Russia and America: A Study in Contrasts
I
MY first impression of America, upon returning after an absence of more than ten years, mostly spent in Soviet Russia, was one of vivid, almost blinding contrasts. At first they came on me so thick and fast that I could do little but blink and gasp. Later, after I had crossed the continent from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific and back again, my impressions began to shake down into an orderly pattern.
The most overpowering contrast between the two countries may be summed up in one word — mechanization. The Soviet leaders have been talking so stridently of their ambitions and achievements under the Five-Year Plan that many foreigners perhaps think of Russia as a land where the machine already dominates everything. But Soviet progress in this field has thus far been almost wholly confined to the erection of new industrial plants; it scarcely touches the daily life of the people.
The Muscovite has no subway to transport him to his place of employment. He struggles into a chronically overcrowded street car, walks up three or four flights of stairs, for the elevator is usually out of order, and carries on his day’s work without benefit of automatic letter chutes, sanitary drinking cups, and a thousand and one other devices which are taken for granted in an American office. Similarly, the Russian housewife performs her duties according to the immemorial pattern of her ancestors, without iceless refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, electric toaster, or other laborsaving inventions common in American households.
The contrast was brought home to me most sharply in the small towns of America. I have traveled tens of thousands of miles throughout the Soviet Union and I know the bleak conditions of the villages, where the sole shelter is usually a ‘Peasants’ Home,’ dirty, crowded, infested with vermin. It seemed to me, then, little short of miraculous to find in Lawrence, Kansas, a well-appointed hotel with clean, comfortable beds and modern bathrooms, and to look out upon the main street black with automobiles. In a Russian town of the same size one sees either no automobiles at all or very few, and these rickety from hard and unskilled use — the property, not of individuals, but of local government institutions. Such privately owned cars as there are belong, almost without exception, to foreign residents.
II
In spite of their sharp contrasts, Russia and the United States share one phenomenon in common: at the present moment there are great numbers of citizens in both countries who are unable to obtain a comfortable or adequate livelihood. The causes of the crisis, however, as well as the resultant distress, are widely, sometimes grotesquely, different. What is regarded as acute want in America might easily pass as a satisfactory standard of living in the Soviet Union. The food allotments which our unemployed receive in cities like Milwaukee, where relief work is well organized, are about equal to the normal rations of many employed workers in Russia. Of course Russia has for ages been accustomed to an excessively low standard of living, — a fact which hasty tourists often forget, — and present conditions do not afflict the people with a sense of hardship. Indeed, it may well be that the young Communist, fired with faith in the upbuilding of his country and ignorant of living conditions elsewhere, enjoys a more satisfying life on his meagre rations than docs the skilled mechanic in America who has been precipitated from comfortable security to the uncertainties of existence on a kind of dole.
Nothing could be more paradoxical than the causes underlying the crisis in the two countries. In America, supply is far in excess of effective demand; in Russia, demand is much greater than available supply. The American system of planless, unregulated industry conducted for profit has built up magnificent machinery for production without creating any guaranty of corresponding capacity to consume. The Soviet system of concentrated state planning has yet to prove its ability to produce enough goods and services to assure a comfortable or even a tolerable standard of living for the whole population.
Consider, for example, the problem of railroad transportation. After my years in Russia, travel in America seemed incredibly luxurious. There I had had to live on tinned goods, mailed-milk tablets, and such uncertain fare as could be purchased from peasants at fantastic paper-ruble prices during brief stops at stations; here I had only to step into the dining car and order whatever took my fancy. After becoming accustomed to the Russian way of arguing and pleading with Soviet and railroad authorities for special permission to buy a ticket on a train that was certain to be crowded to the very doors, I marveled to see how easy it was here to get a lower berth on any train anywhere. But, though it was comfortable to me to be the sole passenger in a Pullman car, as I happened to be in the Southwest, it was obviously not profitable for the railroad. I recalled the exclamation of an American railroad president who visited Russia and looked with professional envy upon the milling throngs around every station. ‘Ah’, he said, ‘if we had as many passengers on our railroad, my financial worries would be over.'
Consider, too, the agricultural problem, a pressing one for both governments. In America we see desperate efforts to persuade farmers to grow less food; in Russia equally desperate efforts to make the peasants grow more. Soviet newspapers take great pains to point out to the Russian peasant that his lot is a happy one in that, unlike the American farmer, he does not live under the threat and fear of mortgage foreclosures. To be sure, there is no mortgage problem in Russia, for the simple reason that there is no private property. But the number of peasants who have been evicted from their holdings and, in many instances, sent under armed guard to forced labor in remote parts of the country is greater than the number of American farmers whose mortgages have been foreclosed. The kulaks, the formerly well-to-do peasants, of whom there were approximately a million families, have for the most part been ‘liquidated,’ to use the euphemistic Communist phrase. Moreover, eviction and arrest are not uncommon penalties for failure to turn in one’s quota of requisitioned grain or for alleged sabotage interfering with the government’s agricultural measures. During the past winter whole communities in the North Caucasus were forcibly deported.
III
In their attitude toward the crisis as well as in the methods adopted to meet it, Russia and the United States stand at diametrically opposite poles. I am thinking now of America as I saw it in January and February, when the country seemed to be in a mood of helpless drift. There were profound differences of opinion about the causes of the depression, and many of the remedies suggested were mutually contradictory and added to the general confusion of thought. The man in the street seemed to look upon the national affliction very much as if it were an epidemic of influenza which, it was hoped, would some day come automatically to an end.
In Russia, on the other hand, the traveler finds a perfect regimentation of all articulate thought. Nothing like it is conceivable anywhere else, unless perhaps in Italy or, more recently, in Germany. Whenever I see a delegation of inquiring tourists making a round of Soviet offices, factories, and collective farms, I know just what answers they will bring back. In talks with foreigners, the Communist in a responsible post adheres closely to the ‘Party line,’ which means that he will interpret Communist policy and explain the difficulties that crop up precisely as these things are interpreted and explained in his catechism — the Soviet press. To be sure, there is a great deal of individual thinking going on in Russia just as elsewhere, but free, public discussion is simply out of the question.
Both Russians and Americans today have many causes of worry, but they do not worry about the same things. I gather from my American acquaintances that they are anxious about actual or impending loss of employment, about investments that have gone wrong, and about banks that have failed or might fail. These things would have no meaning for the Russian. Russia’s employment problems are created by a shortage of labor. Investments are nonexistent in a land where all property is publicly owned. The banks cannot fail, for they are all supported by the state. And money in Russia, unless it is foreign money, which possesses special value, means less than it does anywhere else in the world, simply because its purchasing power is so uncertain. With an abundance of paper money and a dearth of food and manufactured goods, the Russian sums up his dilemma in a popular joke: ‘Who are the richest people in the world? The Russians, because they don’t know what to do with their money.’
Though their economic system automatically frees them from many of the anxieties which cause Americans to lie awake at night, the Russians have special worries of their own. The most popular new play produced in the Moscow Art Theatre is Afinogenov’s Fear, in which an old professor announces his theory that fear is one of the moving forces of life in the Soviet Union. ‘The peasant woman who sells milk,’ declares the professor, ‘fears that she may be called a kulak. The engineer fears that he may be suspected of sabotage. The Communist Party member fears the suspicion of heresy. The non-Party employee fears the chistka [the purging of undesirable workers periodically carried out in Soviet offices].’
The Soviet citizen also has his anxieties about getting food, shoes, textiles, and fuel, and about the crowded and complicated living arrangements which compel several families to share one communal kitchen. One might summarize the difference between the two civilizations by saying that, if the American’s concern is about money income, the Russian’s chief worry is to find things which he can buy with his paper rubles after he gets them.
It is my impression that the old are hardest hit by present-day conditions in Russia, while it is the young who fare worst in the crisis that afflicts America. Men and women past middle age feel keenly the physical deprivations that the Five-Year Plan has brought with it. They miss their butter and sugar, their coffee and white bread. They are less hopeful than their grandchildren about the possibilities of building what Trotsky described as a Communist ‘paradise in this world.’ In America, however, it is the young men and women just starting out in life who, losing their jobs and unable to find others, are the chief victims of the depression.
In Russia, the post-war generation has had its enthusiasm fired almost to a religious pitch by Communist propaganda. There is no paralyzing fear of unemployment, because there is so much work to be done, and young people occupy the most responsible posts in Soviet factories and offices. They are not indifferent, of course, to the lack of material comforts, but they feel the sacrifice less than their elders, partly because they possess greater vitality and endurance, partly because they hope to live long enough to begin reaping the rewards which are expected to flow from their present efforts. Then, too, their ignorance of conditions in the outside world helps to keep them happy; they know only what they read in the Soviet newspapers, which report what is going on in capitalist countries almost wholly in terms of strikes, unemployment, and the persecution of Communists.
IV
The newspapers, indeed, may be taken as symbols of the profound differences in life, interests, and general point of view which separate Russia and America. The Soviet newspaper represents the greatest imaginable contrast to the American newspaper, both in what it prints and in what it omits. One would scan the Russian press in vain for stories of crime, except for political cases which point some Communist moral. There is no scandal, no professional sport, no fashion page, no society column, no advice to the lovelorn — nothing that an American editor would classify as ‘human interest.’ Intimate sketches of Stalin and other Soviet leaders are strictly barred. Very few Russians outside the circle of Stalin’s closest acquaintances know how many children he has, or where he spends his summer vacations, or what his favorite pastimes are. Many a foreign journalist has discovered to his sorrow that the Soviet idea of a biographical sketch is a dry list of the Party Congresses a political leader has attended and of the public posts he has held.
Moscow may be buzzing with gossip about some highly placed Comrade who has yielded to the weaknesses of the flesh and put aside his wife of prerevolutionary days for a charming ballet dancer, but no hint of it ever appears in the press. It is a principle of Soviet journalism to treat as private those marital vicissitudes which receive the fullest degree of publicity in most American newspapers. On the other hand, news which would probably be found only in the special business sections of American papers — such as the figures of steel and coal production — is continually featured as front-page copy in Russia. The Soviet editor fills his columns with details of the current economic plan and the work that is being done under it, with items about Party Congresses, public speeches, state trials, and official decrees and resolutions. Chronicled at full length are the valiant deeds of industrial shock brigadier Ivanov, who laid more than his quota of cement at a new factory, or of rural shock brigadier Petrov, who thwarted some malignant effort at kulak sabotage and succeeded in getting in the hay on his collective farm before the rain came.
Even the most important newspapers, such as the government organ, Izvestia, and the Party organ, Pravda, are restricted in space because of the chronic paper shortage, and rarely consist of more than four pages. As one would expect under a dictatorship, the press is under the strictest control. If a journal prints aspersions against a foreign power, they reflect, not the whim of the editor, but the policy of the government. No indiscreet revelation of foreign policy, no criticism of vested authority, ever appears. Whatever does appear is understood to bear the stamp of official approval.
A noteworthy characteristic of Soviet journalism, as of Soviet life in general, is the almost complete absence of advertising. One looks out of a Russian train window and never sees a billboard. Advertisements in the Moscow newspapers consist only of announcements of theatres and entertainments and notices about rooms and jobs. Significantly enough, requests for rooms outnumber offers fifty to one, and there are many more items of ‘Men Wanted’ than of ‘Work Wanted.’ Advertising in the American manner would of course be wasteful and useless in a country where the shortage of manufactured goods is so acute that the mere rumor of a newly arrived shipment of cheese or textiles is sufficient to attract a clamoring throng of expectant purchasers.
Another medium which emphasizes the striking contrasts between Russia and America is the motion picture. In both countries the themes presented on the screen are rigidly standardized, but the two patterns have crystallized along utterly different lines. Hollywood’s leitmotifs, romantic love and individual success, are banned by the Soviet censor, and most pictures exploit the drama of Russia’s economic programme.
A typical film which I saw in Moscow last year had for its principal characters a Young Communist and a factory girl with whom he was in love. Eventually the man persuaded the girl to quit the factory and live with him. This, as the captions pointed out, was an outrageously scandalous thing for her to do, not because the young couple had entered into a forbidden relationship, for they had duly visited the Bureau for the Registration of Marriages and Divorce, but because the girl had ‘deserted her proletarian post’ for a life of ignoble domestic ease. Gradually her conscience — the word does violence to Communist phraseology, but let it pass — began to torment her as she thought of her untended machine; in the end she abandoned the unworthy Young Communist who had seduced her and returned to her workbench. Whereupon there was an extraordinary rise in the factory’s production figures and an equally remarkable decline in the percentage of waste and breakage.
V
It is frequently said that Soviet Russia represents either a challenge or a menace to America’s political and economic order. I am inclined to be very skeptical of this theory. In every field of life and thought the two countries are as far apart as if they were on different planets, and where comparison is impossible the element of challenge scarcely enters in.
In economic development Russia is fifty years behind the United States. It will have to do an enormous amount of road building, of housing construction, of steady work in mining, in manufacturing, transportation, and communication, before comparison can be anything but grotesque. Soviet leaders have constantly stressed the goal of ‘overtaking and outstripping America’ in the fairly near future, and in this it is quite possible that they have done more harm than good, for they have tended to promote overambitious schemes of industrial expansion which have worked out badly and have clearly put too heavy a strain upon their resources, both technical and human.
The social differences between the two countries are even greater. America was colonized and has been built up on the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. The underlying principle in Russia is that an omnipotent state shall plan and supervise the country’s growth, regulating not only the working habits of the people but their thinking as well, with a relentless and efficient organization of spies (the G. P. U.) weeding out those individuals who do not fit into the regimented scheme of things. It may be debatable which of the systems involves more human suffering, but certainly they foster psychological differences so fundamental that one can hardly regard either as a challenge to the other.
The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics remain, then, essentially a study in contrasts. Some of the sharpest divergences between full-blooded Capitalism and full-blooded Communism are likely to disappear with the passing of time. The march of social evolution may soften the sharp outlines of each. When the débris of the present crisis is at last cleared away, it may well be that America will have parted with a good deal of its ‘rugged individualism.’ Similarly, it is probable that Russia will go still further along the road which Stalin has already marked out, by granting higher material rewards and greater personal authority to the heads of state enterprises in the hope of raising the level of technical competence. In spite of such changes, however, it seems likely that in 1943 or 1953 the American visitor to Russia or the Russian visitor to America will return to his native land and be able to convey to his countrymen a comfortable feeling of superiority by describing the strange habits, customs, and ideas which he has encountered.