"What I Saw in Russia"

Radio Record, Volume V, Issue 41, 22 April 1932, Page 23

"What I Saw in Russia"

W.E.A. Talk from 4YVA e HERE is no country in the world to-day the discussion of whose institutions arouses more angry passions than the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, or Russia, as we once called it. The communist on the one hand sometimes depicts the country as an earthly paradise, whence all the ills to which man elsewhere is still apparently heir have been dispelled, and the anti-com-munist on the other suggests that it is a country where wretchedness and misery are universal, where nobody ever smiles, and where the ordinary citizens are eagerly awaiting a chance to’ throw off the hated yoke whieh is grinding them down. There is no lack of literature on the subject, but much of it is tainted by the violent and sometimes obvious prejudices of the writers. Dr. Fisher, the director of the Otago Workers’ Educational Association. and Professor of Meonomies in the University of Otago, was able in the early part of last year to spend nearly three weeks in territories controlled by the Soviet Government, Ue travelled over . the Traus-Siberian Railway, a journey of nearly eight days. and was later in Moscow, the capital, with a rapidlysrowing population of over three million. During the next few weeks he will describe from 4YA some of the things which he saw in Russia. It is difficult to give in a short space of time a clear picture of the intensely vivid and conflicting impressions ¢reated by a visit to Russia, partly because am me —

one wishes to emphasise at the same time the topsy-turvy character of Russian life and social organisation, and also the fundamental humanity of the individual Russians, whom one meets and converses with. The most sympathetic and enlightening writer on modern Russia, Maurice Hindus, has called one of his books "Humanity Uprooted." The title indicates exactly one of the impressions which the visitor to Russia constantly receives. Nearly everything which we are inclined to take for graunted has been torn up, and an. attempt made to replace it by something entirely | new. The results are often startling, sometimes crude, but invariably stimulating, and sometimes invigorating. It is a uséful, if not always a pleasant experience, to be suddenly confronted — with the necessity for defending and explaining institutions which we haye so long taken for granted that we hare perhaps allowed their inner meaning, their real raison d’etre, to wither away: and die. But at the same time, one isconstantly reminded in Russia of the fundamental similarities between. human beings in all parts of the world. In spite of reports to the contrary, children do play in Moscow quite happily and contentedly. At the -cinema people laugh at jokes, which, in spite of their translation into a revolutionary idiom, are fundamentally the same jokes as arouse laughter in Dunedin. and in the late evening jolly parties may he met in the tramears, who have been amusing themselves with simple gramophones or music boxes.. The series of talks will endeavour to depict a Russia which at the same time is revolutionary, involving a complete overthrow of many of our cherished institutions, and yet human and intelligible. and, in many aspects, attractive, . cm et oe he oe ae CZ (LILI ILILCILTIZititItitiitiititir yi ee Sb DD TE a