Library:This Soviet World

This Soviet World
Author	Anna Louise Strong
Written in	1936
Publisher	Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
Type	Book
Source	https://comlib.encryptionin.space/epubs/this-soviet-world/

ON INTERPRETING A WORLD

A leading Russian Communist said to me a year ago “The mind of our people is changing so fast under the conditions of socialism that it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to speak to the rest of the world. We find it harder to understand them, and they us.”

We who go back and forth between the Soviet world and the world of capitalism—not only in space from New York to Moscow but also in spirit from intimate life with Soviet people to intimate life in America—feel keenly this difficulty. Important words like freedom, democracy, dictatorship have different meanings on different sides of the border. The Soviet world is sharply conscious of planning its future; the capitalist world is always arriving where it hadn’t intended. And Soviet officials are not always helpful in making their acts intelligible; they often assume that only deliberate malice can doubt them and that the only needed explanation is the appropriate citation from Marx.

To explain the swiftly growing Soviet world to that other world out of which it was born is a task that becomes steadily more complex. For if its outer achievements are every year more able to speak for themselves, its inner life more and diverges from that of capitalism in a hundred subtle ways.

In the Berlin station a giant sign greets me with three-foot letters: “Think of your hair!” My mind flashes back to the world I have left. What are Soviet people thinking of? The Stakhanov drive, the Moscow city plan, Marie and her sugar beets, the conquest of the north. And hair and perfume, O yes, of course. Everyone knows of the rising standard of living and firmly believes in a cultural life—more bath-tubs, radios, books and dramatic clubs and doubtless more hair. But their individuality is expressed not by possessions and polish but by the various ways in which men create. Dynamic is the word; their civilization is dynamic.

The regimentation of life by property is my next shock in the capitalist world. The obscene phrases “damages for alienation of affections” or “a $50,000 man” or the remark: “I do it only for the money that is in it”—what degradation they imply of human life and work! I see able engineers spending creative power on little models in a government relief job just to keep alive. I see a journal of high standard, the life-work of an able editor submerged by a new owner’s wish for quick profit. Lives are conditioned in the Soviet world also, by trends and sages of organization, but not by the profits of a boss.

The difference appears in the use of pronouns. People under capitalism are contrasting “I” and “they.” “Too bad it couldn’t have been on my land,” a man remarks of a California oil-strike. Soviet folk would be hailing “our new oil-wells”; to them the idea of a private oil-well is already as quaint as a private postal system. I note a remark about American unemployment: “If it gets any worse, they’ll have to do something.” Who is this ultimate, uncontrollable “they”? The term betrays the class society of which the speakers are unconscious; they are waiting for some boss to act. To hear a debate: “Is America going fascist?” and think how much less passively Soviet folk would word it. “Shall we go fascist? No. Then exactly how shall we prevent it?” Soviet folk say “we” of one-sixth of the earth’s surface. Uzbek cotton-pickers, toiling under the sun of Central Asia, say: “We are conquering the Arctic; we rescued the Chelyuskinites.” Ukrainian farmers who never went up in an airplane talk of “our stratosphere records” and “the loss of our Maxim Gorky airplane” as they take up collections to build ten new ones. But even Mrs. Roosevelt asks me: “Are Russian peasants getting more reconciled to accepting direction?” I feel the hopelessness of language as I answer: “No, they are learning better to organize and direct themselves.”

Americans often ask me whether Russians are not naturally more altruistic than Americans, more fit for communism, they imply. No, it is something quite different. Russians at the time of Revolution were more medieval than Americans, which means “naturally” more petty, unreliable, inefficient, given to bargaining and cheating. Traits of the Asiatic market-place were widespread and occasionally still annoy the visitor. But these traits are disappearing under the fact of joint ownership, which brings identity of individual with community good.

Joint possession of the country’s resources and productive mechanism is the economic reality which unifies Soviet life and makes it dynamic. It is this that washes out the antagonism between personal and public good, that makes men say “we.” It is this that makes men conscious planners of the future; for owners plan but non-owners can only fight or drift. The chief quality of Soviet civilization is the sense that the world is “ours,” to seize, understand and make over.

This Soviet world is my theme; I give scant space to those fast disintegrating forces that fought it. I tell not the “whole truth,” for truth is never “whole”; there are always at least two truths in conflict: the truth that is dying and the truth that is coming into existence. American Tories who intrigued for King George had their truth also, but it remains only as piquant sauce to romance; the truth of the Continental armies remained to build the modern republic. They themselves recalled the frozen feet of Valley Forge less as suffering than as heroism; their raids on hungry farms passed into memory not as banditry but as necessity and daring. History’s greatest gift to victors is that not only they, but their truth survives.

Yet I do no injustice to those many lives which in greater or less degree were wrenched or broken by the coming of the new Soviet order. Even for them the new years obliterate the past. They also change to seek their new future in the new system; Lives broken in terms of property are being remade in terms of work. Saboteurs reform and win posts of honor; kulaks come back from exile to factories and farms; children have an equal start now regardless of fathers. For this war differs from other battles in that all men, even the conquered foes, are absorbed into the ranks of the conquerors—joint heirs to all the fruits of victory.

A. L. S.

PART I: MEN MAKE THE SOVIET WORLD

CHAPTER I: THE PLAN FOR REMAKING THE WORLD

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world; our business is to change it.”

— Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

Whenever I ask myself what brings increasing visitors to Moscow, what they want here and what they find, and why the eyes of the world turn more and more to the Soviet Union with a questing hope that hardly yet dares call itself belief, there flashes into my mind the remark made to me in 1930 at Dnieprostroy by the young and disillusioned son of a Wall Street millionaire.

Dnieprostroy in those days was the first of the famous giants of the new Soviet Russia, “the largest power dam in the world.” Hour after hour we climbed the cliffs and ravines of its mighty construction. We fled from screaming sirens that warned of blasting rock. We saw great stone-crushing plants, saw-mills, locomotive repair shops, temporary power station—all sizable works harnessed to the task of making a greater power station which should in turn serve plants a hundred times their scope. We visited the “socialist city” where discussion raged between advocates of individual cottages or big apartment houses for the future town. We saw hurriedly constructed club houses where thousands of workers busily grabbed knowledge—reading, writing, political economy and the technique of their new job.

Night fell. We stood on the shore of the yet unharnessed river, destined to rise to bury those high banks beneath a man-impounded lake. We far down at the great sweep of electric brilliance that had already shattered the age-old darkness of the Ukrainian steppe. It was then that my companion said: “I think that Dnieprostroy has answered the question that brought me to Russia.”

“What question?” I asked.

“Whether the world is to be changed by trying one at a time to improve human beings or by changing the social environment that makes human beings.”

In the pause that followed the sounds of construction came to us incessantly, rising from the bowels of earth and filling the horizon. The short, sharp puffs of engines, the roar of cliffs torn asunder, the ceaseless beat of mills grinding stone into concrete, the rasp of drills eating down into river granite. Sharpened by night and softened by distance, they blended into a mighty symphony—music of man, the builder, subduing, the earth.

Dark beyond the circling lights lay Hortitz Island, in ancient days the last stand of free-booting bandit chieftains against oppressors. We remembered the husky peasant girl from the island whom we had seen in overalls that morning, gang-boss over twelve men who excavated rock by explosions of liquid air. Dnieprostroy had changed her in a few months from a farm servant to a “brigadier.” We remembered the blacksmith whom we had asked in the glare of foundry fires how he liked his work and who burst forth with fiery will: “You know, we’re going to finish her in 1932”—a simple workman pushing ahead by one year the estimate of Hugh L. Cooper’s world-experienced engineers.

We recalled how competitions between workers of right and left bank drove the dam ahead, doubling the concrete-laying estimates of the Americans by force of newly awakened will. Signals night by night across the raging torrent told in red and green lights the day’s total, celebrated over-fulfillment of plan by a great red star. Night by night, week by week each bank fought to keep its red star shining. We remembered motion pictures, dramas, concerts, lectures which brought the city’s culture to these thousands who had come from the scattered farms of the Ukraine. The fine new polytechnic institute where workers chosen from the river-gangs were being turned in forty classrooms into engineers. We saw on the high bank the homes of the American consultants, who understood better than the Russians the technique of the great job but were eternally puzzled by its spirit.

Yes, Dnieprostroy gave the answer to my companion’s question. Dnieprostroy was a new form of production under a new social system. It was remaking individuals by wholesale.

Increasingly in the past five years Americans have come to the Soviet Union, scientists, engineers, artists, economists all bent on their own pursuits, dogmatic or bewildered tourists, seeking proof of an old belief or material for a new one. Especially since the crash of 1929 smashed the world which was “inevitably getting better,” they have come, fleeing from the ruins of that earthquake to learn what, if anything, the Soviet Union offers. By no means all of them put their question as clearly as did my young companion; by no means all interpret so swiftly the essence of the first construction job they see. But the question he asked is basically what brings most of them, an ancient quest of man which has troubled philosophers no less than baffled tourists: “Can our world be remade? And how to remake it?”

The problem is especially pressing upon the American middle class of today, which has seen its old world taken from it in ways that it hardly understands. The independent small property owners, mostly farmers, who formed a hundred years ago 80 per cent of the American people except in the slave South, bequeathed to their descendants ideals of democracy and freedom, the “liberty and equality of men owning their own means of livelihood.” But large scale industry, developing through a century, wiped out the small enterprisers, increased the number of salaried employees and made the farmer dependent on banks and markets, thus changing America to a “nation of hired workers.” Only 12 per cent of the people live by ownership of their own property, in place of 80 per cent a century ago.

The myth of property remained long after the reality had vanished. Millions of these salaried people still felt hat they owned something—no longer a store, a small workshop, an unencumbered farm, but savings in stocks, bonds, insurance—which lifted them somewhat above the ranks of laboring hands. Crashingly the world economic crisis destroyed this illusion. As if to emphasize how little control these small people had over their own property, the value of their liquid wealth shrank from twenty-seven billion dollars in 1929 to four billion in 1932. Millions of the middle class were thrown into the same abyss of ruin with millions of wage-workers; they wait together on bread-lines, study together the government relief programs, hunt together for a boss. For all of them alike, as long as the capitalist world remains, most put their trust in bosses, someone who owns and will give them access to the means of production and of life.

Their situation is the more distressing because for most of our Western world the past hundred years has been what John Strachey aptly calls the “century of the great hope.” Millions of men became better fed, better housed, better clothed through the industrial revolution which took production out of the home workshop into the factory and knit together the ends of earth by railroad, steamship, telegraph. Especially America—where the arrival of the new machines and technical methods coincided with a continent-wide expansion into lands of vast wealth, developed by energetic oilers from all nations for the first time unhampered by any remnants of feudalism the belief in inevitable progress and increasing prosperity was both a conscious and unconscious national faith. The little red schoolhouse bade every boy aspire to be president. “Go west, young man.” . . . “Don’t be a bear on America,” said successful plutocrats. But far deeper than these conscious preachings spread the atmosphere of determined optimism which made every man who was not a good booster seem subtly immoral to his friends. Did not the great lands of America, the efficient industries of America, the productive energy of America, offer the basis for a good standard of life for everyone—an “American standard”? It was easy to prove that they did—and do!

What happened to that faith in inevitable progress? If it still survives in some circles as a despairing habit, elsewhere it has been replaced by belief in inevitable doom. “Inevitable drift to fascism,” “inevitable twilight of the West,” “the old standard of prosperity can never return,” are phrases common on lips that not long since hailed inevitable advance. Others begin a frenzied search into the faiths of past ages, to know if elsewhere than with us abides the truth. These learn that belief in the inevitability of progress has never been a universal faith. It has been confined to definite periods of economic advancement, and to certain nations within those periods or certain classes within nations. Did not whole centuries of the Middle Ages view the world as an essentially unchanging garden of human souls from which religion culled a few for heaven, leaving the rest for hell? Even today do not hundreds of millions of people—those great suppressed races of the East—find life’s processes so fundamentally evil that their essential faith is Buddhism in which Nothingness is bliss?

Even in our West, as capitalism decays into fascism, there arise new denials of the inevitability of progress. Ideals of the past—the Roman Empire, the Germanic gods, the feudal Britain featured by fascist-striving novels—gild with emotional glamor the tenets of fascism: that science and machine production are evil, that democracy, peace and the conquest of poverty are futile dreams of a decadent society, that murderous war is man’s noblest end. For fascism is the last stand of a desperate capitalism which can no longer use the fruits of science and machine production, which dare no longer permit either peace or democracy, since it must brutally refuse to its victims that abolition of poverty which is already technically possible in the world.

Can human reason find a way to reorganize human society—a way which human wills can follow? Must we go backing blindly into the future, cheered now by faith in inevitable progress, damned now by faith in inevitable doom, and claiming from some supernatural world a just and rational balancing of the unjust, irrational chaos found in this? Or can that continuous, collective application of human thought known as science, which we have learned to take as our best, though still unperfected guide in rationalizing and controlling subhuman phenomena, be expanded to rationalize and control our human destiny? Can man master the machines he has made which today threaten increasingly to enslave him? Can he subdue to his will those tremendously productive forces which his science and technical knowledge have released, and which seem adequate to abolish poverty, yet which at present give increasing unemployment, economic crises, wars?

We are asking, in other words, can men master destiny? Are all those gleams of human reason which have given us increasing dominion over material phenomena but will-o’-the-wisps, luring to a swamp which will engulf us the more blackly for the false, brief light they gave? Or are they gleams of dawn that may brighten into an ever-increasing daylight, in which not only a few isolated phenomena but the whole of man’s own nature and his organized society can be planned by human reason and carried through by human wills?

No less than this is the search that brings men over the seas to the Soviet Union. For if to millions in our Western world the century now passing was the century of the great hope, there are other millions in two great half-continents uniting Europe and Asia, who look upon it rather as the century of the great plan. The reference is not to that Five-Year Plan which the Soviet Union made famous, but to a plan far more comprehensive which prepares and includes all five-year plans in all lands and all the future. A plan for remaking the world drawn up eighty-eight years ago on instructions from a London congress of working-men of many nations, and issued in 1848 under the title Communist Manifesto, the work of the German economists Frederick Engels and Karl Marx.

The Communist Manifesto is usually thought of as the defiance flung at the world by an illegal revolutionary party of hunted people. So it was. But it was also man’s first attempt to apply science to the analysis of human society in order to draw up a plan for remaking the world. Previous attempts to analyze the world were exercises of philosophers, not directed towards change. Previous attempts to change the world were confined to threats or exhortations to secure specific conversions or reforms. Many Utopian pictures had existed of how beautiful society might be when once made over. But the Communist Manifesto tried to answer the question: How can the thing be done? Born in the middle years of that century in which the scientific method was consciously remaking the material world, it sought to analyze the elements of human society, the nature and cause of the changes we see in history, for the purpose of producing social change in a desired direction. That is why it claims to be Scientific Socialism.

The followers of Marx see in him the genius who combined the three chief currents of thought of the nineteenth century—classical German philosophy, classical English political economy and French revolutionary doctrines. The philosophic basis of Marxism is “dialectics,” which views every reality, whether of nature, the mind, or society, as in process of continual change through the development and clash of “inner contradictions.” This theory applied to the study of history shows how economic, political and social systems are constantly changing, at times slowly, at times by leaps, catastrophes, revolutions. American capitalism of the Civil War period is not the capitalism of today. The democracy of the New England town-meeting is not the democracy of the modern imperial nation. They may be called by the same but names deceive; the thing changes even while you look at it to disdain or admire. Even your disdain and admiration changes, the meaning of your words and concepts. What was true, right, desirable yesterday may not be true, right, desirable tomorrow. Systems have their day and cease to be.

Is there any law in this change? Is there in this constant interaction and conflict of systems and ideas anything basic, changing which will change the rest? “The economic structure,” says Marx, is “the real foundation. . . . The mode of production . . . determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life.” For Marx the fundamental thing about any human society is not its system of ideas or religions, nor the form of government nor the nature of its family life. These things are important but derivative. They are determined by the ways in which human beings get food, clothing, shelter, by the stage of their advance and the tools they use in these fundamental operations. In a world whose economic structure fails to reward honesty and altruism, a Marxist would not spend his efforts preaching these virtues, but in creating an economic system where honesty really prospered, where each man’s success must be build on the success, rather than the ruin, of others. The new economic system would make new people; under it, education in the new ideals would be swift and hopeful.

How then do economic systems change? Marx finds the key in his theory of “class struggle.” Man’s science and invention create new ways of production, and these in turn create new “classes” of human beings, i.e., groups of people who have different and conflicting relations to production. Between these classes a struggle goes on around the ownership of the process of production, which is the means of life. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

Thus at different stages of human history new classes arise from new ways of working and the struggle between them produces social change. Modern capitalism has not done away with class antagonisms, but it has this distinctive feature—it has simplified them. “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into . . . two great classes directly facing each other—bourgeoisie and proletariat,” those who live by owning and those who can live only by selling their labor power, by seeking a boss.

Between these two remain for a time the middle classes, distraught survivors of those small property owners and independent craftsmen who once embodied the demand for private property against a feudal past. They suffer deeply under advancing capitalism which dislodges them steadily and painfully into the ranks of hired hands. They struggle against their fate, but their strivings are confused, for their instinctive desire is to go back to small scale property. Their cry is to “share the wealth,” to start over again that old society of small owners which led to the present-day monopolies and which would lead to them again if it could be revived. The right to private property was once revolutionary pledge of freedom, but this also has changed with the passing of history. Private property in farm plots and hand tools freed serfs from feudal masters; private property in steel mills creates a new slavery. Even small ownership today, wherever it survives or comes into being, is at the mercy of large scale finance.

Who owns the world? That is the basic question conditioning all hopes of social change. What is wrong with the world today, according to Marxists, is private ownership of the great productive processes which are socially operated. The way out is not backward to subsistence farms and handicrafts it is forward to social ownership. Not “share the wealth,” but jointly owned wealth, jointly organized by and for all who work. Only thus can the great machines be subjugated; only thus can science and modern technique produce plenty for all mankind. Only thus can the present vision of men into owners and workers be abolished, a division which is wrecking the world by social strife and international war. It must be superseded by one united class of people—joint worker-owners of the world. From this economic equality, all other forms of equality will grow. First a stage of socialism where men have equal access to labor and receive according to their work. Then when the habits of human beings have been changed by joint ownership, will come the stage of communism in which men freely co-operate in work according to their abilities and receive according to their needs.

Who will bring about this change of ownership? Clearly not the present private owners: their interests lie the other way. Nor can the disintegrating middle classes achieve it, except insofar as they come to understand that their future lies with the workers. Only one class of people can develop the will to carry through this difficult long epoch of change—the working class which is bound to the mighty mechanism of modern production, mastering it yet enslaved by it. Joint ownership is their only path to freedom; when they understand this, they will accomplish it. They are thus the “really revolutionary class,” in whom social ownership of modern production is a living need and can become a flaming passion carrying humanity forward to a higher stage.

The task of every Marxist is to help them understand, to make them “class-conscious,” aware of their power and function as creators of social progress. Millions of Americans resent the very idea of classes, and are indignant at “inflaming class-consciousness” where it does not yet exist. But Marxian classes are not epithets inciting to riot; they are categories in a scientific analysis. Marxists say that unless human society is to go down in a catastrophe of slavery, war and ruin, men must own their tools and the wealth which these create; that tools and wealth have grown too complexly social to be owned individually and must therefore be socially owned; and that only the working class can develop the fighting will to seize the power of ownership and through it remake society. The less the workers are organized, the less conscious they are of their power and function, the more will the coming changes in human society be protracted, painful and blind. The more conscious the workers are of their great task in history, the better they are organized, the more they are able to rally around them the middle classes, the swifter will be the change and the less will be the human suffering.

Two generations of economists in many countries developed the Marxian theory. Lenin built on it the Bolshevik Party which in 1917 carried through the Russian Revolution. Stalin is honored today by Bolsheviks not only as statesman and organizer, but as the far-seeing analyst and guider of social change, who continues and develops the scientific method of Marx, Engels, Lenin. One-sixth of the world today is being remade according to the Marxian program—the first consciously devised pattern that men ever applied to society as a whole.

CHAPTER II: THE PARTY OF REVOLUTION

“To distinguish those who worked from those who talked.”

— Lenin

Not by accident did the first socialist revolution take place in Russia. The World War imposed great strains on many countries and the chain of world imperialism broke at its weakest link. More than any other land, Russia was tormented by war and ravenous for peace. Tsardom, that hideous hangover from the Middle Ages, had lost all moral authority and was hated by the entire people. For decades revolution had been brewing in Russia. The World War added the last unbearable pressure and the explosion came.

Not least among the factors which made the revolution possible and helped determine its form was the existence of the Bolshevik Party. This was no spontaneous creation, born at the moment of revolt; for fourteen years it had been consciously welded by painstaking thought and desperate struggle. Its traditions indeed went back much further. The whole last half of the nineteenth century advanced thinkers in Russia, under the oppression of tsardom, had sought eagerly for the effective revolutionary path. Through fifty years of torment, sacrifice, heroism, incredible energy, careful study, they had tested many methods. They had tried to educate and organize the peasantry; they had tried the terrorist assassination of tyrants. They had failed. They had checked their failures by the history of other nations and a section of them had come to Marxism as the correct program for remaking the world.

If Marx furnished the general program, it was Lenin who developed the theory and tactics, proletarian revolution, and built the organization for the seizure of power. Bolshevism, as a trend of political thought and a political party, exists since 1903, when the Social-Democratic Party of Russia split into groups known as Bolsheviks (majority) and Mensheviks (minority), which correspond to Communists and Social-Democrats today in other countries. The older leaders wanted to “widen” the Party, to take in all “supporters” and give them all a voice in determining the Party’s program. Lenin, though recognizing that any social change must rely on wide masses, not only of workers but of many other “allies,” insisted that membership in the Party itself “must be given a narrow definition to distinguish those who worked from those who talked.”

To organize and train the Party of Revolution became thenceforth the central task and the greatest achievement of that world-renowned leader, Lenin, who gave his whole life to the study and practice of the science of political power. Power was to him no mere personal achievement of office; it was the organized lifting of the human race one stage forward in history. He studied how to ride the turbulent upheaval which the conflicts in modern society would inevitably produce, how to prepare and lead men for the seizure of the state and the creation of a new order, how at last to organize them for the conquest of nature and of their own destiny. This was to Lenin the science of power.

Starting with the Marxian thesis that the working class is the group in modern society which can be organized to take power and to build a new order, Lenin created for this class a “vanguard” of leaders. They must be men of intelligence, will, daring; yet they must act in a disciplined manner, reinforcing a common direction. They must make the revolution a life-long profession, steadily studying the economic, political and social forces of the society in which they live. They must apply this knowledge in action. They must take active part not only in elections and political movements, but in strikes, trade union work, demonstrations, distribution of literature and all the other prosaic or dangerous activities through which the working class becomes organized and conscious of its power. They must keep close to the workers, learning from them and assisting them, and win the right to lead by the confidence they inspire.

How are such leaders to be found among the great hordes of the dispossessed and discontented? How, if found, are they to be welded into a disciplined, fighting force? Lenin had no illusions; he knew that the mass of exploited men who are squeezed out by the dislocations of capitalism, and who turn in hope or despair towards communism, contains many fools, knaves, fanatics and self-pitying failures as well as men of intelligence and will. He foresaw a long period of difficult struggle, in which men fit to lead would be tested by fire, men capable of learning would be trained by experience, and others would weed themselves out by their follies. Lenin himself gave most of his years to the slow work of building up and training a not very large but thoroughly tested Party, which could give leadership when the hour of revolution came. I have met simple workers to whom Lenin devoted hours of individual teaching, and who remember today the exact phrases he used with them forty years ago. The making of real Communists able to lead the masses is a long and costly process.

Nothing could be more absurd than the two contradictory views of Communists promulgated today by their opponents. They are usually pictured as planless inciters to violence and riot, people who have a crazy desire for chaos, in the hope that something vaguely called communism may somehow ensue. A more sophisticated view, to which no less a person than Sinclair Lewis falls victim in It Can’t Happen Here, portrays them as brainless sheep required to act in blind obedience to the orders of their superiors for the sake of discipline. Neither of these types could possibly lead a successful strike, much less a revolution. A communist who increased risks by recklessness would be early eliminated; a man who only took orders would be useless as a leader. Communists must learn the difficult combination of intelligence with daring; they must learn to act together but they must all know why.

“What we build cannot be built by passive people,” said one of the secretaries of the Russian Communist Party to me. “We all had strong convictions; we fought for them and went to jail for them,” said another veteran Bolshevik. “Then in jail we fought with our imprisoned comrades over details of past policies, studying and learning from past errors. Often we found that the mistake of a few words in our theory had cost us a year in prison.” Again and again groups which could not agree split off from the others. Lenin made no effort to detain them; he distinguished sharply between those allies with whom co-operation was possible for a longer or shorter period, and the smaller group which would stick through everything. Thus was built up that Party of men who had placed their lives in each other’s hands so often that they could rely on each other with absolute assurance, not through blind submission but through a habit of mutual consultation and swift acceptance of joint decisions.

The most famous picture of the ideal Communist is given by Krupskaia, widow of Lenin, in an article entitled: “What a Communist Should Be Like.” “First of all a Communist is a social person, with strongly developed social instincts, who desires that all people should be well and be happy. Second, he must understand what is happening about him in the world—the mechanism of the existing régime, the history of the growth of human society, the history of economic development, of the growth of property, the division of classes, the growth of state forms. He must clearly picture whither society is developing—to a régime where the happiness of some will not be based on the slavery of others and where there will be no compulsion except strongly developed social instincts. And the Communists must clear the road, as you clear a path in the wilderness, to hasten its coming.

“Third, the Communist must know how to organize creatively. If he is a medical worker, for instance, he must know medicine, then the history of medicine in Russia and other lands, then the Communist approach to the problem of medicine, i.e., how to organize wide masses to create from the ranks of the toilers a powerful sanitary organization in the cause of health. He must know not only what Communism is and what is coming, what his own job in it may be and his approach to the masses. Fourthly, his personal life must be submitted to and guided by the interests of Communism. No matter how much he regrets giving up the comforts and ties of home, he must if necessary cast all aside and go into danger wherever assigned. . . . Body and soul he must be devoted to the interests of the toiling masses, of Communism.”

Men who have risen high in the Communist Party are characterized by these qualities listed by Krupskaia. They are usually reticent about their deepest motives; it is not the thing to gush one’s devotion. One learns of their qualities chiefly through others. Krupskaia, speaking to intimate Party friends at the funeral of her husband Lenin, found the completest expression in the words: “Lenin deeply loved the people.” Radek tells how Stalin, answering greetings sent him by the Party on his fiftieth birthday, “said something which, in the mouth of such a reserved man, sounded as though it came from the very depths of his being. Stalin said that he was ready to shed his blood ‘drop by drop’ for the proletariat.”

Men who would lead the masses in changing the world by the Marxian method must obviously strive for constant growth in two directions: in ever-deepening understanding of social and economic forces and in ever-widening participation in workers’ struggles. Perhaps the first thing that strikes an outsider is the amount of time which all Communists devote to the study of Marxian theory. Managers of great steel plants and busy county officials under the pressure of harvest will find time, at unearthly hours like eleven at night or seven in the morning, for their study of Marxism or their class in current events, deeming these things as essential as their other pressing work.

Visitors to the Soviet Union are not infrequently amazed to find that a Party secretary in a rural township can discuss international affairs with an assurance and abundance of detail which few foreign editors of an American metropolitan news-paper can show, and will handle statistics and history with a good deal more ease than the “Brain Trust.” A prominent American politician once expressed to me doubts of the accuracy of the published interview of H. G. Wells with Stalin. Stalin’s references to the Cromwellian revolution seemed to him too detailed to have been available for conversation. “People,” he said, “don’t talk that way” But any Communist in the Soviet Union who did not know the essentials of Cromwellian revolution, and of other historic revolutions from which he is expected to learn, would join a class to “raise his ideological level.” A Communist who allowed himself to become as ignorant of world affairs as is the average American politician would be ruthlessly “cleaned out” of the Party, or told to join the group of “sympathizers” to learn what he has to know.

The emotional vagueness which is a feature of all capitalist political platforms, and which is indeed desired in order to win wide support without being too definite, is the exact opposite of Communist statement. The Communists even seem to be painfully definite, to “take refuge in formulæ,” or to split hairs over the exact interpretation of phrases. All science and technical knowledge, however, advance by just this splitting of hairs to find the exact chemical formula which produces the alloy or the mathematical relation which strengthens the arch of the bridge; discussions in any congress of physiologists or electricians are full of this “dull theory” without which no scientific progress can be attained. Communists take Marxism as such a science; to rise to eminence among them demands years, even decades, of close and penetrating study of social forces. This is no dogma to be learned once for all; it is a developing body of thought, constantly applied to and affected by new conditions. By the very theory of dialectics, these forces are changing. The speeches of Lenin and Stalin and other Party leaders never deal in stirring oratory or spell-binding generalities but in close and careful analysis. Stalin would no more attempt to sway a Communist congress by “force of personality” expressed in brilliant oratory and colorful phrasing, than Edison would have expected to convince a group of American engineers of the reliability of some new formula by emotional words. One such attempt would ruin either an Edison or a Stalin.

But Communists must not only be scientific; they must also learn to work with the masses. In this they face a special difficulty; the man who has thought for years in Marxian categories may find it as hard to explain them to simple people as an electrical engineer would find it to explain the theory of turbines to men in a candle-lighted world. This is more serious for the Communist than for the engineer; for the latter can build his turbines without help from the candle-lighted individuals, but the Communist cannot make a revolution without the people. Fortunately actions may speak as well as words, and all Communists are required to do active work which brings them in touch with the masses. When intellectuals apply for Party membership, it is a common practice to give them some tasks around a factory, such as teaching night classes in Russian language, civics or Marxism, or practical assistance in trade union work. After a year or two of such testing, the opinion of the workers is taken as to whether the candidate is fit to be a Party member.

Any Communist Party at any stage in its development in any country considers persons who cannot co-operate with workers’ movements as unfit for Party membership. In the Soviet Union where the rank and file of non-Party workers have already considerable knowledge of the Party’s ideals, it has become a common thing for them to assist in helping the Party in its selection of members. Two hundred thousand workers who joined the Party some two years ago were actually nominated by the non-Party workers, through repeated meetings and discussions as to what persons in their ranks should be recommended for Party membership. From time to time the Party “cleans out” its membership, and this is always done at open meetings to which all workers of the given institution are invited. Each Communist in the institution must give before this public an extended account of his life and activities, submit to and answer all criticism, and prove before the assembled workers his fitness to remain in the “leading Party.” Members may be cleaned out not only as “hostile elements, double-dealers, violators of discipline, degenerates, career-seekers, self-seekers, morally degraded persons” but even for being merely “passive,” for having failed to keep learning and growing in knowledge and authority among the masses.

People admitted to the Communist Party—this admission demands a period of study and probation—must give considerable time to unpaid “Party work” i.e., the various tasks of strengthening the organization and organizing the masses around it. Having chosen as the chief purpose of their life the achievement of the socialist revolution, they must learn how to build a joint program. They take part in the discussions from which arise the decisions of the Party and they are expected to carry out these decisions energetically but never blindly. For they must know why the decisions are made; they must understand the Party Line and be able to promote it without bothering other people for orders. They must have strong opinions and fight for them; but they must know when to fight and when to yield. If they cannot learn this, they will find themselves outside the Party, thrown out either as “passive” or as “opposition.” It is not an easy lesson; there have been many political mortalities.

Party members must learn to decide and act collectively, not only in determining the general line, but also in deciding their own work in it. They must consult and accept their comrades’ judgment as to where they themselves can be of most use. In the Civil War Communists were expected to be the first to volunteer for every battle-front. In the Soviet Union today they are first to be sent to difficult posts in industry and farming. They may be torn from jobs in which they are successful and sent to work which they hate; they must there-upon cease to hate it and do it well as an important task. I know of a high official who was taken from a train by a telegram sent through an obscure local secretary in a town through which he passed, and ordered to return for a different assignment. But no order is ever the command of a superior officer; it is the decision of a group of comrades with whom one has chosen to work. This is the famous Party discipline; known as “iron” discipline but also as “conscious” discipline, for it is based not on passive submission but on understanding participation and collective choice. The reward for this discipline is conscious participation in the making of history.

The Communists expect not only to lead the masses, but to learn from them in a constant interaction. They must “organize the proletariat”; they must “guide it in its class struggle.” They must “see ahead of the working class,” and be the “experienced general staff” which “every army at war must have if it is to avoid certain defeat.” But they do not consider themselves a separate caste of leaders, but a “vanguard” intimately a part of the working class they lead. They modify their program to grant temporarily some “backward” demand of the masses, or to include permanently some new form or method which the masses invent. An example of the first was Lenin’s response to the peasants’ demands for splitting up the land, a backward step taken to secure peasant support and “in order that they may educate themselves by fulfilling their desires.” An example of the second was the adoption of “soviets” in government and “artels” in farming, neither of which forms had been foreseen by the Party until they arose. It is the working class which must dictate and not the Party; in 1925 when Zinoviev argued for dictatorship by the Party, Stalin fought against this “narrow point of view,” saying that the confidence between the masses of the people and the Party must not be destroyed by any peculiar Party rights, “because in the first place, the Party might be mistaken, and even if it were not, the masses might take some time to see that it was right.”

How can three million Communists lead one hundred and seventy million people? Because they are not alien to those millions, but are the most energetic part of them, whose capacity to lead has been repeatedly tested and recognized by the others. Millions of non-Party people today in the Soviet Union work loyally, even enthusiastically under Party direction, yet do not venture to call themselves Communists. One of my best friends was a woman who gave her life to the care of homeless children, and who said to me once: “My life began with the Soviet Power; it alone gave me the chance to fight for children. . . . I care more for the Party’s success than for anything in life.” Yet when her fellow-workers voted her “worthy of being a Communist,” she declined the honor, knowing she could not honestly join while she disagreed on one or two points in the Party program.

A fifty-two-year-old wheelwright, Rosenberg, whom I met in the Jewish Autonomous Territory of Birobidjan, had courageously dismantled his home in the Ukraine and taken his family of ten to pioneer in the Far East. He had fought through incredible hardships to build a collective industry which made carts; he was now a member of the city government giving much unpaid time to civic work. “When the Party decided to develop Birobidjan,” he explained, “I knew it would be a great future. It goes higher and higher to the building of socialism. I myself can’t build it, but if I work and others work, we’ll build it.” Few could have expressed the Communist goal more sincerely than Rosenberg, yet he did not think of joining the Party. “I don’t know enough,” he said. “I am just studying the first political courses. Serious reading is not so easy for me. I am fifty-two years old.”

In the Far North fourteen years ago I met Rimpalle, who had risked his life to run the Finnish border and “help the Revolution.” He organized the first quarries and mines in a hungry Arctic land; he created a trade union, a co-operative and a night-school for illiterate natives of the forests. He made $100,000 for the state that first summer and got for himself—it was the time of War Communism—only “rations of potatoes and good, fat gravy and one resoling of my boots.” Rimpalle said to me: “It’s a useful job. Up here so near the border and the propaganda of the White Finns, we needed to have an industry to give food to the people.” He was already a candidate for the Communist Party, expecting to be admitted to full membership in a few months.

These examples show what is required of Communists. Devoted activity under Communist direction, such as the Jewish wheelwright gave, is not enough. Ninety per cent allegiance, such as the social worker offered, is not enough. Nor was it enough for Rimpalle to work self-sacrificingly to increase socially owned wealth; he must understand consciously the political purpose of his work. I have in the course of fifteen years in the Soviet Union met an occasional Communist who was a grafter, and many more who were stubborn bureaucrats and unenlightened fanatics. But I have also seen how the Party throws out dead wood—not always accurately—and renews itself from the working class it leads.

Such is the organized Party which carried through the Revolution and which today welds into shape the great masses of the Soviet Union, with its vast distances, its once backward populations, its hundred and eighty-two nationalities, its foes on all borders. It succeeds by choosing its members with discrimination, by keeping them firmly organized, forever studying and continuously on the job.

The Communist Party does not expect to last forever. “When classes disappear and the dictatorship of the proletariat dies out, the Party also will die out.” It sees its task as belonging to a definite stage in human society, with a beginning, a development and an end. No other political party in the world has this type of historic consciousness, this supreme confidence; all others live from election to election, and make no long time plans. The Communist Party considers that it has a specific job in history and confidently expects to stay in power for the time required to carry it through.