FIVE YEAS PLAN

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 73, 17 November 1931, Page 7

FIVE YEAS PLAN

no menace ENGLISH JOURNALIST'S IMPRESSION OF RUSSIA. LOCAL SAFETY VALVE. A magnificent Minister said to his secretary, "Get me out the figures of this case." "What do you want to prove?" said the Magnificent Secretary (writes Frank Owen, M.P., in the News-Ghronicle). When I went to Russia I asked the editor of the News-Chronicle what he wanted me to write. He said: "What's fit to print." A most serious limitation to the gaiety of our nation. But he sent me to report what I saw and not to write the "Truth About Russia." "But, to judge from the mail bag, it seems that everybody has a different opinion about it all. I might as well offer mine. Not about Communism, hecause it does not exist even in Russia. But about the more. limited subject of the Five Year Plan. If people would simply ask: "Is the Five Year Plan succeeding or not? it would be easy to answer. I could look like an editor or any member of any Front Bench in the House of Commons, cough heavily and importantly, and reply "Yes — and No."

As, however, they always go on to say, "Are people better off or worse than they were?" I sit them down . and give them an hour's address just to learn them. After that they avoid me like the plague. You would not in May, 1918, have said: "Are the Allies winning? Are the British people better off or worse than in 1916?" We were then pulling our belts in another peg. I was at school and having mine pulled for me. "Just Suffering." Those in Russia who are not suffer- • ing gladly are just suffering. There is plenty of bread, just enough meat. There is no butter, except sometimes for children. If there are ticks in Russian butter, I cannot see on what grounds our would-be boycotters protest on behalf of the wretched Russia serfs. It might he tough on us, but as far as their own folk are concerned, it surely shows the high intelligence and humanity of the Kremlin Government. Housing is fearful. In Leningrad you pay 10 kopecks a month for each square metre, after the first 10 metres, 20 kopecks, and so on. This does not include any services. And this figure is only for the very lowest paid workers earning 40 roubles. Rent is graduated on earnings, assessed by the "House Committee" of each building, and paid through them to the- State Trust. Artists, scientists, and poets, if they

know their Marxian stuff, get an extra room. If they don't know it, or know it and don't do it, if they are Nepmen, priests, bourgeois, and are due for ultimate liquidation, they pay just ten times as much. Bathrooms are not counted as ground space, explained my informant with evident pride. But as there is neither soap nor hot water in the Soviet State, the exception is not over important. Nor are kitchens counted as gf ound space to be paid for. But then, as coal is almost impossible to get and everybody who can eats at the factory restaurant, this is not a considerable concession . either. Of course, a kitchen not used as a kitchen is not a kitchen. The Russians are logical. Therefore, the kitchen becomes chargeable for rent. It is simple. Worse Now. Clothes are standardised, and often to a vainly imagined standard size. But the women get through with it somehow, wave, their hair, manage to look different. The Proletarian State has come back to selling three different quality grades of lipsticks. The undulations in society are reappearing. Every now and then the State steam-roller comes along and flattens them out again. If and when the material standards begin to rise, the valleys and the peaks will be more plainly marked. And if they do not rise Things are worse now than in 1927. They will be better again. The Plan will go through. They will get their figures. The fearful wastage of capital involved in this hot-house development will not appear in published statistics. But it will have to be paid' for by human labour. How much more _ will they bear ? Stalin knows the ominous grumbling that goes on now. He is hanging on, grimly. There is a race against time going on in Russia. to get the Plan through before the team cracks. They look like winning — just. Hope of the most extravagant kind, fear, iron discipline such as no free people would ever stand, will provide the stimulus — the whip lash that will carry them up over the pass and out of the dark mountain into the plain. And afterwards? Unless they can show something to their own people for this terrific sacrifice there will he trouble for them — unless there are vines and corn and sunlight down there after all this travail. The Safety Yalve. Stalin, and Lenin before him, always said that the Revolution would have failed unless it could give them something better than the old regime. You may say that they have no means of comparing- their lot with that of other peoples. That the Press is servile, muzzled. That "Pravda" (Truth) and "Izvestia" (News) are censored sheets. The Russians know that also. They have long ago agreed that there is no News in "Truth," and no truth in "News." But it is not a question of the swamp loolcing at the mountain, but of the swamp of 1932 comparing itself with the swamp of 1928. The Government will see to it that a "victory" can he proclaimed at the end of the Plan. They will not have ereated new wealth, but will have tra'nsformed much of their capital of raw material at a'terribly heavy price into industrial plant. Then the food, boots, clothes, that the Plan will have won for Russia, will belong to the sweating masses 'who made them. And the 'Government will not dare to deny them. They will not dare to call for. another effort until they have rested and revived.

succeeding and flooding their own market. The home market of the Russians will be. the safety valve. The masses, taught by the Communists to demand the full pound of flesh and to leave no surplus value, will save the capitalists from the nightmare of their fears. Until the Bolsheviks have built the impregnable fortress of Communism in Russia, they will not be able , w:ll not even want to destroy the invaluable capitalist West. And by the time they have built their strong tower. neither Communism nor Capitlaism will be as crude as they are now.