Eugene Lyons: How the Russians live… (1946)

1

The Pittsburgh Press (December 2, 1946)

How the Russians live…
Soviet peoples just ‘plain human beings trying to make a living’

They work, worry, live just as citizens of other lands, despite Communist system
By Eugene Lyons

Eugene Lyons, for six years United Press correspondent in Soviet Russia, is an authority on its history and system. He was the first foreign reporter to interview Joseph Stalin after his rise to dictatorial power. Mr. Lyons is the author of several books on Russia. He has written and lectured extensively on world affairs. Russia is prominent in today’s news. We believe Americans want to know the basic everyday facts about life and government and economy in a country that looms so large on the world’s horizons. The first of a series of articles written for the Scripps-Howard newspapers is published today.

The fog of propaganda and censorship around Soviet Russia has obscured for outsiders the simple fact that Russians are human beings, with roughly the same faults and virtues as people in other countries.

The temptation is to think of them as characters in a drama or guinea pigs in a great experiment. They are neither. They are folks like ourselves, working, worrying, getting what satisfaction they can out of life despite extreme poverty and political oppression.

That needs to be understood at the outset in looking at the everyday facts of life under the Soviets, as this series of articles proposes to do.

Because of their unhappy history, first under despotic Czarism and then under more despotic Communism, Russians have learned to “take it” better than most other populations. Theirs is almost a genius for bending before the storm.

Submit to terror

They submit to types of terror against which peoples less meek and more politically experienced would revolt. It is fair to say that a handful of zealots could put over the Russian revolution precisely because the masses of Russians are so unrevolutionary.

But this does not mean that they are bizarre creatures who relish hardships and despise freedom. Those are fairly tales spread by the Kremlin’s press agents to justify the harsh dictatorship.

The fact that Russians, once outside their frontiers, usually refuse to return is one answer to the libel that they love to be dictated to and terrorized.

Another answer is in the fact that the Soviet regime considers it necessary to maintain the world’s largest political police system and system of concentration camps.

Long time to adjust

It should be remembered, however, that Russians have had a long time to adjust themselves to the Soviet reality. The overwhelming majority, born or raised since 1917, takes the Communist system, good and bad, as much for granted as Americans take the capitalist system.

After 20 years of it they are scarcely aware that they live under a unique setup. It is life under capitalism that seems to them strange and hard to understand.

In Russia, the struggle for sheer subsistence is grim and never-ending. Bureaucracy and secret police make life a burden. The frequent mass meetings and parades are a continuous nuisance.

They seem natural

But these things have been a way of life so long that they now seem natural. Russians don’t feel either heroic or pathetic. They are far more concerned with where to buy meat, with their jobs and families and personal ambitions than with ideologies and politics.

The new movie, the gossip about the Ivanovs next door, the rumors of a shipment of herring, the temper of the new foreman at the plant, touches them more directly than the latest purges or the new party line.

In short, they are remarkably like people in America. Russian children play in the streets and back yards like children the world over. Russian couples flirt and neck in the public works. The younger people get worked up about big-league football matches. The main topic of conversation – and the safest – is the weather.

Outwardly the same

Outwardly the mechanics of living are not so different from other countries. You work for wages. You buy in shops and markets with your money. You save for a rainy day if you can.

You marry and raise a family and strive to make your children somebodies.

There are rich and poor, educated and ignorant, just as there are in America. The country has its quota of criminals, beggars, bums as well as its quota of high-minded and successful citizens. In Russia, too, it takes all kinds to make a world.

Under the outward resemblance, of course, there are profound differences. The most relevant of these is that factories, mines, offices, farms, newspapers, in fact everything but purely personal belongings, are owned by the government.

Conditions vital

This is a tremendous fact. But as the routine of daily life it seems less important than one might suppose. Whether your factory is owned by a private corporation or a government trust concerns you less than the conditions of labor, the wage you draw and what you can buy with it.

Whether the farm you work on is owned by a private landlord or the government is an important distinction. But what really interests you is how much of what you raise you can keep and what kind of living you get out of it.

These are some of the things we shall consider in the following articles, dealing with economic, political and cultural conditions in Russia as they affect an average person – as they would affect you if you lived in a Soviet society.

2

The Pittsburgh Press (December 3, 1946)

How the Russians live…
Whole families toil just for bare existence in Soviet Union

Group of four allotted 10 by 15 foot living space; buying power still on toboggan
By Eugene Lyons

Eugene Lyons, for six years United Press correspondent in Soviet Russia, is an authority on its history and system. He was the first foreign reporter to interview Joseph Stalin after his rise to dictatorial power. Mr. Lyons is the author of several books on Russia. The second of a series of articles Mr. Lyons has written exclusively for the Scripps-Howard newspapers is published today.

Suppose you were a factory worker in Soviet Russia earning 480 rubles a month, which is the present national wage average. What would your standard of living be like?

In figuring the average the Soviet government throws in the earnings of top managers and engineers, many of whom draw five to 10 thousand rubles a month. This means that the great majority of workers subsists on wages far below the average.

With 480 rubles you would therefore be in an exceptionally good bracket. Less skilled workers in your plant might be averaging 250 or 300. The janitor in your tenement would be drawing 100 or 150; the conductor on the street car that takes you to work would probably be earning 250.

The office would withhold your income tax, social insurance contribution, union dues and other fees, in your case totaling around 80 rubles, so that your monthly take-home pay for a 48-hour week would be only 400.

Black market is key

It makes little sense to translate these figures into dollars. At the phony official rate a ruble is worth 20 American cents. At the “diplomatic” rate available to foreign residents, it is worth 8½ cents. But in the black market – which is a more accurate indication of real purchasing value – the ruble is worth 4 or 5 cents at most.

On this last basis your monthly income would be incredibly low – about 16 to 20 dollars. How then could you be expected to keep alive, especially if you had a family? The answer is twofold.

In the first place, bread and some other staples are rationed at comparatively low prices. Nine-tenths of the ordinary worker’s purchases are limited to these rationed goods.

Barely enough to live on

The amount to which you are entitled would be barely enough to sustain life on a level which an American on relief would reject as impossible. In case of illness, free medical service would be available to you. You would eat one meal at your place of work at a reasonable price.

Your rent, too, would be fairly low. In the larger cities you would be entitled to 4.2 square meters of living space per person – a family of four, in other words, would occupy one room of about 10 by 15 feet.

Your four meters, including heat and light but not repairs, would absorb about 14 percent of your income.

Families also work

In the second place the chances are that your wife and grown-up children would also be working. That is the real secret of how families get by despite the shockingly low wages. The idea of the head of a family supporting it by his own labor has been almost forgotten in the last 20 years.

It’s not any new sex equality but a new economic necessity that obliges Russian women to do the heaviest kinds of men’s work.

You would be living under a three-price system: (1) The rationed prices. (2) The so-called free market, where peasants are allowed to bring their surpluses and individual artisans may sell goods made in their spare time; prices here are 10 or 20 times above the ration ceilings. (3) The “commercial stores” – a kind of black market run by the government itself far above the free market; here only the upper crust of privileged citizens can afford to make purchases.

Prices tripled

Last September, ration prices were approximately tripled.

Black bread, the main item of the Russian diet, went from one ruble a kilogram (2.2 pounds) to 3.4 rubles; butter from 24 to 60 rubles a kilo; meat from 14 to 34 rubles. Prices in the other two categories were lowered. But that would scarcely interest you; eggs at 10 rubles apiece or sugar at 150 rubles a pound would still be beyond you.

Clearly life would be no picnic for you. With your wife and children working and long experience in stretching every ruble you would just barely keep alive.

There was a time, in the 1920s, when Soviet wages in actual buying power were higher than under the czars. But by 1937, they had declined to only 68 percent of the 1913 average – this according to British-American economists on the basis of Moscow’s own figures.

Dr. Colin Clark, an American authority on living standards, has calculated that food consumption per person in Russia in 1934 was 30 percent lower than in 1913.

Far down on list

Recently a study of living standards in 34 countries before the war was published in Washington by a group of leading economists. Soviet Russia stood 28th on the list, just above China and India.

Since the war, of course, conditions have become unavoidably worse. In some regions, such as the Ukraine and White Russia, the end of UNRRA relief will mean literal starvation for many millions.

Maybe we had better drop the idea that you are a Soviet worker. It is a most unpleasant, even creepy, supposition.

3

The Pittsburgh Press (December 4, 1946)

How the Russians live…
Soviet farm system just like feudalism; land owned by state

Peasant can’t leave assigned farm without permission, has small plot for own use
By Eugene Lyons

Eugene Lyons, for six years United Press correspondent in Soviet Russia, is an authority on its history and system. Mr. Lyons is the author of several books on Russia. He has written a series of articles exclusively for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, telling about Russia. This is the third.

The majority of Russians still live in villages and work on the land. If you were a Soviet citizen the likelihood is therefore that you would be working on some “kolkhoz,” or collective farm.

A few farms on an old-style individual basis are still tolerated in the Soviet Far East and elsewhere, but they are negligible in the country’s total farming. There are also large “state farms” run by the government with hired labor like factories. The overwhelming portion of farming, however, is done by the kolkhozes.

To an American the label collective farm sounds like a cooperative undertaking of the kind he knows in our rural areas. It is nothing of the sort.

Just like serfdom

As a collectivized peasant you would be permanently attached to the land like your serf forebears under feudalism. You could transfer to another farm or move to the city only with official permission.

Moreover, there would be no share-and-share-alike nonsense about your status. Your labor would be figured by a complicated method under which some types of farm work are paid five or even 10 times as much as others.

As nearly as it can be done under farm conditions the government enforces a piecework system and big differentials in farm earnings. You would have exactly nothing to say about what is planted or about the disposition of the crops.

Retain fraction

The kolkhoz system is in essence a sharecropping arrangement. The government is the sole landowner and the farmers retain a fraction of the crops they raise.

The collective does not even own its tools and machines. These are rented from a government machine-tractor station serving the locality, and paid for with a share of the crop – this over and above the regular taxes.

Roughly, half of what a kolkhoz raises goes to pay these fees, taxes, interest on seed credits and the like. Part of the remainder goes into compulsory agriculture reserves. What is left – normally about 40 percent – is divided among the kolkhoz members on the piecework arrangement.

Lost brave fight

The average peasant is happy if his share is enough to feed his family for the year. But the better-paid types of farm laborers are likely to have surpluses which they may sell in the free markets in nearby towns and cities. They must carry their surplus to the market personally and sell it personally, otherwise it is punished as capitalistic enterprise.

The peasant fought a brave but hopeless fight against collectivization. Millions of them were exiled from 1929 onward for refusing to join the collectives “voluntarily.” The peasant opposition led to a famine in 1932-33 in which from four to seven millions died.

Concessions made

Although the government conquered it was obliged to make various concessions to the farmers in order to raise agricultural production. The right to sell their surplus is one of these privileges.

Another is the right of the peasant to cultivate a small plot for his private use and to sell what he can spare of this in the free market.

Actually, being human, you would put more effort and loving care into your small private plot than into the collective fields. That explains why about one-fifth of all the produce sold in the free markets comes from the private plots, though these are only a tiny fraction of the nation’s total cultivated area.

Of course, the plot is yours only on sufferance. It may be – and often is – confiscated by the collective. If you get permission to leave the kolkhoz the plot reverts to the collective.

In theory your kolkhoz is self-governing through a chairman and managing board elected by its members. In practice this has been largely forgotten. The chairman is today in most regions appointed by the Ministry of Agriculture.

He is paid a salary and bonuses on output and has come to be more like the director of a factory. All important questions – what to plant, the quotas to be surrendered to the government at its own prices, the norms of work for members – are decided by regional or national bureaus.

The kolkhozes are also responsible for supplying quotas of workers for road-building, for state farms and for industrial projects that happen to be short of labor. These “leased” farmers share in the crop of their kolkhoz. They represent a thinly disguised type of forced labor similar to the “corvee” or labor drafts under Russian feudalism until it was abolished by Czar Alexander II.

4

The Pittsburgh Press (December 5, 1946)

How the Russians live…
Soviet trade unions operate like those of Nazi Germany

Workers have no voice since government dictates at both labor, management ends
By Eugene Lyons

Fourth of a series.

The only way an American can understand the so-called trade unions in Soviet Russia is to think of them as company unions in the worst sense of that phrase.

The same government which appoints the directors of economic enterprise appoints the officials of its trade union. The same Communist Party group which dictates at the management end dictates at the labor end. When managers and trade union officials negotiate wage rates, it is in effect, the government engaged in collective bargaining with itself. In practice the farce has largely been abandoned; the central authorities fix the rates and other conditions.

The unions have no more influence in Russia than they did under Hitler or Mussolini. Their main job is to discipline the workers for greater production and to punish them for slackness.

As a worker you would have no more voice in the conduct of your union and the fixing of work conditions than you have in making production policies – which is to say, none at all.

Fraternization ended

Before the war union functionaries were normally chosen from the Communists in the plant, mine or other enterprise.

To discourage such “fraternization,” union officials on the plant level are now drawn from other factories and even other districts.

Since the government is the only employer, striking or talk of strike is treated as insurrection. There have been isolated instances of attempted strikes – the ringleaders, if identified, have usually been executed.

Piecework only

The worthlessness of the unions may be judged from the fact that labor laws and work methods nowhere tolerated by real trade unions are in force under the Soviets.

For instance, all payment for labor is on a strictly piecework basis. Speed-up devices, pace-setting by the quickest workers and other super-efficiency measures which no self-respecting American labor union would permit are applied throughout Soviet economy.

Lateness of 20 minutes or more without adequate excuse is punishable by prison or banishment to a concentration camp. Children as young as 13 are in many parts of the country allowed to do adult work.

Pay for spoilage

Women work as coal miners, hod-carriers, lumberjacks, ditch-diggers, street cleaners. Workers are forced to pay for spoiled goods and tools and in some factories are searched when they leave the plant.

Until 1929, the Soviet trade unions did maintain a margin of independence. They could appeal to higher authorities against the management and had some voice in factory administration.

Since then, everything has changed.

Trade union officials have been shot for propagating “Western ideas of trade unionism.”

Aside from low wages and the appalling living conditions, the heaviest cross borne by the Russian worker is his constant sense of insecurity. Should he in any way offend the one employer, the government, he is finished.

Along with his job he loses his living space, his ration card, his right to social security benefits. And in Russia there are no private or public charity institutions.

Without warning he may be assigned to labor in some distant place. His work-quota may suddenly be raised, meaning a cut in wages, and he has no recourse. A single mistake, like arriving late for work, may wreck his whole life. For any of a thousand real or imaginary offenses he may be dragged out of bed and hustled off to a concentration camp.

5

The Pittsburgh Press (December 6, 1946)

How the Russians live…
Soviet citizens go to jail for doubting they have freedom

Political system a pyramid with Stalin at top; voting remains meaningless farce
By Eugene Lyons

Fifth of a series.

The new Soviet constitution, handed down from on high 10 years ago, declares that the country is a democracy and enjoys freedom of speech. Anyone who thinks otherwise and dares say so aloud goes to jail or into exile. There we goes to jail or into exile. There we have a pretty good measure of the gap between theory and practice.

If you were an average Russian, what would be your part in the political picture? How much influence would you exert on the policies and the personnel of the government?

These are more vital questions in Russia than in a capitalist country. In America, after all, government is but one of a great many forces that shape your life. In Russia it is the only force. There is just one employer, one shopkeeper, one publisher, banker and land owner – the government. Whoever runs the government therefore runs the whole show.

In theory the country is ruled by a series of Soviets (which means Councils) ranging from the local neighborhood Soviet to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. The executive officials, from Premier Stalin and his Cabinet of Ministers down, supposedly derive their authority from these Soviets.

Go through motions

At frequent intervals you would go through the motions of nominating and voting for delegates to your local Soviet and to the Supreme Soviet. That is the basis for the claim that Russia is a democracy.

In practice the list of nominees is drawn up by the local group of Communist Party leaders, in accordance with instructions from their higher-ups. It is presented to you, along with speeches and sometimes sandwiches, at a mass meeting of the factory or farm employees.

Unless you have a hankering for trouble, you raise your hand in enthusiastic approval.

Vote for one out of one

At the ballot box you have a choice of one out of one. You have the privilege of not showing up to vote or of scratching the names on the ballot. Both procedures are unhealthy, so that the official lists are invariably “elected” by a majority of around 99.9 percent.

The elected legislators, knowing local conditions, can offer useful information in the discussions in the Supreme Soviet, meeting in the Moscow Kremlin. They can call attention to local evils and abuses that need correcting.

But they always vote unanimously for every project or law presented by the leaders. Should a legislator vote in the negative – and it does happen – he finds it to be the shortest road to a concentration camp.

Voting is a farce

So far as affecting the policies of the country is concerned, your voting is therefore an empty farce. As a sensible person you don’t take it seriously. You accept it as a political ritual, like the mass meetings, the unanimous resolutions and the obligatory parading.

Besides – and that’s the crux of the story – the government itself is little more than a puppet. The strings are firmly held by the one and only legal political organization, the Communist Party.

It has some five million members in a population of 180 millions. Assuming that there are 100 million adults, the chances of your being in the Communist elite is about one in 20.

Party isn’t ‘safe’

Even if you happen to be one of the 20, however, your influence on public affairs is so slight that it is nonexistent. There is not a shadow of democracy inside the ruling party.

Communists are arrested and exiled or shot without public trial for talking or acting out of turn precisely as if they were of the non-party herd.

Local party officials are not elected by the members but appointed by the higher authorities. These in turn are appointees of the party organs above them. The party in practice is thus a pyramid of power, every layer subservient to the one above it. Power flows from the top downward.

Politburo at top

At the apex is the Politburo, a self-perpetuating body of 14 men, with Marshal Stalin at its head. This is the real power in the land. Each of the 14, as well as prominent Communists not in the Politburo, swings a lot of weight.

Some of them may even argue with Premier Stalin. But the final decision is his. What happens to those who do not abide by it has been demonstrated in the purges, which killed off stubborn Politburo members along with lesser officials.

Your role in the Soviet “democracy” it thus appears, would be exactly nil. Under the make-believe of voting and government is the reality of dictatorship by one party, subject to the orders of a handful at the top and supervised by a gigantic open and secret police force.

6

The Pittsburgh Press (December 7, 1946)

How the Russians live…
Reds would face death for demanding ‘rights’ guaranteed by law

Citizen’s privileges are only on paper; he can be punished by police edict
By Eugene Lyons

Sixth of a series.

On paper the Soviet citizen is guaranteed a lot of rights that sound remarkably like those cherished by the people in a democracy. The Constitution gives him freedom of speech, press and assembly; the right to petition; equality before the law.

But no Russian in his right mind would venture to exercise such rights literally. He knows from sad experience that under the Soviet setup these privileges have special meanings, not even related to the meanings they have in dictionaries or in non-Soviet countries.

Take freedom of the press. In Russian practice it means that any state or party institution or organization (and there are no others) may publish a newspaper or magazine to present the official views and the authorized information in its particular field.

The publication must be sanctioned by the proper government bureau and its contents are strictly censored in advance. Should it publish one independent thought not in line with the official views of the moment, its editors become candidates for prison or exile.

Criticism limited

Or take freedom of speech. It means that you may criticize the conduct of lower officials and managers. The party at times encourages this “self-criticism.”

It is useful in uncovering fraud and exposing inefficiency – a weapon in the hands of the central authorities for controlling the vast army of officialdom.

But no one is permitted to criticize the government, the party, their policies or their views as such. That’s sabotage and counter-revolution.

Equality before the law is an empty phrase. Of what value are laws anyhow when the ruling party may suspend them, or issue new ones by edict, at its own sweet will? When the tremendous police machine is a law unto itself?

Anything is political

The courts are fair enough in ordinary criminal or civil matters like theft, murder, disputes over personal property. But in political matters there are no brakes on the powers of the police – and anything is political if the police so decide.

Habeas corpus is unheard of in Russia. You can be imprisoned or shot without being informed of your offense – without your family ever knowing what happened to you or why. There is not even habeas cadaver – the bodies of executed people are not returned to their families.

The police may swoop down on your home and rip it apart in a search without warning or warrant. They open and read your letters, listen in on your phone, summon you at will to spy and inform on your closest friends and relatives.

Thieves face death

You may be held incommunicado for months or years, and subjected to physical torture, without any legal recourse.

Though the death penalty has been abolished for ordinary murder, it is applied to a long array of political offenses. For instance, theft of government property is a capital crime – and virtually everything in Russia is government property. Even children as young as 12 are subject to these death penalties.

7

The Pittsburgh Press (December 9, 1946)

How the Russians live…
Soviet terror system calls for every man to spy on neighbors

State pits one citizen against another; MVD has million fully equipped troops
By Eugene Lyons

Seventh of a series.

As a citizen of the Soviet Union, you would be involved, whether you like it or not, in the most extensive espionage and terror system in all human history.

Your every act and word would be observed and reported by armies of professional spies and legions of volunteers. You would come to accept it as a matter of course that a detailed account of what happens in your trade union meeting, your home and your private parties should reach the secret police.

Al the same time you would be forced into spying on others. You would have no alternative. Failure to report “anti-Soviet” remarks or behavior is treated as complicity in the crime.

Refusal to act as informer, even against your mother or your husband, is punished as treason. The first duty of every Communist and Communist Youth especially is to observe and report on the political morals of everyone around him.

A police state

When you cut through the complicated Soviet system you get to the central fact that it is a police state. The power of the dictatorship, in the final analysis, rests on the terror inspired in the hearts of the population by the secret police.

Furst known as the Cheka, then GPU, then NKVD and now MVD, the organization is the instrument through which the whole nation is dominated.

It combines the powers and functions which used to be exercised in Nazi Germany by the Gestapo, the Storm Troopers and the other terror divisions.

Political prisoners

Before the war there were more political prisoners in Russia than in Germany, Italy, Spain and the rest of the world combined. Many a Soviet concentration camp in Siberia and the Far North held more prisoners than in all of Spain and Italy.

The personnel of this dread secret police is usually estimated at four million, though no accurate figures are available. Besides millions of full-time agents and millions who inform as a sideline, the organization has its own troops, including artillery.

These numbering about a million, are better equipped and enjoy greater privileges than the regular armed services.

The authority of the secret police extends over all branches of the government, all organs of the party, all the military forces. Even members of the all-powerful Politburo, with the possible exception of Stalin, are subject to its surveillance. It arrests high government and party officials at will, and has powers of life and death over ordinary citizens.

Offices everywhere

An office of the secret police is on the premises of every large factory and farm. It is the MVD that carries through the periodical purges of the government, the party and the economic organizations, in which literally tens of thousands have been executed, hundreds of thousands imprisoned or banished.

But the MVD is more than a secret police force. It is also the largest single economic organization – operating entirely with forced labor.

As boss of all prisons, concentration camps and penal colonies, it has millions of laborers at its disposal.

These it uses in the most difficult and dangerous undertakings – harbor and canal construction, certain kinds of mining, reclamation projects and the like – especially in remote places like the Arctic regions, the Siberian wilderness, the Central Asiatic deserts.

Millions of prisoners

The extent of this forced labor, exploited ruthlessly under horrible conditions, cannot be exactly ascertained, of course. The usual estimate inside Russia, according to the testimony of hundreds of refugees from the camps and exile colonies, is today 15 millions.

Impressive proof that the figure is not exaggerated is available. Most of the economic projects under direction of the secret police are listed in official economic plans and charts. Though Communists abroad deny the forced labor facts, the Soviet government itself does not.

Engineers can readily estimate the extent of the slave labor needed for the listed MVD industrial undertakings. There have been single construction jobs – the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal, for example – that used a quarter of a million prisoners, tens of thousands of whom died in their tracks.

Citizen’s risk is great

If the 15 million estimate is approximately correct, your chances of being turned into a slave laborer would be about one in seven million population of some 100 million adults. Indeed, since 90 percent of the prisoners are men, that chance for men is closer to one in four.

Small wonder that the average Russian stands in awe of the secret police. There are few families which have not lost someone dear to them in a purge or some other police foray. The terror is so vast and constant that younger people cannot even imagine a social system free of its pressure.

8

The Pittsburgh Press (December 10, 1946)

How the Russians live…
Russians ‘eliminate’ classes by substituting iron-clad categories

Incomes vary as in capitalist nations, but special privileges are greater
By Eugene Lyons

Eighth of a series.

In Soviet Russia today there are no servants – they are called “house-workers.” By the same logic there are also no classes – they are called “categories.”

Soviet leaders have announced formally that the “classless society” has been established in their country. If you don’t want to be pushed out of your category into the category of forced labor, you don’t dispute those glad tidings.

Under the verbal shenanigans, of course, is the grim reality of new classes in place of the old. The economic and social distance between the charwoman and the banker, between the bookkeeper and the head of the trust, between the private and the officer in the Army, is, if anything, greater in Russia than in America.

Passion for classifying

The bureaucratic government has a sort of passion for classifying people. Ranging from the lowliest, unskilled laborer to the powerful officials, managers, police and military officers, the categories are marked by wide difference in income, just as in capitalist countries.

In 1943, the press proudly announced the first “proletarian millionaire.”

More important in a totalitarian setup are the immense differences in privileges. In a dictatorship influence is often a more valuable medium of exchange than money.

The privilege of buying in special shops for high officials, for instance, can hardly be reckoned in cash under conditions of chronic goods shortages.

Marxism now bourgeois

The old Marxist ideal of social and economic equality was expressed in the formula: “From each according to his amity, to each according to his need.”

That formula has been outlawed. People actually go to jail for preaching such “bourgeois equalitarianism.”

The Stalin constitution spells out the new principle: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.”

Classes everywhere

Such class differences run through every department of Soviet life. On trains and boats there are four classes. In factories and offices there are three and sometimes four categories of restaurants – clean, well-stocked ones for the managerial gentry, middling ones for the lower officials, squalid and badly stocked ones for the masses.

The right of inheritance has been restored, which tends to perpetuate the new classes. Income taxes are much lower than in America in the upper brackets, much higher in the low brackets. Interest income on tax-free government bonds is about twice as high as in the United States.

A Red Army private receives 10 rubles a month, a lieutenant 1000 rubles a colonel 2400. The ratio between the pay of a private and a lieutenant in Russia is thus 1 to 100, whereas in the American Army it is 1 to 3.

Elite gets rests

The famous rest homes and vacation resorts in Russia are run in the name of the workers; a few actually go there as special reward for some service. But in the main they are occupied by the managerial and technical elite.

Free education in the secondary schools and colleges of Russia was abandoned by decree of October 2, 1940.

The percentage of workers’ and peasants’ children in the higher schools has been falling fast. With every year the new economic and social differences tend to harden more surely into permanent classes.

9

The Pittsburgh Press (December 11, 1946)

How the Russians live…
Soviet women win dubious new right to work harder

Revolution did give them freedom but now they work in mines and pay alimony
By Eugene Lyons

Ninth of a series.

The Russian revolution freed women from many of the disabilities under which they had lived under the ancient regime. They were given absolute equality of citizenship and the right to equal education. They even obtained the privilege of paying alimony, and not merely receiving it as in backward capitalist lands. Millions of Mohammedan women dropped their veils and were relieved of other onerous handicaps under Moslem customs.

This emancipation of women was without doubt one of the real achievements of the revolution. There is no call, however, to exaggerate its scope – or to overlook more recent Soviet policies that have undone much of that new freedom.

Despite their legal equality Russian women play a comparatively small role in the country’s political life – much smaller, on the whole, than in Sweden or the United States, for instance.

There never has been a woman member of the all-powerful Politburo, a woman top commissar, a woman “president” of any of the larger Soviet “republics.”

While gaining new freedoms Russian women preserved some doubtful freedoms in vogue traditionally under the czars – especially the freedom to work as longshoremen, miners, sailors and in other trades elsewhere reserved for men only.

This is one freedom they had never utilized as fully in the dark past as they do now.

Used as soldiers

Since Russia is not a signatory to the Geneva convention which forbids the use of women as combat troops, they also have the freedom to engage in that field of activity.

When Hitler’s government promulgated measures for enforcing large families, the Soviet press branded it as “debasement of women to the role of broodmares.”

Today practically every one of those Nazi measures is law in Russia. Birth control has been made extremely difficult and abortions illegal. The divorce law now in force is about as rigid as that of South Carolina.

Moreover, divorce has been made so expensive that only Soviet citizens in the higher income brackets can afford the luxury.

There are now special taxes on bachelors, spinsters and families with fewer than three children. Large families receive state subsidies; the mothers of 7 to 9 children are awarded the title “Motherhood Glory”; superior breeders with 10 or more offspring are designated “Heroine Mothers.”

Because virtually all women have jobs, the state-employer has had to make provision for the care of children of working mothers. All large factories and collective farms therefore have day nurseries and some of them kindergartens. Pregnant women are allowed vacations with pay for some weeks before and after childbirth.

Policies change

Official policies toward children have undergone changes as far-reaching as those in relation to the family in general. So-called progressive education has been abandoned in favor of conservative teaching methods.

Co-education has been forbidden in the lower schools.

In the early years of the revolution Soviet propaganda made capital out of its enlightened handling of the problem of juvenile crime. The youthful offender was regarded as the victim of environment, to be educated along new lines rather than punished.

All that is past. By decree of April 7, 1935, children of 12 or more have been made subject to the ordinary court and to the full penalties of the criminal law – including the death penalty for political crimes.

For all the noise made about the new freedom for women in Russia, they have few, if any, privileges not enjoyed by American women – and myriad hardships from which American women are exempt.

10

The Pittsburgh Press (December 12, 1946)

How the Russians live…
Reds teach atheism; they tolerate religion but it’s disreputable

Anyone who worships God can expect little advancement socially, economically
By Eugene Lyons

Tenth of a series.

The position in Soviet Russia of the faithful believer – Christian, Moslem or Jew – is not unlike that of the village atheist in a pious American community. It is legal, but disreputable and highly uncomfortable. Nothing that has happened in the last few years has altered this situation.

During the war the Soviet government called off the more active kind of persecution of religion and restored to the Church some of its former rights. The Kremlin needed to rally the support of believers, who are still the majority. It needed also to improve its position among the very religious populations in neighboring Slav countries which the Red armies were entering.

But it was a change of policy, not a change of heart. Atheism is still the state religion in Stalin’s domain.

Part of school work

Anti-religious propaganda remains a part of the school curriculum. Religious education for minors is still strictly forbidden, except in their own homes. The “godless” museums function as in the past.

The present constitution, like the one it replaced, guarantees “freedom of religious worship and freedom of anti-religious propaganda.” But it is the government itself that carries out the second half of the guarantee.

Young people must give up all hope of rising on the economic or political ladder if they wish also to practice their religion openly.

The widespread notion abroad that religious worship was prohibited in Russia after the revolution is wholly untrue. The Soviet leaders would have been insane to attempt that.

Except during high holidays, there have usually been enough houses of worship for the true believers. This despite the fact that in 24 years before Hitler’s invasion the number of churches and priests declined by nearly 80 percent.

Slave of state

The price which the Orthodox Church in Russia today is paying for its limited new rights is absolute subservience to the state. Even under the czars it had more independence. Should it ever make the lightest gesture in opposition to the regime and its methods, it will be promptly suppressed.

None of the concessions made to the Orthodox Church, incidentally, apply to religious bodies which the government cannot fully dominate. The Roman Catholic Church is a case in point.

If you were a deeply religious person under the Soviet system today your spiritual life would be one long martyrdom.

11

The Pittsburgh Press (December 13, 1946)

How the Russians live…
Red ‘racial freedom’ means peoples have uniform slavery

Each group retains native language but must fit into Communist mold
By Eugene Lyons

Eleventh of a series.

More nonsense has been spread about racial freedom and equality in Russia than about any other aspect of the Soviet picture. Since no race, not even the dominant hundred million Russians, enjoys any freedom, the whole business comes down to uniformity in enslavement.

In practice the much-advertised racial policy of the Soviets means that as a Jew or Armenian, a Kalmuk or Tadjik, you would have the privilege of worshiping Stalin in your own language. You would be allowed to retain innocuous native customs, like folk dances or picturesque clothes, provided these did not run counter to the prescribed Communist principles and policies.

You would be permitted to publish books and newspapers in your own language – but the contents would be exactly the same as in Russian-language publications.

Your children could attend schools conducted in your native tongue. But any teacher who uttered a word not on the Moscow “Party Line” would be quickly liquidated.

Everyone ‘Sovietized’

Where the culture of a minority race does not jibe with the Communist teachings, it is ruthlessly crushed.

The czars’ policy of “Russifying” all non-Russian subjects has been largely (by no means entirely) dropped. In its place is a policy of Sovietizing non-Russian peoples, and cultures by all-out propaganda and terror.

In theory the “autonomous” republics may even withdraw from the Soviet Union. Actually the faintest sign of racial independence is punished even unto death.

Prisons crammed

Concentration camps and prisons are crammed with Ukrainians, Poles, Volga Germans, Tartars, Georgians and others accused of nationalist leanings.

Among them is a large quota of Zionists and religious Jews, since Zionism and the teaching of ancient Hebrew are illegal.

Suppose you were an Armenian or a Jew locked into a prison where the majority was Russian, but were treated no worse than the Russians. You might draw some moral satisfaction from this absence of discrimination. But you would still be a convict.

The analogy with the many-language set-up in the Soviet Union is almost perfect.

No real autonomy

Our 48 states have far more autonomy in running their affairs than the so-called “republics” and “autonomous regions” in Russia. As for comparing the Ukraine or Byelo-Russia with the British dominions, in the matter of independence, the idea is grotesque.

The name “republic” is an outright fraud. Top Party and government officials in the republics are appointed, shuffled, removed, imprisoned or shot at will by the bosses in Moscow. When native officials show too much solidarity with the people from whom they are sprung, they find themselves purged.

Thus virtually all the “presidents” and party secretaries of the non-Russian areas were shot or driven to suicide during the blood purges of 1936-38.

Takes no chances

No prime minister of “independent” Ukraine since 1937 has been a Ukrainian. Because Ukrainian national feelings are deep, the Kremlin takes no chances. The whole comedy may be judged by the fact that the foreign minister of Byelo-Russia today is a Ukrainian.

In Russia the secret police holds the whip-hand. And that is one department that is run on a rigidly centralized, all-Union basis, without even make-believe about local autonomy.

The constitution provides clearly that basic policies in foreign affairs and military affairs must be decided by the central government.