Russia's Iron Age
by
[Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $4.00]
WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN merits the gratitude of all students of social and economic experimentation. At the precise moment when thoughtful minds were propelled by the first blind staggers of the depression to grope toward the Russian revolution, seeking inspiration in diagnosing capitalist ills, he produced Soviet Russia — a formulation of questions and potentials. And now, after the same minds have fully grasped the portent of the questions raised (aided perhaps by personal fondness or antipathy for industrial codes), he brings forth Russia’s Iron Age — a series of answers and judgments. For twelve years he has served on the front line. He now folds his tent. He issues an apologia with his usual clarity, comprehensiveness, and a penetration sharpened by the years. True, he writes more freely than in the past, but not in the vein of Now It Can Be Told. Rather does he mark his departure for new fields by taking stock of the sum total of his experience and knowledge to check the credits and debits of the Soviet system. Incidentally, 1934 is the first year since 1917 when empirical judgments on the fundamentals of the system might justifiably be fixed in print. Timeliness, unquestioned authority, and intellectual honesty— these three qualities make Chamberlin’s judgments on Soviet Russia of commanding value to social experimenters everywhere.
As though picking up the thread from his first book, he summarizes the changes wrought by Russia’s Iron Age, 1929-1934, the era of the first five-year plan, of industrialization and collectivization, of dynamic and pitiless transformation, with its great triumphs in terms of steel and concrete, and its great tragedies in terms of human beings. He then proceeds throug nineteen subsequent chapters to analyze and pass judgment on every important aspect of the Soviet régime. Notable among his conclusions are these: —
In polities, that the dictatorship has strengthened; that Soviet terrorism is to be relaxed for a time; that Stalin, the Peter the Great of to-day, is the incarnation of the Iron Age; and that the odds favor Voroshilov rather than Kaganovich as his successor. In industry, that striking achievements in production and building contrast with dismal failure in transport: that the bill is being paid in the form of a distinctly lowered standard of living for Russian people. In agriculture, that the Soviet Government employed the famine of 1932-1933, which it could have averted from its own resources, as an instrument to break the peasants’ resistance to collectivization, that the low point of the agrarian crisis has been passed at a cost of famine, elimination of the kulaks, and a terrific decimation of the country’s live stock. In planning, that the second five-year plan tends to shift the emphasis from quantity to quality, from giantism to decentralization, from the European to the Asiatic regions as weight centre, from extravagant and futile planning to some measure of discretion. In foreign relations, that just because the stakes are so great the much-threatened Soviet-Japanese war may never take place; that the reorientation from Germany to France, entry into the League, and recognition by America, mean that the Soviet Union has abandoned it> self-righteous isolation and ‘arrived in the family of nations; and that the Soviet Union justifies neither the fears of a Red Trade Menace nor the hopes of a Red Trade Promise. In social matters, that the revolution has changed not human nature but human behavior, as the incentives for career, promotion, and power replace old incentives for wealth; that the main problem of the Soviet system is to discover how much individualism must be conceded in order to make a collective system work,
Chamberlin closes with excerpts from his diary, l924-1934. Barring the unpredictable results of a major war, he foresees that Soviet Russia will develop a self-contained economy, which will neither serve as a model for the rest of the world, as its admirers believe, nor go down in violent ruin, as its enemies hope.
The book was evidently not done in one piece. Some sections were written last spring, others in the early summer. But the sweep of the author’s style, his lively humor, and his unfailing stream of anecdotes rush the reader over the infrequent and pardonable failures to coördinate the interpolations with the earlier text. One question only does Chamberlin straddle — the future of religion in Russia. This volume rounds out his record of twelve years of faithful reporting. Since the Soviet system has arrived at what seems like relative stability, it is likely to remain an authoritative interpretation for some years, and be referred to as ‘Chamberlin on Russia.’
BRUCE HOOPER