RED SMOKE

BY ISAAC DON LEVINE

AUTHOR OF "STALIN"

Ri STROKEf 1 f

RED SMOKECOPYRIGHT, 1932

BY ISAAC DON LEVINEPUBLISHED, 'JUNE, 1932

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATESOF AMERICA

ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

Timber is floate4l down the Volga in great rafts 14

Dnieprostroy, the gigantic dam on the DnieperRiver in the Ukraine .

. . . 15

Leningrad Port is one of the few harbors ofRussia 30

At Kuznetstroy, in Siberia, is situated the spec-tacular iron works under construction inthe great Kuznetsk Coal Basin31

Surfacing the Moscow-Leningrad highway . . 78

At Magnitogorsk, the Soviet "Gary, Ind .," agigantic steel city is rising79

This tractor squad is at work on the steppes ofSouthern Russia94

Torgsin, the government department store forforeigners, stands on the main businessstreet of Moscow95

RED SMOKE

BY ISAAC DON LEVINE

RED SMOKE CHAPTER I

THEY were discussing the Five-Year Plan.Among those present were intellectuals prima-

rily interested in the idea of a planned society as aremedy for the current economic crisis . Otherswere more interested in the Russian experimentfrom the standpoint of communism or socialism .

The group was listening to the author of a re-cently published book on the Soviet economic sys-tem who had spent several months in Russia lastyear. The speaker was conveying his views withemphasis.

"Where did you get your data?" I inquired ."From direct observation, by interviewing hun-

dreds of persons while in Russia, officials as wellas workingmen."

"But after fourteen years of contradictory im-pressions from the scene of the Russian Revolution,don't you think that the time has come to go toscientific sources and present the Soviet's own au.

8

RED SMOKEthentic evidence for an . appraisal of events inRussia?"

"You do not doubt the honesty of my state-ments?"

"Not at all, but neither do I challenge those ob-servers who have arrived at the very oppositeconclusions. I simply challenge the method of sub-jecting events in Russia to a test of veracity . Mr.X reports from a certain city on the Volga his ownimpressions and opinions. Mr. Y who has visitedthe same place has a diametrically opposed reportto make. Both are sincere. One has to make thechoice of believing either Mr . X or Mr. Y. Thatillustrates the value of impressions gathered fromfield observation."

"I spent several months investigating the Five-Year Plan and I ought to know something aboutit."

"What Five-Year Plan are you talking about?""Why, the Five-Year Plan in operation in the

Soviet Union today .""Have you read the Five-Year Plan?"There followed an embarrassing pause and a

bewildered expression ."What Five-Year Plan?" stammered the parlor-

lecturer."THE Five-Year Plan, the original and only

RED.' SMOKE 9official record of the plan issued by the Soviet Gov-ernment."

It appeared that the speaker and all those pres-ent had never heard of it. That the Five-Year Planpossessed physical dimensions similar to those ofa small encyclopedia was news.

It was news that the Five-Year Plan is not a mereslogan. And it took some effort to explain that thefamous plan, in its original and basic and onlyauthentic form, is quite different from the variouspolitical interpretations of it which enjoy suchpopularity throughout the world .

"I am referring to the exhaustive compilationof the leading Russian economists, geologists andtechnologists, published in four volumes by theSoviet Government, under the auspices of the StatePlanning Commission. This record embodies theresearch and study of several hundred scientists .This was the only Five-Year Plan ever adopted bythe Soviet Government."

On a later occasion, a Russian journalist who hasbeen in this country for several years asked me toread a ten-thousand word article dealing with theFive-Year Plan which he had prepared, for publi-cation in an American magazine .

"Where did you get your facts?""I keep up with the current literature . I have

10 RED SMOKEread most of the books and articles on the subject,both in English and in Russian ."

"Did you consult the Five-Year Plan?""No." The gentleman knew of it, but had never

had the occasion to read it."But how can you write on the effects of the

Five-Year Plan without having read it, without be-ing acquainted with the premises of the subject?"

The red smoke emanating from the various men-aces and challenges raised so suddenly in connec-tion with the economic pyrotechnics of the Sovietdictatorship has obscured many visions, and makesit necessary to emphasize that, in addition to the al-most metaphysical Five-Year Plan which has be-come at best a political battle-cry, there is also aphysical Five-Year Plan, predicated on a set ofeconomic laws, affording the only legitimate stand-ard by which one can measure the performance andthe possibilities of the experiment in Russia .

This Five-Year Plan should not be confused withthe numerous expositions and interpretations andsummaries of it published abroad. A careful scru-tiny of these works reveals that virtually all ofthem have failed to convey the fundamental prop-ositions postulated in the original Five-Year Plan.

These propositions are derived from the eco-nomic geography and geology of Russia . Theeconomic history and destiny of Russia, in the past

RED- SMOKE

11as well as the future, are determined by a set ofinexorable physical limitations inherent in the na-ture of the country, such as her northern location,the dimensions of her territory, the character ofher soils, the pattern of her rivers, her lack of openports, her isolation from the maritime highways ofthe world, and the distribution of her mineral de-posits and her centers of population .

The natural resources of Russia, in conjunctionwith unalterable geographic factors, are such as tocondemn her to an existence of relative poverty inthe role of a second-rate agricultural state. The be-lief that Russia is a country of almost unlimitednatural resources has gained wide currency sincethe Revolution. That the Soviet Union is endowedwith vast potential wealth, that it rivals Americain undeveloped riches, has been asserted again andagain by writers who professed to regard the futureof Russia either as a promise or as a menace . Themisconception has been perpetuated by the polit-ical mentors of the Bolshevist movement. It gavesubstance to the theory of Russia's passing in brieforder, under a planned stewardship, from a stateof backward agriculture to one of advanced tech-nical magnificence .

Fundamentally, the Five-Year Plan is an effortto convert natural resources into mechanical power,to transmute fuel deposits and reserves into me-

12 RED SMOKE

chanical horse-power. That is the cornerstone ofelectrification, industrialization, mechanization andsimilar slogans raised by Lenin and his disciples .

With insufficient natural resources, with an eco-nomic geography that is unfavorable, the Five-YearPlan would be an empty gesture . The mineralwealth of the globe is not distributed evenly orin proportion to population. There are large areaswith vast numbers of inhabitants in the worldwhich possess fewer industrial potentialities thanany one of a dozen states of this Union.

The phenomenal mineral wealth and naturaltransportation facilities which have conspired tomake America the industrial giant of mankind can-not be duplicated or even approximated by anyother country . Russia, as far as natural resourcesare concerned, ranks among the lowest countries inthe world .

The professed aim of the Kremlin mentors ofthe Five-Year Plan is to transform primitive peas-ant Russia into an advanced industrial country thatwould overtake and surpass the leading capitalistnations, notably the United States .

But does Russia possess the possibilities for real-izing this grandiose aim of the Five-Year Plan?

Speaking before the first national conference ofindustrial directors held in Moscow in February,

R D- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -SMOKE 131931, Joseph Stalin, the political boss of the SovietUnion, answered the question emphatically :

"Yes, we do have these possibilities . What arethey, what is required in order to realize them?

"First of all, we must have sufficient natural re-sources (italicized by Stalin), such as iron ore,coal, oil, grain, cotton. Have we got these? Yes .We have more of them than any other country.Take for example the territory of the Urals whichpresents a combination of resources that cannot befound in any other land . Iron ore, coal, copper,oil, grain, what have the Urals not got! We haveeverything, with the exception, perhaps, of rubber .But in a year or two we shall also have rubber . Asfar as this prerequisite is concerned, the requisiteof natural resources, we are fully provided for . Wehave even more than we need."

Thus spoke the political leader of the Five-YearPlan, the generalissimo of the drives and cam-paigns which have made the Soviet State loom asthe industrial colossus of the world of tomorrow.

But the real Five-Year Plan' is not a political1 The Five-Year Plan, when italicized, refers to the official record

under that title, third revised printing, Moscow, 1930 . All the vitalquotations in the following chapters dealing with the natural re-sources of the Soviet Union are derived from that source . Asthis Russian edition is available but to a few in this country andas the author did not wish to encumber the text with footnotes, itseemed advisable to give the following references for the specialstudent of the subject : Volume I, pp. 13, 138 ; Volume II, Part I,

14

RED SMOKE

battle-cry. It is primarily a document incorporatingthe results of a most comprehensive survey of thenatural resources of the country, and deals withthe `elements contained in the prerequisite given byStalin for the industrialization of the Soviet Union.The evidence which the Five-Year Plan presentstends to refute completely and to destroy Stalin'srhetorical, "We have everything!"

Russia was among the first countries in the worldto institute a national surveying body. This cornerstone of the Five-Year Plan was laid several yearsbefore the Revolution. It is not by accident thatthe Five-Year Plan is being conducted like a mili-tary operation. Its origin was the World War. Thedate of its birth was 1915 . The circumstances werenot unlike those which prevailed at the formallaunching of the Five-Year Plan .

Six months after the outbreak of the war, theImperial Academy of Sciences formed a Commis-sion for the Study of the Natural Resources ofRussia, for the purpose of thoroughly surveying thecountry and discovering mineral and other richeswhich Russia imported from abroad and which sheneeded badly for the conduct of modern warfare .pp. 7-11, 17, 19, 44, 50, 99, 115-119, 129, 136, 141, 155, 475; VolumeIII, pp. 227, 229. For further information on the subject, consultthe publications of the Commission for the Study of the NaturalResources issued by the Academy of Sciences, Leningrad .

Timber is floated downthe Volga in great rafts .In spite of the inex-haustible timber re-serves in Russia'sn o r t h e r n provinces,there is actually a shortage of firewood in the populated centers,particularly in Siberia . Russia's massive timber zones are located inalmost uninhabitable areas where roads are a novelty . Moreover, allof the Siberian rivers flow north, directly away from the populatedareas, and thus are useless for the exploitation of the northernforests .

Dnieprostroy, the gigantic dam on the Dnieper River in the Ukraine,was built for the generation of hydro-electric power . As Russia is a flatcountry and totally lacking in mountain streams, its water power re-sources are extremely meager. According to the Five-Year Plan, thepotential water power of European Russia constitutes but 0 .4% of theworld total. The wealth of the country's liquid energy is located in theturbulent Siberian rivers, but all flow into the Arctic Ocean and be-cause of climatic conditions can only occasionally be exploited . Dnie-prostroy, it is interesting to note, has a far greater capacity than isrequired by the existing industries within its reach .

D SMOKE

15This Commission was the first governmental

body of its kind in the world. After the revolution,the Academy was renamed the Soviet Academy ofSciences, but its main staff of experts remained inoffice. The Commission for the Study of the NaturalResources established connections with Lenin, andthrough him, with the Supreme Economic Council .Subsequently it became closely identified with theState Planning Commission. Its findings are con-tained in scores of tomes published by the SovietGovernment and form the backbone of the officialrecord, the Five-Year Plan.

The natural wealth of a country, as far as itsindustrial development is concerned, consists firstof all of its power resources. This the authors ofthe Five-Year Plan recognized from the outset .

"The 'industrialization of our national economyc be developed successfully only on a broadpower base," we read in the Five-Year Plan, whichproceeds to say that the best index to the socialistindustrialization of the country is provided by theinstallation of mechanical power.

What is Russia's chief source of power? We areinformed by the Soviet economists : "In the con-dition of the Soviet Union, the basis of the powerresources of the country is fuel . . . the role ofthe other power resources-water and wind-isquite small."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------16

RED SMOKEThe common notion that Russia's fuel resources

are well-nigh inexhaustible is not borne out by thescientific framers of the Five-Year Plan, who an-nounce :

"The fundamental task of the Plan is to insurethe development of our national economy by pro-viding it with a firm fuel base which would renderthe supply of fuel completely stable, and, above all,immune from shortage or crises .

"The idea underlying the Plan is that the supplyof fuel must be derived exclusively from the ex-ploitation of our own resources (italicized in theoriginal), without the importation of foreign coal .. . . The well-known fact can be emphasized oncemore that the majority of our industrial centersdo not have sufficient bases of their own and areconsiderably removed from the fundamental andhigh-quality regions, the Kuznetsk (Siberia) andDonetz (Ukraine) coal fields .

"With regard to fuel resources, the condition ofthe Soviet Union differs substantially and unfavor-ably for us from that of the United States, Englandand Germany . . . .

"The industries cultivated in the Leningrad district were definitely based upon the import of for-eign coal."

After reviewing the various fuel resources of thecountry with respect to their potential wealth and

RED SMOKE 17location, the Five-Year Plan declares in unequiv-ocal terms that the basic source of power for theerection of an advanced industrial Russia is coal ."For nearly all of European Russia," we are told,"the Donetz Basin will be of exceptional impor-tance, even as the Kusnetsk is for Siberia and theUrals. The remaining coal deposits are of localvalue and of low grade .

"In these circumstances," reiterates the Five-Year Plan, "the central place in the power balanceof the country is held by the Donetz Basin whichis the fuel base for the industrial South and asource of long-distance fuel for the European partof the Soviet Union."

The main key to the industrialization of Russia,to its boasted rivalry with America, is, therefore,coal. What then are the coal resources of Russia,as compared with the rest of the world? An answerto this question is not yet a full statement of thecountry's power resources, for the location has adirect bearing upon the exploitation of coal.

Since the Donetz Basin is virtually the mainsource of coal for European Russia, it is well tobear in mind that the latter covers an area a littleover half of that of the United States, with a pop-ulation approximately equal to that of the entireUnited States . It is here that the overwhelmingshare of Russia's industries is located .

18 RED SMOKEThe Donetz Basin possesses three quarters of

one percent of the world's total coal supply. TheUnited States possesses coal reserves amounting toforty-eight and- six-tenths percent of the world'stotal deposits. While the United States has overfifty times the coal resources of European Russia,it has only seven times as much coal as all of theSoviet Union, which occupies one-seventh of thesurface of the globe. Seven-eighths of Russia's coalreserves are to be found in remote Siberia, witha total population of twelve million, located in anarea which is almost two and a half times the sizeof the United States .

According to the most sanguine Soviet estimates,the total coal deposits of the Soviet Union, includ-ing actual, probable and possible reserves, amountto 475 billion metric tons of which 56 billion areto be found in the Donetz Basin . The total com-bined coal resources of all of Russia are less thanthe coal deposits of the single state of Wyomingand are but a little in excess of the coal wealth ofthe state of Colorado . And there are but three im-portant coal fields on the territory of the SovietUnion, an area eighty-two times the size ofWyoming.

The many thousands of miles which separatethe two inaccessible coal basins of Asiatic Russiafrom the existing and planned industrial centers,

RED SMOKE 19render them virtually non-exploitable, especiallywhen it is borne in mind that Leningrad found itmore profitable to import coal from Great Britainacross the sea rather than haul it from the DonetzBasin in the Ukraine.

But what about the Urals? Did not Stalin pointto them as a treasury of boundless wealth? "Whathave the Urals not got?" The Urals lie on the bor-der of European and Asiatic Russia, and constitutethe oldest industrial area in the whole country. Itwas there that Peter the Great built the first ironworks. It is, on the whole, one of the best studiedand explored and worked parts of the land. Theauthors of the Five-Year Plan, mindful of the ironore deposits in the Urals, are quite precise withrespect to their possession of that most preciousand most fundamental resource of power-fuel.

"The fuel energy of the Urals is disproportionateto its productive resources, hindering the large-scale development of the area," we read in themaster work of the Five-Year Plan. "The Uralsmust also be added to those regions which arepoorly provided with power, resources," we find inanother chapter. And still further on we discoverthat "particularly essential for the Urals is the sup-ply of wood . . , in view of the relatively lowprovision of the Urals with mineral fuel of theirown." In another volume of the Five-Year Plan

------------------------------------------20

RED SMOKEwe come across the following: "The existing short-age of fuel in the Urals will be made up by theimport of coal from the Kuznetsk basin . . . .With the construction of the Magnitogorsk metal-lurgical plan (one of the gigantic enterprises beingbuilt in Russia) and with the development of theother branches of industry in the Urals, the latterwill be facing a growing shortage of coal."

It would, therefore, appear that the Urals arealmost barren of coal, but that is not the exact case .The Urals do have some local coal deposits, butthey are of low quality, they are inadequate, andthey are so distributed as to make their commercialexploitation highly questionable .

America has achieved her premier industrialposition in the world because of her boundless na-tural resources, first among them being coal . Wehave mined since the beginning of the present cen-tury thirteen billion tons of coal, an insignificantfraction of the country's coal reserves.

Russia lacks this primary element for her neces-sary rise from a state of aboriginal agriculture tothe first base of the modern industrial level . Shehas coal deposits, but they are insufficient, they aretoo far apart, they are removed by great distancesfrom the old industrial centers which had devel-oped on firewood and similar fuels which are noweither exhausted or antiquated .

RED SMOKE 21With respect to coal, Russia is not only im-

mensely inferior to the United States and to Can.ada, but, on a per capita basis, even to the majorityof the Western European countries .

It is true, the total mineral resources of the globehave not yet been definitely ascertained, althoughtremendous progress has been made in that direc-tion in recent years.' The best estimates of theworld's resources, such as made by the Interna-tional Power Conference, represent but the sum-mary of our knowledge to date. The possibility offurther discoveries of mineral wealth in Russia isstrong indeed . Yet it is impossible to plan a con-crete program of development except on a basisof actual, known resources . Geologists divide theirestimates of mineral deposits into three categoriesactual or visible ; probable ; and possible reserves .The Five-Year Plan, being a definite project, isbased upon actual, available resources . The Five-Year Plan, as executed by Stalin, is predicated notonly upon probable and possible reserves but alsoupon unknown and unpredictable quantities. Al-ready his economic drive is proving singularly de-void of power. Its energy is that of political rhetoricwhich cannot be measured in tons and which can-not be converted into kilowatts .

RED SMOKE CHAPTER II

RUSSIA. will be forced to import coal fromabroad during the operation of the next Five-

Year Plan, already officially proclaimed by Mos-cow, if the present Stalin adventure in forcedindustrialization should be continued, accordingto the original Five-Year Plan framed by the lead-ing Soviet economists.

Russia has few coal fields, and their location isa recognized handicap to her industrial develop-ment. But coal does not exhaust a country's powerresources. There are other fuels, such as peat, tim-ber, and oil. There are other sources of energy,such as water power, the wind and, theoretically,the sun.

If Russia is to outstrip the industrial giant ofthem all, the United States, then her potentialpower resources other than coal must be so hugeas to make up for the disparity between her coalreserves and those of America .

22

RED SMOKE 23But can Russia compare with America and other

leading industrial nations in power resources? TheFive-Year Plan proves that there is little prospectfor Russia ever to catch up with America . Theavailable sources of power for industrial purposesare extremely inadequate in the Soviet Union .

Russia possesses peat deposits in abundant quan-tities. But peat is a low grade fuel. And the sci-entists who laid out the Five-Year Plan are nonetoo hopeful as to its immediate exploitation .

"Peat could play a great role in the fuel needsof the region where deposits of it are found, butin the current five-year period it is futile to countupon its attaining wide use even in these regions,"declares the Five-Year Plan, and adds :

"And if the exploitation of peat is not feasiblefor the present span, all means and forces shouldbe concentrated to expedite the solution of itsavailability for the next five-year period when thequestion of supplying Leningrad and the CentralMuscovite Provinces with imported coal will attainextraordinary acuteness .

But Russia is popularly believed to have withinreach another source of fuel, namely, fabulous tim-ber reserves. The Five-Year Plan, however, is notso sanguine on the subject. It says :

"Following the strenuous exhaustion of all themassive timber resources in the neighborhood of

24

RED SMOKEthe industrial regions, firewood is now essentiallyone of the least secure fuel resources for industrialneeds, but it is being intensively exploited as anemergency supply in the existing fuel difficultieseven to the extent of violating the conservationlimits. To permit such an exploitation of timberunder the Five-Year Plan is, of course, impossible ."

Russia's northern provinces abound in timber .But her industrial centers cannot depend upon theremote firewood as fuel. Siberia has vast timberreserves. Yet Siberia actually suffers from a short-age of firewood! Let the Five-Year Plan speak :

"Among the unfavorable factors in the exploita-tion of timber, the extremely unequal distribution(italicized in the original) of the forests in rela-tion to population must be kept in mind . The mostpopulated part of the territory is the least providedwith woods. The main massive timber zones arelocated in the almost uninhabitable areas and, asa result, lack labor and are separated from theconsumers of firewood by great distances, accentu-ated by extremely poor and unfavorable means ofcommunication."

The unfavorable means of communication, inaddition to the short summer and absence of roads,are due to the natural phenomenon of all the Sibe-rian rivers flowing from the centers of population,from the south, toward the far north. It would

RED SMOKE 25hardly pay to float timber upstream for thousandsof miles.

"Hence," continues the Five-Year Plan, "suchanomalous phenomena of Siberian economic real-ity as a demand for firewood that approaches hun-ger, a demand coming from the plains ; the highcost of lumber and wood ; the extreme exhaustionof all timber resources along highways and in set-tled areas ; and at the same time an annual lossof vast quantities of timber in the uninhabitableregions due to waste."

The authors of the Five-Year Plan then reviewthe next important fuel resource of the country,oil, of which Russia possesses enormous deposits,although these again are unfavorably located, asthey are entirely concentrated in the Caucasus,the southernmost extremity of the Soviet Union ."It is sufficiently known by now that oil is not anindustrial fuel, but a most valuable raw material,"they declare. After pointing out that the Plan en-visages the use of the refined oil products, such asgasoline and kerosene, as articles of export and asvaluable necessities for motor and naval consump-tion, they state

"Therefore, oil as a fuel, which role it playedfifteen to twenty years ago in a big way, is nowfundamentally changed, and must surrender itsfunction. It certainly cannot be regarded any

-

-------------- ------------------------------------------------

26 RED SMOKElonger as a basic source of the country's fuel sup-ply."ply." Due to the mechanized processes of extract-ing the most from crude oil, and the demandexisting for these refined products in the worldmarket and the prices they command, oil is far tooexpensive to be used as a source of power for in-dustrial needs.

Russia has not as much oil in the ground as theUnited States . But if the oil reserves of the UnitedStates were to be employed as fuel to supply thepower necessary to run the industries of the coun-try, the known American oil supply would beexhausted within one year.

When oil is converted into horse-power, in termsequivalent to coal, it shrinks tremendously. Thetotal known and supposed oil reserves of the SovietUnion, expressed in terms of coal, according to theFive-Year Plan, form 0.8% (eight-tenths of oneper cent) of the power resources of all of Russiaand 3.8% of those of European Russia.

"The general fuel situation of the old industrialcenters, the Urals, the Central Muscovite Provinces,the Leningrad and Ukraine areas," says the Five-Year Plan, "which consume two-thirds of the entireindustrial fuel of the country can be characterizedas follows : the Urals and the Central Provincesdeveloped their industries on their secure fund oftimber which was cheap and sufficient at the time .

RED SMOKE

27The tempestuous growth of oil production in 1885-1903 (before the coming of the automobile) stimu-lated industrial development along the UpperVolga, partly in the Central Provinces and partlyalong the rest of the Volga . (The Leningrad indus-tries depended upon imported foreign coal .)

"It is just these fuel resources--timber, oil andimports-which in our contemporary situation areeliminated as fundamental sources of supply forthese old industrial centers . Yet in the current five-year period these regions are witnessing an inten-sive expansion of the consumption of fuel on scalesfar exceeding those of pre-war days ."

The ambitious capital construction undertakenby Stalin and the other political directors from theKremlin,_ exceeding the limits set in the basic Five-Year Plan, is therefore a menace to the small re.serves of fuel which Russia commands, and prom-ises to drain them within an even shorter space oftime than anticipated by the economic authors ofthe Plan.

Consider, all of European Russia possesses fuelresources, rendered in terms of coal, and includingcoal, timber, peat and oil, to the extent of a littleover 11/ °% (one and one-half per cent) of theworld's total power resources. European Russia,with four-fifths of the population of the SovietUnion, contains less than one-sixth of the total

---------------------------------28

RED SMOKEpower resources of the country, according to thefive-Year Plan.

But, after all, fuel is not the only source ofpower. There is water power, for instance. Howdoes the Soviet land fare in this regard?

Russia is predominantly a flat and low country,and water power is one of its least assets . "Themajor part of our water power," states the Five-Year Plan, "is distributed over a wide network ofplain rivers, the lesser part is concentrated inmountain streams of any considerable fall ." It ispointed out that in spite of the construction ofseveral powerful hydro-electric plants, includingthe much-advertised Dnieprostroy under the super-vision of Hugh Cooper, the builder of MuscleShoals, "the utilization of water power . . . in thetotal energy balance of the country can furnishonly about 3 % of the industrial power."

"Taking into consideration the relative povertyof the basic industrial regions of the Soviet Unionin water resources," we are told in another sectionof the Five-Year Plan, "water power cannot exer-cise any substantial effect upon the fuel balanceof the country as a whole. The fundamental sourceof power in the economy of our country is its fuelresource."

The annual capacity of the water power of Euro-pean Russia, expressed in terms of coal, is eight

REDmillion tons, or 0.4% (four-tenths of one per cent)of the world total, as compared with one hundredand forty million tons, or 770 . of the world total,found in the United States.

Asiatic Russia, of which Siberia occupies theoverwhelming part, is comparatively rich in waterpower, and possesses two-thirds of that source ofenergy available in the country. But all the greatSiberian rivers flow from the south to the north,away from the inhabited zones, and towards theArctic Ocean into which they fall. The wealth ofwater power in Siberia is therefore of no practicaluse and, in view of climatictic conditions, hardlylikely ever to be exploited .

Nevertheless, there are still other sources ofenergy in the world, such as wind and sun. Didnot man from the earliest times exploit the aircurrents in his windmills? However, the Five-YearPlan dismisses this element briefly with the state-ment: "The utilization of wind energy for indus-trial purposes has not yet passed the stage of smallexperimental stations."

The quest for an easy source of power has eventurned the Soviet scientists to a real pursuit of thesun. The director of the Soviet helio station, in anarticle published in the Moscow lzvestia (the officialorgan of the government) in May, 1931, declared :

"In the condition of the fuel difficulties which

30

RED SMour country is experiencing and' the strain upon thefuel resources in connection with the continuousenormous growth of our industries, the exploita-tion of any new source of power is of extraordinaryinterest. Helio power is a field in which it is pos-sible in the shortest time to add to our fuel reservessuch a new and unexampled and inexhaustiblesource as the `basin' of sun energy. If we couldutilize one-hundredth of our suitable area, theenergy thus secured would exceed all the needs ofthe Soviet Union." The author refers to an experi-mental station established by a British Companyin India and concludes with the challenge, "Thecapitalists are trying to wrest from us the-'leader-ship in this new field of technique ."

Obviously this field of technique was too novelto be taken seriously by the compilers of the Five.Year Plats, and they omitted it altogether fromtheir survey of the power resources of the nation .Having closely inquired into the various forms ofavailable energy both in European and in AsiaticRussia, they found that the basic source of powerfor the industrialization of the country is coal.Like a red thread, this conclusion runs through the ;entire Five-Year Plan.

Lacking in water power, her dense centers ofpopulation denuded for hundreds of miles of for-ests, Russia under the Five-Year Plan as conducted

Leningrad Port is one of the few harbors of Russia,a vast country with a negligible sea coast. The entireSoviet Union does not possess a single first-classharbor. This isolation from the ocean highways hascontributed largely to the lack of its economic de-velopment. In relation to its area, Russia's coast linecompares unfavorably with that of all other import-ant nations. Its merchant marine constitutes onlyone-half of one per cent of the world total .

At Kuznetstroy, in Si-beria, is situated thespectacular iron worksunder construction inthe great Kuznetsk CoalBasin. Since Siberia ispractically barren ofiron deposits, this plantdepends upon orehauled nearly 2,000miles from the inade-quate iron deposits in the Urals . Kuznetsk in turn supplies coal to the Mag-nitogorsk plant in the Urals . The cost of carrying one ton of coal between thetwo points is about $7 .60. Nowhere in the world is ore or coal hauled byrail for industrial uses over such long distances and at such high costs .

R D MOKEby Stalin is vitally dependent upon coal. But thegeography of her coal reserves is extremely unfa-vorable, and European Russia, with an area ofnearly two - million square miles, has but one im-portant coal field, and that in the southern zone,adjoining the Black Sea.

Even a dictatorship such as holds Russia in avise of iron cannot create a new form of societywithout sufficient natural possessions . A rationaleconomic order must unfortunately be built withinthe limits of irrational natural resources .. Whenthese resources are inadequate, the transportationelement becomes of especial moment, particularlyin a vast domain such as the Soviet Union.

--------------------------------- ------------------------------ ---------------------RED SMOKE CHAPTER III

THE Five-Year Plan in the hands of Stalin isa political football. The Five-Year Plan of the

Soviet economists, who recognize that civilizationis communication, stands for power resources plustransportation facilities . The potential wealth ofRussia cannot be properly measured except byapplying to it the standard of transportation. It ison this scale that the Five-Year Plan weighs thecountry's latent mechanical power .

The State of Pennsylvania contains within itslimited boundaries a greater concentration of in-dustries than is to be found in the entire SovietUnion. What made Pennsylvania is the great fundof fuel at hand, its proximity to the numerousAtlantic harbors, its nearness to sources of metalore and to dense centers of population providingmarkets for its products.

This element, were it present in Russia in pro-portion to its area, would inevitably make for the

32

RED. SMOKE 33success of the Five-Year Plan . Were the naturalresources of Russia to be concentrated in a terri-tory the size of Germany or France, bordering onseveral seas, she would be a legitimate contenderfor a leading position among the Western Europeanindustrial states, but never a contender for theleadership gained by America because of the Tat-ter's huge resources, natural means of communica-tion, indented coastal lines stretching for tens ofthousands of miles and punctuated by harbors ofsuperlative quality .

The natural conditions whicli make for the de-velopment of a first-class transportation systemmay be subject to certain human influences, butbasically their boundaries are fixed by extra-humanlaws which no Five-Year Plan can modify .

Climatic extremes, arid wastes, marshy tundras,rockless steppes, the absence of maritime frontiersand of suitable harbors, flat rivers frozen over forlong periods of time, and, finally, sheer distance,are inherent handicaps to the development of ahigh technical level of civilization. All these handi-caps are to be found in Russia .

The economic geography of the Soviet Union hasno relation to Stalin's conduct of the Five-YearPlan, although the economists who framed thePlan were cognizant of that vital factor, and prem-ised their work upon the actual geography of their

34 RED SMOKEcountry. After surveying the scanty natural re-sources of Russia, they write :

"Another essential element in determining theindustrial role of our fuel resources is their terri-torial location in relation to the fuel-consumingindustrial centers.

"Transportation in general and that of railroadcommunication in particular," declare the authorsof the Five-Year Plan, "must play an exceptionallyimportant part in the actual conditions of the geog-raphy of the Soviet Union. Indeed, given the ex-treme stretching of our country in its width, wefind that all the main rivers run either from theNorth to the South or from the South to the North.In the latter case, most of them flow to the ArcticOcean, which makes their exploitation for purposesof communication impossible during the greaterpart of the year and very difficult and hazardousin the other part."Even more unfavorable is the situation of Rus.

sia with regard to maritime transportation. Here isa colossal land with a negligible sea coast. Thereis no great country in the world so handicapped asthe Soviet Union in this respect. Its Baltic borderline is short and possesses not a single first-classharbor. Its Black Sea shores do have two or threegood ports, but the Black Sea is an inland lake,locked twice, by the Bosphorus and then Gibraltar,

RED SMOKE 35for the Black Sea is an extension of the Mediter-ranean and its accessibility to the ocean highwayswill always depend upon other powers . Five thou-sand miles from Moscow is its Pacific coast, whichis too distant to be of economic benefit to the pop-ulated and industrial regions of European Russia .

The Soviet Union possesses twenty-five thousandmiles of indented coast line in the North . Siberiahas scores of wonderful harbors . But that oceanis the Arctic Ocean and the value of this maritimefrontier is nilThe Five-Year Plan recognizes this unusual fea-

ture of the economic geography of Russia . Uponreviewing the unfavorable condition of the navi-gable waters in the interior, it continues :

"Precisely similar is the situation with regardto marine transportation, which is extremely lim-ited in relation to the area of the Soviet Unionbecause of the insufficient indentation of its coastallines, with the exception of the North . Thus, theextreme continentality and the peculiar geographyof its waterways impose very high demands uponits land system of communication and especiallyupon railway transport.

"The importance of this aspect of transportationwill increase when the geographical location of ourbasic natural riches and power resources, on theone hand, and the distribution of our centers of

------------------------------------------- - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -36 RED SMOKEpopulation and our industrial points and consum-ing markets, on the other hand, are borne in mind .For example, the fundamental source of power,coal, is concentrated in three localities to the extentof 95%, the Donetz having 14.4%, the Kuznetsk69.617o and the Irkutsk basin 117o, while the dis-tance between our two greatest coal fields, theKuznetsk and Donetz, is 2,500 miles . In the samesituation are our known reserves of oil which areconcentrated to the extent of 85 % in the Caucasus.The same is true of our timber : 82% of our for-ested area are in Northern Asia, 1217o in the North-ern zones of the European part of the Union andonly 6% in the balance of our territory. Yet ourproductive industries are located to the extent of95.6% in the European area, including Transcau-casia, and only 4.47% in Asia.

"The lion's share of our industries falls in theCentral Muscovite Provinces, the Leningrad dis-trict and the Ukraine. Here will be found, too,40% of the total population of the Soviet Union .The presence therefore of a whole series of widegaps as far as the location of our productive forcesis concerned, which is the basic task of transpor-tation, is the second highly characteristic featureof the economic structure of the Union .

"Finally, the third peculiarity is the size of thecountry's area in itself. Thus, if we remember that

RED SMOKE 37during the coming five-year period the grain fundsof Siberia and Kazakstan (Southern Siberia) willplay an important role, together with the coal ofthe Kuznetsk fields, in the economic life of thewestern half of the Union, we will find the latter,(the European part) facing the necessity of over-coming by transportation means a distance rangingfrom 1900 to 2500 miles."

Such, in outline, is the complexity of Russia'stransportation potentialities in conjunction withher power resources. The European part has onemajor coal field, and that far removed from thegreat nests of industry. In the circumstances, theFive-Year Plan emphasizes, "the situation demandsfirst of all, the wide exploitation of local fuels . . .such as peat deposits and the coal reserves of Mus-covy, the Urals, etc. But it must be observed thatin the majority of cases, these resources are low-grade fuels, and, therefore, little transportable."

The main fuel resources of the country are inthe Asiatic part of the Union, mainly Siberia. Asi-atic Russia, the Five-Year Plan states, containsnearly 84% of the total power resources of theland, distributed over an area nearly five times thesize of European Russia but having a population,largely tribal, of about twenty million. In 1930,there were 162 million people in the Soviet Union .

The European and industrial part of the coup-

38

RED SMOKEtry therefore depends upon far-away Siberia forits supply of energy, the life-blood of the Five-YearPlan. Even the Urals, bordering upon Asia, can-not develop their iron ore deposits without resort-ing to remote sources of fuel . The nearest coal fieldof consequence to the Magnetic Mountain in theUrals is the Kuznetsk basin in Siberia . The Five-Year Plan envisaged the combination of the twobases into a moderately developed industrial entity.

Stalin's political dictatorship rushed with theexecution of the Plan far ahead of its fixed norms,and on a scale involving several times the outlayof the original funds scheduled for capital con-struction. As Peter the Great ordered a city to bebuilt on the swampy banks of the Neva, so Stalincommanded a Steel City to be built at the MagneticMountain-Magnitogorsk. This city was to belarger than Gary, Ind., it was to be the greateststeel plant in the world.

The fuel problem and the transportation costsinherent in the consummation of that huge enter-prise were not studied until several months beforethe opening of the works I It was only in June,1931, that the Moscow Izvestia and Pravda, theleading organs of the Bolshevist regime, seriouslytook the matter up, and wrote :

"The creation of the iron and steel industry thatwill work on the iron ore of the Ural Mountains

RED SMOKE

39,and the coal of the Kuznetsk basin brings forththe problem of hauling iron ore and coal over ex-tremely long distances. There are only three casesin the entire world where iron ore and coal arecarried over distances as great as that separatingthe Kuznetsk basin from the Ural Mountains.These cases are: the hauling of iron ore and coalover the Great Lakes in America, the carrying ofSpanish iron ore to the ports of the Netherlandsand England, and the transport of Swedish ironore from the Gulf of Bothnia to the ports of East-ern Germany. In all of these cases the iron ore andcoal are transported by water and nowhere in theworld are these commodities carried by railroadover such long distances. Therefore, there is nodoubt that other things being equal, the transporta-tion cost will make the price of pig-iron producedin the Urals and the Kuznetsk basin much higherthan the price prevailing for this commodity inworld markets. It is true that the creation of theUral-Kuznetsk iron and steel industry is dictatedamong other things by the consideration of thenational defense of the country, but neverthelessthe high cost of transportation still remains thechief obstacle in the materialization of these plans .

"The solution of this problem was originallybased on the creation of a trunk railroad line con-necting the Urals and the Kuznetsk basin. A special

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------40 RED SMOKEcommission has been appointed to investigate thepossibilities of creating a waterway for haulingiron ore and coal between these two centers . Sofar, nevertheless, the principal means of transpor-tation in this case is still the railroad .

"The cost of carrying one ton of coal from Kem-erovo'(Kuznetsk) to the Magnetic Mountain (Mag .nitogorsk)' is estimated at $7 .60. In the UnitedStates the carrying of iron ore from the mines byrail to Lake Superior and then by water to theports of Lake Erie varies in accordance with exist-ing freight rates from $1 .14 to $1 .66 per ton. . . .The Ural-Kuznetsk industry is faced with the sameproblem. In America, ore is hauled over some 1500miles, and in Russia the haul from the Urals tothe Kuznetsk is from 1300 to 1500 miles by thecombination (yet to be created) of waterways andrailroads and 2000 to 2200 miles over the railroadsonly. . . . Meanwhile, water transport being onlyin the planning stage, freight is still forwardedfrom and to the Kuznetsk basin by rail."

Stalin's Gary, Ind., in the Urals promises to be-come an industrial pyramid, for it cannot operateon coal costing $7 .60 a ton to transport, and thereis not enough iron in the Magnetic Mountain tojustify the construction of a waterway connecting itwith the Siberian coal fields . When Stalin declaredboastfully at the convention of industrial directors,

RED SMOKE 1speaking of natural resources, "we have more thanwe need!", he furnished an index to the perilousapplication of irresponsible politics to irrefutableeconomics. It is an index to the fate of the Five-Year Plan, conceived and laid out by studious sci-entists, as it is being piloted through the clouds ofphraseology and dictatorial whimsy to destinationswhich are not set in the charts and are invisible tothe unbiased eye.

The industrialization of America Began not onlywith the railroads, but also with the Lincoln Highway. In this country, abounding in rock, highwaysare a common phenomenon which arrest no attention .

Russia is an immense rockless plain. You cannottransport rock from the Caucasus to the UpperVolga. There are scores of large provinces in theSoviet Union suffering from a shortage of stone.The Five-Year Plan recognizes this vital naturalshortcoming characteristic of the country.

When one considers that of the two million milesof roads in the Soviet Union, only fifteen thousandmiles are paved ; and one takes into further con-sideration the fact that rock, ordinary rock, is aprecious article in many central regions ; and whenone bears in mind the high cost of modern highwayconstruction and the huge distances characteristicof Russia ; only then is it possible to form an idea

42 RED SMOKE

as to the enormous capital outlay required in orderto provide the land of the Five-Year Plan with themost elementary of all transportation facilities,with the first requisite for building a modern civili-zation-roads.

Judged in the light of her power resources andher potential means of communication, it wouldbe impossible for Bolshevist Russia to catch upwith and outdistance America in our day or at anyfuture date. Only one condition could conceivablyalter this situation : were Russia to possess giganticcapital resources in the form of gold, silver, copper,iron and other valuable metals .

RED SMOKE CHAPTER IV

IF RUSSIA lacks the fuel resources necessary forthe laying of the foundation of a challenging

modern civilization, she is even worse off as regardsthe basic metals indispensable to the erection of anew industrial order. The prevailing notion thatRussia possesses rich stores of unmined metals inher immense territory does not stand up underclose examination.

Singularly poor in iron, copper, gold and silver,the Soviet Union lacks the four essential metalsfor the attainment of the goals set by Stalin's ownedition of the Five-Year Plan. If Russia possessedunlimited power resources, if she had the makingsof a first-class transportation system, she would stillneed the metals which have given our industrialera the appellations of the iron age, copper age, theage of the gold or silver standard .

The empire that Stalin would build with the ironcohort of Bolshevism requires first-of all not polit-

43

------------------------------------------44

RED SMOKEical iron, but iron ore in the ground. Yet the SovietUnion, occupying one-seventh of the surface of theglobe, is one of the poorest countries of the worldin iron ore deposits.

That iron is the foremost requisite for the suc-cess of the Five-Year Plan has been recognized byits scientific framers at the outset. They knew thatall the talk of Russia overtaking America was boundto remain pure propaganda unless Russia foundherself in possession of metal wealth exceeding thatof the United States . But such is not the case. Infact, the Soviet position is most deplorable in thisregard.

"The main factor in achieving the goal of catch-ing up and surpassing in the briefest time the mostadvanced capitalist countries (meaning the UnitedStates) is the provision of our country with metaland, particularly, with pig iron," declared Prof .A. Archangelsky, a famous authority, at the ex-traordinary session of the Soviet Academy of Sci-ences held in Moscow in June, 1931 . He continued :

"The European part of the Soviet Union, if youtake into consideration the vastness of its area andif you except the Urals, must be qualified as a coun-try relatively poor in iron ore ."

But what about fabulous Siberia, if that be thesituation in European Russia? Siberia's wealth hasbeen inordinately exaggerated. At the same session

RED SMOKE

45of the Soviet Academy, its noted member, A . E.Fersman, reported as follows upon his return fromthe latest expedition to Siberia :

"As compared with the enormous scale of con.struction work in Siberia, her supplies of mineralsare insignificant. It is sufficient to say that in Si-beria the known iron ore deposits amount to 4 tonsper capita, whereas in Sweden there are 390 and inEngland 100 tons per person. . . . The Magnito-gorsk plant (the Soviet Gary, Ind., in the Urals)'alone will require in 1932 three million tons ofiron ore and six and one-half million tons of non-ferrous metals ."

According to Prof. K. I. Bogdanovicli, in his"Iron in Russia," published by the Soviet Academyof Sciences, the visible deposits of iron ore in theMagnetic Mountain amount to 15 million tons ; theprobable reserves amount to nearly 44 milliontons ; and the possible unsurveyed deposits totalover 48 million tons.

The known visible and probable reserves of themuch-heralded Magnetic Mountain therefore totalabout 59 million tons of ore . The pig-iron contentof that reserve, according to Prof. Bogdanovich,would reach about 28 million tons, or preciselytwice the production of pig iron in the State ofPennsylvania during the year of 1929. However,should we include the unsurveyed reserves in the

46 RED SMOKEregion where Stalin is erecting the famous Magnito-gorsk steel city, the total iron ore deposits of 93million tons would yield less than 47 million tonsof pig iron. In the entire Urals, covering an enor-mous area, the visible and probable reserves ofiron ore amount to but 135 million tons. Altogether,including the possible reserves, Prof. Bogdanovichestimates the deposits of the Urals at 360 milliontons, but the ores are mostly low-grade and of"limited exploitability."

At the Pennsylvania rate of production, theMagnetic Mountain would be exhausted in about4 years. According to the estimates of Stalin's ad-ministration for the production of the Magnito-gorsk steel city, the Magnetic Mountain would van-ish in less than a decade. It is perhaps needful toobserve that the basic Five-Year Plan did not con-template the erection of a "Gary, Ind." at the Mag-netic Mountain, but provided for a modest plant .Since the cost of building the steel city of Magnito-gorsk runs into hundreds of millions, the self-costper ton of the pig iron produced there will reachan unprecedented figure . And in a decade the steelcity will become a non-productive monument tothe political conduct of the Five-Year Plan, whilethe enormous investment will have been completelywiped out.

But that gigantic Magnitogorsk enterprise, a

RED SMOKE 47whim of Stalin's political machine, is now in im-mediate jeopardy, because the Kremlin has discov-ered, a little too late, that iron deposits alone do notjustify the construction of a metallurgical plant ifmarkets are remote and transportation costs pro-hibitive. Iron ore like coal depends for its exploita-tion upon its transportability. It is commerciallytransportable only over short distances . It must bewithin reach of fuel deposits . But the location ofRussia's iron ore deposits is naturally such thatwide gaps separate them.

"A satisfactory solution of this problem ;' assertsProf. Archangelsky, "will to a great extent dependupon the distribution of the iron ore deposits overthe territory of the Soviet Union. . . . It is true,we have two enormous depositories in Krivoy Rogand Kerch (Ukraine), but the first and especiallythe second are located at the southern border of thecountry. This increases exceedingly the burden ofsupplying with pig iron the Central and Northernindustrial regions."

The official organs of the Soviet Government rec-ognize that the transportation cost alone will makethe price of pig iron produced at Magnitogorsk inthe Urals, "much higher than the price prevailingfor this commodity in the world markets ."

On a smaller scale, the same transportation bar-rier exists in European Russia where there are only

48

RED SMOKEtwo iron ore' sources, both too far removed fromthe major industrial centers . "The matter of sup-plying these centers, once they develop their indus-tries," reads the Five-Year Plan, "will encounteressentially the same difficulties as the majority ofthe areas of the European part of the Union ."

Nature endowed vast Russia with a meager shareof the world's quota of iron . The United States,one-third the size of the area of the Soviet Union,has five times the amount of iron ore.

"The iron ore deposits in the ground of the So-viet Union, in the European part as well as theAsiatic, amount to 1,836 million tons, with an ironcontent of 774 million tons. Half of this total com-prises the visible and probable reserve; the otherhalf-the possible reserve."

The authority for this statement is the leadingSoviet expert on the subject, Prof. V. L. Tukholka,in the official compendium entitled "The Wealthof the Soviet Union." He continues :

"As regards iron ore deposits, the Soviet Unionoccupies a place which is not to be found amongthe leading countries . In size of these deposits, theSoviet Union is surpassed by the United States,France, England, the West Indies and Sweden."

If on a quantitative basis, Russia is the sixthcountry in the world in iron, on a per capita scaleshe lags behind even more . Germany, Spain, Nor-

RED SMOKE 49

way, Greece, Luxemburg are far ahead of Russiain iron wealth in proportion to population.

The United States possesses nearly ten billiontons of unmined iron ore. During the last decadethe pig-iron production in the United States alonewas equal to nearly half of all of Russia's unminediron. The iron found in America above ground, inthe form of machinery, buildings and equipment,exceeds all the reserves, visible and possible, knownto exist in the immense territory of the SovietUnion .

Such, in prose, is the iron epic of the poeticalFive-Year Plan of Stalin, the Iron Man of Bolshe-vism.

But in this age of electricity, of the automobile,the radio, and sanitary plumbing, non-ferrous met-als form a vital element in civilization . - Copper,lead, aluminum, nickel, vanadium and a dozenother products have long since been recognized bytechnologists as indispensable to the modern stand-ard of living.

In this respect, Russia far from being the ownerof unlimited resources, is actually in a critical con-dition. Stalin boasted : "We have everything! Wehave more than we need!" In point of fact, theSoviet Union has almost nothing in the way ofnon-ferrous metals . Says the Five-Year Plan :

"The tightest corner (sic l) in our national eeon-

50 RED SMOKEomy is non-ferrous metallurgy. The production ofnon-ferrous metals before the war as well as duringthe past five years has been insignificant . Only nowdo we commence to cultivate the development ofsuch metals.

"The actual and assumed deposits of ore of non .ferrous metals in the main known sources of theSoviet Union are very small and provide the plantsnow under construction and those already in oper-ation for not more than a period of five to tenyears .

"The distriliution of these ores in the variouslocalities of the country makes the prospect of theirexploitation difficult, partly because of weak veinsand sometimes because of the absence of railwaylines that would connect them with the industrialcenters ."

The total known copper reserves of the SovietUnion, expressed in terms of American productionand consumption, would be exhausted within a pe-riod of twelve to fifteen months, according to Prof.A. D . Breiterman, the leading Soviet authority oncopper."Our .known copper resources," he writes, "the

widespread opinion as to our extraordinary wealthin copper notwithstanding, are comparatively mod-est."

Stalin declared that Russia had more than she

RED SMOKE 5],needs, that the Urals had everything. The FiverYear Plan proves that the Urals have no coal andare barren of oil. And now Prof. Breiterman de-stroys the legend of the Urals being a great treasuryof copper, stating :

"The total reserves of copper ore (in the Urals)can be fixed at about 600,000 tons, not countingabout twenty per cent loss in mining . The data inour possession make an altogether definite pictureof a character demanding restraint and caution injudging the copper resources of the Urals ..

"On a world scale, our copper resources can inno manner pretend to first-class rank. There canbe no talk of comparing our reserves with those ofNorth America. Let us not forget that the NorthAmerican copper mining industry smelts in thecourse of twelve to fifteen months' operation oreto the amount of 1,230,000 tons" (which is morethan Russia's known total copper resources) .

Before the war, according to Prof . Bogdanovich,Russia was the tenth country in the world in theproduction of copper. She has been a regular largeimporter of copper, and the Five-Year Plan con-demns her to dependence upon foreign copper.The same is true of lead. Russia used to import987o of the lead used in the country. She still pro-duces lead and zinc in insignificant quantities . Theknown deposits of such vital non-ferrous metals

52 RED SMOKEas nickel, tin, aluminum, vanadium in the SovietUnion are admittedly negligible. Should the Five-Year Plan succeed in starting many of the plantsunder construction, it would mean that the SovietUnion would be forced to subsist on foreign metals.But she could do that only if she possessed thecapital resources to purchase them, notably, pre .cious metals .

But the general belief that Russia is the ownerof great reserves of precious metals, which shecould in turn convert in the world markets intoindustrial metals, has no foundation in reality.Even the most sanguine Soviet experts estimateRussia's unmined reserves of gold as totaling 10, .000,000 pounds, valued as $3,000,000,000 . If themining and extraction of gold be calculated as cost-ing fifty cents per dollar, then all of Russia's goldtreasures in the ground would be worth one-halfof the hoard of gold held by the Bank of France,and about one-third of the bullion held by theUnited States. All the unmined gold in the bowelsof Russia is but twice the amount which Francetook out of this country within a period of sixweeks in the summer of 1931 .

As a gold-producing country, Russia had reachedits heyday in the 19th Century. According to E. E .Anert, in "Gold," published by the Soviet Academyof Sciences, Russia produced during the 114 years

RED SMOKE 53,preceding the World War 32 %o of the world's totalgold supply, valued at about $1,410,000,000. Itsrelative position in the industry was declining whilethe United States, Southern Africa, Australia, Can-ada and Mexico were rapidly gaining. The culmi-nating point of the Russian gold industry was in1885. At the outbreak of the World War, Russiawas mining about 10% of the world's gold output:

The gold industry developed in waves in Russia .'The exploitation of gold fields and mines wasabandoned as soon as the yield became poor andas soon as new gold-bearing areas were discovered,with the result that "the rich sections in the greatand numerous old gold-bearing areas have beenexploited and a multitude of poorer sections re-mained." From the Urals to the Pacific Coast, thenumerous gold regions have been tapped and madeto yield their first harvest. What is left is undoubt-edly very valuable, but requires the installation ofmodern machinery for the extraction of gold bythe newest mechanized processes .

The Soviet Union is poor in iron and in gold,and has almost no copper. But her silver depositsare virtually non-existent .

The total silver deposits in the ground of theboundless Soviet Union are a little in excess ofthree million pounds, valued at about $20,000,000 .Russia imports over 96% of her silver require

----------------------------------------------------------------------------A4 RED SMOKEments. The highest production of silver everachieved in that country, in 1912, amounted totwo-thousandths of one per cent of world produc-tion. Russia's banner silver year yielded but oneper cent of the United States average annual pro-duction of silver during the last five years .

The Soviet Union does possess huge reserves ofplatinum in the ground, valued at about $250,-000,000, but the platinum market has catastrophi-cally declined since the World War, and the annualSoviet production of platinum amounting to $3,-000,000 remains an insignificant factor in theprogress of the Five-Year Plan, even as the wealthymanganese mines in the Caucasus provide but asmall annual revenue .

The proverbial poverty, of Russia is unquestion-ably due, in a large measure, to centuries of . mis-rule, exploitation and waste on the part of thegoverning exploiters.

Stalin's regime, like -that of many past absolutistgovernments, has drained the country of her visiblewealth and exposed her population to a misery un-paralleled in modern times, and brought the Rus-sian standard of living below that of China andIndia.

But fundamentally Russia's poverty springs fromthe poverty of her soil and mineral wealth, fromthe climatic conditions of the country, from her

RED SMOKE 55geographical location and inland character, fromher segregation from the commercial highways ofthe world, from the vast distances lying betweenher interior and the few harbors she possesses, andfrom the huge and fruitless and uninhabitable areasshe covers.

Russia's outstanding source of energy is her manpower. But an industrial civilization is predicatedupon substituting for the primitive power of manthat of the machine, and upon the equipment of acountry and a population with mechanical men andhorses. The man power of China, the man powerof India is greater than that of Russia . Man powerin industrial terms is a source of poverty. Manpower without mineral power condemns Russiato remain an. agricultural country, with a constantlydeclining standard of living so long as her birthrate continues to rise.

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-RED SMOKE CHAPTER V

T HE resources of the Russian soil are far frombeing commensurate with the dimensions of

the land. The vastness of the area of Russia is re-sponsible for the widespread misconception of herpotential ability to develop into a first-rate agricul-tural power. Yet the geography of the country issuch as to limit severely her habitable territory. Infact, agriculturally these resources are just as inade-quate for the huge and growing population as themineral reserves are for industrial progress .

From the standpoint of agriculture, EuropeanRussia is overpopulated. With an area of 1,700,000square miles, more than half of that of the UnitedStates, and with a population equaling that of thelatter, European Russia is no land of open spaces,of farming bonanzas. When one considers thenorthern location of the country, as illustrated bythe fact that Moscow lies 700 miles and Leningrad900 miles north of Montreal, it becomes clear why

56

the density of population in the zones fit for culti-vation is as great as that of the most congested partsof Western Europe .

Because of this condition, the beginning of thepresent century witnessed a rising tide of emigra-tion from the southern and climatically favorableparts of European Russia into the uninhabitedtemperate zones of Siberia. The migration, inter-rupted by the war and the revolution, of peasantpioneers who left their native villages in quest ofland in Asiatic Russia embraced millions, and wasan overflow dictated purely by economic necessity,by acute land hunger.

It is no accident that 15 per cent of the total areaof Russia holds about 80 per cent of the popula-tion. It is understandable in the light of the factthat nearly all of Russia is located on a parallelwhich runs north of the United States . It is an in-evitable consequence of immutable geographic limi-tations and their bearing upon the souls of thecountry.

According to Prof. W. Elmer Ekblaw, who wentto Russia as a member of the Second InternationalCongress on Soils, held in 1931, the significanceof the northern location of the Soviet Union lies,first of all, in the fact that the growing season thereis comparatively short. "Even in the great grain-growing belt in Southern Russia, the growing sea-

-------------------- --------------------58 RED SMOKEson is not much longer than in the wheat-growingsection of Canada . Frosts come late in the springand early in the fall. Some years the growing seasonis too short over the northern half of Russia foreven the raising of potatoes ."

"The northern location of Russia is particularlysignificant," declares Prof. Ekblaw, "in that iteliminates from consideration as a food-producingland practically half of that great area of eightmillion square miles which constitutes the SovietRepublic. Half of that area need not be consideredas even moderately habitable or as a region ofvery large production of foods or other things forman's sustenance." That zone is and must be mostsparsely settled, because it can support but a fewhunters, trappers, fishermen, and reindeer herders .

The soils of northern Russia are acidic and unfitfor agriculture, except by special care and methods.Prof. Ekblaw points out that only south of the 55thparallel in Russia are the soils favorable, and thatcircumstance determines the density of populationin the southern zones which are located in thesame geographical position as the inhabited partsof Canada .

But the southern zone, too, suffers from climatichandicaps. As Prof. Ekblaw states : "The northernboundary is the boundary fixed by the shortness ofthe growing season, one of those limitations that

RED SMOKE

5nature has set inexorably and insuperably andthat man has never been able to transcend to anygreat extent. The southern boundary is an equallyinexorable boundary, one fixed by the inadequacyand irregularity of the rainfall. That southernboundary is the line of less than 20 inches ofrainfall annually on the average over a long timeperiod. Cereal crops could be grown there withouttrouble, but on the average two-fifths of the yearsover a hundred-year period, are marked by whollyinsufficient amount of rainfall for the productionof cereal crops . Consequently, when the droughtperiods come, there is failure of the crop uponwhich the people depend. The population is notfixed by the years of adequate rainfall, but by theyears of insufficient rainfall.

"In this zone the soils are extremely fertile andwill grow almost any quantity of crops when therainfall is adequate; but when the rainfall is in-sufficient, even with the highest mechanization ofthe land, and the most scientific treatment it is im-possible to produce a crop. Then famine threatensthe people. That southern zone is preeminently agrazing land and should be kept a grazing landexcept in a few of the more favorable locations ."

This area belongs to the regions known amonggeographers as famine zones, the like of which areto be found throughout the world . "Because of

60

RED SMOKEthat great drought famine zone in the south andbecause of the similar short growing season faminezone in the north," according to Prof . Ekblaw,Russia with her teeming millions thus delimited,has always remained in a slough of misery and dis-tress from which she cannot very well emerge .Irrigation cannot overcome the aridity of the soilto any great extent because of the low relief ofthe land and the inadequacy of the rainfall . Irriga-tion on a large scale is practicable only where thereare mountain slopes, and cannot be developedsuccessfully in extensive flat areas such as char-acterize the steppes of Russia.

"The nature of the soil in northern Russia,"observes Prof . Ekblaw, "is such that it is a mistakein practice to collectivize the land and throw itinto big units, cultivated by machine methods .Through long ages, long centuries of trial anderror, the Russian peasants have found, just asthe farmers of Scandinavia and Northern Ger-many and the midlands of England have found,that the land must be cultivated in strips, ridgedup in the middle, and trenched on either side, themore rapidly to drain the land and retard undueacidity. That process of agriculture which we callstrip farming has obtained in Northern Europeever, since agriculture became successful. To level

------------------------------------------RE'D SMOKE

61that land and use machinery on it is a mistake ; itmust be cultivated in narrow strips if crops are tobe grown there. If leveled out flat so that acidifica-tion goes on too fast, the land becomes "sick," ashas been said of some of our own land in theNorthwest. Only by the strip method of agriculturecan the land be farmed successfully and perma .nently. Vast areas of Russia are being cultivatedextensively which should not have been changedfrom the old strip farming system of agriculture .

"The consolidation of the small farms into largeunits, whereby each peasant ceases to be self-sus-taining, will reduce the aggregate amount of foodproduced in Russia by ten to twenty-five per cent .In the old days of small-farm agriculture, thepeasants were self-sufficient. Each had a garden inwhich he raised vegetables, and fruit, chickens andpigs. He had cattle from which he got his milk andsome hides. His farm was largely self-sufficient . Inyears of favorable conditions, he produced a sur-plus. Now that system is gone, and he is usingmachinery on large field units of commercial crops.That may grow more wheat, barley, rye, sunflowerseed, flax, but in the aggregate it will produce lessfood for the people than the old self-sufficient sys-tem of agriculture, and will continue the inade-quate supply and the monotonous diet of the

62 RED SMOKERussian village and make Russia's food problem,always acute, more acute now than ever ."Prof. Ekblaw concludes his observations on the

subject with the remark, "when the crisis comes,as it will inevitably come in Russia, when thedrought prevents the production of crops for twoor three years,--the wheat crop in large sectionswas only one-half of normal and the potato cropa failure in many of the northern sections lastsummer,-we are going to hear of starving thou-sands and millions of Russians again as in thepast."

The ever-present food problem in Russia wasand is a result of the hunger for land, aggravatedby political misrule. The hunger for land, that virusof modern Russian political history, was and is anoutgrowth of remorseless nature. The economicgeography of Russia has ever been the determin.ing factor in the retarded development of her civili-zation. The natural limitations which have alwaysmade for her poverty and isolation from the West,doom Russia to a future of relative backwardness.

The history of Russia has been shaped by herphysical environment . It is a history apart fromthat of the Western world. The development ofRussia had little in common with the course ofWestern civilization. During the march of the

RED SMOKE 63latter, there have been aberrations which threw itinto contact with the dark continent of Russia.Ancient Greece sent out adventurous colonists whoplanted themselves on the shores of the Black Sea .The Norsemen occasionally penetrated the north-ern parts of Russia . Byzantium followed for awhile in the wake of the ancient Greeks and im-ported Christianity into Russia, which, it is nowgenerally recognized, drove no deep roots into hersoil. The enterprising traders of the HanseaticLeague followed the lanes of the Norsemen. Butall these were sporadic invasions to which Russia

remained largely impervious.The main stream of Western civilization did not

draw upon Russia and did not contribute to thegrowth of her civilization. It was the Eastern influ-ence which permeated her life and moulded herdevelopment in lasting ways . This is especially illus-trated in the difference between serfdom in theWest and serfdom in Russia, a difference both ofcharacter and origin. In the Western world, serf-dom developed. In Russia, it was introduced . In theWest, it sprang into being at the dawn of civiliza-tion with the integration of society, and underwentan evolution from slavery to complete emancipa-tion as part and parcel of the evolution of society.

It is a common misconception that serfdom inRussia had existed since times immemorial . As a

---- ----

-- -------------64 RED SMOKEmatter of record, Russia until the SeventeenthCentury was a country of freemen . Feudalism didnot develop there over a period of fifteen centuries .The soil did not make for it . The Mongol tradi-tions did not make for it . When serfdom was estab-lished, it was imposed from above, by autocraticdecree, even as the present form of collectivization .And in the course of the two and a half centuriesof the existencie of serfdom in Russia, the peasantchattels revolted several times on a scale whichshook the very foundations of the state .

The geography of Russia, particularly of Mus.covy, made for individualized cultivation, for theownership of small strips of land . Hence, thedespotism required for the maintenance of collec-tive slavery. Hence, the oppression needed in orderto fetter to the soil millions of free settlers whosetraditions were alien to feudal bondage .

Russia burst the bonds of collective farming inthe same year in which the negro slaves buildingagricultural capitalism in the South on the cottonplantations of their paternalistic masters were setfree. That strange coincidence of history may bedue to the unusual similarity in character and du-ration between negro slavery in the United Statesand serfdom in Russia .

In Russia, the liberated serfs did not win theland. The feudal lords remained, and the peasants

RED SMOKEof Russia had to toil for more than a generation inorder to pay to the masters for the small holdingsacquired. The Volga continued in rebellion. "Landand Freedom" was the cry of the millions ofwretched tillers. The feudal order was giving wayslowly, the landlords and the church persisted incollecting, in a new manner, the earnings of themasses of peasants. There was never enough landfor the former serfs . There was never enough bread .

The need of more land and more bread was theyeast of the revolutionary ferment in Russia. Thestructure of the autocratic state remained essen-tially feudal, basing itself upon the hundreds ofthousands of land-owners. The nature of the revoltagainst that state was essentially directed againstagricultural capitalism, against patriarchal collec-tivism. The peasant went in quest of individualopportunity, and because of his overwhelmingpreponderance as well as because his labor pro-vided the life-blood for the state, he was recognizedas the most potent threat to the ancient order whilebeing at the same time the most dangerous weaponin the hands of all revolutionary buccaneers andideologists.

Such was the agrarian question-the axis of theRussian Revolution. It revolved around "Land and

eedom." Its growth was spontaneous, springingfrom'the fabric of native soil . Its theory was home-

65

6,6 RED SMOKE,made and elementary, having nothing to do withthe revolutionary doctrines of the advanced indus-trial West.

The Russian Revolution was primarily a peasantrevolt on a vast scale. The industrial proletariat thathad come to the fore since the last decade of theNineteenth Century was a green and stubborn off-shoot from the trunk of a mammoth peasantry. Itwas so fresh from the steppe, so bound to the farm,that its cry, too, was that of "Land and Freedom ."The Russian worker was a semi-peasant, and thepromised land appeared to him in the shape of astrip of his own soil, away from the hideousmachine.

It was under the impact of the monstrous peasantwave that the autocracy went down, sweeping alongto irreparable destruction the pillars of the feudalsystem, the remnants of serfdom, the survivingorder of outworn agricultural capitalism . Bolshe-vism had nothing to do with the agrarian revolu-tion. It was the World War which gave 10,000,000peasants arms to turn against their foes . The peas-ant in the garb of the soldier demolished feudalism.So great was his thirst for land, that he insisted onpeace at once. And when the Provisional Govern-ment failed to give it to him, he dictated it, in thewords of Lenin, "with his legs, by running awayfrom the front."

----RED SMOKE

67But Bolshevism imbibed enough of the West

to attempt a novel synthesis of the industrial revo-lution with the agrarian. The peasant on the Volgawanted land and more land . But that course wouldonly undermine the revolutionary aims of the pro-letarian element which was being led to a new formof society-Communism. Hence, Lenin's theory ofthe dictatorship of the proletariat. The peasantwould have to be led. He would have to be har-nessed. The proletariat would serve as the leader .The harness would be provided by the dictatorship,exercised by one party. Lenin left the Volga for theSeine with the problem of the agrarian revolution .He came back with the gift of the dictatorship ofthe proletariat, the cornerstone of Bolshevism-agift which peasant Russia did not readily acceptbut which Lenin was too careful to impose upon hisnative soil.

The Russian Revolution was at the bottom agra-rian, at the top proletarian. In its depths it was andremains a revolt from collectivism in favor of indi-vidualism. At its height it was and remains anattempt to bridle the peasant with a new brand ofcollectivism. The revolution on the Volga was na-tionalist. The Bolshevist revolution was internation-alist. To the peasant inhabiting five-sixths of Russia,Communism was an alien force let loose in hismidst by the devil. But the peasant had no con-

--------- -------------------- - ------ --------------------------- -----68 RED SMOKEception of statehood . Bolshevism had a pattern allfashioned by the hands of Lenin. And Lenin knewhow to graft that pattern upon the inchoate tide ofliberated serfs frantically crying, "Give us land!"

'On the night of . November 7, when Lenin hadbarely had time to organize the Soviet Government,long before the factories and the banks and themines were nationalized, almost immediately afterthe capture of the Winter Palace and the fall of theProvisional Government, Lenin hastened to draftin pencil the first decree of the new regime, thedecree abolishing the ownership of land and mak.ing it a national property. At that hour, when thecrudely worded but ineradicable manifesto was readbefore the Congress of Soviets, the greatest andmost durable victory of the Bolshevist Revolution.was secured. A foundation of 120,000,000 peasantswon over by the nationalization decree was erectedunder the Bolshevist dictatorship, and the greatestagrarian revolution in the history of the world be-came an accomplished fact .

RED SMOKE CHAPTER VI

F OR the first time in history ownership of landwas abolished in an area exceeding one-seventh

of the surface of the globe. The peasantry that hadbeen reared on the traditions of land-hunger didnot quite understand what the nationalizationmeant. What they had striven for was to divide thelandlords', the church and the state holdings, toaugment their own strips, to own them . But theseinnate and inevitable tendencies were deflectedwhen Bolshevism sold the peasant to go out andtake the land, to vent his hatred and vengeanceagainst the former masters, and to divide the spoils .In this furious .rush to grab parcels of cherishedsoil, in the blinding trail of arson and pillage ofestates and full bins, the peasant could not and didnot pause to understand that the fund of land waslimited, that the population was bound to increase,that the holding would eventually get smaller andsmaller, that the-land-hunger could not be sated by

69

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------70

RED SMOKEa mere acquisition of the masters' domains, andthat the title to the land was not vested in the tillerbut in the state which exercised the dictatorship ofthe proletariat.

The ownership of the land was abolished, whichmeant a gain for the doctrine of social revolution,but a loss for the 120,000,000 peasants that madeit. The peasant won an extra ten acres but at thesame time lost title to his own six or eight acres .But so long as the immediate greed could be satis .fied, the peasant was deluded into imagining him-self the proprietor of his farm. Yet he could notsell any of his land. He could not buy an extrastrip. He acquired land only by redistribution ashis family increased and lost it as it decreased. Thisthen was the unexpected and far-reaching contri-bution of Lenin to the perpetuation of the socialrevolution. No sooner had the vestiges of the Volgafeudalism been torn to shreds, than Lenin droveinto the soil the stake of a new and seemingly revo-lutionary feudalism. The agricultural economy wastransferred from the rails of collective servitudefor the old owners to the rails of a similar servitudeto the new title-holder, the Bolshevist dictatorship,but in theory only-for the time being .

The urban Soviet state needed bread and lackedthe necessary organizational and technical weaponsto make the peasantry turn it in collectively. And

RED SMOKE ?1so it came to be that the Soviet Government wascompelled to give the agricultural vassals a breath-ing spell . It was not an easy breathing spell for thenew serfs. The new government did what all gov-ernments- had done-it imposed severe taxation . Ifthe peasant had to pay rent to his landlord beforethe revolution and taxes to the state, his taxes tothe new regime exceeded that of his total tributein the past, for the new regime had inheritedwreckage from the war augmented by famine andthe destruction it had itself let loose . If the peasantdid not surrender his produce, in the naive beliefthat it was the product of his own toil, that itwas his own property, the new state sent armeddetachments with bayonets and muzzles that re-sembled the pre-revolutionary models to requisi-tion, confiscate by force and in case of resistanceto set fire to whole villages and drive the opponentsinto the wilderness. If the peasant had dreamedof peace, of a free market for his yield, of a newroof over his cabin and a new shed for his cattle,he was quickly undeceived, as individual enterprisewas penalized, a larger crop made its owner auto-matically a class enemy of the state, an extra cowsingled its proprietor out as a potential capitalist,and a new roof crowned him as a "kulak"-theequivalent of the term bourgeois in the city.

Long before the revolution Lenin had discerned

72 RED SMOKEthe evolution in the village since the emancipationof the serfs in 1861 . Individual peasants, endowedwith more ability, more thrift and industry, andwith greater shrewdness, had been overcoming thehandicaps of the old order and developing intofarmers not unlike those found in Western coun-tries . This process was expedited after the revolu-tion of 1905 and the Russo-Japanese War whenthe Czarist regime opened new fields of opportu-nity for peasants to acquire additional land as ameans of abating the revolutionary ferment. As aresult, the ancient uniformity of the peasantry dis-appeared and the mass of agricultural populationpresented a body one end of which consisted oflandless, wretched and often indolent and drunkenfarmhands and the other of a fairly prosperousstratum of farmers employing hired labor and hav-ing an income which at times exceeded that of apoor squire. But regardless of his property, thepeasant remained a member of the lowest socialcaste in the country .

If this process were permitted to continue amongthe peasants, what would happen to the social revo-lution? This question was the one to which Leninapplied himself early in his life. What was thesense of abolishing the capitalist class in the cityif another capitalist class, the basic one, were per-mitted to exist and function and grow in the village,

---------------------------------RED SMOKE

73

controlling the country's fundamental source ofcapital-grain? What was needed, Lenin discov-ered, was to bring the class war into the villageeven after the disappearance of the landlord . Andsince the economic status of the peasantry wasvaried and frequently at conflict, all that was neces-sary was to differentiate the different strata judg-ing, by their possessions . Thus came into being thedivision of the agricultural population into "bed-niak," the poor peasant, "seredniak," the middlepeasant, and "kulak," the wealthy peasant, andarbitrary classification which proved of terrific mo-ment. With such an arsenal of primitive rivalry itwould be easy to introduce the class war into thevillage, by setting the "bedniak"-the village pro-letarian-against the "kulak."

Before the World War, the alignment of classeson the land had been so changed that the "kulaks"produced altogether more than three times theamount of grain which the landlords' estatesyielded. The landlords and the "kulaks" combinedwere responsible for half of the total grain produc-tion in Russia, the other half coming from thefarms of the poor and middle peasant. In otherwords, although the peasants continued to cry forbread and land, they were in fact the producers ofmore than four-fifths of the grain . The export ofwheat from Russia had achieved such enormous

----------------------------------74

RED SMOKEproportions, the growth of the cities in the countrybecame so rapid, that the markets offered an un-usual incentive to peasant initiative, to individual-ized farming, to the acquisitive instinct . From yearto year the peasant moved upward along the ladderof per capita wealth. The revolution interruptedthis process .

The revolution not only deprived the feudalowners of their holdings but also expropriated the"kulaks." Their acreage was reduced to the samelevel as that of the other peasants, their cattle andother inventories were confiscated in part, theirtaxation burden was heavier than that of any groupin the land. But the "kulak" was kept alive intheory if not in reality, even 'as the bourgeois wasin the city. Just as the impoverished capitalist waspersecuted in town, so was the degraded "kulak"held up continuously as a symbol of the class war.A former "kulak" was like a leper ; once a "kulak"always a "kulak." He was the object of unremittingpersecution . When there were not "kulaks" in thevillage, they had to be invented. The dictatorshipdictated that . In terms of economic potency, how-ever, the peasantry was leveled by the revolutionto a remarkable degree . The landless received land .And the average holding of the peasant was singu-larly fair in proportion to the souls per household .In reality, the revolution produced a middle peas-

RED SMOKE

75antry, of a somewhat lower coefficient than that ofbefore the war, but based upon as just a scale of di-vision of wealth as any human community coulddevise .

"Is it possible to drive forward at an acceleratedpace our socialized industries having such an agri-cultural base as petty farming which is incapableof creating large surpluses and which at the sametime forms the predominant power in our nationaleconomy?" inquires Stalin, and proceeds to answer :"No, it is impossible. Is it possible to base theSoviet power and socialist construction for anylength of time on two different foundations, thefoundation of large-scale and consolidated socialistindustry and the foundation of the most dividedand backward petty-trading peasant economy? No,it is impossible. At some future date it must endin the complete collapse of the whole nationaleconomy. Where is the way out? The way out isto consolidate agriculture, to make it capable ofaccumulation, of reproducing wealth, and in thismanner to transform the agricultural base of ournational economy. . . .

"Lenin said : `Petty production gives birth cease-lessly, daily, hourly, elementally, and on a whole-sale scale to capitalism and to a bourgeoisie ."'

But the natural conditions which make for pettyproduction and the eternal processes of life which

76 RED SMOKEmake for inequality of natural endowments, whichmake for greater or lesser ability, greater or lesserambition, continued to operate. What man woulddivide rationally, nature redistributed irrationally .At the theoretical hour in which all of the hundredmillion peasants found themselves equal possessorsof the precious soil, the new process of differentia-tion already began. Now it was the enterprisingIvan who begged leave to move out of the villageand take up a stake several miles away at someclearing in the wood in order to build up his inde-pendent patrimony. Now it was Peter who was en-terprising enough to go to work to the neighboringtown for the winter instead of hibernating on hisoven, and come back with enough funds to pur-chase an extra horse which meant additional crops .And now it was Stepan who in return for milkwhich his cow gave bountifully or in return for afew bushels of rye which his land yielded in agreater measure was able to secure the services ofhis poorer neighbor and thereby gain greater in-come which made for further increment .

From 1917 to 1927, during the first decade of therevolution, the Soviet dictatorship, in spite of allits Draconic policies and weapons, found itself at aloss to arrest the natural rehabilitation of the peas-antry on the foundations of the new agriculture .Instead of 15 million small peasant holdings in the

RED SMOKEcountry at the outbreak of the revolution, therewere 26 million ten years later . The restrictions onthe "kulak" class had reduced its production to14% from 38% of the total crop. "The poor andmiddle peasants began to produce after the revolu-tion 11/2 billion poods1 more grain than before therevolution," declared Stalin. "Such are the factswhich testify that the poor and middle peasantsreceived colossal benefits from the Soviet revo-lution."

The farmerization of the peasant was proceedingdespite the severity of the state regulation . The di-vision of the land into smaller and smaller holdingsharbored a direct threat to the cause of Commu-nism. The individual farmer only produced as muchas he needed for his maintenance unless be couldconvert his surplus into manufactured goods. Thecity was unable to supply him such goods except atexorbitant prices which rendered a winter's laborinto the equivalent of a pair of boots. The pettyfarmers thus held a sword over the urban dictator-ship by withholding its bread from the city . Social-ism had anticipated this eventuality and advocatedthe consolidation of small farms into large ones,as ;t more economical and productive system . Leninshortly after the revolution launched a campaignfor-' :'organization of Soviet state farms and of1Pood, a Russian weight equivalent to about 36 pounds.

77

78

D SMOKEcollective agricultural cooperatives. . During theperiod of civil war, the era of Military Commu-nism, when the grain shortage in the cities was ca-lamitous, a great deal of effort was put into the premotion of these agricultural units alongside of theforcible requisition of grain. They never flourished,but were never abandoned, as they offered the onlytheoretical solution for the abolition of individualfarming and the conversion of the present classinto a proletariat .

The New Economic Policy, dictated by the star:,vation in the cities, allowed the peasants a freemarket for their produce. But a ,free market im-plies an equitable exchange of goods. Since thesocialized industries were unable to furnish thecommodities required by the village, the city andthe dictatorship continued to depend for their ex-,istence upon a widely scattered mass of petty agri-culturists. But during the ten years these agricul .turists were spontaneously rebuilding the basicindustry of the nation, each holding on howeverto his own strip, the dictatorship found it possible, ,by squeezing the 26 million life-cells "methodicallyand relentlessly, to experiment with its state indus-tries, to maintain a large standing army, to reestallish a stable currency. At a high rate of waste,' thecity and the state nevertheless benefited by the ac-cumulation of wealth which was going on over the

Surfacing the Moscow-Leningrad highway. Ofthe 2,000,000 miles ofroads in the SovietUnion, only 15,000miles are paved. Lying flat and low, Russia is deficient in ordinaryrock. The entire road building schedule of the Five-Year Plan isless than one-third of the 50,000 miles of highways constructedor paved in the United States in the single year of 1931 .

At Magnitogorsk, theSoviet "Gary, Ind.," agigantic steel city is ris-ing. Costing over $100,-000,000 these steelworks are being erectedat the Magnetic Mountain in the Urals where the available ironore deposits are sufficient to last for only a decade. When the ironreserves in the Urals are exhausted, this costly and much-adver-tised plant will become a non-productive monument to Stalin'sfnlly_

R D SMOKE

79boundless steppes. Having rendered the agrariandanger immune by the nationalization of the land,the Bolshevist government was living and in a meas-ure prospering off the labor of the peasant

But the rate of progress of the Communist in-dustry was way behind that of the individualizedagriculture. And there seemed n o way out of theeverwidening,disparity.'Where would it lead? Even-tually the enormous agricultural sponge would ab-sorb all that the industries of the city could pro-.dues, and yet allow the city barely enough grain tosubsist. In fact, as the individual landholders multi-plied, the village retired more and more into itsown shell and the tentacles of the city seemed lessand less able to draw its sustenance from the soil .And unless the city could'miraculously shower uponthe land multitudes of articles of elementary neces-sity, it would find itself virtually blockaded andboycotted by the village .

This is precisely what happened . As the cropsof 1927 were gathered, as winter approached, thegrain collections for the :urban population and theRed Army were so low that, after several years ofcomparative prosperity, ,starvation once morestared in the face of the proletarian dictatorship."The inevitability of a serious crisis in our entirenational economy," in the words of Stalin, con-fronted the Soviet regime.

80

RED SMOKEBolshevism found itself on the string of the

peasant cart. It was certainly not headed for social-ism. For the agrarian revolution was not a socialistexperiment. The tens of millions of peasants had infact overthrown feudalism in their eagerness to at-tain bourgeois individualism. The Soviet dictator-ship was like a fortress besieged by an unorganizedand passive horde of farmers. It could remainencircled for quite a while and await its inevitabledoom. It could make peace with the enemy andcompromise on the future form of society . But Bol-shevism was not reared on compromise . It couldadvance and attempt to regiment the inert masses,to use the prerogatives -of the dictatorship in orderto force the peasants into further dependence'uponthe state, and it chose the latter course .

Only time can tell whether the violent and fluc-tuating attempts, to press the individualized mil-lions back into collective organizations, to consoli-date the divided holdings into estates of large sizeis an attempt to reverse the original function ofthe revolution and to reimpose feudalism upon anenormous population. What has been occurring inRussia is either a new revolution or a colossalcounter-revolution, but in both cases of vast mo-ment. The dictatorship, having once taken title tothe land, proceeded now to take title to the peas-ants' means of production, his cattle, his imple-

RED SMOKE 81ments, his household goods. But at the same time itoffered the peasant the prospects of a free andbountiful existence, of a higher standard of livingand culture, by furnishing him with the most mod-ern means of production, with the tractor and thecombine, as a guarantee of increased crops, in-creased release from drudgery, and eventual salva-tion through the blessings of the machine .

The Bolshevist dictatorship, with a blind faithin the machine and in its own instruments of force,proceeded to herd the divided peasants into largeflocks gathered upon artificially created areas, re-gardless of the natural limitations of the soil. It wasdriven to do so by the shortage of food, by the needof self-preservation, and by the need of capital.The Five-Year Plan, on the agricultural front, as-sumed the character of an offensive campaign reek-ing with mad destruction and valorous fanaticism .This new agrarian revolution attempted not only toroot out the social traditions of thousands of years,but also to violate the natural conditions of Rus-sian agriculture. Because of the violence of the at-tack, the dictatorship actually succeeded in its firststeps in hitching the primitive agricultural powerof the country, at terrific cost, to the most advancedmotor power of the age. Certainly never beforehave one hundred million human beings foundthemselves torn from their accustomed environ-

82

RED SMOKEment like a huge herd of game driven into a pre-serve and there trained to become domestic . Neverbefore has the population of an entire country beenthrown into such unutterable confusion . The newagrarian revolution was at once a war from withoutand a war from within, for while the dictatorshipwas assailing ruthlessly the incipient and potentialcapitalists of the village, the poor peasants were in-cited to fratricidal strife against those who werebetter off. The exact consequences of this man-made holocaust in the economic structure of theRussian people will remain incalculable for manyyears to come.

RED SMOKE CHAPTER VII

jTHE basic Five-Year Plan, as framed by thescientists, set goals in harmony with Russia's

poor capital and natural resources . It was admittedthat the achievement of those goals would subjectthe country to a great strain . In the field of agricul-ture, the creation of collective and state farms waslimited to about 12% of the total homesteads,leaving a large class of independent peasants toproduce wealth and revenue to enable the govern-ment to finance its industrialization efforts . In therealm of industry, the plants to be erected werelaid out on a modest scale, in accord with thedemand for goods, with the resources and technicalhelp available.

Less than two years before Stalin embraced theidea of planning as an effective political platform,in April, 1927, he declared : "We need the Dnie-prostroys as much as a moujik needs a phono-graph." Two years later the Dnieprostroy as orig-

83

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RED SMOKEinally proposed in the Five-Year Plan was declareda paltry project, and its design was expanded so asto make it the largest hydro-electric enterprise inall Europe. The same procedure was applied toscores of other projects. Estimates were revised up-ward and upward. The same moujik was suddenlyfound to need gigantic, sometimes fantastic, estab-lishments requiring a capital outlay many timesthe amount originally budgeted by the Five-YearPlan.

The goals of the Five-Year Plan were upset, allthe natural limitations of the country were disre-garded. The dictatorship adopted planning as apolitical slogan. Instead of a graduated and coordi-nated movement forward, the Five-Year Plan be-came a series of reckless leaps towards improvisedgoals that far exceeded the potentialities of the landand that destroyed the very essence of planning.

Planning a new economic order was not a BoI-shevist invention. It could not have developed ina country as primitive as Russia . Planning was firstformulated in Germany by an academic economist,Karl Ballod, shortly after the introduction of elec-tricity as an industrial form of energy. It was de-signed not for peasant countries but for technicallyadvanced nations. It was obviously predicated upona sufficiency of power resources and an extensivefund of mechanical plants . Visualizing an increase

RED SMOKE

85of such power, the author beheld the possibilitiesfor reorganizing human society in a way that wouldrelease it from drudgery, give it more leisure, morewealth, and a higher degree of culture . Not Marxbut Faraday was the father of planning.

A proletarian and urban dictatorship in an agri-cultural country such as Russia was inevitablyfated to a terrific conflict and the necessity of exer-cising force to maintain itself . The Revolution inRussia was, as far as the majority of the peoplewas concerned, a move towards enhanced indi-vidualism. But the Bolshevist political coup wascollectivist in aim, envisaging a socialized state .This divergence in the body that was Russia hadbeen foreseen long before the Revolution by Leninas well as by the leaders of the other politicalparties. It had formed the subject of endless con-troversies, of numerous works, of heated oratoricaldebates for more than a decade. When Lenin na-tionalized the land on the night of the Bolshevistseizure of power, it was in consequence of thissituation.

And to meet the incessant tide of individualismin the village, to combat the continuous increasein potential capitalism on the land, Lenin from thevery beginning of the Revolution raised the sloganof planning and advanced his famous electrifica-tion thesis. Lenin was met with derision . His in-

86

RED SMOKE

sistence on his device was largely misunderstood inhis own camp. His followers had the politicalpower, what more was needed? But Lenin knewthat eventual doom faced the dictatorship unlessthe peasant question were solved .

It was the peasant question, therefore, whichwas the soil of planning in Russia. It was to savethe political power that mechanical power wasrelied upon. Again and again it was emphasizedthat electrification was the sole way out from thealley into which Bolshevism had walked in No .vember, 1917, when it took over the reins of gov-ernment in the hope of a coming world revolution .If Germany had gone Bolshevist, its technologywould have been at the command of Russia . If allof Western Europe had gone over to Communismand formed part of one Soviet Union, the resourcesof the united state would have been pooled . Butthe international revolution was slow in coming .And Lenin saw the handwriting on the wall andfrantically pushed this electrification plan .

With the aid of the machine, the tractor, the peas-antry, like the urban labor, was to become a homo-geneous proletariat, toiling in the employ of thestate, ruled by a political power which acts astrustee of its material and spiritual welfare andwhich promises to lead it to the ultimate haven-auniversal high standard of living.

RED SMOKE 87If privation is the order of the day, if oppression

and terror are in vogue, if sacrifices are demandedor extracted by the mailed fist of the dictatorship,it is all done not in the name of private property,but in the name of tomorrow. Tomorrow will bringsocialism. Tomorrow will bring material happiness.First there was the naive dream of "loot and loot"--dividing the riches of the capitalists and thelandlords. Would not such a division make everypauper prosperous and every person well providedfor? Then, when all these riches had been expro-priated, divided, wasted, and need stared in theface more ominously than ever, the machine washeld up as a bait . Was not America an example ofmachine-made wealth? Why not the same in Rus-sia? Let the machine produce wealth. It will yieldmore than enough to go around .

The abstruse tomes of the Five-Year Plan of thetechnologists did not quite provide for such amunificence of gifts. But the political coaches ofthe Five-Year Plan opened limitless prospects forthe populace. "What have we not got!" This phraseof Stalin's like that of his predecessor Lenin aboutlooting the looters was enough to fire the imagina-tion of hundreds of thousands of Communist com-rades and especially youths. The Five-Year Planbecame a religion, a mystical aberration not iden-tified with its original postulates. It became a pro.

88 RED SMOKEmotion campaign, a military adventure in ter-minology and tactics. Not only did it assume thatcharacter in Russia, but it overflowed into the restof the world and was imbibed deeply by thosewhose will to revolution had failed to keep stepwith their rational equipment . In the meantime,the test of the Plan itself-industrialization-hadgone unobserved .

According to that test, Russia has not advancedan inch towards the goal of the Five-Year Plan,after three years in the race with the leading indus-trial nations. That goal, the goal of all industrialprogress, is urbanization. Today the Soviet Unionis exactly as much of an agricultural country as itwas three years ago before the Stalin drive .

In spite of the high-pressure campaigns, in spiteof the increase in the number of industrial workersin Russia, her population remains over 8351o agri-cultural. In the United States the agricultural popu-lation has gradually declined to 25%.

The Russian birth-rate adds annually nearly 3million to the country's inhabitants, swelling theprimitive village horde. The rate of industrializa-tion has been slower than the rate of the growth ofthe village. The plan of the Kremlin to create amodern urban civilization is hourly, daily, frus-trated by the natural, planless phenomena of life .For every new factory worker, developed at great

RED SMOKE

89expense and privation, five new peasants grow up-on the land.

Despite the collectivization movement, the intro-duction of large numbers of tractors and the othermodern means of farming applied to Russian agri-culture under the Five-Year Plan, the peasantproduces less wheat and corn today than beforethe war. The pre-war production of grain in Russiaamounted to 1,477 pounds per capita . In the yearof 1930, when the crops were particularly favor-able, the per capita production of grain was only1,180 pounds, or one-fifth below the pre-revolu-tionary standard. In 1931, the norm was even farlower. Yet 1930 was the "dumping" year when theSoviet Government exported large quantities ofgrain abroad. That, however, was no new event inthe life of the Russian people. In 1897, a year offamine, Russia exported huge quantities . In fact,Russia had always been exporting grain while herpopulation starved, to countries which had a muchhigher per capita production of grain themselvesbut which usually imported additional supplies.The Bolshevist dictatorship simply devised meansof extorting from the peasantry supplies of foodeven though it deprived the population of a fifthof its meager bread ration and lowered the standardof living of the people to new depths .

The political maneuvers incidental to the launch-

90 RED SMOKEing of the collectivization movement and the indus-trialization campaign dazed the world with theirbizarre character, obscuring the significant andvital effects of the Five-Year Plan upon the coun-try. The construction initiated by the Kremlinpoliticians attracted photographers and movie oper-ators from all over the world and made handsomemodernistic illustrations when outlined against thebackground of the steppe, the camel, and the fur-clad peasant. But modern industry was not madefor photographers to analyze and comprehend . Theindustrial enterprises reared from the ground withdizzying "American" speed entranced the observersand inspired them with the belief that a new worldor menace was rising on the Volga .

But brief as the period of planning in Russia hasbeen, it already holds portentous lessons for theblind believer. It was one of Lenin's pet electrifica-tion schemes to erect a powerful electrical stationin Central Muscovy, in Shatura. The planning andbuilding of that station was a great event eightyears ago. It occupied many front pages in thenewspapers, was the subject of numerous reportsand books, all happened before the heyday of theFive-Year Plan. What has happened to Shatura,once advertised as a milestone in the electrificationprogram? "You all know how, in its time, we builtShatura," declared the Soviet Commissar of Agri-

RED SMOKE

91culture, Yakovlev, at the Sixteenth Congress of theCommunist Party in 1930 . "Its walls will" lastfor many decades longer than the station itself willexist." This is an isolated admission, but it is farfrom an isolated case.

If Russia had unlimited power resources, if shehad all the makings of a great transportation sys-tem, what would be her chances of attaining in thenearest future a level of technique and a standardof living comparable to that of the United States?The base from which peasant Russia is beingdriven, by forced marches, is such as to permit nocomparisons with Western countries . And any talkof a contest between America and Russia, such asMoscow indulges in, is bound to remain a farce .

The area of Russia is three times that of theUnited States. The railway mileage of the SovietUnion is about one-fifth of that of America . Thetotal tonnage of watercraft owned by the UnitedStates is 10.3 million, as against four-fifths of amillion in the Soviet Union.The per capita production of coal in America is

11' times that of Russia, of pig iron 11 times, ofsteel 10 times, of electricity 16 times .

The national income per capita in the SovietUnion is $75 a year, as against $560 in the UnitedStates.

Upon the successful completion of the Pive-Year

4-

92

RED SMOKEPlan, Russia should have 20,000 miles of surfacedhighways. The United States has about 700,000miles of paved roads. In 1931 alone, a year of se-vere economic crisis, 50,000 miles of roads wereconstructed in America at a cost of over a billiondollars . This mileage is three times the amount pro-vided for by the Five-Year Plan but not yet built .

The merchant marine of the Soviet Union consti-tutes one-half of one per cent of the world tonnage ;that of the United States, 22 .5 per cent. There are30,000 automobiles in Russia as against 26 millionin America .

The total useful fuel energy produced annuallyin the two countries, according to the Five-YearPlan, is 40 against 536. The combined power ofman, draught animals, fuel and water power pro-duced in the Soviet Union is 58 against 573.6 in theUnited States, in terms of billion kilowatt hours.

"According to our calculations," reveals theFive-Year Plan, "the productivity of our agricul-tural labor is approximately five times lower thanthat of our industrial labor. In the United Statesagriculture is twice as productive as in the SovietUnion; industry three and one-half times as pro-ductive.

"The productivity of a miner in the UnitedStates is six times that of one in the Soviet Union."

In 1928, the railroads of the United States car-

RED SMOKE

93Tied a total freight tonnage of 1 billion 275 milliontons ; at the end of the Five-Year Plan the annualtonnage of the Russian railways should reach 281million tons.

The savings banks of Russia have deposits total-ing a quarter of a billion dollars, as against 30 bil-lion in the United States.

The Soviet Union has 300 thousand telephonesubscribers, as against 20 million in America. TheSoviet Union handles annually about 800 millionpieces of mail, including printed matter, or 5 percapita, as compared with 120 per capita in Ger-many, 145 in England.

As a further index to the civilizational standardof Russia, it is significant that that country handlesabout 25 million telegrams a year, or one-eighth ofa message per inhabitant, which is about half ofRussia's pre-war telegraph service . The UnitedStates handles annually about 225 million tele-grams.

The basic standards of measuring a people's cul-tural level and material welfare remain housing,food and clothes, all' the three of especial import inthe rigid climate prevailing in the greater part ofthe Soviet Union .

If we apply the figures furnished by the Five-Year Plan in regard to these three factors alone,both as to the existing and planned levels, the

R D SMOKE-standard of living, of the Russian people and theircorresponding ability to push forward rapidly to,that of the most advanced nations is revealed moststrikingly.

In 1927-28, the urban population of Russia, com-prising as it does its entire industrial segment, occu-pied living space which averaged 61 square feet perperson. Since home ownership has been abolishedand all the city dwellers are tenants either of themunicipalities or the state, the available housingarea in the cities and towns has been continuouslyon the decrease, and the additional constructionnever suffices for the increase in population due tobirth alone. It should be emphasized that livingspace includes kitchens. On this basis every couplehad not more than a room of 10 by 12 whichserved as living room, bedroom, and kitchen.Nearly 20,000,000 people forming the urban popu-lation of the country live in this manner.

But this average does not convey the full pictureof the housing conditions of the bulwark of the in-dustrialization drive, the workers . According tothe Five-Year Plan, the labor army of the nationaveraged 52 square feet per soul, the industrialworkers only 50 square feet, and the miners 40square feet per capita. The miners, therefore, hadto contend with a room 5 by 8. A miner's familyof 5 would average a hovel containing altogether

This tractor squad is at work on the steppes of Southern Russia .By means of forced collectivization of the peasantry and theintroduction of modern agricultural machinery, the Bolshevistdictatorship had expected to produce bumper crops . Thenature of the Russian soil, however, demands individual, stripfarming. The crop of 1931 was far below the expectations ofStalin's Five-Year Plan estimates. The hunger in the cities in-creased ; the yield of grain in the country per capita declined .The shortage of food in the spring of 1932 compelled Stalin toretreat and proclaim free trading for the peasants .

Torgsin, the governmentdepartment store forforeigners, stands on themain business street ofMoscow. Due to thecatastrophic deprecia-tion of the Soviet cur-rency, Russia is the onlycountry in the world inwhich the governmentaccepts foreign ex-change exclusively andrefuses its own currencyfor goods. Thus Sovietcurrency is useless forthe purchase of food-stuffs and other goods on sale at the Torgsin stores. Only foreigners and the few Russianswho receive dollars and pounds from their relatives abroad are able to buy necessitiesfrom these government shops which are well supplied . The Russian workers, holdingfood cards, are compelled to wait in line at other government shops where Russian cur-rency is accepted but the shelves of which are usually empty .

R D MU Eliving space equivalent to a room a little over 13 by15 feet.

Nearly two-thirds of the entire urban populationhad living space below 64 square feet per person .Three-fourths of all the industrial workers aver-aged so-called homes with accommodations of 37square feet per capita, or a chamber of a littlemore than 4 by 9. 219o' of the whole populationhad less than 32 square feet per person . In otherwords, more than a fifth of the urban inhabitants,mainly those concentrated in the bigger centers,had each rooming quarters equal to 51/2 -by 6 feet.

The Five-Year Plan, fully aware of the situa-tion, outlines a program of home-building, but sup-plements it with the following observation :

"To build additional space sufficient to furnishan average of one room per person, including thekitchen, in place of the present half-room." Thisis declared to be the desirable end . Obviously acondition which makes every kitchen in the citiesand towns a living room, and a crowded one at that,is not calculated to bring Russia nearer to the levelof the advanced countries. But the Plan adds :

"Such a scope of building would demand expen-ditures which are beyond our reach for the timebeing and would probably encounter a shortage ofbuilding material.

It is superfluous to draw any comparisons be-

96 RED SMOKEtween the housing problem in Russia and inWestern countries. Possibly China or India mightcontain data which approach this unbelievablestandard of home accommodations . But thenneither China nor India is spending hundreds andhundreds of millions of dollars on chemical, elec-trical and metallurgical plants .

The food standard of Russia is equally low .Bread has always been the main victual of thecountry. In 1927-28, the consumption of breadamong the urban population per person a day wasone and one-tenth pounds ; among the rural it wasone and a third pounds. The Five-Year Plan pro-vides for no increase in the consumption of breadalthough it is the main article of sustenance for thepeople.

The consumption of meat per person daily inRussia was over a third of a pound in the citiesand less than a seventh of a pound in the villages .The fact should be borne in mind that more thanfour-fifths of the country's population is rural . Themeat fare of a nation has a direct bearing upon itsproductivity. Man power is beef power, and thefact that a Russian miner produces six times aslittle as an American miner and that a Russianpeasant working twice as long produces one-half asmuch as an American farmer is most pertinent inthe development of an industrial order.

Considering the agricultural nature of Russia, itsconsumption of eggs and dairy products is a revela-tion of its living standard . The average urban in-habitant had approximately seven eggs a month, ora little over one egg per four days. The rural popu-lation, which produced this precious article, con-sumed annually on a per capita basis less than 50eggs, or 4 a month. So great was the hunger of thevillage for such necessities as salt, sugar, andmatches that the peasants deprived themselves ofeggs in order to save means of exchange . The Five-Year Plan, when fulfilled, would provide everycity dweller with one egg for two days! In the cur-rent fourth year of the five-year period eggs havevirtually vanished from the city markets in Russia .

Russia manufactured in 1928 enough shoes andboots to provide every person with two-fifths of apair per year, or at the rate of one pair for twoand a half years . The Five-Year Plan provided foran increase in footwear at the end of the periodsufficient to give every person three-quarters of apair per year, or at the rate of one pair for a yearand four months.

The production of cloth and woolen goods inthe country amounted to half a yard per person,and the manufacture of cotton goods of every de-scription amounted to about 18 yards per person,all on an annual basis. Such is the fund of textile

------------------------------------------98 RED SMOKEgoods to clothe the population, from underwear tomillinery, from outer garments to handkerchiefsand shawls .

Such is the level of civilization of the countrywhich Stalin started at breakneck speed on itsfrenzied march to the pinnacle of iron and steel andelectricity, on its "historic" contest with . . .America!

Modern technology, to create a higher standardof living, demands first of all a certain minimumstandard to begin with . Industrial progress is evo-lutionary, it is a gradual climb from one level toanother, stage by stage, with the aid of accumulat-ing capital and knowledge. A standard of livingcannot be created by the magic wand even of adictatorship . A standard of living grows with thenatural development of a country's resources . Bat-tlecries and political persecution and coaxing can-not raise a country from the depths of poverty . Amachine cannot be commanded to create wealthwhere there is destitution . In the hands of theBolshevist dictatorship, the Five-Year Plan be-came not a creative but a destructive weapon, andinstead of raising the standard of living of the peo-ple, it subjected them to increased privation andchronic starvation.

RED SMOKE

CHAPTER VIII

STALIN's conduct of the Five-Year Plan by aseries of fitful drives rather than a single co-

ordinated movement has already set Russia's na-tional economy back at least twenty years .

The balance sheet of the terrorist campaign toindustrialize Russia, at the end of the first threeyears, shows on the debit side nine definite failuresand on the credit side three questionable majorachievements.

First, on the debit side, the destruction of live-stock by the peasants on a scale unprecedented inhistory. While the Kremlin bulletins were an-nouncing glamorous victories on the collectiviza-tion front, claiming that millions of agriculturistswere voluntarily joining the collective farms, these"volunteers" preferred to execute a mammothslaughter of their own cattle rather than turn themover to the Soviet Organizations .

According to the official figures of the Five-Year99.

---------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------100 RED SMOKEPlan, the Soviet Union had in 1928 over 230 mil-lion head of horned cattle, sheep and pigs .

Then came Stalin's agrarian revolution . Therewere desultory reports of the destruction of animalhusbandry in the villages. But it was not until re-cently that it was possible to secure evidence as tothe price of the collectivization drive. At the closeof 1930, according to Grinko, one of Stalin's chiefexecutives, there were left in Russia a little lessthan 153 million head of live stock .

The peasantry destroyed within eighteen monthsnearly 78 million domestic animals. Almost onethird of the entire live stock of the nation wasbutchered by the population. Such a carnage hasnever been recorded anywhere. When one con-siders that even in 1928 Russia's live stock wasstill less than it was in 1916, that it took ten yearsof slow reconstruction for the country to build upits terribly depleted animal husbandry, that thelatter formed the most precious possession of theimpoverished peasant, one can visualize the de-spair responsible for the nation-wide slaughter.

But great as the canvas of that slaughter is, stillawaiting its Tolstoy to unfold it in human terms, itis the destruction of national wealth which it en-tailed that bears witness to the cost of the . Five-Year Plan. In any agricultural country, animalhusbandry constitutes a basic asset. Russia's na-

i

RED SMOKE 101tional wealth being among the lowest in the world,the annihilation of one billion and a half dollarsworth of primary wealth such as is represented bylive stock is a national catastrophe. It will taketwenty years of peaceful progress for the Russianpeasantry to regain its husbandry of 1928 .Second the food-card system which threw Russia

back to the distressing days of intervention, theblockade, and the famine . The Five-Year Plan didnot provide for any lowering, of the standard ofliving, for the re-introduction of the rationing sys-tem abandoned by_ Lenin in 1921 after the con-clusion of peace with Poland, for the bread-card,milk-card, meat-card, and all the other cards forthe purchase of elementary necessities .

"The execution of the industrialization plan,"declares the original Five-Year Plan, "will demandsacrifices from the workers. However, we will beable to furnish the entire working class ever in-creasing goods for their consumption."

There is nothing in the Five-Year Plan aboutbread-lines, about vegetable-lines . There is nothingin that master-work about food parcels from Amer-ica. There is nothing about a shortage of meat, alack of soap, an absence of potatoes from the mar-kets and stores. On the contrary, the Five-YearPlan outlined a gradual rise in the supply of com-modities to the population .

------------------------------------------102

RED SMOKEAs soon as Stalin took over command of the

Five-Year Plan, an alarming shortage of necessitiesappeared all over Russia. Beginning with the sec-ond year of the campaign, a rationing system wasintroduced which gradually extended to every vitalarticle of consumption . The people of Russia beganto hunger once more, after a lapse of seven yearsof comparative ease under the New EconomicPolicy (NEP) . Visitors to the Soviet Union, wit-nessing the endless queues of haggard and shabbypeople waiting for a pound of produce or a bit ofcloth, were under the impression that that condi-tion had existed throughout the Revolution. Butthat is contrary to fact. To the famished millionstoday, the period of 1921-28 seems like a lostparadise. To these millions, the Five-Year Planmeans certain agony today for promised plentytomorrow.

There is nothing in the Five-Year Plan aboutthe struggle for bread. There is nothing to Stalin'sapplication of it but a struggle for bread . The So-viet press has for the last year and a half wagedthat campaign without let-up . As late as November18, 1931, the Moscow "Pravda," one of the officialorgans of the Bolshevist party, proclaiming the ne-cessity of "Mobilizing the masses in the struggle forbread."

What a commentary on the success of the Five-

RED SMOKYear Plan I The cis that it imposedulation, that it dewon during the prdreds of thousanpendent upon foocipally the Uniteto increase the suas they had been

Third, the infitime since the Renot envisage thetablished with sucquickly upset thachieved by theofficially quotedfifty-one cents. AcOne can surreptifor a dollar. Theso declined thatmuch as five rubsimilar price. Heseventy rubles aof goods in the Sare fixed on a golfamily to semi-stvertised raise inloses its buying

103

rdinal failure of that plan todayshortage of food upon the pop-

rived the latter of the few gainsceding decade, that it made hum-s of Russians more or less de-parcels sent from abroad, prin-States, and that it utterly failedply of commodities to the massesolemnly assured .tion of currency for the secondolution. The Five-Year Plan didollapse of the gold currency es-pains in 1923 . The Stalin drivegreatest financial victory ever

oviet Government. The ruble - isy the State Bank in Moscow atually it is worth about two cents.iously get 20 or 30 or 40 rublesurchasing power of the ruble haspound of butter will fetch as

es ; an ordinary cake of soap ace, the average worker's pay ofonth, with the existing scarcity

ate chain stores where the pricesstandard, condemns him and hisrvation. Hence, the recently ad-workers' wages. When currencyower, such raises become inev-

------------------------------------------104

RED SMOKEitable. In turn they keep the government printingpresses busy, as exemplified strikingly in Germanyduring the great post-iivar inflation . The Russianworker would rather receive $7 a week in gold cur-rency than three times that amount in worthlesspaper.

Fourth, the mobility of labor which the Five.Year Plan did not anticipate . In his famous pro .nunciamento last summer, Stalin complained ofthe increasing fluidity of labor . He declared : "Inany event, you will find few enterprises where thepersonnel of the workers did not change in thecourse of six months or even three months at leastfrom 30 to 40%."

What does it mean? Why do the workers of theSoviet Union, that labor paradise, migrate con-tinuously? Why does Stalin have to resort to spe-cial measures to keep them attached to theirlathes?

"The growth of the mobility of labor," answersTrotsky in a recent article, "signifies that in theconditions of the third year of the Five-Year Planthe working masses do not feel quite happy. . . .The inflow of labor from the villages to the citieshas ceased not because the peasantry has achievedideal prosperity, but because the condition o f theworkers-this should be stated honestly, clearly,

RED SMOKE 105openly-has grown extraordinarily worse in re-cent months." And Trotsky adds :

"One should not be deceived : the physicalmovement of the workers may portend their polit-ical movement."

Fifth, the employment crisis and the mysteri-ous shortage of labor in agricultural, teemingRussia . The Five-Year Plan, cognizant of the tre-mendous surplus population in the villages, fore-saw, with the partial mechanization of agricul-ture, a huge horde of peasants seeking and notfinding employment in the cities. Behold a miracle!The reports from Russia speak not only of uni-versal employment, but of an actual scarcity oflabor. How did it all come to pass?

There , are at least 15 million unnecessarylaborers in the Russian villages, according to theleading Soviet economists. The Russian village wasever a reservoir of surplus labor which found noapplication . The problem of how to dispose of thisincreasing fund of man-power always worried Rus-sian thinkers, including the framers of the Five-Year Plan.

Suddenly, the problem is solved and the world isinformed that there is no unemployment in Rus-sia ! There is no unemployment in the Russiancities, because of the flight of hungry millions backto the villages, because the collective farms fath-

--------------------- ---106

RED SMOKEered by the government lured hundreds of thou-sands where no bread hunt was necessary . Theofficial Soviet investigations show that 50°Jo of thelabor in the collectives remains unexploited . Inother words, there are twice as many toilers on theland as required! But there is no way of gettingthem out.

Sixth, the collectivization movement, in spite ofits imposing statistical gains, has not eradicated theinstinct of private property in the peasant . In spiteof the increased acreage, in spite of the employ-ment of tens of thousands of tractors, the SovietUnion has no large quantities of grain for export .The Kremlin has found as yet no way of makingthe members of the collective farms part with theirgrain. Due to the migration of the population backto the land, the villages have been holding backtheir agricultural supplies to satisfy, their ownneeds first. The entire collectivization movementmay yet prove a boomerang. The Soviet press isfull of evidence revealing that the large masses ofpeasantry regard the produce of their labor astheir own. So long as that produce consists largelyof bread, even the dictatorship is powerless to takeit away from the famished people .

Seventh, the collapse of the transportation sys-tem for which the Five-Year Plan was unprepared.The Commissar of Railways, in his report last May

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107to the State Planning Commission, gave the follow-ing description of the Soviet traffic system :

"The technical condition of railroad transportis terrible. . . . The condition of the roadbed isbad . . . there are large numbers of rotten ties. . . the rails are light and worn-out . . . thelocomotives and cars are antiquated, inadequate,and of low capacity."

"The means of transportation has become aserious obstacle to the development of the socialisteconomy of our country," writes the official organof the State Planning Commission. "At the minesthere are large quantities of ore lying about ; thesurface is covered with dumps of coal that cannotbe moved ; agricultural produce, especially grain,lies at railroad stations in the open ; manufacturedgoods are accumulated at factories ; oil cannot betransported from the fields in needed quantities ;lumber is piled up ; building materials are waitingshipment, etc."

Nothing proves so strongly the planlessness ofStalin's Five-Year Plan as the strangulation of alleconomic arteries by the breakdown of the trans-portation system which should be the elementaryprerequisite for the planning of an industrialorder.

Eighth, the housing crisis which is continuallygrowing more acute. Moscow, with its population

108 RED SMOKEof two and one-half million, overcrowded to in-credible limits, had a building program in 1931 of235 houses! According to the "Pravda" of Decem-ber 3, 1931, only 80 of these were completed byNovember 1 . "Of the 282 frame buildings planned,not one has been finished . Thirty-seven of the pro-jected buildings have not even been started."

Leningrad, with a population of two million, hada building program for 1931 of 24 million rubles."Actually, by November 1, the completed build-ing operations totaled about 11 million rubles .. . . . During the first ten months of the currentyear the building departments have turned over foroccupancy 1,643 apartments, with an area of 940,-000 square feet," states the "Pravda ."

Eyewitnesses returning from Moscow or Lenin-grad may talk glowingly of the great building op .erations going on there. But the Soviet evidenceconclusively shows that the two capitals, harboringnearly one-fourth the total urban population ofthe country, were scheduled to carry out a home-building program (in the third and decisive yearof the Five-Year Plan) equal to the expansion ofan American city of the size of San Francisco orPittsburgh (in the worst year of a great nationaldepression) . At that, both Moscow and Leningradfell far short of the plan! According to the "Prav-

RED- SMOKEda" of the same date, a similar condition prevailsin all the other centers of the country .

Ninth, the defective quality of production. Theworld has been regaled with innumerable statis-tical reports of tremendous increases in the quan-tity of manufactured goods produced under theFive-Year Plan. Such statistics are impressive. Lessdramatic may be the fact that the article in ques-tion is of such quality as to be perishable in ashort time and therefore highly expensive. "Itsuffices to pick up any of our papers to becomeconvinced that in this regard the situation is catas-trophic," writes Christian Rakovsky, once Presi-dent of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, then SovietAmbassador to France, and now an exile inSiberia. "Neither agitation nor administrativemeasures, nor measures of a legislative character,have -been able to put a halt to the process of thedeterioration of the quality of production. Thefacts are sufficiently well known so that I will con-fine myself to a few of the most obvious examples .

"In the following metallurgical factories, typicalenterprises, the amount of defective goods was :Djerjinsky Factory (wrought iron plates), 3217o ;Djerjinsky and Petrovsky Factory (steel parts),40% ; Verkhnye-Turinsk Factory (steel parts),100% ; Lapayevsky Factory (sheet metal), 407 o' ;

109

110

RED SMOKENadiejdinsky Factory (high quality steel), 30% ;Marti Factory (steel), 32%.

"This list can, of course, be increased manytimes. It is a matter, therefore, not of single de-fects, but of a whole system of producing defectivegoods.

"The percentage of slate in the production ofcoal increased sharply, reaching in some instancesas much as 18 per cent. Only 20 per cent of thebricks produced could stand up under the estab-lished methods of loading . Matters are still worsein light industries, in which textiles broke all rec-ords. According to the figures often quoted, theaverage percentage of defective goods in the different trusts was 50 per cent . The press also quotesthe figures of the losses in millions of rubles, con-nected with this drop in quality. It is character-istic that the new factories do not remain behindin the percentages of defective goods. The textilefactory of the Melange Syndicate, which has beenrecently constructed, produced in April, 93.98 percent (1) and in May 92.37 per cent defectivegoods. According to the figures of the People'sCommissariat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspec-tion, the percentage of defective goods in the pro-duction of rubber reaches 14 per cent, of shoes 13per cent. There is literally not a single branch ofindustry where the problem of quality is not a

R D SMOKE

illvery painful one, and there is almost not a singlebranch where the current year did not bring a de.terioration of quality. It is clear, in connection withthis, that where the produce has to go through sev-eral stages in the process of production or throughseveral branches of industry, the poor quality inone branch is multiplied by the poor quality in allthe other branches. . . The deterioration of thequality of production makes the quantitive in-dices more or less fictitious . Even Kuibishev wascompelled to admit this at a session of the SupremeEconomic Council (of which he is president),where he declared : `The figures of the tremendousgrowth of industry become relative if we take intoconsideration the qualitative changes .' Industrial-ization of July 18 expresses itself still more em-phatically, when it declares that under suchconditions `all our quantitative achievementswould not amount to a farthing'".

Such are the main failures of the Five-YearPlan whereit is possible to check by performance .

On the credit side are certain achievements stillin an experimental stage . First, the tremendous re-duction in illiteracy and the doubling of the school-ing facilities of the nation. But the educationalvalue of the Soviet schools which are nothing but"Red" Jesuitical seminaries that falsify past andcurrent history, inculcate hatred, and shut the

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------112 RED SMOKEminds of the students off from the live streams ofhuman civilization, is of doubtful character .Second, the modernization of primitive agricul-

ture by the introduction of the tractor and inten-sive methods of farming. This is a revolutionarychange in the life of the peasantry. It is bound toexert a lasting influence upon the future of Russiaand her eventual role in the world. But its successfrom the Soviet standpoint still remains to be dem-onstrated, and will be definitely established onlythen when bread-cards are discontinued, whenfood becomes plentiful in the country, and whenthe Soviet Government is able to reap its surplusharvest for export without subjecting its popula-tion to untold wretchedness .. Third, the erection of a large number of metal-lurgical and chemical and other industrial plants,representing an investment of billions of dollars .Most of these plants will remain . Whether theSoviet Government or some other powers willcontrol them the future will answer. As far as theFive-Year Plan is concerned, the success of theseplants will be demonstrated only when they com-mence operation, when they start mass productionand do so on a profit basis and not with a govern-ment subsidy, when the goods they produce reachthe consumers, when the famine of commoditiesceases in the country, when the standard of living

R D SMOKEof the people begins to rise ; ii brief, when theyprove not merely industrial pyramids but livingorganisms supplying a living and growing demand .

For the present, the entire gigantic industriali-zation effort still awaits its justification by all therules of sound economics. As for Stalin's grandioseexperiment, whatever the verdict of history maybe, it is a luxury which the harassed people ofRussia did not court and which they could ill af-ford after a decade and a half of unexampledprivation.

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RED SMOKE CHAPTER IX

T HE Five-Year Plan, in its simplest definition,is a means of attaining the millennium with

the aid of the machine. Lenin, the leader of abackward peasant country in revolution, beheldthe marvelous machine and hastened to adopt it asthe savior of society. In the environment of Russiathe machine acquired almost divine powers in theeyes of the masses. It opened the high road toabundance, universal prosperity, and happiness .How was one to convert a primitive agriculturalpopulation into a modern industrial nation? Howwas poverty to be replaced by wealth? How was anew world to be evolved from one in a primevalstate? By means of the machine, of course! Let onemillion machines be installed, let one hundredmillion mechanical horse-power be called into be-ing and they will yield magic crops of goods, they

This chapter, substantially in the same form, appeared in Scrib.ner's Magazine, and the author is indebted to the editor of thatpublication for permission to reprint it here .

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115-will shower blessings upon famine-ridden human-ity. A grand vision, calculated to capture the heartsof any populace; a vision as blinding as that ofMoses, Christ, and Mohammed ; a vision sufficientto imbue a large block of mankind with a newreligious frenzy. But how does one transform itinto reality? What are the precise methods of ac-complishing the various synonyms of the Five-YearPlan, such as electrification, tractorization,mechanization, industrialization?

The ingredients needed for the magical transfor-mation of society would inevitably be as simple asthe conception itself. Given a monolithic statepower, modern machinery, a supply of labor, asource of capital, a certain output of trained tech-nicians-and you have all the elements for thecreation of a new and happy industrial society .Such is the rudimentary theory of the Five-YearPlan. Government, it is held, is effective only whenit is a dictatorship, when it is single-tracked, whenit avowedly represents a particular class . Govern-ment is then divorced from human failings, it ispurged of politics, of jealousies, of rivalries . A dic-tatorship is the perfect instrument for the rebuild-ing of the world.As to the machine, it is a complete and sharp

weapon, a definite fortress . It stands in social sci-ence for the means of production . All that is re-

------------------- ---------------- ----------116 RED SMOKEquired is to capture it, to harness it to the rightarm. The machine can be controlled, can beoperated without regard to location, to environ-ment, to age, so long as the operating hands arethere. Labor is a well-defined article . Labor hasto be told that it has the power ; it has to be fed,sheltered, provided with entertainment, and, aboveall, organized. Capital is a well-known quantity .Capital is independent of labor . Capital is notwealth, but money. Its value is commensurate toits size. Produce tons of gold, mine carloads ofdiamonds, and you have capital. As to technicalknowledge, it is nothing but the- engineering pro-fession. This profession is so far nothing but aby-product of capitalism, contaminated with itsdecayed culture. How does one master technicalknowledge? Simply by impressing into service theengineering profession. The engineers must beterrorized, watched, strapped to the plants, andcommanded to perform certain tasks for whichthey are indispensable .

Given all these elements, the economics of anew world order become a matter of forcefulmechanical mixing and driving. Such is the chem-istry of the Five-Year Plan. You throw all theingredients into a melting-pot. You supervise thebrew with a keen eye, you stir it every now andthen with a mighty stick, and in time there will

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spring upon the scene a new society, a new civiliza-tion, lusty, fat, victorious.

Trotsky has illustrated this view of the Five .Year Plan in his description of one of its primephases--the industrialization of agriculture-when he wrote : "From peasant nags and woodenplows, however combined, you cannot create large-scale farming any more than a combination offishermen's rowboats can make a steamer. . . .The socialist reconstruction of farming we view asa matter of decades." This applies to the entireBolshevist experiment in economics. You cannotcreate a new world with a dictatorial whip by im-porting' American machinery, American engineers,by exporting below cost the capital resources ofthe country, such as grain and oil that are badlyneeded. at home. No life will spring into beingunder ac, dead hand, however, vigorous its gripmay be. .

Dictatorship is essentially a primitive form ofgovernment. It was Stalin who proclaimed that thepremises, the foundations of the Bolshevist revo-lution, are located in the dictatorship. Yet it is oneof the earliest stages of the development of humansociety. Dictatorship is an outgrowth of and isadapted for backward countries and peoples . Itsprocesses of thought and action are absurdly sim

118 RED SMOKEple. It is a sledge hammer made by domestic means .Its application to modern civilization is like theapplication of a tool of the Stone Age to a finelyconstructed watch.

The dictatorship of the proletariat as a politicaltheory grew up in the pre-power age. It was anatural development of the age in which the toilermastered mechanical levers and attached them tohis muscles in order to secure easier conditions ofwork and a higher yield of goods. The modernmachine is fed not on the energy of the human armbut on that of the remote bowels of the earth . Thediscovery of electricity made the old economictheories obsolescent and the traditional revolu-tionary movements archaic. Socialism, combiningdistinct religious elements with economic theories,was quick to adopt the age of power and to hitchelectricity to its chariot.

The idea of planning was not imbedded insocialism. Planning was not in any manner relatedto the dictatorship of the proletariat which pre-ceded it as a theory by a generation or two. It wasonly when the vistas of boundless mechanicalpower at the command of man began to gleam be-fore the socialist thinkers at the close of the Nine-teenth Century that planning came upon the sceneas a magic way of liberating the workers from theirservitude. Indeed, if ten mechanical men could aid

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every inhabitant of a given country, then the mil-lennium was at hand.

The Bolshevist experiment focused the world'sattention upon the gulf separating politics andeconomics. The Five-Year Plan offers an excep-tional test of the relationship of power resourcesand their technological utilization to outmodedpolitical theories and methods . The Five-Year Planis endowed with a dual being. Its nerves are thoseof natural resources converted into mechanicalenergy. Its hands are those of traditional, politicswhich are trained in the primitive school of mas-tering and conquering and dominating your fellowbeings. While the rule of politics lasts, the fund ofpower and technology is dumb. When the naturalresources begin to speak, the political dictatorshipwill lose its voice .

The Bolshevist dictatorship is steeped in theheritage of the antediluvian period of the machineage. Its philosophy is that of the school of thoughtwhich grew out of the Manchester textile factoriesof four generations ago. Its intellectual baggage isthat of the rebellious weavers on the threshold ofthe industrial era. Its social doctrine has remainedstatic for a century while the machine grew too fastfor its newer significance to be fully analyzed andrealized. The machine has brought in its train aninfinite series of social values which call for new

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RED SMOKEdefinitions, new appraisals. The Bolshevist dicta-torship is oblivious of these ; its mind is closed toany revision of views ; the blade of its theoreticalweapon is old and rusty.

The Bolsheviks are famous for their courage,their dauntlessness . "There is nothing we Bolshe-viks cannot achieve," Stalin has declared, onlyparaphrasing what Lenin had said many times be-fore. How fitting such words are on the lips of adictatorship, and how primitive! All that is neces-sary is to have a concentrated political power im-bued with superconfidence, impatient of anycontrary opinion, inspired with zeal, infused withdriving power. Such a force is sufficient, to be sure,to give a start to almost anything, even as a straining of the muscle will drive a ball high in the air orfar toward the horizon. But planning presupposesnot only an objective, not only a gun that is capableof reaching the objective, but also certain knowl-edge of higher mathematics. The dictatorship gaveRussia an immense push with its Five-Year Plan,but where Russia has been pushed, where the pro .jectile will land, where it will explode, is anothermatter.

For three years now the merchant vessels plyingfrom the American shores to the Russian watershave been transporting precious cargoes of ma ..chinery. Emissaries from Moscow have been

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121"studying" the marvels of Ford's empires, selectingthe choicest and most expensive wares, and carry-ing them back home to the steppes along the Volgaand the slopes of the Ural Mountains. Nothing wastoo modern, nothing was too good, for these back.woodsmen. That grand vision seemed to become areality upon the inspection of a Detroit or Akronindustrial giant by the Kremlin buyers . Theywould assemble the wonderful machinery, erect itin their pauperized land, and riches would flowautomatically into the eager hands of the waitinghordes. They would seize the machine, they wouldhitch it to their political system and brawny arms,and they would be in possession of the golden calf .For the machine would function indefinitely, in-defatigably, regardless of the number of shiftshandling it, and a' new calendar that gave it no dayof rest. Labor seemed plentiful, machines werecostly and relatively few.

But the modern machine is not to be identifiedwith that of the days of the weavers . The modernmachine lives off ten thousand hidden arterieswhich feed it in a manner beyond the conceptionof a Volga peasant or a Chinese coolie . It took acentury of the most intensive cultural develop-ment, of the most bewildering social growth, toproduce the "belt" or conveyor system, with itssuperhuman precision, its complicated and in-

122

RED, SMOKEsatiable demands. The conveyor, as every expertknows, is the highest expression, the climax of themost complex civilization man has ever produced .Take that conveyor away from Michigan or Ohio,move it to the Amazon River, and it will balk . Itwill go on strike and upset all calculations. Themodern machine is an organic growth, it belongsto its surroundings, like the soil on which it isplanted. The machine has grown with the man incharge of it and the man has grown with the ma-chine that he tends. A human being can drive an-other human being to incredible lengths . No oneyet knows the endurance possibilities of man ; en-durance records are being broken from day to day.But a human being is powerless to drive a machinethe way he drives himself or a fellow man . Themodern machine knows how to rebel effectivelyand better than man does.

Labor, too, has its defined as well as undefinedlaws. To old-fashioned capitalism labor wasnothing but a commodity. Marxism was built onthis. Yet Bolshevism in practice applies that veryviewpoint toward labor. True, labor is proclaimedas the keystone of the future society. It is toldagain and again that the government functionsfor the ultimate good of the toilers . But labor hasimmediate interests as well as remote ones. It findsitself on the string of a ruling class, the objectives

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of which may be promising indeed, but the func-tions of which are like those of any other government. Consequently, labor in Soviet Russia, alltheory notwithstanding, finds itself treated as acommodity. One state organ, known as a certaintrust or syndicate, makes a contract for wages andworking hours with another state organ which hap-pens to be known as a trade union. For the Soviettrade unions are admittedly "stateized." Workersare not permitted to strike, on the theory that theywork for a workers' government . Labor is in effecta disciplined army. Every now and then there aremobilizations, every now and then labor contin-gents are shifted from one front to the other .

The Bolshevist dictatorship never anticipated alabor shortage when it launched its Five-YearPlan. Was there not an ample supply on hand?Did not the birthrate yield a natural populationincrease of three to four million annually? Yettoday the labor question is confounding the dic-tatorial minds. Labor is human, and its control liya political oligarchy should presumably be fareasier than that of the machine. But even humanityis inventive. Hence, the extreme fluidity of laborin the Soviet Union, the constant drifting of work-ers from one plant to another. Hence, the problemof the appalling labor "turnover" in the major in-dustries where during a period of six months this

--------------------- -------------------------------------124 RED SMOKEmobility has been reaching 40 to 50 per cent . Youcan drive labor to the machine, you can lure theworker to the job, but youu cannot make him pro .duce according to your plans unless the surround-ing conditions stimulate him to such production .Hence, the employment of five men where oneGerman or American worker would do. Hence, theinsufficiency of ten million industrial workers ina country which, with all its plants and projects,will stand no comparison with the industrial statusof the State of Pennsylvania alone .

The machine will balk, but it cannot escape.Man will escape. Labor is after all an aggregationof human beings, and even a strong-arm dictator.ship, is not strong enough to cope successfully withthe human urge to flee from the difficult present,to go in search for a better life elsewhere, to ex-change • the monotony of the conveyor for thefamiliar rhythm of the shovel and the axe, to strainagainst the yoke of statutes and commands, evenif these be devised for the ultimate welfare of thevictims themselves. Hence, the drastic measurespromulgated by the Soviet Government or the stop-page of labor mobility, for the attachment of theworker to his lathe. Hence, punitive measures onthe one hand and attempts at generosity in dis-tributing food rations, on the other . But labor,especially Russian labor, fresh from the fields, just

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125come from the plow and the horse, continues toplay havoc with charts, blueprints, manifestoesand schedules. It takes an accumulated traditionof generations to produce a modern industrialworker, one in whose veins courses the rhythm ofthe machine. The muscle of the Russian peasant islike that of a dray-horse led into racing groundsand made to run alongside the finest thoroughbredsof the turf. No statistician, no Marxist planner, cancalculate the, pace of raw muscle under strain, andno dictatorship can budget such a rate of produc-tion.

The industrial worker of the West is a meat-eating being. The Russian workers live on soggybread and cucumbers. The human energy intro-duced into the modern machine is largely beefenergy. It is inconceivable that a population thathad for centuries absorbed vodka, thrived on but .termilk and cottage cheese, could have the stamina,the endurance, to build and develop an intensiveindustrial civilization. Of course, the Russianworker would gladly turn to the consumption ofbeef. But he gets less of it today than two decadesago.- The calories consumed by the average Rus-sian are sufficient for one who drives a horse andperforms similar manual labor, always at a slowpace over an extended work-day punctuated byfrequent periods of rest, but is altogether made-

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RED SMOKEquate for the industrial tempo of Detroit . Hence,the "shortage of labor in Russia today, anominous shortage.

Capital is not a dogmatic norm of intrinsic valuewhich can be controlled from beginning to end inany given place. It is wealth accruing . from laborand savings. -Capital is not static, but living ; it iscumulative and constantly changing in its valuewhich is in proportion to its position, its market-ability, and many factors that cannot be computed .A crop in the interior of China varies in its capitalvalue from a crop in Nebraska . Capital is measuredin relation to the demand for the goods which itcan purchase. You may calculate the value of onehundred million bushels of grain on hand, andplan its exchange into industrial machinery. Butyou cannot calculate the price of grain far enoughahead .

The capital resources of Russia are largely theproduction of grain, oil, and timber. The yield ofgrain depends upon such uncontrollable factors asthe weather. One serious drought in Russia wouldupset irreparably any Five-Year Plan. On theother hand, a fair harvest in Russia and a superla-tive harvest in the Argentine would have asimilarly disastrous effect upon such a plan, for itwould reduce the exportable capital to an unknownfigure. The appearance of a series of gushers in

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127Texas will cut the capital- value of the Russian oilinto half, even as the discovery of a large diamondfield in South Africa recently, at a time when thefinancial depression engulfed the Western world,had rendered almost valueless the great Romanoffjewel collection in the Kremlin, a collection cher-ished as a treasure of emergency capital . Theeconomic crisis in America, the collapse of worldwheat prices, have greatly embarrassed the execu-tion of the Five-Year Plan and drained the Soviettreasury, straining at the same time its creditabroad and home to a dangerous point, as evi-denced by the depreciation of the Soviet currency .

The Stalin theory of building socialism in thecountry strikes a rock in this field alone. Whenthe Amtorg, its leading commercial agency abroad,is forced to resort to short-term notes for amountsas low as $250 in payments for goods purchased, itis a telling commentary upon the capital resourcesof the Soviet Union today. Unless Moscow founditself in possession of gigantic supplies of stableand exchangeable money, its future is bound toremain uncertain. But the capital reserves of Rus-sia are exhausted, its savings are non-existent, andits labor does not produce, but consumes, wealth .

Primitive is the conception of the Bolshevistdictatorship that technical knowledge can eitherbe acquired under high pressure or purchased

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ah'road and mustered into service by a strongpolitical regime. It is true that kings and granddukes have for thousands of years hired architectsand engineers to build castles and palaces to carryout their whimsies . History has known of rulerswho employed experts to build hanging gardens,canals, and even such civilizing projects as greatirrigation works. The Stalin dictatorship, with adifferent objective in mind, approaches its greatbuilding program with the same attitude towardknowledge.

"The Bolsheviks must master technique," de.Glares Stalin. His cry is echoed by his prime minis .ter, Molotov, in these words : "The slogan of themastery of technique is the central slogan." Suchwas the battle cry in the spring of 1931 . But howdoes the dictatorship proceed to master technique?Ivan the Terrible imported architects from Veniceand erected the famous and bizarre Cathedral ofSt. Basil in the heart of Moscow. But did he mastertechnique? Stalin has imported specialists fromDetroit and has erected a number of industrialpyramids. That part of it is easy in the modernworld. Cables and tempting offers will bring toMoscow the finest engineering minds in the world.There is a vast gulf between a building programand a production program. The world is dotted .

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with,non-producing monumental edifices, from theChinese Wall to the Maya temples .

In our industrial civilization the construction ofan enterprise forms its most elementary part. Ifit is not to remain an isolated castle on a moun-tain top, if it is not to be doomed to eventual ruin,such an enterprise must be a living outgrowth ofthe fabulously rich life of our contemporaryy world;it must subsist on the hundreds of cultural, eco-nomic, and purely human elements that are woveninto the pattern of the newest society; it must in-evitably depend upon a fine communication system,upon a highly organized network of distribution,upon an almost infallible method of accounting,upon a stable currency, an ample supply of nour-ishment, a certain standard of education, a set rateof productivity, a well-developed system of relaxa-tion and entertainment, a minimum of domesticcomforts and conveniences, and, above all, uponfree expression of that indefinable something whichmakes human individuality-regardless of the factwhether the task in which one is engaged is dedi-sated to the welfare of all rather than to the wel-fare of a single person.

Technique is not a static commodity . It is a nerveof the human brain, it is a form of human intellect.Technique cannot be pumped into a machine bypolitical device. The peasant who knows how to

130 RED SMOKEoperate a windmill or how to set a fox-trap is notnecessarily possessed of technical knowledge whichmakes him fit to operate a modern machine. Be-tween the two stages lies an abyss of accumulatedintellect, generations and generations of develop-ment. When the Stalin dictatorship fitfully at-tempts to harness technique in a peasant country,it attempts to snatch the lightning and convert itssingl lash into myriads of sealed bulbs. The dicta-torship would harness the human mind, insofar asit is represented by the engineering profession ; itwould limit it, confine it, prescribe its daily runsand make it . . . create! But not even a dictator-ship can fetter, saddle and ride the human mind .

The problems of the Five-Year Plan, the prob-lems of capital and labor, of the machine and oftechnique, are only now beginning to emerge.They are the problems of production, and produc-tion is the acid and ultimate test of the Five-YearPlan. A dim realization of the import of these prob-lems was conveyed by the spokesman of the Krem-lin, Premier Molotov, in March, 1931, when hedeclared : "It has been shown that we are betterable to build new great works than to organizetheir production afterward."

Yet the roots of the problems of the Five-YearPlan, of the colossal task of organizing produc-tion, lie beyond the range of reforms, of efficiency

RED; 'SMOKE 131measures. They are inherent in a philosophy whichis out-of-date, inherent in the antiquated socialtheory of Bolshevism. It is useless to judge theFive-Year Plan upon the basis - of the reports offield workers ; it has to be judged upon its ownevidence, its deeper sources which tap the uni-versal processes of the society that it is intendedto affect profoundly. How misleading the obser-vations of eyewitnesses can be is revealed by thefact that the first definite loud word which theoutside world public had from Russia as to theproblems of the Five-Year Plan came in July, 1931,when Stalin published his speech which virtuallyamounted to an announcement of a New EconomicPolicy. Dictators do not wake up in the morningwith the bright idea of presenting their countryand the world with a magnanimous manifesto .There were strong forces which dictated the Stalinmove. Under a system where all vital informationis centered in the hands of a small group such asStalin's Political Bureau and is issued to the worldin occasional fragments and only in accordancewith the expediency of the moment, it is not sur-prising that for over two years the Five-Year Planhas been advertised as a challenge, a menace, apromise of a new social order, and has alreadybeen hailed both by its enemies and its championsas a success .

132

RED SMOKEThe problems of the Five-Year Plan, and all the

succeeding Five-Year Plans for which it stands, theproblems of building a planned and rational mod-ern economic order in an inchoate and poor andprimitive peasant land, arise out of the blind alleyinto which the dictatorship has led Russia . Just asthe success of the Five-Year Plan would be a tri-umph for the idea of dictatorship, so its failurewould be the exposure of its fallacy . That the dic-tatorship finds itself already in a blind alley, isevidenced by the frantic quest for easy remediesand solutions . Three months after Stalin's cry,"The Bolsheviks must themselves become special-ists," he came out with a reversal of his policy, withconcessions to the terrorized engineering class, withprizes to technicians under arrest l It is evidencedfurther by the fact that the equality in the laborwages has been abolished, that the piece system hasbeen introduced, that a number of disciplinarymeasures have been adopted to stop the migrationof labor and to increase efficiency ..Finally, in the spring of 1932, under the pres-

sure of the inexorable economic consequences ofhis earlier adventures in the name of the Five-Year Plan, Stalin nullified most of the "achieve-ments" of his dictatorial rule by lifting the ban onprivate trading in foodstuffs. Again, this retreathad not been predicted by the Moscow spokesmen

in the Soviet and world press. These spokesmenhad been consistently humming the official tunethat all was well with the Five-Year Plan. Stalin'snewest policy confirmed the opposite. It revealedthe bankruptcy of the collectivization drive, thecatastrophic condition of the animal husbandryof the country, the growing shortage of food sup.plies, the alarming depreciation of the currency,and the even more alarming shortage of seeds forthe sowing of the 1932 crops . A critical emergencydeveloped in the month of March, signalized bystrikes of workers clamoring for bread and by thepassive resistance of the peasantry on the land.Once more, the dictatorship saw itself threatenedfrom within. Once more, it took a leaf out of Len-in's scriptures and sought shelter in a camouflagedretreat to a, partial NEP (New Economic Policyinitiated by Lenin in 1921). The collective farmsand individual peasants were granted the right tosell their surplus products in the open market .Whether such surplus products exist in quantitiessufficient to satisfy the demands of a starved popu-lation is doubtful .

The dictatorship is seeking a way out that isthe meaning of the new Stalin course. It is resort-ing to palliatives for its radical problems . It isvainly striving to find simple cures for the revolt ofthe American machine on the Volga. Boldly it

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manipulates its meager credit resources, and play-ing its political trump cards now in New York, nowin Paris, now in Berlin and now in London, itstrives to secure sorely needed funds, not to carryforward the Five-Year Plan, but to meet the billsfor the equipment already purchased abroad .

But the dictatorship cannot locate the real andfundamental cause of its troubles, its zigzags, itsfutile assaults now upon one front, now upon an-other, because that cause is the dictatorship itself,because all the problems of the industrialization ofRussia, because all the aspects of the true progressof Russia, are hopelessly entangled in the nooseof the dictatorship. Because only by cutting theGordian knot of dictatorial political power coulda possible solution be indicated. But no dictator-ship has ever surrendered, its power voluntarily.And the Stalin dictatorship shows no signs of be-coming an exception . It will find plenty of scape-goats yet, it will stage many maneuvers, retreatsand advances, it will blame the world bourgeoisie,the backwardness of the Western proletariat, thedelay in the coming of world revolution, and allthe other now familiar enemies, for its own fail-ures ; but it will not abdicate except under pressureof a Titanic force cradled by its own blind policiesin the depths of Russia .