Dorothy Thompson

Buffalo Evening News/February 7, 1928

BERLIN, Feb. 7— Soviet Russia after ten years is like a vast river whose stream has been directed into one narrow channel. Outside that channel one sees a stagnant river bed, from which all life has departed. But in the channel itself the currant is swift-running and powerful, and the dynamic power of this narrow stream is not to be minimized.

Certainly, one’s impression of Russia depends on whether one looks at the rushing stream or at the deserted riverbed. It depends on whether looks at Peter the Great’s Leningrad, which is like a beautiful disintegrated corpse; at some of the Black Sea works, where, despite optimistic reports of the government’s grain export, there is every impression of stagnation; at a city like Baku, where the government’s oil Industry is going at a pace that would do credit to any western power; at a town like Ivanove-Voznesensk, in which a vast cotton industry is concentrated; at the center of the lumber industry in Karelia, where former workers are running thriving paper mills, or, above all, at Moscow.

Too Little Attention

In Moscow there is poverty. In Moscow there is appalling housing; in Moscow the now tall and practical city jostles a shabby and casual village; in Moscow, after ten years, one can still observe the pitifully struggling remnants of the old bourgeoisie; but Moscow is undeniably a living city.

A criticism has been often directed against Soviet Russia, which my experience there did not confirm. It has been said that Russia is a series of Potemkin villages, that the foreigner is led around by the nose, that he sees and hears only what the government wants him to see and hear. But If I had any personal complaint to make about my stay in Moscow it would be rather that the government did not pay the slightest attention to me. At least not openly.

I suffered from the same disabilities in getting around, in visiting institutions from which everyone, and, not the least at all, Soviet citizens themselves, suffer: a cumbersome and incredibly complicated and extensive bureaucracy in which no one seems to wish to assume responsibility, so that the accomplishment of the merest processes of living undermines, in the long run, the steadiest nerves.

Shift Responsibility

It took me five months to get a visa for Russia, a week to get permission to leave. Each process cost me $12, and, in between the registry of my passport twice because I changed my hotel cost another $5.

Workmen’s clubs, factories, and schools could not, theoretically at least, be visited without a permit from the foreign office or the “Voks,” the bureau of cultural relations, whose business it is to deal with foreign visitors. And this institution is one of the most well meaning and inefficient organizations which it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. One is passed around from one person to another; one is advised by the “Voks” to go to the foreign office and by the foreign office to go to the “Voks.”

At last I took matters into my own hands, employed my own interpreter, made my own schedule, arranged my own dates. But I never asked for any permit in the end I did not get. I myself picked the factories, schools, clubs and other institutions which I wished to visit, and sometimes I picked them quite haphazardly out of the telephone book.

No Effort at Concealment

I saw some institutions which could objectively be considered as models of their kind, and I saw others which were certainly no particular credit to their makers. Apart from the ubiquitous and indiscriminating bureaucracy, nothing was placed in my way.

I am convinced that it is not true that the visitor who goes to see Russia cannot see it. To arrive at the truth about Russia is quite another matter The analyst of statistics will find himself at his wits’ end; and very soon the man who proposes to make a definite report on the workings of the industrial system will find it excessively hard to present a statement which he himself believes to be accurate. But in so far as life is lived on the surface, it is there for every eye to see. And, undeniably, a great deal about Russia can be learned by loitering in the streets of Moscow.

That the revolution has uprooted and put into motion the peoples of this vast land, which reaches from a spot in northern Siberia 34 miles from Alaska down into central Asia, and from the borders of Europe to the Pacific is observable in these streets.

Cosmopolitan Pilgrimage

The celebration of the tenth anniversary of the revolution in early November brought to Moscow people who had never before been on a railroad train, women from Armenia and Turkestan, individuals who look Iike Lamas from Mongolia, which although not part of the Soviet republic is nevertheless under its influence, peasants from the Ukraine, from Crimea, from White Russia, who before the revolution could not and would not have contemplated a visit to the national capital.

And day and night the streets are crowded with Moscovites. Enter their homes, and you will understand why Collectivism in home life has been a complete failure. The government knows it now and is building or helping co-operatives to erect two, three, and four-room apartments on German or American models. The last thing which can be socialized, it has found, are human stomachs. In the matter of kitchens, all men are individualists.

But the apartment houses do not go up fast enough; there is a shortage of capital. Moscow, before the war hardly more than a picturesque and extensive village, had today 2,000,000 souls. If the Moscow Soviet were to provide for merely the natural increase in population, it would have to carry out an annual building program twelve times as comprehensive as that of the city of Vienna, which is probably a model among European capitals.

Makeshift Housing

Meanwhile the majority of people are housed in the makeshift way instituted by the revolution, when all the houses were seized and the proletariat quartered together with the bourgeoisie on the basis of a certain number of square feet per person.

Experts will tell you that the average number of persons per room in Moscow was six before the war, it is now 4.2. I do not know whether these figures are accurate. I only know that if before the war in certain slum sections there was a horrible state of overcrowding, this evil has now been spread out a little thinner, over the entire population.

The handsome palaces, the large apartments of the former bourgeoisie, have been given over to workers, and after ten years they are still not livable. The facades are chipped and decaying. The characteristic little iron porches are rusted and the interiors display a tenement-like aspect of utter ruin. An apartment of ten room which formerly housed a family of five now may contain five or more families. But such an apartment has many rooms which can only be entered through others now occupied by other families, and has only one kitchen.

Eating Brings Mixups

One would think that in a Communist state after tan years some form of communal living would have been worked out whereby such dwellings could be organized and the various families determine by schedules who was to do the cocking each week and how the expanses were to be divided. Such, indeed, was the hope of many Utopians at the beginning of the revolution.

No one in Russia any longer believes in this phase of collectivism. Experience has demonstrated the obstinacy of the principle of private ownership in the matter of sauce pans. The fine stove of iron and tiles has been abandoned in these communal kitchens because if one family heats it the entire population of the house or apartment steals his fire.

The kitchen contains a dozen or more small deal tables and on each table is the “primus.” If the institution of fresh air had taken a firmer hold on the Moscow population and windows were left open the visitor would hear, at meal times, a terrifying, though subdued, roar through all the streets. This roar, accompanied by sputterings of blue flame, is no revolutionary rite nor presage of another rising. It is the sound of the “primus,” the one-burner oil stove, which more than any institution in modern Moscow asserts the eternity of the individualist.

Dangerous But Useful

The primus emits gases which, if they could be collected, might solve the problem of chemical defense, engaging the attentions of the Red Army and the numerous defense organizations; the primus explodes frequently and has cost, according to a serious observer, more lives than the whole revolution; the primus is as noisy as a small dynamo. But on it one can cook one’s own kasha, boil one’s own soup, in one’s own saucepan, and while swearing allegiance to Communism, be one’s own master in the communal kitchen.

The little tyrants of Russia are the house committees in these crowded dwelling houses. All the tenants who are wage-earners (traders and non-workers excluded) can vote for these committees who administer the house. If a Communist lives in the housed he is usually and in the nature of things on the committee and one member of it always serves as the informer of the G.P.U.—the organization for the apprehension of spies, counter-revolutionists, etc.

The committee decides about the disposal of rooms, settles conflicts, which are bitter and numerous, determines rates—which are fixed upon the class of the person who pays and not upon the space itself, so that a foreigner or a concessionaire or a trade pays manyfold what a factory worker is charged for similar quarters—collects rent, water and gas bills and sees to repairs.

Much Petty Graft

For these services president and secretary are remunerated out of the house funds, and alas, they often add to this rather paltry sum by embezzling the repair money, so that a Moscow newspaper reported while I was in Russia that 3,000 cases of dishonest house committees had been brought before the Moscow courts this year.

Even the new houses do not solve the problem of overcrowding, because it is impossible to get the tenants to use them according to design. A foreign concession built apartments for the employees consisting of one living room and a large kitchen for each family. Before long as many as 26 people were living in one such dwelling.

Outside of meal times the population flees from crowded, ill-smelling quarters into the streets, into the very numerous workers’ clubs, into the cinemas, into the theaters and into the markets.

The shops and markets reveal a great deal about the present social system in Russia. Up and down the Twekskaya, the Petrovkaya and the other shopping streets one sees constantly, and especially over food stores, the word “Kommyhap” (Kommunar).

Co-Operative Shops

These are the co-operative shops which Sovieet figures show are increasing, taking the place of private or government trading places.

The government has found that the government itself is not the best means of distribution, and encourages these co-operatives. But in many cases it subsidizes them to an extent which makes them virtually government institutions. The statement that they are “free” co-operatives is open to serious question. They are always favored over private enterprises in the granting of concessions. Although they are classified as free co-operatives, the population itself almost always refers to them as the “government stores.”

The government has its own shops, to be sure, which are usually distributing stations for government industries and monopolies. Wines and spirits, furs, machines and books are nearly always sold in such shops, which are outposts of the industry itself.

Stampede to Buy

Private shops usually handle such manufactured goods as clothing, smaller industrial articles and household goods. They are taxed higher than co-operatives, are granted less favorable concessions, and enjoy a grudging legality. Nevertheless their owners often make a great deal of money. The only explanation for it is the shortage of goods and the hunger for them. In Russia today people buy and buy and buy.

Before the Kommunar and the government shops there are often huge queues; on any given day the complete supply of galoshes, or wadded coats or felt boots may be sold out. And at the private shop, for a little more money, one can obtain an article as good or better.

The investigator is at a complete loss to understand where these buyers come from. If wages are investigated, he finds that the average worker earns perhaps $50 a month. According to official reports, no employee in Russia outside of technical experts engaged by the industries earns more than $125 per month. Yet a pair of felt boots to wear over one’s shoes as protection against the bitter cold costs $20, and I have seen hundreds of such boots on the feet of Moscow women.

One explanation of the relative plentifulness of money to spend is that many persons have two, three or half a dozen jobs. Another is the paternalism of government and trade unions.