Page Four

PEOPLE'S ADVOCATE

Wovember 5, 1937

USSR Celebrates 20 Years of Triu

phs

Leading . §. Im Art...

Bolshoi Theatre on Sverdlov Square,

seen through the rain.

Marking Two Decades of

ocialist Achievemen

MOSCOW:

By: ANNA LOUISE STRONG

PPROACH of the 20th anniversary of what is universally called the great Socialist
revolution produces many statistical comparisons with pre-war conditions. The news-

paper Pravda in a double page summarizes

and farming.

the truly stupendous advances in industry

Pre-war landlords owned 40 per cent of the farmlands. The kulaks owned 22 per cent.

Highty-tive per cent of the rural popu
credibly poor farming divided the tiny scattered strips.
horses and implements. Half of them poss essed wooden plows,
million metal ones, Tractors and combines were unkndwn.

lation owned less than 40 per cent of the land. In-
A third of the peasants lacked

as there were only four

Today 18,500,000 farm families collectively possess and operate 99 per cent of the
farmlands which are organized into 234,000 large farms.

356,000 tractors and 96,000 combines.

As a result of this mechaniza-

tion, the sown area has grown
from 260,000,000 to  357,000;000
acres. Grain production has in-

creased 50 per cent. The chief
growth has been in more valuable
{ndustrial crops, making the total
value of farm: products double the
pre-war figure.

Part of the released rural labor
las improved rural conditions and
part entered rapidly-expanded in-
dustry which is now the largest
in Hurope employing nearly 26,-
000,000, more than double the pre-
War number.

Tabor productivity has had a
three-fold increase and the total
volume of industrial products a
seven-ftold increase over the pre-
war figure. The national income
has quadrupled. It is now 86 bil-
ion rubles, 99 per cent of it com-
ing from socially-owned enter-

prises, planned for the common
prosperity.
In the meantime, there has

been a tremendous increase in cul-
ture and education. The total num-
per of people studying grew nearly
five-fold, from 8,000,000 to 33,000,-
060, including 29,000,000 in the
primary and secondary schools.
The secondary schools show an
eizhteen-fold increase with an ad-
vance in the quality of schooling-
Universities grew five-fold, and
now have over 500,000 students.
General adult education was form-
erly non-existent. Now 9,000,000
adults are studying.

Se
(4FNHE term proletariat no
longer applies to Soviet
workers as the term suggests

workers who own no tools and
have only their labor power to
sell,’ says Pravda, official Soviet
paper, in a special number discuss-
ing contrasts in the working
class before and after the revolu-
tion. It was published as the
Soviet Union neared its 20th birth-
day.

Soviet workers, owning all the
productive means in the country,
are called ‘something working
class history never knew.”

Pre-revolutionary Russian work-
ers had wages, hours and pro-
ductivity incomparable to any-
thing in America and Hurope and
comparable only to the Chinese
Asiatic standard. A factory survey
of 1908 showed that the average
wage was 20 rubles and 50 ko-
peks—about $12 a month—with a
workday from 10 to 12 hours. Trade
unions were suppressed and the
country’s resources belonged to
private capitalists, chiefly for-
eleners. There were 30,000,000 poor
peasants concealed in the army of
the unemployed and pressing on
the labor market.

The World War further ex-
hausted the country, which re-
covered economically about 1928.
Hence the chief gains in the living
standard are attributable to the
two 5-year plans of the past decade.
Soviet workers and white collar
employees number nearly 26,000,-
000—more than double the pre-war
number.

Wages have tripled since 1929
and now average 2,862 rubles an-
nually. Labor productivity grew
4-fold, with the Shortest workday
in the world—six to seven hours.

Twenty-two million members of
163 trade unions possess 5,653
club buildings, 13,000 libraries,
hundreds of sanitoriums and sport
stadiums. They also administer
sigantic social insurance funds
which tripled in the last six years
reaching in 1936, nine billion
rubles, equal to 2 tenth of the
whole national income. It includes:

WNine-tenths of these horizon-

touching fields are serviced by a network of highly-mechanized tractor stations with

over a billion Tubles in disability
and age pensions. Health resorts
served 1,500,000 workers. Maternity
benefits grew 10-fold in the last
four years, reaching nearly a bil-
lion rubles.

Besides social insurance, other
vast sums which come under the
state and union social services in-
cluded students’ stipends, free
medicine, cultural services, total-
ing 600 rubles annually per worker.
thus adding the equivalent of two
to three months’ wages.

e@
| epee preparations for the
coming Soviet elections are in
full swing over the entire country,

comparable to an American presi-
dential campaign.

The first noticeable difference is

Industry...

the population of 10 neighboring
precincts.

Phe mere preparation of teachers
for these courses is a Serious mat-—
ter. Training courses for teaching
election procedure have just been
finished for Moscow province. It
had an attendance of 4,000 rural
teachers, 1,000 village chairmen,
900 lawyers, 400 club leaders and
as many local editors, all of whom
will teach others.

A spetial motion picture 1S
ready for release which shows the
whole process of election, the bal-
lot box certified, empty, and sealed
jin the presence of representatives
of public organizations. It shows
how voters present identify certifi-
eates, receive ballots and blank
envelopes, enter the voting booth,
and finally how to mark ballots.

Stalin Metallurgical Plant at Magnitogorsk.

the serious study attending Soviet
elections, which have become the
occasion for the study of civics in-
eluding the Soviet constitution,
citizens’ rights, and even inter-
national affairs. Factories and vil-
lages are conducting literally hun-
dreds of thousands of courses on
these subjects.

The Moscow ball-bearing works
has 586 study groups in election
procedure. At the Caliber works
three-fourths of the workers are
studying. A typical factory is the
Moscow Electrozayod. In the early
summer after the election law was
published, lunch-time discussions
were held and $,000 workers re-
ceived a brief survey of election
procedure. Instructors from this
plant gaye 1,200 lectures among

WENTY-five-year-old Mother
Ella Reeve Bloor, US delegate
to the twentieth anniversary of the
Russian revolution, is receiving
many visits from workers’ delesa-
tions in a beautiful suite at the
Hotel Moscow, one of Europe's
largest and the_ Soviet Union's
most modern hotel.

Amazing contracts mark Mother
Bloor’s life. She has been in jails,
mining camps and steel towns, and
now she is in this luxurious apart-
ment. ‘What you receive here is
only a recognition of your many
decades of work in behalf of work-
ers,” the committee said to her.

Visitors and invitations are
pouring in. The whole aspect of
Moscow has improved unbelievably
since her previous visit in 1929,
Mother Bloor said.

Aims of Fascists Defeated as

Soviet Peo

ple Guard Progress

: JOSHUA KUNITZ im New Masses

VER since my return to America, after a rather long stay in the Soviet Union, friends,
enemies and sympathizers of the Soviets have pelted me with innumerable questions

— eager, anxious, worried, malicious, cynical, hopeful. What is really going on in the

USSR? What are all these reports about spies, shootings, fear psychoses?
Is it true that labor discipline has broke

world?

j n down, that Soviet economy is in a state
of chaos. and that the Soviet worker is among the most underpaid and exploited in the

Are there really symptoms of new classes being formed under the dictatorship of the

proletariat? Can one see smiling faces in t
that the church is regaining its influence?

munism or has the communist goal been lost sight of ?
At first the questions seemed bewildering. They reflected such ignorance of funda-

mentals, such uncritical acceptance of the tripe dished out in the capitalist press,

distorted views of the nature of
the revolution and the texture of
Soviet life that any effort on my
part to give a credible answer
seemed doomed to fail.

It was like trying to explain to
an incredulous European, ‘whose
ideas of America have been formed
by lurid and sensational news-
papers, that the US is not a mad
scramble of noise, Skyscrapers,
gangsters, movie actors and jazz,
that the vast majority of the popu-
lation lives in quiet, little frame
houses, that gangsters and movie
stars constitute only a very minute
part of the American people and
that scores of millions of Ameri-
cans have concerns more important
than swaying to the rythym of
jazz. The Buropean shakes his
head but remains incredulous.

IN my two years and three
months in the USSR, I had
seen the disappearance of food
ecards, the rise of the Stakhanov
movement, two drastic reductions

in the prices of consumption
goods, the opening of thousands
of modern shops, restaurants,

eafes, beauty parlors, perfumeries,
yes, and dance halls. Where a
couple of years before a foreigner
in Moscow could be distinguished
miles way by his collar tie and
felt hat—now that distinction has
vanished.

During my two years in the
Soviet Union I saw the Soviet
masses excited not only over spies
and Trotskyites, but also, and even
more, over the conquest of the
Worth Pole and the splendid flights
to America, over the new consti-

tution over the Pushkin and
Rustavelli centenaries, over the
magnificent victories won by

young Soviet musicians at the in-
ternational meets in Warsaw and
Brussels, over the Moscow Art
Theatre production of Anna Kare-
nina, over the magnificent festi-
vals in Moscow of Ukranian,
Uzbek, and Kazak art, over the
congress of poets in Minsk, where
I heard about a hundred poets re-
cite their verses in sixty different
languages before an immense and
thrilled audience.

During the last two years I had
taken two long trips and several
short ones through the Soviet
Union. I had visited dozens of fac-
tories and collective and state
farms. Never in all my previous
trips (seyen of them) did I see the
country so prosperous, the fields
so rich, and the cattle so numerous
and fat.

Everywhere there was striking
evidence of building, beautifying,
sprucing up. This is an absolute
and indisputable fact, as everyone
who has journeyed at least twice
within the last three years through
the Soviet Wnion will testify.

W the light of these fresh im-
pressions I- brought with me

from the USSR, the questions
hurled at me on my arrival in the
United States seemed quite be-
wildering.

The answer to one question in-
variably provoked still more ques-
tions, and so without end. Every
time I had to begin from the be-
ginning, from pre-revolutionary
days, tracing the course of the
revolution through war and inter-
yention, through civil war and
famine, through the first steps at
reconstruction in the period of the
NEP, through the excruuiating,
exciting, exalted, delirious days of
industrialization and collectiviza-
tion, through the triumphs of the
First and Second Five Year Plans,
all the way to the immediate pres-
ent, with its new tribulations,
hardships and glories.

‘And as I went into all that, I
discovered to my inexpressible dis-
may that most people, even when
their use of such words as reyolu-
tion, industrialization, collectiviza-
tion war, wrecking and freedom
was relatively intelligent, were yet
woefully mechanical an dad un-
imaginative. These words were
only mere words to them, combina-
tions of consonants and vowels
representing yague jdeas not based
on personal experience.

This lack of imaginative re-
sponse largely accounts for the
false criteria, pismy judgments

and petty fault-finding so often en-
countered even in sympathetic
discussions of the Soviet Union- In
the case of out-and-out enemies, as
for example, most of the seribes
in the capitalist and Trotskyist
press, the situation 1S ageravated
py prejudice, ignorance, wishful
thinkins, sensationalism, and de-
liberate adaptation to the demands
of the capitalist employers and
readers.
C2)

business of ‘“PSy-

choses. There was a time
swwhen most Moscow newspaper
correspondents affirmed that the
Soviets suffered from a War PSy—
chosis. These gentlemen could
neither discern nor imagine the
possibility of the Soviets being at-

AKE this

he Soviet Union? What about the reports
Ts the Soviet Union progressing toward com-

such

Government...

= Building of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Uzbeck
Soviet Socialist Republic at Tashkent.

tacked.

Recent events, particularly the
assault on Ethiopia, Spain and
China the German-Japanese anti-
Communist pact, and the maniacal
ravings of Hitler and Mussolini,
have rendered the old diagnosis 2
little absurd. Now it is clear, even
to the least imaginative, that
rather than a ‘psychosis,’ Soviet
emphases on adequate military
defense was based on a2 sound
estimate of the dangers inherent
in contemporary imperialism’s eco-
nomic and political contradictions.

But the word psychosis, which is
a euphemism for ‘crazy, 1S an ex=
ceedinely convenient word in the
correspondent’s lexicon, a wonder-
ful means of concealing a dearth

of knowledge, imagination or wit.
Tt explains away everything one
does not understand or wish to
understand.

The latest application of the
word has been in connection with
the drastic measures adopted by
the Soviets in the matter of spies,
wreckers and diversionists.

‘Russia Gripped By Spy. Psy-
chosis,’ sereams the headline in
the New York Times, and the dis-
traught reader envisages one hun-
dred and sixty million people, ob-
sessed by a Spy mania, scurrying
about looking into closets and un-
der beds, peering through key-
holes, digging into garbage piles,
ransacking attics, pursuing ima-
finary non-existent spies.

Industry Forges Ahead ~

jC (eee are statistics showing the
great development of Soviet
jndustry to the point where the
USSR is now the leading industrial
country in Europe.

The Second Five Year Industrial
Plan was fulfilled as far back as
April 1, 1937, nine months ahead
of schedule.

Compared with the first Six
months of 1936, the correspond-
ing period of 1937 showed a 15
per cent imecrease in industrial
production.

Output of Soviet industry in the
first six months of 1937 was 104
per cent greater than the total in-
dustrial output for the whole of
1932:

In terms of rubles, the increase

alone in industrial output in the
first six months of 1937, a5 com-
pared with the last six months of
1926, represents 5,200,000,000
—equal to half the value of the
entire annual production of pre-
revolutionary Russia.

Copper smelting has increased
27 per cent, aluminum 21.4 per
cent, production of diesel motors
38.8 per cent, of autos 72.7 per
cent and output of machinery in-
dustries 18.4 per cent in the first
six months of this year the cor-
responding period of last year.

Wages of industrial workers
have imcreased more than 400
per cent since 1928.

The headline has performed its
function, especially since most
people don’t take the trouble to
read a newspaper carefully. The
inevitable conclusion is that the
Russians are crazy~

Wew York Times’ Mos-
cow Cerrespondent Harold Denny
himself writ in the article on
which the headline is based:

“The Soviet Union's fear of
spies is undoubtedly justified .. .
Germany, Japan and even Poland
are notoriously given to spying.
There can be no doubt that they
have built up elaborate espionage
organizations in Russia and are
employing considerable numbers
of Russians. We ourselyes have
only to look back to the World
War, when Germany planted spies
and saboteurs all over America
even before we entered the con-
flict. In the Far Hast the Japanese
have suitable spy material in
White Russian refugees in Man-
churia and it is entirely credible
that they have smuggled many
with forged passports into Siberia,
where they can pass easily as
Soviet citizens.””

@

See people seem to be genu-
inely shocked at the thought
that after twenty years of Soviet
power here are still counter-revo-
Jutionary elements to whom the
Fascists appeal.

They forget that 150 years after
the French revolution there are
still royalists in France. They also
forget that in the American South,
the resentments generated by the
expropriations of the Civil War
ean still be felt.

In the unfolding of one of the
most fundamental, pervasive,
thoroughgoing, geographically far-
flung upheavals on record, involv-
ing scores of nationalities and
many millions of people, twenty
years, historically speaking, is an
infinitesmal span of time.

True, there are already about 50
million youths in the Soviet Union
who know only the Soviet system;
but, on the other hand, there are
still 110 million adults who have
brought into the present many
psychological vestiges of the past.
The overwhelming majority of the
Jatter, the workers, the poor and
middle peasants, the intelligentsia,
and even many of the former ku-
Jaks, are loyal Soviet citizens.

There is however, 2 Small minor-
ity of disgruntled ones; those who
cannot be reconciled to the loss
of their property, whose ambitions
were frustrated, whose careers
were smashed. These elements will
join any opposition and will work
hand in hand with any enemy of
the Soviet government, whether
he calls himself Right or Leit,
Trotskyite or Bukharinite, Fascist
or bourgeois democrat. These ele-
ments supply the grist for the
Fascist mill.

The enemies of the Soviet Union
speculated on war, hoping to
catch fish in the troubled waters.
They spied, they wrecked, they
sabotaged in a desperate attempt
to disrupt industry, undermine
confidence, weaken the country
and so make it the easy prey of
Fascist aggressors. Except for 2
few minor and isolated successes,
they have failed.

The German and Japanese and
Polish warmongers have suffered

the first major defeat in their.

secret attack on the Soviet Union.
The Fascist contingents in the
USSR have ben exposed and are
being exterminated. The job is done
efficiently. There is no hysteria—
and no “psychosis.”

In full reliance on the swift
revolutionary justice of their goy-
ernment, the Soviet masses 20
confidently about their business of
living and working and building
socialism. They laugh, sing, make
love, have children,
about inadequate housing. They
prepare for the coming elections,
study, crowd movie houses, and
fill stadiums. They take vacations
in the Crimea, bask in the sun,
suck Spanish oranges, and glory
in the most lavish crop Russia
has ever seen or, in the old days,
eyen dared to imagine.

and Physical Culture

and kick

tomy

a See