Humble Servants of the Revolution

"Please, please let me visit him. After all, you're a human being."
"There are no human beings here, Eliena Petrovna, only humble servants of the revolution."

"Try as I would to exorcise it, the knowledge that she was a secret police agent was ever a ghost at the banquet of our affections."

"Within a year Nikopol seemed not so much an industrial establishment as a hunting ground for the police and their secret informers."

"Only a modern Dante in a pessimistic moment could evoke in words that picture of the secret underground factory of the Commissariat of Munitions, operated chiefly with slave labor."

"Thanks, Mother, and don't worry about me. I'll be all right. I know revolution is no picnic."

"Suddenly I found myself among men who could eat ample and dainty food in full view of starving people not only with a clear conscience but with a feeling of righteousness, as if they were performing a duty to history."

"A lush, ripe obscenity is the most striking and sometimes the only reminder of the 'proletarian' origins of our regime."


I had never heard of Victor Kravchenko's brilliant postwar polemic, I Choose Freedom, until I read John Fleming's The Anti-Communist Manifestos. But Kravchenko's autobiographical attack on the Soviet Union was enormously popular, both in the United States and Europe, and did more than almost any other book to undermine Russia's reputation in the West. Fleming is slightly incredulous that French and American Leftists were unable to believe that Kravchenko, a relatively high level Soviet bureaucrat, had personally written the book that so powerfully undermined Western confidence in their erstwhile ally.

However, even today it's hard to believe that a translator--however free the translation--could have transformed the biography of an engineer and bureaucrat into such a perfectly complete indictment of Bolshevism. Yet however much Kravchenko was aided, the autobiography is historically accurate and essentially true. Kravchenko really witnessed what he said he witnessed; and the Soviet Union really was as bad, if not worse, than his testimony suggests. It's only the horrific facts of the Soviet economic and political system that make Kravchenko's story seem incredible today.

Kravchenko's slow rise to bureaucratic prominence gave him a tour de horizon of Soviet malevolence. Over the course of a decade, Kravchenko witnessed collectivization and man-made famine, purges and super-purges, police state surveillance and torture, class warfare and Party privilege, bureaucratic over-centralization coupled with economic chaos, propaganda disassociated from social reality, judicial crimes and slave labor camps, and diplomatic hypocrisy and military incompetence.

Propaganda

It’s self-evident that totalitarian regimes take the liberty of monopolizing the media and bending the truth to suit their needs. This being said, it’s sometimes shocking to encounter specific pieces of propaganda. Take for instance a pamphlet entitled USSR-7: Entering the 21st Century, donated to me by a friend who visited Russia in the 1980s during a high school trip. The pamphlet is a tour de horizon of Soviet accomplishment in technology, manufacturing, science, health care, education, and social reform. Needless to say, the pamphlet presents the country in the best possible light, but the copy is nothing short of ridiculous, even in the era of glasnost and Gorbachev.

According to USSR-87, the October Revolution actually “put an end to exploitation” in socialist countries once and for all. It also ensured that almost all Soviet working men and women were members of trade unions with direct responsibility for organizing factory work, and the ability to nullify management decisions whenever necessary. In one strikingly false passage, the writer stresses that “Moscow and the Kremlin have become symbols of social progress and the struggle for mankind’s future.” In another, the writer insists (somewhat defensively?) that the Soviet Union is blessed by a unified proletariat, peasantry, and intelligentsia. In a third, the writer touts figures of industrial expansion and impressive increases in the standard of living of Soviet citizens.

Beginning in 1917, Communism had granted a backward people free education and health care, complete equality of the genders, and diverse leadership roles for ordinary men and women. It had also equalized the wealth in the various republics and autonomous regions. Moreover, the county was witness to a system of total fraternity among the many nationalities. As the writer tells us, the USSR’s “1500 Eskimos” are treated as the absolute equals of even the vast Russian people. Absurd exaggerations like that one might strike some readers, then and now, as comic, but they are also saddening. What must it have been like to live in a society where lies like these were so ubiquitous? How much worse must life in the previous generations have been when even the benign Gorbachev era had so much trouble discussing the country with any degree of objectivity or realism?

It’s possible that an official short summary of the American experience would be inadequate and biased, but certainly this tract demonstrates that the Soviet government was totally unable to either recognize or admit some basic realities about the USSR, even 70 years after the October Revolution Gorbachev’s “revolution from above.” The tract does hint at some fundamental problems within the USSR, including housing and other consumer shortages as well a gap between scientific breakthroughs and their application to manufacturing problems, but the cures involve breathtakingly naïve generalizations about “renewing” all aspects of society and “accelerating” the pace of development. They also involve more strenuous “five year plans.” The plans suggest a certain frenzied illogic in governmental thinking: the Soviet Union had to get better in each five-year cycle, no matter how bad things had gotten in the previous cycle.

On the other hand, the USSR was at least paying lip service to ideas related to consumer desires, democratization, and active citizenship. And in a sense, the country was reaching out to the West for support in the form of increased trade. What is more, the Soviet Union really was making concrete proposals for the improvement of international relations, something the pamphlet touched upon, even as it took gentle stabs at the Western powers for not fully reciprocating. But sadly, the Communist system was set up to fail. The political system ensured that the rural soviets as well as the Supreme Soviet were passive entities, rubber stamps for executive power, whether it came from a despot like Stalin or a would-be reformer like Gorbachev.

The USSR in NYC

The Soviet Union invented a new language that Orwell might have called New Speak. Soviet political leaders spoke to one another using Marxist phraseology, and spoke to the Russian public in a glowing torrent of propaganda. Eventually, the emptiness of Russia’s official discourse collapsed on itself. Everyone knew that the Pravda, the Moscow newspaper named for the Russian word for “truth” meant just the opposite. People preferred to seek out literature smuggled in from the West, printed illegally at home, or gleaned from jammed foreign radio signals.

At some point, the discrepancy between Russian reality and Russian words became unsustainable. Soviet propaganda was also directed outward, to its allies as well as its enemies. A USSR New York exhibition pamphlet, printed in 1959, illustrates the eerie quality of the Soviet effort to convince Americans that the Soviet Union was outperforming the American one and would soon surpass it. While admitting that Russia had not yet built a Communist society—which would presumably make any comparison with flawed capitalist states absurd—the pamphlet reminds readers that the country was the first socialist state in the world, and had overcome a long legacy of economic and cultural backwardness to become the world’s second largest industrial power.

Moreover, Russia had used socialist planning principles to increase gross industrial output by “36 times since 1913.” Its scientists had engineers had already made important contributions to diverse fields, including agriculture, optical instrumentation, engineering industries, nuclear medicine, the biological sciences, and machinery. The pamphlet also emphasized Soviet successes in the production of iron, steel, chemicals, and various forms of energy. And, if one cared to listen to friendly Russian exhibition staff members, they would tell Americans about Soviet advances in electronics, semi-conductors, radio and television applications, and infrared instruments.

Best of all, the pamphlet graciously reminded Americans that the Soviet Union, and not the United States, had launch the first “artificial satellite” into space, Sputnik, a milestone in the long history of human accomplishment.