Dr. Abram B. Genss, assistant director, was in charge of contraceptive supplies and the administration of birth control, such as it was. He was antagonistic, disagreeable, unpleasant, shouting “Malthusianism” into my ears more times in one hour than I had heard it before in twenty years. The methods in the Moscow clinic were antiquated, and I suggested sending a physician to instruct them, but my proposal was not acceptable.
I considered Russia’s situation very serious. Her population was a matter of mathematics; it had increased some fifty million since the downfall of the Empire. Unless she looked ahead and educated her people in the problems which arose out of population, within two generations she would find herself with the same differential birth rate then existing in England and the United States. It would, however, have much more tragic consequences since it would lower the augmentation of the capable, skilled, shock troops of industry, the idealists and active, selfless workers, and would multiply from the bottom unskilled, ignorant, dull-witted workers, the superstitious element which even the greatest efforts of a Soviet dictatorship running at top speed could not pull up and out of their evolutional environment.
I really began to see Russia under another guise after we stepped on the train from Moscow to Gorky, the former Nizhni Novgorod. Around the big, city hotels vendors had been trying to dispose of soft, warm sables and gold-embroidered altar pieces evidently reft from churches, asking good prices for them. But now the peasant women offered tea cozies, wooden boxes, carved and painted, dolls, leather, brass, knickknacks for the tourist, quite unlike anything obtainable elsewhere in Europe, and always, of course, Russian blouses.
The side-wheel steamer Kommunistka, small but comfortable, was waiting to carry us down the Volga to Stalingrad. Our party occupied practically all available cabins, but hundreds of Russians were jammed on the decks. At some points the river was a mile wide as it slid between flat landscapes, limitless as far as the eye could reach. Often we overtook rafts of logs, some at least a quarter of a mile long, each bearing a diminutive house where the captain and his family lived. You could see the children scampering back and forth and the crew pushing it leisurely into the current.
We were four days in transit, passing many villages and a few towns—Kazan, Samara, and Saratov. I do not remember the cities clearly. Some places are indelible in your mind; others amount to very little. If you are searching for something and do not find it, the scene vanishes.
At every stop men and women accompanied by children and baskets of belongings were collected in hundreds. They had come a week or more early to make sure of catching the boat, spending the nights on the ground, subsisting on a loaf of bread, a tomato, or a cucumber. Their children were taken care of in the station crèche, bathed, dressed in fresh clothing, taught, directed in play, delivered to the parents just before the Kommunistka landed.
Then came the mad scramble. It was like the old days on Ellis Island when the peasants from Europe arrived, thousands of them, carrying huge bundles on their heads, shoving and rushing and jabbering in strange tongues, attempting to squeeze in. You wondered how so many people could ever get on board. They had no comforts, no room to sleep such as we. They appeared stark and hungry, while we had marvelous food, in fact too much of it. Any American planning to lose weight in Russia was badly disappointed.
Stalingrad, near the mouth of the Volga, was Russia’s greatest industrial city. Here I saw a hotel which was going up in front and falling down behind with about equal rapidity; the building material was lying in the streets. In the one in which we lodged we had to dodge spigots. Plumbing had been laid on all over the country, but the stream from any tap never by any chance landed where it was intended to. You approached cautiously, not knowing whether it would get you in the eye, in the nose, or shoot over your shoulder and hit your suitcase. The bathroom had no lock, and the attendant insisted it was his job to help patrons take a bath. I pushed on one side of the door; he on the other. I won.
At Stalingrad, as everywhere I had been before, I was looking for Russian contraceptive methods, but having been discouraged both by Dr. Kaminsky and Dr. Genss, I went at it rather carefully. When I visited the impressive new hospital I asked the superintendent, who was a gynecologist and spoke good English, whether he gave contraceptive advice.
“I do not, but we have a department of consultation.”