SOVIET & NAZI

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 October 1939, Page 3

SOVIET & NAZI

TWO SYSTEMS ANALYSED FUNDAMENTALLY OPPOSED. IN SPITE OF SIMILARITIES. It is easy to draw up a catalogue of similarities between present-day Germany and Russia, write Maurice Hindus in an exchange. Germany is a dictatorship, so is Russia. Germany has a Fuehrer whose name is Hitler, Russia has a Vozhd whose name is Stalin, and it is a gross offence in the one country as it is in the other to question the infallibility of “the lea’der.” Germany has a Gestapo; Russia has a GPU; Germany employs terror as a’ method of government; so does Russia; Germany has concentration camps; Russia has labour camps. Germany, like Russia, has a stern censorship; Germany subsidises large families; so does Russia. Germany has purges; so has Russia, only in Russia they extend'over a longer period of time and are more costly in lives and substance. Yet in my judgment it is as wrong to speak of the two as the same as it is to say that a thistle and a rosebush are the same because both have brambles. Let us examine the two in terms of their politics, their economics, their sociology. At the outset it is well to emphasise that there is no communism in Russia. Communism is only a blue print of a future society toward which Russia is aspiring. Under communism, so runs the theory as exponded by Engles and Lenin, there is no State. There is only the fullest individual freedom. The dictatorship therefore is a means to an end —to enable the industrial workers to obtain and to hold power for as long a time as necessary to change the system of production and distribution and to make possible the realisation of Communism. Russia is a long way from such a realisation, but to the Russian, whether of the Stalinist or the.Trotskyist or the Menshevik persuasion, dictatorship and all that it implies, is an instrument of temporary control.

Not so with the National Socialists. “The State,” says Hitler in “Mein Kampf,” meaning of course the Nazi “has to appear as the guardian of a thousand years’ future, in the face of which the wish and egoism of the individual appears as nothing and has to submit.” The Soviet constitution is at present mainly a paper document, though three of its basic rights —to a job, to a vacation on full pay, to an education from the grades through the university—are to the best of my knowledge in universal application. But the document is required study in all schools, in the army, in factories, on collective farms, everywhere that people gather for any kind of education. Unlike the Germans under Herr Hitler, the Russians are continually being inculcated with ideas of democracy and the liberties that it presupposes, and some day, though perhaps not before Russia has solved her problem of production, the moment will come when they will practise real democracy. Else why educate the entire population in its ideas and privileges. The divergence in economics is no less marked than in politics. The Russians repudiate income yielding private property, the National Socialists uphold it. In their original 25 points, the National Socialists condemned income “unearned by work,” and promised “emancipation from the slavery” of interest charges, confiscation of war profits, nationalisation of business combines. The National Socialist international policy and economics are driving Herr Hitler into continuous encroachment on the profits and prerogatives of private business and are making him increasingly anti-capitalist. But he has spruned demands of his more radical associates for outright nationalisation of “the means of production,’’ such as Russia has achieved. In their sociology the National Socialists and the Bolsheviks are at daggers’ end at every step.

In Germany, race is everything, in Russia it is only an accident by birth. “In the folk State,” says Herr Hitler, “the race question is raised to a predominant position.” To the Russian, superiority of race is not only a repudiation of scientific truth but rank coun-ter-revolution. In Soviet Russia, antiSemitism is treason', often punished by death. In Germany, it is the law of everyday life and of everyday adventure.

There is this difference between the National Socialist treatment of Jews and the Soviet treatment of kulaks: Because of race theory no hope is held out to the Jew in Germany. But to the Bolsheviks, because of their theory of class struggle and equalisation of classes, the kulak is promised restoration to citizenship when he has “reforged himself into a new being. We may laugh at the word “reforged,” but it is a fact that millions of kulaks have already been restored to citizenship. The National Socialists consider war a builder of character; the Russians regard it as an evil. “In eternal comoat, said Herr Hitler, “humanity has grown to greatness; in eternal peace it will go down to destruction.” Had anyone dared to utter such sentiments in Russia, he would have been instantly arrested and charged with counter-revo-lutionary conspiracy. In higher education, the following figures tell an illuminating tale. In 1932 there were in Germany 116154 students in higher institutions of learning. In 1936, the number had shrunk to 67,082, and in 1937 to 53,753. In Russia, in 1913, there were in higher institutions of learning 112.000 students. In 1932 the number had increased to 394,000 and in 1938 to 650.000. Russia regards higher education as a good in itself. Germany limits it to imminent needs. “Why shouldn't a blacksmith be a college graduate?" the director of a ball-bearing factory in Moscow once said to me. I have never heard or read of any National Socialist leader who would make a similar announcement. Consider further the divergence in the attitude toward women. In Russia, the emphasis always is on woman’s intellectual equality with men; in Germany the emphasis always is on her intellectual inferiority to men. Not a career in Russia is closed to women. The National Socialist slogan: “Thank God we reject women in Parliament, on the platform and in State administration,” has been denounced in Russia as an example of Fascist “inhumanity to women.” Equally striking is the divergent attitude toward art. True enough. Russia has a rigid censorship and artists arei required-to conform to the ideology of the moment. But then the Russian ideology doesn’t exalt war as a maker of character, or push women into a pure-1 ly domestic environment or pronounce the blue-eyed man superior to the dark-eyed man. The Russians do not apply their censorship to artists of the

past. Germany has banned Heine, Lessing and Mendelssohn. In Russia these three German artists of letters and music are heroes. Goethe has not been banned by the National Socialists but he hasn’t been extolled. "We aren’t and do not want to be the land of Goethe and Einstein,” someone once wrote in the Berlin “Lokal Anzeiger.” In Russia both men command utmost admiration. Gogol was known for his adulation of the Czarist autocracy and the Orthodox church. Yet since the coming of the Revolution nearly eight million copies of,his works have been printed. With the possible exception of Czechoslovakia in the pre-Munich days, I know of no country in which the great literature of the past, native and foreign, has been so eagerly studied as in Russia, not only in schools, but in factories and on farms. To me National Socialist Germany and Soviet Russia are enemies for reasons of geography as well as for reasons of ideology. To an American, of course, any dictatorship is anathema; at least this is the case at present, and the Russian dictatorship as such may not be better nor worse than the German dictatorship. Yet in Russia the dictatorship is considered a temporary condition and in Germany it is to last 1000 years. In Russia it is a means to an end; in Germany it is an end in itself.