A. That is the name given the Soviet Political Police in 1934. It has had three names, first the Cheka, then the G.P.U., pronounced Gay Pay Oo, and now NKVD, pronounced En Kah Vay Day, which is an abbreviation for the Narkomvnudel, itself an abbreviation of four Russian words meaning Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Whenever the Political Police has accumulated too much blood on its name, it is changed, but its functions remain the same: to administer the Terror.
Q. Are the people in the collective farms better off than when they were individual farmers?
A. I did not know the Russia of the Czars, but the peasant himself gave a very good answer to that when he refused to go into the collectives, and rather than enter with his livestock, killed it by the thousands of head, until within a year more than half the cattle, horses, pigs, and sheep of the country had been slaughtered. The Soviet Union has not yet entirely recovered from this animal massacre. The peasants slaughtered their livestock because once collectivized, the livestock passed completely out of control of the peasants. Stalin later conceded each collective farm peasant the right to own one cow and one pig as his private possession. Otherwise the members of the collective may not dispose of the product of their own toil.
Q. But isn’t that precisely the nature of a collective, for all members to pool their resources and labor and then draw the dividends?
A. That is the theory, but the dividends for the Soviet peasant consist of the barest subsistence. They must turn over to the State trusts a stipulated amount or share of whatever their collective produces, wheat, or dairy products, beef or pork, and this share is usually so high that there is nothing left for the peasants to eat but black bread and cabbage. It is the settled policy of the Five-Year Plans to take from the soil all its produce except the minimum subsistence for the peasants and devote it to industrialization, by distribution at high prices to the workmen, and by export, in exchange for machines from abroad.
Q. Then, surely the Russian workman is much better off, since the whole system is supposed to be for the benefit of the proletariat.
A. He is better off than the peasant, but he is worse off than any other white workman in the world. In the winter of 1934-1935 I made a survey of the Russian standard of living and compared it with the standard of living in capitalist states. In order to make the comparison as fair as possible I chose the little capitalist states which used to be a part of Imperial Russia—Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.
First I spent two months in Moscow, studying the standard of living of the workmen in the best Moscow factories. These workmen were more favorably situated than any others in the Soviet Union. Then I spent three months studying the standard of living of typical working-class families in the little capitalist states. To my surprise I found that the poorest workmen’s families in the capitalist states lived considerably better than the Moscow workers, who were the most prosperous in all Russia.
This was after seventeen years of Communism, and the capitalist states used for comparison were among the poorest in the world. They had all suffered more from the World War than Russia as a whole had suffered, and they began their new national lives from scratch, without capital or credit. Yet the average workman in Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland was living at least twice as well as the best-off workmen in the Soviet Union.
Q. How did you get your facts?