Dorothy Thompson
Buffalo Evening News/March 2, 1928
Russians Taught Science and Not Religion Is Best Weapon Against Nature’s Caprices.
Russia’s efforts to ensure the future growth of Communism are described today by Dorothy Thompson in the 23d of a series of 24 articles.
Every leader of Russia knows that the future of Communism depends on whether industrialism can grow fast enough so that the proletarian cities can keep control of power, and whether the peasants can be persuaded by economic arguments into adopting a more social form of organization and one more compatible with the aims of the cities. This program calls for the working of larger areas of land co-operatively and so increasing production.
But so far the government’s efforts in both directions have not been very successful. Rapid industrialization requires capital. A Communist government committed to world Bolshevism has not been very successful in borrowing from abroad and the system has not been best fitted to accumulating capital at homes. The tendency of the peasant having got his land is to sit on it and, if possible, extend it.
The Bolshevist policy toward the peasant has been opportunistic from the beginning and at variance with orthodox Communist teachings.
An Expedient Decree
The first land decree passed on the second day of the revolution, giving the landlords’ land, implements and livestock to the peasants under the control of local land committees, a revolutionary, but not a Communistic measure in any sense. It did not tend to greater collectivism. On the contrary, it created a thousand petty individualists where there was one before. It was purely a political measure to enlist the moujiks in the Bolshevist ranks, and as such it succeeded admirably.
As a Communist measure, it has failed and as an economic measure it has failed. Russia’s 23,000,000 farms do not begin to raise the amount of food that the great estates did, although agriculture is improving. Furthermore, the export of food has decreased in ever greater ratio. No doubt the peasant eats better than he did before the war. If every Russian farm consumes two eggs more per week the Russian export of eggs is decreased over 1,000,000,000 a year if production remains static. The Russian peasant is aware of his rights and is no longer willing that the cities should prosper at the cost of his stomach.
Propaganda Falls.
And this is the crux of the whole Russian problem. The peasant cannot be forced to produce at the point of the bayonet or under the pressure of a thumb-screw bureaucracy. Ten years’ experience has proved this by costly examples.
He cannot be persuaded to produce by propaganda. Millions have been spent on it. It has had an educative effect but in a rather different sense than was expected. It has not made the peasant more Communistic and collective, but it has made him much more aware of his importance and power. Soviet propaganda has waked the moujik up. Even the co-operatives have furnished him with a weapon against the towns.
Russia has learned that only one thing will make the peasant produce and that is to offer him cheaper and better goods in exchange for his products. And this it still cannot do. The Russian peasant today can buy less for a pound of butter than he could before the war. And if he cannot get boots for his butter he wraps his feet in rags and eats the butter!
Horse Measure of Prosperity.
Not only is his production lower but apart from food, which he consumes in larger quantities and of better quality than before the war, he is, despite his ownership of the land, materially worse off than before the war. His implements have worn out and he cannot replace them. And he is infinitely worse off materially than the peasant of England, France or Germany.
A great deal is said in Russia about the rich peasant, the kulak — the country prototype of the city Nepman. Nothing better illustrates the poverty of the Russian peasant than the realization of what a kulak is.
Taxation is leveled in Russia according to capital, and the poorest class of peasant is totally exempt. But a family which has capital assuring an income of $50 per year per adult member is regarded as falling into the rich kulak class, and above this amount is taxed 25 per cent, “A horse for every peasant family” is a Soviet ideal far from realization.
Taxes Reduce Holdings
A friend who has lived for years in Russia and made an especial study of the peasantry gave me this information: In one village— where he has been living — in the county of Volsk on the Volga, where there are 30,000 households, there were a year ago five families, each of which owned five horses. Now there is no household with five horses and only four with four each.
This means, of course, that the presence of taxation upon the rich kulak (the capitalist with five homes) is such that he has had to reduce his plant. But this means a decrease in general production. It is precisely the kulak who produces with greatest economy.
The ideal toward which the Soviets work is a nation of great co-operative farms, industrialized, electrically run, mechanically equipped and manned with Communist workers who share the interests of the city proletariat. But the ideal has practically no realization. Less than 4 per cent of all the land in Russia is worked collectively, counting government holdings, co-operative farms, colonies of town population, especially Jews, artificially settled, and agricultural concessions held by foreign capitalists.
An Ideal Unrealized
Moreover, this ideal is held up to a people still largely illiterate, consisting of more than a hundred races, varying from the poor Russian farmer to the richer Ukrainian peasant, including Georgians, who sometimes have 3000 head of sheep; Siberians; and half-esquimaux peoples, living from fishing and trapping; and Asiatic nomads.
Before it can make a progressive agricultural population the Soviet government has to overcome enormous handicaps. Not only does it have to teach people how to read, but for whole tribes and races it has to make first an alphabet, because the language has never been codified. It has to overcome religious superstitions, in which Orthodoxy or Mohammedanism are mixed with curious pagan rituals predating Christianity.
The atheistic campaign which the Soviets carry on among the peasants is more easily understandable, if one has even seen an Orthodox religion procession devoted to prayers for rain. Soviet scientists are less interested in the souls of the peasants than in overcoming the fixed idea that not magic but knowledge is the weapon against nature’s caprices.
The Archive 