MOSCOW AFTER TWENTY YEARS : I. CONSTRUCTION
By SIR BERNARD PARES
[Sir Bernard Pares, Professor of Russian in the University of London and Director of the School of Slavonic Studies, Who knew Russia intimately before the War, and has been a severe critic of the Bolshevik regime- since, returned to this country a few weeks ago after paying his first visit to the Soviet Union since its foundation in 1917. In a series of four articles in THE SPECTATOR, Sir Bernard sets dawn his impressions of Moscow of today as compared with the Moscow of nearly twenty years ago.] ACTUALLY it is a little less than twenty years ago— in 1917—that I left Moscow. My first feeling, on finding myself again walking its streets after so long an interval, was one of surprise at the siniplieity of it all. Petrograd was a place I always hated : in fact, I should not have been sorry for the plough to go over it. Moscow was, and still is a home: someone else's home it may be, but anyhow a home, and here one knows that one is at the heart of the Russian people, which, whatever it is called, is still the Russian people. When INwas .a student in Moscow, in 1898, I used, for the sheer sake of the sense of home in it, to walk through the Kremlin every day ; and now, though the Kremlin has returned to its early rile as a fortress—this time the fortress of Communism— I was constantly walking past it and all round it, and from my hotel I had a full view into it.
For nearly a month I was going freely wherever I pleased, roaming the streets, going through the big shops, watching the streams of buyers and rioting the great accumulation of stores of every kind. Familiar snatches of Russian conversation floated past me as I walked. It was the ordinary sort of talk which I might have heard in London—frank, open and familiar, and on subjects of everyday interest. The people were well dressed— which is naturally more noticed in winter costumes— especially the children, and the general impression was that they were also well fed. Certainly there was here no suggestion whatever of a sullen and disgruntled people wondering when it could be relieved of a hated Govern- ment. We must remernher, of course, the wholesale deportations from Moscow on the introduction of the internal passport system in December, 1932.
Everyone who lives in Moscow now—and that means 3 or 4 million people—has to earn the right to do so by taking a hand in the vast work of construction which is everywhere in progress. That is, they are all playing a part in the big movement ; and it is also quite clear that if one speaks of Moscow only (and I spent the whole of my month there) they are already profiting by doing so. I kept on asking myself the question—to what extent the circle of public support around the Government had widened, both as compared with what I learned from other visitors of two years ago and, perhaps more, as compared with my own instinct so well remembered out of pre-Revolution times. To what extent was the Govern- ment a foreigner to the people ? In the times of Tsardom I had never failed to feel its almost complete isolation. In Moscow of today this separation seems to have dis- appeared altogether, and in my many visits to public offices and great institutions Government and people were of the same stock. I had plenty of opportunities of talks with many of the foreign representatives in Moscow, and with those whom I found in charge of the various Government institutions. But specially valuable to me were a number of young Englishmen, some of them previously known to me as senior treasurer of the Union of students in London University, who had taken up professional posts as specialists of various kinds in the enormous work of planning. They were attracted hither for the most part not by Communist abstractions, but by the vast and inspiring scope of this huge work. They attributed the wholesale change that had taken place in living- conditions to the last two years, and above all to the year 1935. In 1933 they too had witnessed how ragged creatures stood at street corners speculating in black rye bread. They have themselves lived through the bad times, and they still regarded the housing problem as acute. But they looked back on that time as one of a tightening of all belts Which has now definitely yielded the promised results.
The first Five Year Plan was the first expression of Stalin's particular programme of making the U.S.S.R. self-sufficing, even if the rest of the world remained non-Communist, and thus, among other things, of giving the country that heavy plant which could make it inde- pendent of supplies of munitions from abroad. As far as Moscow is concerned, one could certainly say that the time had been reached when the results of this policy were already being distributed. To take another side, attention was now being devoted to the levelling up of quality, so that Russia should no longer nerd to send half-finished goods to be completed abroad. More important still, Soviet Russia is also trying to make herself more independent of foreign experts. This has always been in view from the time of Peter the Great ; and we were always being told that the foreign specialists were only there to teach the Russians to manage for themselves. From the evidence I had from British specialists now at work there, sometimes in very far-flung fields, it would certainly seem that in the very last few years a good deal more real progress was being made in that respect than in any previous period.
I am, let me repeat, speaking of nothing outside Moscow. This city, always the real heart of Russia, is now the central workshop of the whole ; and, especially since the wholesale expulsions, it must be regarded as a hive of workers all of whom are taking an active part in the great movement. The streets are far better paved, and I had a particularly good opportunity of seeing how well they were looked after, because, during my stay there, there was one of the heaviest remembered falls of soft snow, which most unseasonably, vanished all at once, leaving conditions which had to be cleared up directly if the streets were again to become passable, and this work was carried out with admirable prompt- ness. As to the rest of the country, I could only take opinions from those British specialists of whom I have already spoken, but they—particularly one elderly American who had held a high post in the work of construction in the Urals—gave me some very striking facts about the rapidity with which even " peasants of yesterday," often after initial and sometimes very amusing mistakes, were adapting themselves to the use of hitherto unknown machinery, and even sometimes making inventions of practical value. His younger British confreres, mostly at work in Moscow itself I met several and heard of about 40 of them—were literally inspired by the vast scope of the work accessible to them, such as they might have found in America, but hardly today in England. One young man had to fight his way, within a given fix d time, through the work of setting up new telephone communication between Moscow and Leningrad, with a queer host of Asiatic collaborators and sometimes almost cut off from food supplies. This was not a question of Communism but of hard practical work. A foreign diplomat in Moscow, clearly not over-friendly to Communism, speaking of the Five Year Plan, remark- ed : " They have won all along the line " ; and precisely this was the burden of the New Year speech by the Prime Minister of the Soviet Government, Mr. Molotov. This was a time of all-important government meetings, and the motto was everywhere displayed that the New Year must lead to new triumphs. The hotel in which I stayed seemed at times to he filled with delegations from the country, for instance from the collective farms, which were received in the Kremlin and came back obviously stimulated by the encouragement which had been given them. In contrast with Russia of the past, I could not fail to notice a new and much more purposeful look on the faces, not only of those in some position of authority, but of the ordinary inhabitants. That is something which one only too often missed in the past. I might add that all the old signs of pauperism in Moscow—often so obtrusive, as, for instance, the distorted and misshapen limbs that were stretched. out to one by the beggars lying at the gates of churches, have disappeared altogether. Neither did one see any signs of the great epidemic -..of waifs and strays which was at a given time one of the most serious embarrassments of the Communist Government. These had vanished from the streets completely. There is no doubt, as far as Moscow is concerned, that a definite stage of achievement and prosperity has been reached. One would have to know a great deal more of the life of the country as a whole to be able to define to what extent one can discount future interruptions or reverses of this prosperity : for instance, to what extent it is due to good harvests and what is the measure of stabilisation of the new system of collectivised agri- culture, as a guarantee against the old dependence on the chances of the crop of the year. But there is anyhow at this time nothing to suggest such a reaction. In the Museum of the Revolution, an admirably planned historical summary of popular movements from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries down to the present moment, I saw in one of the last rooms a caricature which I should much like to reproduce. The bourgeois, with the traditional top-hat and cigar, hears of the Five Year Plan and expresses his incredulity ; in the next picture, he is looking up with a rather bored interest and the word : " Indeed ! " and in the third, the top-hat and cigar are gone and he is exclaiming : " Well, really ! " The makers of the plan are entitled to this satisfaction.
[In the next three weeks Sir Bernard Pares will Write on " Education," " Social Services," and " Desiderata" respectively]
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