ALL ABOUT SOVIET RUSSIA
I Was a Soviet Worker. By Andrew Smith. (Hale. 12S. 6d.) Straw Without Bricks. By E. M. Delafield. (Macmillan. 7S. 6d.)
Moscow in the Making. By Sir E. D. Simon, Lady Simon, W. A. Robson and J. Jewkes. (Longmans. 7s. 6d.) The Position of Women in the U.S.S.R. By G. N. Serebrennikov. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) Men, Medicine and Food in the U.S.S.R. By F. Le -Gros Clark and L. Noel Brinton. (Lawrence and Wishart. 5s.) Nursery School and Parent Education In Soviet Russia. By Vera Fediaevsky and Patty Smith Hill. (Kegan Paul. ios. 6d.)
THESE books, like most publications about Soviet Russia, fall into three categories—" pro," " anti " and " blue book." The first category is here represented by Scenes from Soviet Life, the second by I Was a Soviet Worker, and (with a few reservations) Straw Without Bricks. The other volumes, though of varying quality, all belong to the " blue book " species, and will appeal mainly to readers possessed of a Grad- grind-like appetite for facts.
Mr. and Mrs. Coates have given us a sort of Intourist Baedeker de luxe—the result of a tour of Soviet Russia made by themselves in the summer of 1935. The ground covered was Leningrad, Moscow, Kharkov, Rostov-on-Don, Stalingrad and a trip on the Volga ; and the blend of sight-seeing and propaganda, which is the speciality of the Intourist organisa- tion, is accurately reproduced. There are many good descrip- tions, and the book can be commended to anyone intending to make a similar tour—or indeed, to anyone wishing to gain a general impression of a tour in Soviet Russia without going to the trouble or expense of making it. The only drawback is that Mr. and Mrs. Coates seem to possess an unusual capacity for inspiring their interlocutors with a sense of the Importance of Being Earnest. Thus a sailor on the boat from London to Leningrad, complimented by them on the excellence of his dancing, replied : " We Russians love singing and dancing. They are good for us physically and psychologically, and the Government, through various institutions, encourages these recreations."
In similar vein the architect of a theatre at Rostov-on-Doh delivered himself to them on his masterpiece : " Western Europeans seldom grasp the fact that our Government propagates discontent with- ugliness, not only from the platform, in the Press, and through the wireless, but also by such buildings as this."
All this is rather a pity, because Russians really have a sense of humour; and one cannot help wondering every now and then whether the sailor, the architect and the rest were not engaged in pulling the leg of those over-zealous propagandists.
Mr. Smith and Miss Delafield propagate " discontent with ugliness " by rather different methods. Mr. Smith is a Slovak who settled in the United States before the War, became an active member of the Communist Party, made a conducted tour of the Soviet Union in November, 1929, and settled there in 1932, working for three years in an electrical works near Moscow. The contrast between theory and practice, between the fair exterior of the stage-managed tour and the reality of life in the normal conditions faced by the Soviet worker, was too much for Mr. Smith, who in 1935 returned with relief to the comparative paradise of capitalist America. Mr. Smith writes with much circumstantial detail, and there is no reason to question his bona fides or the substantial accuracy of his statements. Only those who (like Mr. Smith himself) have taken at their face value the " workers' paradise " stories of the propagandists will be shocked and surprised to discover the primitive standards of life still prevailing. in Russia. A political revolution does not in twenty years change the whole face of a vast country. It is instructive to place side by side the account given by Mr. and Mrs. Coates of their trip on the Volga in 1935 and Mr. Smith's account of the same trip in 1933.
There is no doubt of the improvement in conditions between the two periods (in 1933 the famine was still raging). But in the main it is the difference between those who are determined to see only what they are meant to see, and those who are determined to see only what they are not meant to see.
Miss Delafield could afford to be more detached, and is more subtle in her methods. Incited by an American publisher, she went to spend three months in a collective farm. " Dis- content with ugliness " sums up the main impression of her recorded experiences. But she is not without admiration of the stolid, hard-working endurance of the members of the Commune, and admits in general that she might be " more enthusiastic if Mrs. Pansy Baker and the Guide were less so."
(Mrs. Pansy Baker is an American, and would be the perfect tourist from the point of view of Mr. and Mrs. Coates.) But on the whole Miss Delafield's attitude is one of gloomy scepticism. Many people, a Russian doctor told her on the eve of her departure, " think that because they have visited a few museums, schools and hospitals with an interpreter, they know something about this country. They do not. They know nothing." Agnosticism, combined with a sort of instinctive shrinking from the sordidness of the externals of Russian life, remains the keynote of Straw Without Bricks.
Moscow in the Making is the only one of the " blue books " which merits serious attention. The four " experts " (so described on the dust cover) who have set out to investigate the system of government of the city of Moscow are, on the whole, modestly conscious of their limitations. None of them speaks Russian, or has had any previous intimate contact with Russian affairs ; and two at least of them seem to realise that the positive results of their inquiry do not amount to much. The most interesting and illuminating passages are those in which the authors stumble, almost as if by accident, on fundamental problems inherent not merely in Soviet city administration, but in the whole Soviet system of government. What, asks Professor Jewkes, is " the process by which economic decisions are made " ? Who, for example, decided that, at a moment when housing is admittedly one of the gravest problems of life in Moscow, enormous sums should be expended on " such relative luxuries as the Metro and the Palace of Soviets " ? Evidently, the Party, not the " consumer." For Professor Jewkes is clearly right in seeing that " the liquidation of the discriminating consumer " is the essential hall-mark of the Soviet as opposed to the capitalist system. Mr. Robson considers that the municipal bureaucracy of Moscow is vastly overstaffed; and Sir E. D. Simon, in two concluding chapters, sits on the fence in endeavouring to reply to the questions whether the Moscow Soviet is (a) democratic (b) efficient. The book contains two maps of Moscow, one showing the city as it is, the other as it will be when the plan of reconstruction has been carried out.
The other three books on our list proceed from the assumption that everything done in the Soviet Union is supremely important because it is done in the Soviet Union. As Miss Delafield remarks on visiting a Leningrad clinic for children, it is " not nearly as clean or as well-equipped as any similar institution in England or in America would be." But nobody thinks it worth while to go into ecstasies of admiration about such institutions in England and America. No serious critical work can be done on the study of social hygiene in Soviet Russia by writers who are either Soviet citizens bound by the canons of Soviet orthodoxy or foreigners ignorant of Russian conditions and dependent on what they are shown by Soviet
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