Poor as the goods are, they are not so poor as the method of putting them in the hands of the consumers. Since there is always a goods shortage, the consumer is placed in the permanent position of a supplicant, glad to get anything even if it is a substitute for a substitute for the article he wants. Allocation of the scanty supplies is made from the top down. The local community is not asked what it needs. The Planners arbitrarily ship certain quantities of shoes, hoe handles, and seed, and the recipients have learned to be grateful, no matter if what they needed was kerosene, matches, and cloth.
Q. But you said something about the monetary system, that it had failed too. How can a monetary system fail in a completely planned national economy?
A. The monetary system under the Soviets seems just as difficult to handle as it is in the capitalist system. The authorities incessantly juggle wages against prices, raising the one, lowering the other, inflating the currency, selling bonds and even lottery bonds, as blatantly gambling as the old Louisiana lottery. Yet the answer never seems to be achieved satisfactorily. Always the citizen’s purchasing power is behind his needs. Fundamentally, of course, the answer is that there is never enough of anything to go around.
Q. But isn’t the answer to that the fact that the Soviet State is taking away from the citizens today in order to invest in productive industry from which the citizens will draw a dividend tomorrow? At least I should have thought that was the theory.
A. That is the theory, but one of the tragic aspects of the epic struggle of the Russian Bolsheviks to make their collectivist system work is that their investments in factories and machinery wear out almost as fast and sometimes faster than they can replace them and build new ones. The bad workmanship of the buildings and the poor quality and rough handling of the machines results in a speed of deterioration far beyond the normal in the capitalist world. If they had given their population slightly better food and living conditions and had therefore been compelled to limit their investment in new buildings and machines to something like a capitalist standard of new investment, deterioration would probably have taken away more plant than they could replace.
Q. How do you explain such inefficiency and wastefulness?
A. For all the reasons given before, and for another which I left for a different category since it is, so to speak, historical, while these reasons we have discussed are current. The historical fact of import at least during the life of this generation is that the Bolsheviks twice in twenty years exterminated their ablest people in the country, or rather I should say, the Bolsheviks first killed off the ablest people of old Russia and then Stalin killed off the ablest Bolsheviks. It has been so long ago, and the popular interest and sympathy in the Soviet experiment was at the time so great, that we have almost forgotten what the Bolsheviks did to their own countrymen.
Their conviction was that they could not establish Communism, or Socialism, without physically exterminating the persons who had become, under capitalism, better off than the mass of the people. They reasoned that no capitalist, and by that they meant any person who lived a little better than the poorest member of the community, would ever tolerate willingly the establishment of a Socialist State. They believed all such people would attempt to wreck the new Socialist economy. The professional revolutionaries had spent half their lives attempting to wreck the capitalist system, and they attributed to the capitalists a similar resolution.
In Germany, the Nazis succeeded in coercing the capitalists into becoming useful members of the National Socialist Collective. In Russia, the Bolsheviks set out to destroy the capitalists as a class, or rather every human being who by his birth, or position, or accomplishment, had become identified as an active member of the old system. First, they killed off the aristocracy and landed proprietors, numbering several hundred thousand, and including of course the Czar and his family. Then they exterminated the industrialists, not very numerous, because Russia was the least industrialized of the great nations. Nevertheless they were important. With them a little later were exterminated the managers, supervisors and technicians, the scientists, the professional men, dentists, surgeons, lawyers, teachers, and judges. These numbered a million or more.
By the time I got to Russia in 1925 all these were fully exterminated. By extermination I mean just that. They were either shot, or sent into exile in the Arctic or the deserts of Central Asia, or condemned to penal labor under such conditions that they died within a few years. They were nearly all killed. Only the most meager remnant remained, a few accidents of survival. I shall never forget the man who peddled cigarettes. I shared a house in Moscow with Theo Seibert, correspondent of the Hamburger Fremdenblatt, today, alas, editor of the Voelkischer Beobachter. Theo and I used to try to get the old man to talk, but he was too frightened to make much sense. The baldheaded trembling man who begged us to buy his cigarettes had been a Justice of the Moscow Supreme Court! His survival was just an accident.