YEARS AFTER THE REVOLUTION
By George Novack
Maurice Hindus is a well-known American journalist, born in the Russian countryside, who has been visiting the Soviet Union and commenting on the vicissitudes of its development since 1923. He has written twenty books about Russia, more than any other author in the Western world. He has never agreed with Marxism or Bolshevism but has been a fuzzy, populist-minded sympathizer of the 1917 upheaval, especially concerned with its effects upon the vast peasant population of Russia.
He has just published an account of his last three journeys to the USSR in 1962, 1963 and 1965, "years that span the collapse of the Khrushchev epoch and the rise of the new Kremlin leadership." (The Kremlin's Human Dilemma, Russia after Half a Century of Revolution. Doubleday and Company, Garden City, New York. 1967. $5.95.)
It is filled with informative reports of his encounters and discussions with assorted types of Soviet citizens in the cities and the villages. These gain depth and perspective because he is able to compare conditions in successive periods of Soviet development from personal knowledge as well as from candid conversations with old friends.
Hindus is sensitive to the highly contradictory characteristics of the Soviet scene today. He takes careful note of the immense changes wrought in Russia and gives due credit to the colossal achievements of the socialist revolution. The sensational advances in science, technology, industry and military power, in education, sports, literacy and general culture, in the raising of living standards, in medicine, health and social services, in the opportunities opened to women and to the children of the working class, and the transformation effected in the life and outlook of the muzhik.
At the same time he does not spare the evils and shortcomings of Soviet society. He examines the incompetent service trades, the time-wasting ordeals of buying the necessities of life, recurrent shortages, inadequate housing, the low quality of consumer goods, the inequalities (a great many of the "have-nots" talked bitterly to him about "the rich" and "the poor"), the hard work imposed on women, the restrictions on thought and movement, the political monolithism, the systematic suppression and distortion of news, the incapacity to solve the agrarian problem, the death penalty for economic crimes, official anti-Semitism, the repression of nationalities, the puritanical attitude toward sex, and numerous other features which indicate how far Soviet society still is from realizing the program of socialisn.
Here is one of the most significant episodes related in his book. It occurred during a visit to Rostov in 1963, a city he had last seen in'1936. Hindus had read reports in the Western press of demonstrations the previous year in Rostov and bloody riots in Novocherkask, a city of 100,000 thirty miles away. These had been provoked by mass resentment over increases in the prices of meat and butter which became a factor in Khrushchev's downfall.
Although prominent party officials had been dispatched to the troubled areas, not a word of these disorders had appeared in the Soviet press. Resident foreign correspondents were not permitted to check on the authenticity of the reports. Since Hindus was the first foreign journalist who spoke Russian well to come to the city since the outbreaks, he was eager to find out what had actually happened.
Everyone he spoke with evaded his inquiries on the matter until by chance during his last evening in Rostov he received confirmation from an unexpected source -- from factory workers. He was eating supper at his hotel when he entered a conversation with two young men and a pretty girl "with a Bardot hairdo." The girl and one of the men worked in the Combine factory while the third was a technician in the building industry. ;
Suddenly one of the young men, Vasya, left the table and on his return, the other, Vitya, turned to Hindus and said: "Do you know there is an agent here?" -meaning an agent of the security police.
"Where is he?" I asked. "Point him out to me."
"You cannot see him from here. He is in the back room, watching. Why don't you go over and speak to him?"
"Oh, no," I said, "I have nothing to talk to him about."
Pointing to Vasya, Vitya said, "He has just been having a talk with him. What did he tell you?"
"He saw the Germans," Vasya replied, “coming over to our table, and he told me that Soviet citizens aren't permitted to speak to foreigners. I asked him if there was a law against it and he said he knew what he was talking about."
"Did you tell the agent," I asked, "that the foreigners you spoke to were tourists from communist East Germany?"
"Of course I did but he said it made no difference. Foreigners are foreigners and Soviet citizens are not allowed to speak to them..."
"There is Soviet legality for you," said Vitya, rankling with suppressed rage. "Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev] tells us we are the freest people in the world and the agenty here forbid us to speak to foreigners. What kind of freedom is that? And if you only knew what they did last summer in Novocherkask to students and workers, to men and women. It makes my blood boil whenever I think of it."
“Tell the American precisely what happened," prompted Valya.
"Why, when factory workers in Novocherkask demonstrated against a cut in their wages, for that's what the increased prices of meat and butter meant, the police and the agenty reinforced by soldiers shot them down. Students and other citizens joined in the demonstrations but the shooting continued. Even children were struck down. And this in a socialist country, in a workers' country."
He picked up a slice of bread and held it before me. “Our sweat and blood went into this bread. Our sweat and blood goes into everything we produce. We believe in socialism and in socialist justice for the people who make this bread." He stroked the slice with his other hand and swept on. "So much of it is shipped out of the country. So much of other things which we ourselves need is shipped to countries which give us nothing in return that they make up the loss by cutting our wages, and when we protest -.-" He put the bread back on the plate. "I'm not speaking of myself. I earn good wages and I'm not married, but thousands of others are not so lucky and feel the pinch sharply. You should hear our workers talk about it."
Valya nodded. "It's the truth. Our workers don't understand why so much of our production is shipped out of the country when we are so poor and need everything ourselves."
"Look what's happening in Iraq," broke in Vasya. "We've poured millions of rubles worth of goods into the country, and they've paid us back by slaughtering communists. Does this make any sense?..."
At that moment, writes Hindus, "a white-coated waiter, a giant of a man, coming from behind, slipped over to Vasya, flung his arms around him, lifted him out of the chair and hauled him off to the back room. No one spoke. No one offered any explanation, nor was any needed..."
"What d'you suppose will happen to Vasya?" I asked.
"They '11 probably send him away," replied Vitya, "for three years to atone for his sin at hard labor. ey say the cult of the individual is dead. But our agenty do as they please. The brutes."
After this incident Hindus himself had some difficulties with the local authorities about his passport but managed to return to Moscow.
Here we have a rare instance of first-hand testimony from independent sources of the slackened but continuing coercion of the masses exercised by the post-Stalin regime. Hindus draws the following conclusions from the experience:
"First: there could no longer be any doubt of the massacre in Novocherkask. The young factory workers who told me about it obviously did not lie. They were so irate that ‘despite the ever watchful eye of the security agent in the back room and in complete disregard of his warning not to speak to foreigners, they did not hesitate to spill the story to the one foreigner who happened to be in the restaurant at the time they were there. The threat of punishment did not hold them back.
"Second: the instrument of terror, it was obvious, was not scrapped. It was only shelved and like a well-oiled gun it was held ready for use in an emergency.
"Third: the Party would not tolerate open defiance of its authority even by workers. When the demonstrators in Novocherkask refused to abandon their open protest against the new prices of butter and meat, guns were turned on then.
"Fourth: the provincial security police were more clumsy than their counterparts in Moscow or Leningrad. It is inconceivable that in either of these cities a worker, any citizen, whatever the suspicion he might arouse, would in the presence of a foreigner, especially a journalist, be lifted from his chair and hauled away. The agent or agents would wait until the man left the restaurant.
"Fifth, and most significant: the Khrushchev leadership had bungled into an everdeepening crisis, though not a word of it was said in the press." The premier's sudden ouster came a year later.
It is noteworthy that Hindus, who was indulgent toward Stalin's regime and equivocal about its misdeeds, is severely critical of the policies of his present successors and dubious about the stability and longevity of their rule. He writes that Brezhnev and Kosygin are as politically conservative and bankrupt in new ideas as Khrushchev and that their leadership is constitutionally incapable of meeting the demands of the people or solving the problems posed by the new Soviet epoch.
He is convinced that the Soviet Union cannot revert to private ownership of the means of production or in landholding or adopt Western-style parliamentarism. He further says that "talk of a popular uprising in the Soviet Union in the sixties is even more absurd than it has been in the twenties or thirties." He anticipates that Khrushchev's replacements will in turn have to give way to a younger, bolder, more far-seeing leadership which will take over through a palace revolution and introduce innovations on the Yugoslav model. Such a reformation, he concludes, "is as inevitable as the continued flow of the Volga into the Caspian."
How strictly and one-sidedly categorical some liberals become once they embrace determinism! We shall see whether the political future of the Soviet Union moves along the lines charted by Tito ~- or envisaged by Trotsky.
TEETH SET ON EDGE
Paris
The news is official. Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva asked for political asylum in the United States. Political asylum? As far as the entire world knows, to the extent that she was a public figure Svetlana never engaged in political activity, either in her father's time nor under his successors.
But no matter what unknown personal reasons influenced Svetlana's action, her case unquestionably has a political side. On learning this astonishing news, one could not help but recall the words of the Old Testament, "The fathers have eaten a sour grape and the children's teeth are set on edge."
Stalin's crimes deeply affected his daughter. It is known that Svetlana's mother -- either by murder or suicide -- was a victim of Stalin's policy during the time of the forced collectivization. There have also been references to a companion Svetlana had in her youth who became a victim in the great purges of the thirties.
Some will say that this is going far afield. It is easy to believe that Stalin's successors have far from overlooked Svetlana. These successors require Stalin to be a "nonperson"; and how can a "nonperson" have a daughter? These successors have already had enough difficulties with the children of Stalin's victims -- the Yakirs, Preobrazhenskys, Okudzhavas and others. The victims' children and the hangman's daughter, each in their way, are reminders that a Stalin existed and that those who are today in the leadership of the party and the state survived because they were his accomplices and his right-hand men.
The "de-Stalinization" undertaken by Stalin's successors is an operation in their own defense, not the great cleansing Soviet society needs and which only a political revolution carried out by the working masses can bring about. Until that time comes, the teeth of the children will remain set on edge.