The people stood there looking, their imaginations fired. They said, “This is what is happening to us.”
Most particularly I wanted to investigate what had been done for women and children in Russia, to learn whether they had been given the rights and liberties due them in any humanitarian civilization. Grant, Rose, as she was known to me, and I went one day to the Institute for the Protection of Motherhood and Childhood, a vast establishment stretching over several miles, with model clinics, nurseries, milk centers, and educational laboratories. I was overwhelmed in contemplating the undertaking. There was no doubt that the Government was exerting itself strenuously to teach the rudiments of hygiene to an enormous population that had previously known nothing of it. Russia was also aiming to free women from the two bonds that enslaved them most—the nursery and the kitchen. All over the country were crèches connected with the places they worked.
Children were the priceless possessions of Russia. Their time was planned for them from birth to the age of sixteen, when they were paid to go to college, if they so desired. No longer were they a drain or burden to their families. Not only were teachers or parents forbidden to inflict corporal punishment, but children might even report their parents for being vindictive, ill-humored, disorderly, and in many cases they did so.
In one divorce dispute as to custody of the offspring, the father argued that the mother was bad. The Judge asked, “Of what does her badness consist?”
“She is nervous and loses her temper.”
The Judge agreed she was not fit for motherhood.
Furthermore, Russia was investing in future generations by building a healthy race. If there were any scarcity of milk the children were supplied first, the hospitals second, members of the Communist party third, industrial groups fourth, professional classes fifth, and old people over fifty had to scrape along on what they could get, unless they were parents of Communists or closely associated with them.
I was eager also to find out what had been done about the study carried on by Professor Tushnov, of the Institute for Experimental Medicine, on so-called spermatoxin, a substance which, it had been rumored, produced temporary sterility in women. I made an appointment with him, but a shock awaited me. He had tried out his spermatoxin on thirty women, twenty-two of whom had been made immune for from four to five months, but now all laboratory workers had been taken from pure research and set at utilitarian tasks such as the practical effects of various vocations on women’s health. Nothing concerning immunization to conception could be published in Soviet Russia, no information could be given out under penalty of arrest, and, moreover, nothing could appear in a foreign paper which had not already been printed in Russia.
Intourist, the Government tourist bureau, and Voks, the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, had asked me when I had first arrived whom I wished to see and where I wished to go, and had offered to call up people on my list and arrange for visits, a service which had saved me much trouble and expense. In spite of this co-operative attitude, I was suspicious that much was being hidden from us. Before I had left America I had heard I could see only what Russia presented for window-dressing, and with this in mind I was on the alert.
Both Grant and I wondered how the hospitals built under the Tsars compared with recent ones. When I asked to be taken to a certain one, I was assured it was too far away, and anyhow it was being renovated; there was nobody there. I said to myself, “Aha! here is one of the forbidden sights. Whoever heard of a hospital equipped to handle thousands of patients being utterly empty? They are not going to let us see this because it might speak in favor of the old in contrast to the new.”