PEASANT AND PROLETARIAN
of the U.S.S.R. (Lawrence and Wishart. 8$. .6d.)
have regarded. isor7 es a purely. proletarian achievement. ' how far the proletarian State Ices really captured thk country- The capital 'event in the Russian agrarian world' between side $905 and $917 was -the StolYpin feform. Stolypin's ,plan was ; to modernise Russian agriculture by the abolition of. the strip.- cultivation system. of the mir,-and at the Milne time to create a the
privileged class of industrious, independeni, do peasants, Who would form throughout the countryside a nucleus loyal to the regime. He succeeded to some extent in regime. He gives a good account of the atmosphere which the outlying parts of the Empire, where the traditional system the Soviet Government is trying—with was less firmly rooted, butfailed in the-central regions, including . most of Great Russia, andit;Was -here that the agratian distitirjj
bances were severest in .1917.• Lenin. approached the agrarian problem ,y;rithout much Sloan's rate opiter,dietaAbout agticulturer-the statements tbat guidance frOrn hiS:0015,fiets.iand• teachers (it, is Odd diet pr. the oppOsiiiOn- to colleCtivisailon came filial ," those feiv peasants Owen does not quote Marx'sTrefiectiOhs on ctip:riussian-mir). who had larger farTfis a,ticf. who Were rsmall LeMplajers," and In principle, he could hardly fail to approve that iNart, of that the harvest of 1933 was "a record for the whole of Russian Stolypin's reform- which aimed at abolishing antiquated history 46: not suggest any very profound lultyitAeilge of quasi-feudal system'. i But he was.a sourid tactician ; and it was Russian agiarian problera. :
essential to harness the mass of peasant discontent to the chariot of the proletarian revolution. Lenin considered the peasant The Russian Peasant Movement, 1905-1917. By Launcelot A. problem, as Stalin afterwards put it, "on the basis of the Owen. (P. S. King. us. 6d.) theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat." Any
Soviet Democracy. By Pat Sloan. (Gollancz. 6s.) attempt to:apPlY Marxism to the countryside might alienate Soviet Union, 1936. (Lawrence and Wishart:, 6s.) . f khe-peasant-aridliestioy: the .reVoliition. Lenin hedged. The The Second Five-Year Plan : StatetPlatking Commission fainoits L.ind. Decree of November 8th, 1917, took the land • u:1 aWaY from its eitiSting ownets4o1i that point peasant and " WrrHotrr the peasant movement of -19r7 there would have ! Easlievik saVi eya to eye. But Kieft to the local peasant Soviets been no Russian Revolution as the world has known Dr. the task of: deciding the mode of land-tenure to be adopted, Launcelot Owen believes that land-hti4er had More to do "whether: household, individual, communal or co-operative." than Marx with the Bolshevik revolution, and kg.. out to Lenin could:%car_cely have been content to leave the matter analyse on the basis of published material_1(mainly official) :tbe there. He recognised that one result of 1917 had been to part played by the peasant in the great upheaval. His staiting.'. create a "petty bourgeois peasantry " ; and Dr. Owen ends point is the abortive revolution of $905, when (for the first time with a hint that Stalin's collective farm is the continuation of since the Pugachev insurrection in the eighteenth century) the the policy which Lenin would have been obliged to follow if agrarian movement took on a revolutionary. character; and -, he had lived. The revolution could not be completed until though his thesis is necessarily: and 'adinittedfy one:sided, it the Oeisant wá niadè not iiaEti&l sy'eapiiii,-but an integral is a valuable rgdreSsing of the balance as against those whb part of it. But even:now there-ieniants an 'element' of ,doubt have regarded. isor7 es a purely. proletarian achievement. ' how far the proletarian State Ices really captured thk country- _ t *de 4,1;. • • ' • reader. who turns from The .Russian Peasant Movement to Soviet Democracy cannot-fail -to be struckby:ffie-intignificant amount of space and attentiohliven-to e peasant in the latter
book., Mr. Sloan spent two ThreeYears in Moscow among
the .sPoilt cliffclien=-Oroletiliat'_1-30--officialof the Soviet '
nucleus loyal to the regime. He succeeded to some extent in regime. He gives a good account of the atmosphere which a considerable measure
of success—to create in factories, in schools and in law-courts.
But itji ....wOld be an exaggeMtion to suppose that either the a enthusiasm or_the material ashievemepts whigh,-he chrOt. ides - - - - - - •. 2-i are characteristic:of-I the=cciiintry as _a _whole. Two of Mr. Lenin. approached the agrarian problem ,y;rithout much Sloan's rate opiter,dietaAbout agticulturer-the statements tbat guidance frOrn hiS:0015,fiets.iand• teachers (it, is Odd diet pr. the oppOsiiiOn- to colleCtivisailon came filial ," those feiv peasants Owen does not quote Marx'sTrefiectiOhs on ctip:riussian-mir). who had larger farTfis a,ticf. who Were rsmall LeMplajers," and In principle, he could hardly fail to approve that iNart, of that the harvest of 1933 was "a record for the whole of Russian Stolypin's reform- which aimed at abolishing antiquated history 46: not suggest any very profound lultyitAeilge of But Mr. Sloan's main purpose is eVidently to convince English readers with a prejudice for democracy that democracy is nowhere so nearly realised as in the Soviet Union. He makes play with the notorious difficulty of defining democracy, and with the fact that every democracy known to history has been based on the predominance of a particular class. But when he maintains that the predominance of the Communist Party in Soviet Russia means the democratic rule of the whole proletarian and peasant population, Mr. Sloan makes an unverified and unwarrantable assumption. How does he know that "the people of the •U.S.S.R. " do not "want more than one political party " ? Nobody ha5 been bold enough to ask them. Bourgeois democracy, with ill its shortcomings, is still strong enough to permit of organised opposition parties and alternative governments ; and so long as Communist and Fascist regimes are too weak to-permit-themselves this luxury, they will not be democratic -(whatever Heir Hitler or Comrade Stalin may say to the contrary) even the imperfect sense in which the word is used in Western Europe. We shall begin
to believe that Stalin's position is. ,`.`.,constitutionally . similar to that of Mr. Baldwin in Britain"—the comparison is on many counts surprising—when we find him caricatured in the Soviet Press in a " similar " style to Mr. Low's cari- catures of Mr. Baldwin.
Soviet Union, 5936 and The Second Five-Year Plan are semi- official publications. The former contains a series of speeches delivered during the past year by Stalin and other Soviet leaders, as well as speeches by some selected " Stakhanovite " workers, in which they celebrate, in becomingly modest terms and for the encouragement of the rest, their contributions to the speeding-up process in Soviet industry and agriculture. Indeed, in all the pionouncements collected in this volume the neVr" slogan " of " socialist competition " take's' the first place. Thei.increase produCtitiry .is7noCif- clearly the first pre-occupation of the Soviet regime. The ioltirne ends with the new constitution, given curiously enough in its original draft form, not in the final amended text adopted last December. The Second Five:-Year Plan is a handbook of statistics, prefaced with an introduction by the President of the State Planning Commission.
E IL CARR.
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