The Soviets Through Soviet Eyes
The Soviet Theatre. By P. A. Ilarkoti. (Gollancz. 5s.) IN countries like Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, where the boundary line between news and propaganda has been obliterated, writers on public affairs rapidly grow accustomed to a hot-house atmosphere from which every
chilly draught of criticism is carefully excluded. Their rare excursions into the open air find them not only highly sensitive to criticism, but quite unable to anticipate it intelligently. They are ill at ease in a foreign element which they do not understand. And this is presumably why the foreign propa-
gandist in this country almost always makes such a poor showing. He is like a political orator who can get away with anything at an enthusiastic party meeting, but whose remarks, read next day in cold print, make his friends blush for him.
These reflections are suggested by the first four volumes of Messrs. Gollancz's new series of monographs about Soviet
Russia written by qualified Soviet experts. There is no reason to doubt that each of the four authors is a sincere and intelligent upholder of the Soviet regime and is proud—as he is quite entitled to be—of the achievements of the regime in the particular field in which he works. Yet every now and then they shock the reader with fallacies so glaring and so ridiculous as to betray a complete atrophy of the critical faculty. Thus Mr. Nodel, in Supply and Trade in the U.S.S.R., introduces a section on the bread-making industry with a quotation, already used in Marx's Capital, from a British
Blue Book of 1862 on the conditions then prevailing in bakeries—the implication apparently being that mechanized baking is peculiar to Soviet Russia and that the conditions of 1862 still prevail in the capitalist world: Mr. Yanson, the
author of Foreign Trade in the U.S.S.R., goes one better when he assures us that " in the U.S.S.R.. poverty, hunger and unemployment have been abolished." Maeinflay's schoolboy could have told him that however much con- ditions may have improved in the last ten years, the standard of living is still immeasurably lower in Soviet Russia, and abject poverty far more widespread, than in any other large European country ; that Soviet Russia is the only European country where, within the last five years, people have actually died of hunger ; and that unemployment, in the western sense of the word, has never existed in so industrially uadeveloped a country as Russia, and has therefore certainly not been " abolished " by the Soviet regime.
There is indeed a constant assumption, on the part both of Mr. Nodel and of Mr. Yanson, that there is a legitimate basis of comparison between the economic structure of the Soviet Union and of Western Europe—to the vivid disadvantage of the latter. In reality, such a basis scarcely exists. The present stage of Russian economic development is roughly comparable to, say, that of England in the first part of the reign of Victoria. Mr. Nodel correctly points out that, in present-day Russia, " the growth of consumption exceeds the growth of production." The same phenomenon was observed in Western Europe a century ago, and in America more recently still ; and neither it nor its consequences can be ascribed to the merits of the Soviet system. It is for this reason, and not owing to the monopoly of foreign trade, that Soviet Russia takes no part in the struggle for markets "- a statement which, by the way, is gradually ceasing to be true. The test will come when Russian economic growth reaches the same stage which has produced elsewhere the now familiar diseases of over-developed capitalism. There is no proof, and in the opinion of many no probability, that the Soviet system will prove immune from these diseases.
But while anyone who has preserved his critical faculty will be irritated by many of Mr. Node's and Mr. Yanson's assump- tions, these two books do present a clear picture of Soviet home and foreign trade respectively, and will help the student who does not want to delve into more pretentious treatises. Mr. Yanson not only describes the organization of Soviet foreign trade, but analyses the distribution of that trade among the principal countries—drawing the familiar moral that those who live on good terms with the Soviet Union get the best orders. Now that the United States have at last recog- nized the Soviet Government, and Great Britain has been deposed from the proud position, which she used to occupy in the Soviet Press, of Public Enemy No. 1, the Anglo-Saxon countries may have a chance of displacing Germany from her hitherto predominant role as Russia's principal supplier.
No achievement of the Soviet regime deserves more respect than its serious effort to tackle the health question, which had been hopelessly neglected over the greater part of Russia in the days of the Tsars. 11 at the 'worthiest subjects make the heaviest reading ; and Mr. Semashko, though he gives us many facts, more figures and still more pious aspirations, has pro_ duced a rather indigestible essay. Mr. Markov's book on the Soviet theatre is of more general interest. The theatre always appears to the foreign observer a particularly live force in Soviet life, partly perhaps because it is a field where indi- vidual idiosyncrasies and differences of opinion are still allowed some play. It is possible to distinguish two broad tendencies in Soviet theatrical production—that associated with the Moscow Art Theatre which, though it has adapted itself to the revolution, still maintains in essence the realist traditiOn of Stanislaysky ; and that of Meyerhold, whose productions aim at the bizarre, the conventional and the symbolical. Mr. Markov was for some years a director of the Moscow Art Theatre, and his sympathies clearly lean to that side. He is, however, universally and impartially laudatory. Meyerhold, he tells us, " marches untiringly ahead and delights in solving great stage problems "—which sounds impressive but means • precisely nothing. At any rate, everyone is agreed that there shall be no more nonsense abbut art for art's sake. The Soviet theatre " strives. not merely to represent, but to change the world," and " we can already distinguish the outlines of a theatre whose object it is to transform the world." Which also sounds impressive, but not very attractive.
JOHN HAI.LETT.
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