or approximately three-fourths of the entire
Soviet population. * The Slavs consist mainly of the Great
Russians, the Russians proper, who number almost 105,-
000,000 and who have settled in all parts of the U. S. S. R. ;
the 37,000,000 Ukrainians, sometimes known as "Little
Russians," whose republic of rich agricultural and in-
dustrial regions borders the Black Sea and Poland in the
southwest and is about as large and populous as France;
and the Belorussians, numbering a little under 9,000,000,
who live in the western zone just north of the Ukraine
and whose name means "White Russian" in the Russian
language. They should not be confused with the anti-
Soviet exiles and emigres who left the Soviet Union dur-
ing the Revolution and Civil War and who are also called
White Russians. The Ukrainian and Belorussian Re-
publics bore the brunt of the Nazi invasion in 1941-42,
were completely overrun by the German armies and
suffered terrible devastation.
The Slavs have for centuries been predominantly
members of the Orthodox Eastern Church, which, like
the Protestant, has consistently refused to acknowledge
the authority of the Catholic Pope. The Soviet or eastern
Slavs are closely related, racially and linguistically, to the
western Slavs (the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks) and to the
southern or Balkan Slavs (the Bulgarians, Croats, Mace-
? AH population figures for Soviet ethnic groups in this chapter are
estimated as of January 1, 1949; and are based on the last national census
of 1939, together with estimates of the natural increase since that time and
of the appalling number of deaths during World War II. Allowance must
be made for some margin of error.
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? SOVIET ETHHIC DEMOCRACY
donians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes). The U. S.
S. R. contains small minorities of Bulgarians, Czechoslo-
vaks and Poles.
Next to the Slav the most prevalent racial strain in
the Soviet confederation of peoples is the [Turco-Tatar^
some 21,000,000 strong and largely Mohammedan in reli-
gion. The Turco-Tatars, dark-visaged and oblique-eyed,
are mostly the mixed descendants of fierce Asiatic war-
riors led to far-ranging conquest in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries by the mighty Eastern emperors:
Genghis Khan, he who said that "as there is one ruler
in heaven, so there should be but one on earth"; and
Tamerlane, "the Earth-Shaker. " Tamerlane's victorious
sweep into Europe reached as far north and west as the
Volga River and left along its banks settlements which
centuries later developed into the thriving, present-day
Bashkir, Chuvash and Kazan Tatars of the great Volga
basin.
Several Soviet peoples of the mountainous Caucasus
and Transcaucasus are also Turco-Tatar in origin, pre-
eminent among them being the Azerbaidzhanians, over
3,000,000 in number, who form one of the sixteen consti-
tuent Union Republics of the U. S. S. R. The Azerbaid-
zhan Republic, bordering the Caspian Sea and Iran, has
traditionally been known as the "Land of Fire," because
of its easily combustible oil and gas deposits. (Azer
means fire. ) In the early nineteenth century fire-wor-
shippers of the cult of Zoroaster still carried out their
rites before the flames of their sacred temple in Baku.
This internationally famous city is the capital of Azer-
baidzhan and the greatest center of oil production in
Soviet Russia.
However, the heart of Turco-Tatar strength in the
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
U. S. S. R. lies east across the Caspian Sea in the warm, rich
domain of Soviet Central Asia. Here the Kazakhs, the
Kirgiz, the Turkmenians and the Uzbeks, all of Turco-
Tatar stock and possessing their own Union Republics,
dwell in what is historically one of the most interesting
and romantic parts of the Soviet Union. It was in this
land that there rose the famous and fabulously wealthy
cities of Holy Bukhara and Golden Samarkand, their
many mosques, minarets and other structures combining
to create an architectural splendor unsurpassed in the
Moslem world. Here met and merged the trade, the art,
the civilization of the ancient and medieval East, with
Persian, Turkish, Indian and Chinese influences all play-
ing their role.
The hot, arid climate of Soviet Central Asia has been
a major factor in bringing a large proportion of the land
under the sway of soil-destroying sands. For instance, in
the Turkmenian Republic 80 percent of the territory
consists of desert wastes. Since earliest times, the pros-
perity of Central Asia has depended primarily upon the
proper utilization of water and the efficient maintenance
of the irrigation system. And the Soviets, with their tire-
less energy and scientific techniques, have made enor-
mous strides in the battle to extend fertility to one of the
world's driest and most barren plains. *
The Uzbek S. S. R. , containing the cities of Bukhara,
Samarkand and Tashkent, its capital, is the most prosper-
ous and populous of the Central Asiatic Republics. It
is the great cotton state of the Soviet Union and also
excels in the growing of silk. But since 1917 it has also
become highly industrialized. In Tsarist times the Uz-
beks were called "Sarts" from the old Turkish for "wan-
? See pp. 204-207.
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? SOVIET ETHHIC DEMOCRACY
der. " Their country, comparable to the American south-
west, has an over-abundance of sunshine. "The men of
Uzbekistan wear white clothing open to the waist, expos-
ing their sunburned chests, and black skull caps embroid-
ered in white. The women are dressed in brightly
colored gowns of radiant pale yellows and reds. The
girls' black hair is braided in innumerable thin plaits;
old men in colored turbans ride along on donkeys. "3
East of Uzbekistan is the Kirgiz Republic, situated
in a high and mountainous region contiguous to China's
Sinkiang Province. There is a widely held belief that
the birthplace of the human race was in what is now
Kirgizia. The Kirgiz people were poverty-stricken nom-
ads under the Tsar, but have since developed a fairly
stable and prosperous agricultural life. To the north of
Uzbekistan lies the huge Kazakh Republic, in itself alone
one-third as large as the United States. In its climate,
expanse and great business of stock-breeding northern
Kazakhstan is much like Montana, Wyoming, Colorado
and Utah; while the southern portion of the Republic is
reminiscent of New Mexico and Arizona. In mineral
resources the Kazakh S. S. R. is even richer than America's
Rocky Mountain region.
The Kazakhs are generally of medium build, black
hair and/swarthy complexion. Until the Soviets took
over, this people were roving herdsmen wandering with
their big flocks and herds over the unending steppe and
desert, living the major part of their lives in the saddle,
and moving their tents and scanty possessions from place
to place on the backs of camels. They have shared in the
vast industrial and agricultural progress that has come
to Central Asia during the last third of a century; and
their nomadic life is now mainly a thing of the past.
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
Generalizing again about Soviet Central Asia, we can
say that in no section of Soviet Russia is the contrast of
old and new more marked. For this entire region has
leaped, in but a moment of history, from a stagnant semi-
feudalism, characterized by Asiatic tyranny of the most
barbarous type, to a progressive, modern, dynamic stage
of society in the form of Marxist socialism. This revolu-
tionary advance is apparent wherever one goes in Cen-
tral Asia, whether in the city districts where the old build-
ings and the new stand side by side, in the rural areas
where the native population in their traditional garb
operate tractors and combines, or in the remote valleys
and mountain ranges where isolated peoples have for the
first time been brought into contact with twentieth-
century civilization.
herent inferiority of the female sex: "A hen is no bird,
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
and a woman is no human being. " Other Russian say-
ings indicate the harsh treatment that women in Tsarist
days were likely to receive: "Love your wife like your
soul, but thrash her like a pear tree"; "Beat your wife,
the food will be tastier. "
The Soviet Government not only reversed the former
Russian attitude toward women, but went ahead of any
other country in eradicating exploitation of woman by
man and establishing full sex equality in all relevant
ways. This means much more than giving women the
suffrage, a right granted even in the United States and
Great Britain only during the past few decades. Soviet
theory and practice extend equality between the sexes
to the relationship between husband and wife, to eco-
nomic and professional activity, to educational and cul-
tural opportunity, and to participation in every form of
political life.
In the 1937 elections 16. 5 percent of the deputies
chosen for the Supreme Soviet of the U. S. S. R. were
women; in both the 1946 and 1950 elections the per-
centage increased to about 21 as compared with less than
2 percent in the United States Congress for the same years.
Hundreds of women are members of the Supreme Soviets
of the Union and Autonomous Republics. All Soviet
judges and jurors are elected; and in 1949 over 39 percent
of them were women. In 1951 approximately 413,000
women were students in higher educational institutions
and comprised more than 30 percent of the student body.
In the same year more than 40 percent of all persons
employed in the national economy were women. Over
383,000 women were working as engineers and tech-
nicians and over 1,000,000 in the public health system,
including 191,000 qualified physicians and surgeons.
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? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
The Soviet policy does not neglect the biological
function of women as mothers, and indeed extends to
mother and child every possible protection. Sex equality
in Soviet Russia has certainly not led to the break-up of
home life; and there is much evidence that it has brought
increasing stability to the family as an institution. The
system of easy divorces characteristic of the early post-
revolutionary years has given way to a tightening of the
marital bond through making divorces more difficult and
expensive; and to an emphasis on building up a psycho-
logically adjusted and permanent family unit. Grounds
for divorce are desertion, mental disease, the sentencing
of one spouse to three or more years in jail and other
weighty reasons satisfying to the People's Courts. Birth
control techniques are legal, but not encouraged.
In any case we must guard against the fallacy of think-
ing that Soviet sex equality, or any other social-economic
reforms in the U. S. S. R. , can automatically solve the com-
plex problems of sex relations and of women's role in
home management. At the same time we are warranted
in doubting whether the exigencies of the cold war justify
the Soviet Government's policy of refusing to allow Soviet
women married to foreigners to join their husbands
abroad.
The Soviet Constitution takes another epoch-making
step forward in the next Article (123), which ensures
ethnic democracy: "Equality of rights of citizens of the
U. S. S. R. , irrespective of their nationality or race, in all
spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political
life, is an indefeasible law. Any direct or indirect restric-
tion of the rights of, or, conversely, any establishment of
direct or indirect privileges for, citizens on account of
their race or nationality, as well as any advocacy of racial
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? SOVIE7 CIVILIZATION
or national exclusiveness or hatred and contempt, is
punishable by law. " The Soviet attitude toward racial
and national minorities within the U. S. S. R. is fraught
with world-wide significance, particularly in view of the
fascist attempt in World War II to foist permanently on
mankind a program of racial prejudice and oppression
and in view of the present distressing minorities situa-
tions in such nations as the United States and South
Africa.
Article 124 concerns the much misunderstood Soviet
attitude toward religion: "In order to ensure to citizens
freedom of conscience, the Church in the U. S. S. R. is
separated from the State, and the school from the Church.
Freedom of religious worship and freedom of anti-relig-
ious propaganda is recognized for all citizens. " In the
old Russia the Orthodox Eastern Church was the official
state church and had a controlling voice in the educa-
tional system. A large part of the outcry against the Soviet
Government's treatment of religion has been due precise-
ly to its taking over a principle long established in the
United States, namely, the separation of state and reli-
gion and of school and religion.
A more friendly feeling between government and
church has recently developed in the Soviet Union for
the reason that the Orthodox Church gave such loyal
support in resisting the Nazi invasion. However, it is my
belief that on the whole there has been true freedom
of worship, despite some local excesses against the Church
authorities in the early years, since the Revolution of
1917. There has actually been more religious freedom
than under the Tsars in the sense that the disestablished
Orthodox Church has no longer been able to persecute
minority Protestant, Hebrew and Mohammedan sects;
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? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
and so all religions under the Soviets have legally stood
on a plane of equality. In a later chapter I shall go into
the details of the status of religion in Soviet Russia. *
The next few Articles cover the controversial topic of
civil liberties in the Soviet Union. Article 125 states:
"In conformity with the interests of the working people,
and in order to strengthen the socialist system, the citizens
of the U. S. S. R. are guaranteed by law: freedom of speech;
freedom of the press; freedom of assembly, including the
holding of mass meetings; freedom of street processions
and demonstrations. These civil rights are ensured by
placing at the disposal of the working people and their
organizations printing presses, stocks of paper, public
buildings, the streets, communications facilities and
other material prerequisites for the exercise of these
rights. " Article 127 guarantees the "inviolability of the
person. No person may be placed under arrest except by
decision of a court or with the sanction of a procurator. "
Article 128 reads: "The inviolability of the homes of
citizens and privacy of correspondence are protected by
law. "
The opening statement on civil liberties obviously
qualifies freedom of opinion by the clause "in order to
strengthen the socialist system. " This definitely implies
that those who are opposed to socialism in Soviet Russia
are not granted the right to express their opposition. In-
dividuals in favor of the restoration of Tsarism or the
capitalist system would quickly get into hot water if they
attempted to express their views. Soviet practice up to
date has gone further and has denied freedom of opinion
to citizens who, even while agreeing that socialism is the
goal, continue to take issue, after a policy decision has
? See p. 121.
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
been made, with basic Communist Party or government
directives.
In his book, The Law of the Soviet State, Andrei Y.
Vishinsky, former Procurator-General (Attorney Gen-
eral) of the U. S. S. R. and since 1949 Minister of Foreign
Affairs, asserted: "In our state, naturally there is and can
be no place for freedom of speech, press and so on for the
foes of socialism. "5 How flagrant a violation of civil
liberties this amounts to becomes clear if we apply the
converse of the principle expressed to the capitalist
United States. Then we would have: "Under the Bill
of Rights, naturally there can be no place for freedom
of speech, press, assembly and political organization for
the enemies of capitalism. "
Nevertheless, Soviet citizens retain a wide area for
the operation of free speech in the determination of
policy, up to the point when a final decision is taken, and
in criticism of the way in which policy is carried out.
Soviet workers have been outspoken in their slashing
criticism of economic affairs, factory officials and govern-
ment bureaucrats. This constant self-criticism in the
Soviet Union has become a well-established institution
and provides hostile foreign writers with a great deal of
ammunition for exposing bureaucracy, inefficiencies and
other defects in the Soviet system. We can express the
situation in this manner: Within a limited yet fairly broad
circle of controversial subjects Soviet citizens have full
latitude of speech, but when they go outside that circle
to question settled government policies or fundamental
Marxist principles, their freedom of speech is drastically
curtailed.
The second part of Article 125 underlines once more
the stress that the Soviets put on the economic implemen-
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? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
tation of civil liberties. What use is freedom of the press
unless printing presses and stocks of paper are available?
What good are constitutional guarantees for freedom of
opinion unless the people have "the material requisites
for the exercise of these rights"? Soviet political scientists
make the claim that in the capitalist countries the work-
ers, especially, do not possess these material requisites
because they lack in general the financial means to hire
printing presses, print newspapers and magazines, rent
meeting halls and buy radio time. Capitalist democracies,
Soviet critics go on to say, talk a lot about the abstract
forms of civil liberty, but do not give those forms sub-
stance in economic realities.
The Communists also argue that in capitalist coun-
tries, although governmental authorities crack down only
too often on freedom of speech, the main incidence of
censorship comes from pressures by private businessmen
and corporations that own and operate at least 95 percent
of the press, the radio, the movies and book publishing.
These prime mediums of communication are slanted
overwhelmingly on the capitalist side of every fundamen-
tal issue and need no government prompting to carry on
a constant campaign against socialist and Communist
doctrines. What this amounts to, the argument concludes,
is that under capitalism there is a pervasive private and
voluntary censorship of ideas which is less honest yet just
as effective as the open government censorship in the
Soviet Union.
The remaining articles in Chapter X are primarily
concerned with the duties of Soviet citizens, such as ob-
servance of the laws, maintaining labor discipline and
taking part in universal military service. Article 131 is
particularly worth quoting: "It is the duty of every
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATIOH
citizen of the U. S. S. R. to safeguard and strengthen public,
socialist property as the sacred and inviolable foundation
of the Soviet system, as the source of the wealth and
might of the country, as the source of the prosperous and
cultured life of all the working people. Persons commit-
ting offenses against public, socialist property are enemies
of the people. "
The new rights of man guaranteed in the Soviet
Constitution show more clearly than any other section
of that document the ideals toward which Soviet social-
ism is driving. Some of those ideals have already been
largely fulfilled. It is no small thing for the Soviet Re-
public to have abolished unemployment and depression,
to have provided social insurance and free medical care
for all, and to have established racial, economic and
educational democracy as well as equality between the
sexes. It is the challenge of such achievements which, as
Edward H. Carr, a British professor of international poli-
tics, shows in his illuminating book, The Soviet Impact
on the Western World, has led to much salutary social
and economic legislation in the West during the past
two decades. These accomplishments of the U. S. S. R. are
either slighted or not mentioned at all in the great hue
and cry which anti-Soviet forces are continually stirring
up.
Naturally those hostile to Soviet Russia concentrate
on its salient weaknesses, such as the state of civil lib-
erties and of political democracy. Any impartial ob-
server of the Soviet scene must admit that the Socialist
Republic limps and lags in these two significant criteria
of a civilized nation. Despotic practices inherited from
Tsardom, the historical Russian pattern of exalting the
community above individual rights, the long tradition --
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? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
fostered by the Orthodox Church -- of the principle of
unanimous agreement on important issues, the domestic
turbulence and hatreds resulting from the greatest revo-
lution in history, the fear and actuality of foreign ag-
gression, and the Marxist theory of proletarian dictator-
ship have all combined to hold back the evolution of
civil liberties and political democracy in the Soviet
Union.
Many people in the Western democracies thought
that the famous Moscow Trials of 1936-38, in which a
number of prominent Communist leaders were convicted
of treason, were a ghastly travesty on due process of law
and were complete frame-ups. I myself, after reading
carefully the voluminous verbatim testimony in the three
big trials -- something which few critics of Soviet justice
have bothered to do -- became convinced that the defend-
ants' sweeping confessions were genuine and that they
were indeed guilty of conspiring with Leon Trotsky and
outright fascist agents to overthrow the Soviet Govern-
ment. Since Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin and the others
firmly believed that Stalin had betrayed socialism both
at home and abroad, they felt justified as revolutionaries
in adopting any methods whatever to get rid of his re-
gime.
At the same time, when fascist plotting under the
direction of Hitler and Mussolini was making such head-
way throughout the European continent, it was too much
to expect that Soviet Russia had become so stable that
there could be no fifth column within it. Actually, many
of those who denounced the Moscow Trials naively
assumed that political progress had been so rapid in the
Soviet Union that it was simply impossible for a con-
spiracy linked with the Fascist-Nazi Axis to find root
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
there. During this trying period miscarriages of justice
occurred, in my judgment, not in the Moscow Trials, but
in the general purges that accompanied them throughout
the country and in which many innocent persons suffered.
Furthermore, the feeling against Trotsky was so extreme
that the Soviet authorities not only condemned him as
a traitor -- which he was -- but took the lamentable and
ludicrous step of re-writing history in an endeavor to
erase from the records all accounts of the leading role
he played in the 1917 Revolution and in the defense of
the Socialist Republic during its initial stages.
In his memoirs of the pre-war years Winston
Churchill makes a most significant comment on the Mos-
cow Trials. He relates that while President Benes of
Czechoslovakia was bickering with Hitler in the fall of
1936, "he became aware that communications were pass-
ing through the Soviet Embassy in Prague between im-
portant personages in Russia and the German Govern-
ment. This was part of the so-called Old-Guard Com-
munist conspiracy to overthrow Stalin, and introduce a
new regime based on a pro-German policy. President
Benes lost no time in communicating all he could find
out to Stalin. Thereafter there followed the merciless,
but perhaps not needless, military and political purge
in Soviet Russia and the series of trials in January, 1937,
in which Vishinsky, the Public Prosecutor, played so
masterful a part. "6
To see the Soviet picture clearly we must also recog-
nize that history shows that far-reaching revolutions have
usually given rise to the most unscrupulous conduct and
to bitter, throat-cutting dissension among the revolu-
tionaries themselves. Sidney and Beatrice Webb give
us the historical perspective: "Even England and Scot-
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?
THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOX
land, in the small population of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, with a much less fundamental revo-
lution, produced generation after generation of conspira-
tors, to whom treason and killing, with lies and deceit,
were only part of what they felt to be a righteous ef-
fort. . . .
"The French Revolution of 1789-95 ushered in a
similar period of conspiracy and struggle, leading to a
whole succession of counter-revolutions, not reaching the
stability of a democratic republic, with its large measure
of personal security and social equality, for nearly a
century. . . . In Russia [which was in 1900 in the matter
of morals and civilization very much where Britain and
France stood in 1700] the pattern of behavior of the
revolutionary conspirators culminated in a bitterness
and mutual antagonism more acute and all-pervading
than in any other example. "7
Especially since the end of World War II reckless
charges have been made that the Soviet Union is a hor-
rible slave state keeping from ten to twenty million
people at forced labor in concentration camps situated
in Siberia and other places. While there is no question
that the Soviet authorities have isolated political prisoners
and ordinary criminals in special work camps, the num-
bers involved have steadily declined in recent years and
have at no time reached the huge totals conjured up in
the lurid imaginations of anti-Soviet propagandists.
The Soviet Government has from its earliest years
prided itself on its method of retraining and rehabilitat-
ing prisoners of whatever variety for a normal life in the
community by giving them useful work to do while im-
prisoned. One of the chief aims of this procedure is to
ensure a good job for the prisoner when he is finally re-
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
leased and to make certain that society does not perma-
nently boycott him for his original offense. Prior to the
Second World War penologists from foreign countries
had frequently praised this Soviet system of curative
work as highly intelligent and effective. Now, with
malice aforethought, the same thing is stigmatized as
"slave labor" as part of an endeavor to indict the total-
ity of Soviet civilization.
These remarks are not intended to negate the fact
that the administration of justice in the Soviet Union
has been biased and harsh towards those considered
enemies of the socialist state; that the Soviet authorities,
relying on an omnipresent secret police, have jailed tens
of thousands of blameless individuals in their periodic
purges; and that Soviet prisons and labor camps have
frequently failed to maintain decent and healthy condi-
tions. In a country where general standards of living have
remained comparatively low, the life of political and
other prisoners is likely to be on a correspondingly low
plane. We can accept as true many of the bitter experi-
ences related by escaped Soviet prisoners without gener-
alizing their reports into a condemnation of the entire
Soviet system of penology.
In 1949 the Soviet Government expelled an American
writer, Miss Anna Louise Strong, as a foreign agent and
a spy without giving her a proper opportunity for legal
defense or even explaining what precisely were the
charges against her. I am glad to say that later, during
1950, my wife and I organized a group of American writ-
ers and intellectuals who sent a vigorous letter on the
Strong case to Mr. Alexander S. Panyushkin, Soviet Am-
bassador to the United States from 1947 to 1952. This
communication urged the Soviet Government "to review
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? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
carefully the case of Anna Louise Strong and to see
whether some mistake was not made regarding her by
the Soviet Security police or other officials in immediate
charge. "8 Nothing ever came of this protest.
Persons like myself, who believe firmly in the Western
ideals of individual liberty and the toleration of dissent,
often as these ideals have been thwarted or betrayed in
the West, have the obligation to continue our criticism of
Soviet institutions insofar as they do not measure up
to true democratic standards.
It would be possible to write a book of considerable
length concerning the violation of civil liberties and
political democracy in Soviet Russia. In fact author
after author has done this very thing, as if the repressive
aspects of the Soviet dictatorship were the complete story
about the U. S. S. R. Yet despite all the legitimate quali-
fications about Soviet political life, the Soviet Consti-
tution itself clearly belongs on the positive side of the
ledger. It is a document that does great credit to its
framers and that presents a grand design of human living
of which the Soviet people can well be proud.
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? CHAPTER III SOVIET ETHNIC DEMOCRACY
1. Soviet National and Racial Minorities
Take the map of the Union of Soviet Socialist Repub-
lics and identify, each with a distinct color, the homeland
of each of the 577 Soviet races, nationalities or tribesT
and you will have an incomparable crazy-quilt of gay
and gaudy hue. For within the sprawling boundaries of
the U. S. S. R. and amongst its population of 210,000,000
there are scattered a greater number of different ethnic
groups, both large and small, maintaining their separate
territories and cultures, than in any other country on
earth. (They speak over 125 different languages and dia-
lects and practice as many as forty different religions! /
Most people outside the Soviet Union still refer to
that country as "Russia. " This is incorrect, since the
Russian Republic is only one of the sixteen main repub-
lics of the U. S. S. R. and the Russians themselves come to
only a little more than half of the total Soviet popula-
tion. A prime reason for Lenin and his associates choos-
ing the official title, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
for the new state was to try to make sure that none of the
minority races and nationalities of the former Russian
Empire would feel subordinate, as in pre-revolutionary
days, to the large Russian majority. The idea implied
in the very name was that all the racial and national
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? SOVIET ETHNIC DEMOCRACY
groups in the confederation would stand on a plane of
freedom and equality.
The Soviet policy toward minorities goes back to the
earliest period of the 1917 Revolution. On November
15, nine days after it came into power, the Soviet Gov-
ernment issued, under the signatures of Lenin as Premier
and Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities, a revolutionary
document entitled, \HThe Declaration of the Rights of
the Peoples of Russia. " This emancipation proclama-
tion for ethnic minorities, unique in the annals of state-
craft up to that time, pledged the Communist regime
to support the following four basic principles: (1) "The
equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia; (2) the
right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination,
even to the extent of separation and the formation of
independent states; (3) the abolition of all national and
national-religious privileges and restrictions; and (4) the
free development of the national minorities and ethnic
groups inhabiting Russia. "1"!
Before many weeks had passed the Soviet Govern-
ment made another significant pronouncement directed
to the Moslem peoples of the former Tsarist Empire.
"Moslems of Russia," it began, "Tatars of the Volga and
Crimea, Kirgiz and Sarts of Siberia and Turkestan, Turks
and Tatars of Transcaucasia, Chechens and Mountain-
eers of the Caucasus -- all those whose mosques and
chapels have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs
have been trampled under foot by the Tsars and oppres-
sors of Russia! Henceforth your beliefs and customs,
your national and cultural institutions are free and in-
violable. Build your national life free and unhindered.
You have a right to do so. Know that your rights, as well
as the rights of all peoples of Russia, are protected by the
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? SOVIET CtVILlZATIOH
Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies. "2
This second declaration indicates to some extent the
complex ethnic make-up of the Soviet Union.
The i largest single ethnic division, which includes
three chief nationalities, is the Slay^ which totals about
150,000,000 or approximately three-fourths of the entire
Soviet population. * The Slavs consist mainly of the Great
Russians, the Russians proper, who number almost 105,-
000,000 and who have settled in all parts of the U. S. S. R. ;
the 37,000,000 Ukrainians, sometimes known as "Little
Russians," whose republic of rich agricultural and in-
dustrial regions borders the Black Sea and Poland in the
southwest and is about as large and populous as France;
and the Belorussians, numbering a little under 9,000,000,
who live in the western zone just north of the Ukraine
and whose name means "White Russian" in the Russian
language. They should not be confused with the anti-
Soviet exiles and emigres who left the Soviet Union dur-
ing the Revolution and Civil War and who are also called
White Russians. The Ukrainian and Belorussian Re-
publics bore the brunt of the Nazi invasion in 1941-42,
were completely overrun by the German armies and
suffered terrible devastation.
The Slavs have for centuries been predominantly
members of the Orthodox Eastern Church, which, like
the Protestant, has consistently refused to acknowledge
the authority of the Catholic Pope. The Soviet or eastern
Slavs are closely related, racially and linguistically, to the
western Slavs (the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks) and to the
southern or Balkan Slavs (the Bulgarians, Croats, Mace-
? AH population figures for Soviet ethnic groups in this chapter are
estimated as of January 1, 1949; and are based on the last national census
of 1939, together with estimates of the natural increase since that time and
of the appalling number of deaths during World War II. Allowance must
be made for some margin of error.
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? SOVIET ETHHIC DEMOCRACY
donians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes). The U. S.
S. R. contains small minorities of Bulgarians, Czechoslo-
vaks and Poles.
Next to the Slav the most prevalent racial strain in
the Soviet confederation of peoples is the [Turco-Tatar^
some 21,000,000 strong and largely Mohammedan in reli-
gion. The Turco-Tatars, dark-visaged and oblique-eyed,
are mostly the mixed descendants of fierce Asiatic war-
riors led to far-ranging conquest in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries by the mighty Eastern emperors:
Genghis Khan, he who said that "as there is one ruler
in heaven, so there should be but one on earth"; and
Tamerlane, "the Earth-Shaker. " Tamerlane's victorious
sweep into Europe reached as far north and west as the
Volga River and left along its banks settlements which
centuries later developed into the thriving, present-day
Bashkir, Chuvash and Kazan Tatars of the great Volga
basin.
Several Soviet peoples of the mountainous Caucasus
and Transcaucasus are also Turco-Tatar in origin, pre-
eminent among them being the Azerbaidzhanians, over
3,000,000 in number, who form one of the sixteen consti-
tuent Union Republics of the U. S. S. R. The Azerbaid-
zhan Republic, bordering the Caspian Sea and Iran, has
traditionally been known as the "Land of Fire," because
of its easily combustible oil and gas deposits. (Azer
means fire. ) In the early nineteenth century fire-wor-
shippers of the cult of Zoroaster still carried out their
rites before the flames of their sacred temple in Baku.
This internationally famous city is the capital of Azer-
baidzhan and the greatest center of oil production in
Soviet Russia.
However, the heart of Turco-Tatar strength in the
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
U. S. S. R. lies east across the Caspian Sea in the warm, rich
domain of Soviet Central Asia. Here the Kazakhs, the
Kirgiz, the Turkmenians and the Uzbeks, all of Turco-
Tatar stock and possessing their own Union Republics,
dwell in what is historically one of the most interesting
and romantic parts of the Soviet Union. It was in this
land that there rose the famous and fabulously wealthy
cities of Holy Bukhara and Golden Samarkand, their
many mosques, minarets and other structures combining
to create an architectural splendor unsurpassed in the
Moslem world. Here met and merged the trade, the art,
the civilization of the ancient and medieval East, with
Persian, Turkish, Indian and Chinese influences all play-
ing their role.
The hot, arid climate of Soviet Central Asia has been
a major factor in bringing a large proportion of the land
under the sway of soil-destroying sands. For instance, in
the Turkmenian Republic 80 percent of the territory
consists of desert wastes. Since earliest times, the pros-
perity of Central Asia has depended primarily upon the
proper utilization of water and the efficient maintenance
of the irrigation system. And the Soviets, with their tire-
less energy and scientific techniques, have made enor-
mous strides in the battle to extend fertility to one of the
world's driest and most barren plains. *
The Uzbek S. S. R. , containing the cities of Bukhara,
Samarkand and Tashkent, its capital, is the most prosper-
ous and populous of the Central Asiatic Republics. It
is the great cotton state of the Soviet Union and also
excels in the growing of silk. But since 1917 it has also
become highly industrialized. In Tsarist times the Uz-
beks were called "Sarts" from the old Turkish for "wan-
? See pp. 204-207.
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? SOVIET ETHHIC DEMOCRACY
der. " Their country, comparable to the American south-
west, has an over-abundance of sunshine. "The men of
Uzbekistan wear white clothing open to the waist, expos-
ing their sunburned chests, and black skull caps embroid-
ered in white. The women are dressed in brightly
colored gowns of radiant pale yellows and reds. The
girls' black hair is braided in innumerable thin plaits;
old men in colored turbans ride along on donkeys. "3
East of Uzbekistan is the Kirgiz Republic, situated
in a high and mountainous region contiguous to China's
Sinkiang Province. There is a widely held belief that
the birthplace of the human race was in what is now
Kirgizia. The Kirgiz people were poverty-stricken nom-
ads under the Tsar, but have since developed a fairly
stable and prosperous agricultural life. To the north of
Uzbekistan lies the huge Kazakh Republic, in itself alone
one-third as large as the United States. In its climate,
expanse and great business of stock-breeding northern
Kazakhstan is much like Montana, Wyoming, Colorado
and Utah; while the southern portion of the Republic is
reminiscent of New Mexico and Arizona. In mineral
resources the Kazakh S. S. R. is even richer than America's
Rocky Mountain region.
The Kazakhs are generally of medium build, black
hair and/swarthy complexion. Until the Soviets took
over, this people were roving herdsmen wandering with
their big flocks and herds over the unending steppe and
desert, living the major part of their lives in the saddle,
and moving their tents and scanty possessions from place
to place on the backs of camels. They have shared in the
vast industrial and agricultural progress that has come
to Central Asia during the last third of a century; and
their nomadic life is now mainly a thing of the past.
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
Generalizing again about Soviet Central Asia, we can
say that in no section of Soviet Russia is the contrast of
old and new more marked. For this entire region has
leaped, in but a moment of history, from a stagnant semi-
feudalism, characterized by Asiatic tyranny of the most
barbarous type, to a progressive, modern, dynamic stage
of society in the form of Marxist socialism. This revolu-
tionary advance is apparent wherever one goes in Cen-
tral Asia, whether in the city districts where the old build-
ings and the new stand side by side, in the rural areas
where the native population in their traditional garb
operate tractors and combines, or in the remote valleys
and mountain ranges where isolated peoples have for the
first time been brought into contact with twentieth-
century civilization.
