The characteristic of the people who built the new industries and farms was boundless initiative. When Americans speak of Soviet people as “regimented,” I always laugh. Every land and age has its frame of conformity and its channels for changes. But never in any land, until my later visits to China, have I rnet so many dynamic individuals as those who found expression in the USSR’s Five-Year Plans.
Bill Shatoff was a sample. I found him sick in bed in a Novosibirsk hotel. He was building railroads, fighting for rails, for cement, for labor; his eyes had gone bad with the strain. I asked why he didn’t bring his wife out, have a comfortable home, regular meals, some rest. Bill stared.
“The greatest thing in life,” he said, “is work. No, not just work. Creation! And in this spot of time in which we live, there is the chance to create without end or limit. Could I turn from an hour of creation to be nice to a wife or to come to dinner on time?”
This zeal to create filled not only the leaders. It was born in millions of plain citizens as they saw new roads to life. In the previous chapter, we saw how once illiterate peasants became farm scientists, amateur actors, parachutists, aviators. Far greater changes took place among more backward nationalities. The USSR had more than a hundred and fifty nationalities in all stages of development, from reindeer-keeping Eskimos and sheep-herding nomad Kirghiz to peoples with old civilizations like Armenians and Georgians.
Soviet policy was to let all national cultures develop, as long as the economy grew towards socialism. But fifty-eight small nationalities had not even an alphabet, much less books. So scientists developed written languages for them; books were printed in Moscow in a hundred languages, until book publication in the USSR, at the end of the first Five-Year Plan, was greater than in Germany, France and Britain together. Books were only one transforming force; there were also new laws, science, art.
The greatest transforming force was the peoples’ own struggle for life. The writer, Panferov, put it this way in a Paris conference:
“The working class built a dam on the surging Dnieper and made its unruly waters serve man. It transformed the misty Urals into an industrial center and mastered the wild and distant Kuzbas. In remaking the country, the working class remade itself.”
In the early thirties, everyone discussed “new people.” A Russian writer offered to Moscow News some one-page sketches of “new people.” He said he had about a thousand of them. To our surprise, he added: “That’s not too many to show all the kinds of new people developing under socialism.” A Sverdlovsk newspaper was running a daily column called “New People,” giving anecdotes that illustrated changes in habits and views. Some of these, I fear, proved later to have been wishful thinking; the struggle for socialism neither brought Utopia nor abolished sin. None the less, great and significant changes did appear in people. Of all the many, I shall take only a few: the freeing of women in Central Asia, the children’s way of choosing future jobs, and the rise of the Stakhanovites—all illustrating, in different ways, the quality of that period’s life.
The change in women’s status was one of the important social changes in all parts of the USSR. The Revolution gave women legal and political equality; industrialization provided the economic base in equal pay. But in every village women still had to fight the habits of centuries. News came of one village in Siberia, for instance, where, after the collective farms gave women their independent incomes, the wives “called a strike” against wife-beating and smashed that time-honored custom in a week.
“The men all jeered at the first woman we elected to our village soviet,” a village president told me, “but at the next election we elected six women and now it is wc who laugh.” I met twenty of these women presidents of villages in 1928 on a train in Siberia, bound for a Women’s Congress in Moscow. For most it was their first trip by train and only one had ever been out of Siberia. They had been invited to Moscow “to advise the government” on the demands of women; their counties elected them to go.
The toughest fight of all for women’s freedom was in Central Asia. Here, women were chattels, sold in early marriage and never thereafter seen in public without the hideous “paranja,” a long black veil of woven horsehair which covered the entire face, hindering breathing and vision. Tradition gave husbands the right to kill wives for unveiling; the mullahs—Moslem priests—supported this by religion. Russian women brought the first message of freedom; they set up child welfare clinics where native women unveiled in each other’s presence. Here, the rights of women and the evils of the veil were discussed. The Communist Party brought pressure on its members to permit their wives to unveil.
When I first visited Tashkent, in 1928, a conference of Communist women was announcing: “Our members in backward villages are being violated, tortured and murdered. But this year we must finish the hideous veil; this must be the historic year.” Shocking incidents gave point to this resolution. A girl from a Tashkent school gave her vacation to agitating for women’s rights in her home village. Her dismembered body was sent back to school in a cart bearing the words: “That for your women’s freedom.” Another woman had refused the attentions of a landlord and married a Communist peasant; a gang of eighteen men, stirred up by the landlord, violated her in the eighth month of pregnancy and threw her body in the river.
Poems were written by women to express their struggle. When Zulfia Khan, a fighter for freedom, was burned alive by the mullahs, the women of her village wrote a lament:
“O, woman, the world will not forget your fight for freedom!
Your flame—let them not think that it consumed you.
The flame in which you burned is a torch in our hands.”
The citadel of orthodox oppression was “Holy Bokhara.” Here, a dramatic unveiling was organized. Word was spread that “something spectacular” would occur on International Women’s Day, March 8. Mass meetings of women were held in many parts of the city on that day, and women speakers urged that everyone “unveil all at once.” Women then marched to the platform, tossed their veils before the speakers and went to parade the streets. Tribunes had been set up where government leaders greeted the women. Other women joined the parade from their homes and tossed their veils to the tribunes. That parade broke the veil tradition in Holy Bokhara. Many women, of course, donned veils again before facing their angry husbands. But the veil from that time on appeared less and less.
Soviet power used many weapons for the freeing of women. Education, propaganda, law all had their place. Big public trials were held of husbands who murdered wives; the pressure of the new propaganda confirmed judges who gave the death sentence for what old custom had not considered crime. The most important weapon for freeing women was, as in Russia proper, the new industrialization.
I visited a new silk mill in Old Bokhara. Its director, a pale, exhausted man, driving without sleep to build a new industry, told me the mill was not expected to be profitable for a long time. “We are training village women into a new staff for future silk mills of Turkestan. Our mill is the consciously applied force which broke the veiling of women; we demand that women unveil in the mill.”
Girl textile workers wrote songs on the new meaning of life when they exchanged the veil for the Russian head-dress, the kerchief.
“When I took the road to the factory
I found there a new kerchief,
A red kerchief, a silk kerchief,
Bought with my own hand’s labor!
The roar of the factory is in me.
It gives me rhythm.
It gives me energy.”
One can hardly read this without recalling, by contrast, Thomas Hood’s “The Song of the Shirt,” that expressed the early factories of Britain.
“With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread.
Stitch, stitch, stitch, in poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still, with a voice of dolorous pitch,
She sang the song of the shirt”
In capitalist Britain, the factory appeared as a weapon of exploitation for profit. In the USSR, it was not only a means to collective wealth, but a tool consciously used to break past shackles.
Every year the Soviet Union produced its crop of heroes, usually the makers of records in production. In 1935, the names most heard were two. Stakhanov, a coal miner, devised a better production method—his name was used for a movement. Marie Demchenko, a sugar-beet grower on a collective farm, studied beets in the laboratory cottage and in the spring of 1935 challenged all the beet-growers: “Let us flood the land with sugar; my brigade pledges twenty tons of beets per acre.”
Hundreds of farms accepted the challenge. Thousands of visitors inspected Marie’s brigade at work; millions of readers followed the determined drive, as they nine times hoed the field and eight times cleared it of moths by fires at night. The whole country sighed when no rain came in August, and cheered when Marie got the fire department to pour 20,000 buckets of water on her land. She got twenty-one tons per acre amid the nation’s plaudits. In a year or two, her record was surpassed but her fame remained green.
The end of her story is significant. Marie’s gang were invited to Moscow to the November celebrations. They stood in the leaders’ tribune. Marie told Stalin, gushingly, how she had dreamed of coming “to see the leaders.” Stalin replied: “But now you also are leaders.” Marie considered this. “Well, yes,” she agreed. Stalin asked what reward she wanted. Marie wanted a scholarship to study beets. She got it. Such were the ideals of rewards and leadership in 1935.
Many articles were written about the kind of people socialism should produce. When a group of Turcoman horsemen made an amazing 2,690 mile run across deserts to Moscow, and Stalin complimented their “clearness of goal, perseverance … and firmness of character,” Pravda elaborated the theme into an editorial on the Soviet ideal of character. This was declared to be “the exact opposite” of the unquestioning obedience which Hitler had shortly before demanded of German youth. “Strong and original individuality” was declared to be the quality of the Soviet citizen. “Not submission and blind faith but consciousness, daring, decision. … Strong individuality, inseparably connected with the strong collective of the toilers.” “From the clear goal seen by millions … grows remarkable voluntary discipline.” Thus was deliberately stated an ideal defying that of the Nazis.
In the latter half of 1935, the Stakhanovites began to shake the country. Simultaneously in a hundred places, workmen on new machines began to shatter standards of production, often against indifference or opposition by management, but followed by strained attention of fellow-workers. Every country in the world took notice, calling the movement a “speed-up.” It was more than that—it was a storming of the world frontiers of productivity. Some miners in the Donbas doubled Ruhr production; some blacksmiths in Gorki Auto Works broke standards set by Ford; some shoemakers in Leningrad made records fifty percent above the Bata Works in Czechoslovakia.
Hundreds of American specialists who five years earlier tried to “teach the Russian,” must have grumbled when they heard about it, “Why couldn’t they do it when we showed them how?” The reason was clear. The USSR had equipped itself with new machines and brought eleven million greenhorns to operate them. The greenhorns broke machines—but learned. They could not learn when their teachers told them; it had to grow in their nervous systems. But what they learned was not only the technical skill of the Americans. It was skill with the pride of ownership added—ownership of the mechanism that makes the modern world.
People who attended the All-Union Congress of Stakhanovites —everyone in Moscow wanted to go—told of its thunderous cheers. The press grew lyric over “taming the fiery steed of science,” “preparing the way to Communism where each shall receive according to his needs.” In all the discussion appeared the new people’s characteristics—a joyous initiative, a pride in mastery of complex processes, a conscious cooperation with society, a hunger to learn.
Stakhanov told his thought when he made his record. “International Youth Day was approaching; I wanted to mark it with a record. My comrades and I had for some time been thinking how to break the shackles of the norm, give the miners free play, force the drills to work a full shift.” Busygin, the blacksmith, declared: “There’s nothing I dream of as much as studying; I want to know how hammers are made arid to make them.” Slavnikova wanted to “beat the record” on a machine she had studied but never used. The foreman opposed it. She told him: “I’m a parachute jumper. That norm doesn’t scare me. I’ll upset it.” She did.
Vasiliev, a blacksmith who made a record in forging connecting rods, used the words “boded up” and “exploded” to express his feelings. When his 1934 record was beaten, he “boiled up” and went back to work four days before his vacation ended. “I beat Andrianov, but then I saw in the papers that a Kharkov smith made more than a thousand. Then I exploded. I made 945 in one shift. … I consulted my gang how to organize our work place; then we got 1,036. We discussed it with the foreman and told him how to change the furnace; he gave us a furnace that could heat 1,500 in a shift. What steps us now? We talked it over and placed the metal in such order that it was easier to take up. On October 27, I made the All-Union record, 1,101 in a shift. Comrades, I haven’t yet got out of that hammer all she’ll give, but I’m going to.”
The Stakhanovites disdained overtime work as a confession of inefficiency—they insisted that a rhythm be found which should not be physically exhausting. “If the work is done right, you feel better and stronger.” They were keen on teaching their skill to others. The locomotive engineer Omelianov, after making a record, demanded “the slowest engineer” as a pupil and made him, also, a record breaker. The demands of these men broke the technical processes. An engineer told me: “I’m sitting up nights to plan the How of work to keep up with them.”
“Ten years hence,” said a Stakhanovite to me, “farming and industry may cease to be our main occupations. We shall produce all we need. But there are other occupations. Human development, exploration, science—to these are no limits.” He recognized no bounds to man’s advance, neither in man’s own nature nor in time and space.
Youth, especially, knew no limits. Schools helped children discover their aptitudes early; summer camps and excursions widened their field of choice. Newspaper discussions drew out their self-expression; one newspaper, the Pioneer Pravda, was almost all written by children. In Tiflis, the children of railway workers built and operated a half-mile railway in the Park of Culture and Rest; it carried passengers, collected fares, and used the money to expand the road. In most of the “grown-up” activities, a place was found for children. In the 1934 “war with drought,” children’s groups of gleaners followed the reapers and competed in saving grain-heads; in a northern county, children proudly told me how they collected tons of bird-droppings and wood ashes to fertilize exhausted fields.
On the Murmansk train, in 1934, I met twenty young “Arctic explorers,” all under sixteen, bound for the polar regions. Their interest in maps, Arctic cruises and northern peoples, had won for them this organized cruise. They would meet adult Arctic explorers who would treat them smilingly as possible future colleagues. That same summer, ten of the best botany pupils were given an expedition to the Altai Mountains, where they hiked 1,200 miles and found twenty-seven new varieties of black currants and a type of frost-resistant onion. Two of these “young botanists” were sent as delegates of the others to take the plants to the aged plant-creator, Michurin.
The feelings of Soviet youth in those days appear in two incidents. Anna Mlynik, valedictorian of the first Moscow class to finish the new ten-year school, said in her valedictory, June, 1935: “Life is good … in such a land, in such an epoch. We, young owners of our country, are called upon to conquer space and time.” Some extravagance is allowed to valedictories, but youths in the past have been subjects of kings or citizens of democracies; never, till Socialism, dared they call themselves “owners” of the land in which they lived. The same year, Nina Kamenova made a parachute jump from icy space twice as high as Mt. Rainier, winning a world record. Her words on landing, at once seized by Soviet youth as a slogan, were: “The sky of our country is the highest sky in the world.”
Even while they happily bragged, the assassination of Sergei Kirov had started a chain of investigations which were to transform the triumphant mood of 1935—when Utopia seemed just around the comer—into the “great madness” of 1937.
One fruit of those happy days remained for history—the new Soviet Constitution was born in those years.
The USSR has always claimed to be democratic; this the West has always denied. Here is no space to trace die Soviet political and electoral system in detail. Whatever Americans thought of Soviet elections, Soviet people took part in them at least as energetically and hopefully as we. They not only voted for candidates; they wrote their demands into the “Nakaz,” the “People’s Instructions” which became first order of business for incoming governments.
In the 1934 elections, my husband spent every evening for a month as a precinct worker, visiting every person in his precinct and stimulating them not only to come out but to list things they wanted the government to do. He told me of an old woman who had never before voted—“What use am I to the Soviet Power,” she said—but who, on his prodding, looked around her kitchen hung with laundry and decided to ask the government for more public laundries. She got them eventually, too. Moscow City Soviet, that year, received 48,000 “people’s instructions” and had to report on them all in three months. Many, of course, were duplicates or had to be referred to the central government, but a large number were reported back to the people in a novel way. The demands could be met, said the City Soviet, if the people who wanted them would give volunteer work. “Soviet democracy” was judged not only by the number who turned out in elections—this grew from 51 percent of the voters, in 1926, to 85 percent in 1934—but by the number of volunteers a deputy could gather to help in government tasks. Much work on taxing and housing commissions, for instance, was by volunteers. Howard K. Smith, in the late thirties, noted the atmosphere this created, and said on his visit to Moscow: “You got the impression that each and every little individual was feeling pretty important doing the pretty important job of building up a State. … The atmosphere reminded me of a word … it was ‘democracy.’”
Since the 1922 Constitution, however, great changes had taken place. The basic wealth of the land was publicly owned; the people were no longer illiterate. Indirect, unequal voting from die place of work no longer fitted; people everywhere knew of their national heroes and could vote for them directly. On February 6, 1935, the Congress of Soviets decided that the Constitution should be changed to conform to the changed life of the nation. A commission of thirty-one historians, economists and political scientists, under Stalin’s chairmanship, was instructed to draft a new Constitution, more responsive to the people’s will, and more adapted to a socialist state.
The method of adoption was highly significant. For a year, the commission studied all historic forms—both of states and of voluntary societies—through which men have organized for joint aims. Then a proposed draft was tentatively approved in June, 1936, by the government and submitted to the people in sixty million copies. It was discussed in 527,000 meetings, attended by thirty-six million people. For months, every newspaper was full of people’s letters. Some 154,000 amendments were proposed—many, of course, duplicates, and many others more suitable for a legal code rather than a constitution. Forty-three amendments were actually made by this popular initiative.
In the great white hall of the Kremlin Palace, 2,016 delegates assembled, in December of 1936, for the Constitutional Convention. It was a congress of “new people” risen to prominence in tasks of industry, farming, science. Farmers came, no longer listed under the generic title “grain-growers,” but as specialists, tractor-drivers, combine-operators, most of whom had made records. There were directors of great industrial plants, famous artists and surgeons, the president of the Academy of Science. This was the new representation of the Soviet Union towards the end of the second Five-Year Plan.
The Constitution reflected the changes in the country. It began with the form of the state and the basic types of property. Land, resources, industries were “state property, the wealth of the whole people.” Cooperative property of collective farms, and “personal property” of citizens in their income, their homes and chattels, were “protected by law.” Elections were to be by “universal, direct, equal and secret ballot for all citizens over eighteen.” The section on “Rights and Duties of Citizens” was cheered section by section; it was the most sweeping list of rights any nation ever guaranteed. The right to life was covered by four headings: “The right to work, to leisure, to education, to material support.” The right to liberty was expanded into six paragraphs, including freedom of conscience, of worship, of speech, of press, of assembly, demonstration and organization, freedom from arbitrary arrest, inviolability of home and of correspondence, “irrespective of nationality or race.”
The Constitution was a direct challenge to Nazi-Fascism, then in power in Germany. The Nazis called democracy outworn; all Soviet speakers hailed democracy and socialism as “unconquerable.” Hitler preached “superior and inferior races.” Stalin challenged him in one of the most sweeping statements ever made of human equality: “Neither language nor color of skin nor cultural backwardness nor the stage of political development can justify national and race inequality.”
Tens of millions of people poured into the wintry streets of the USSR to hail the event with bands. Progressives around the world hailed it. “Mankind’s greatest achievement,” said Mrs. Sun Yat-sen in far-away China. Romain Rolland spoke from the placid Lake of Geneva: “This gives life to the great slogans that until now were but dreams of mankind—liberty, equality, fraternity.” The Constitution was violated even while it was written. This is not unique; few Constitutions are punctiliously observed. But the Constitution of the USSR was violated by its author, Stalin, who was clearly very proud of his “democratic Constitution,” yet who was guilty of a strange duality. For, while the Constitution remained the basic law of the USSR, proudly observed by the people, the government departments and the ordinary courts, it was not even noticed by the Political Police. This organ, given by Stalin in 1922 a centralized power, had become a state within a state. It respected neither the Constitution nor any other laws of the USSR. From this grew the dark events of the following years.