Moscow

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE Russians won the war by concentrating on the barest essentials and ruthlessly casting aside everything that had no direct relation to the war effort. Among the temporary victims of the wartime discard were the Marxist ideologists and Party propagandists. The slogan “Workers of the world, unite!" was removed from the mastheads of the Army newspapers and a new national anthem was substituted for the “ Internationale.”

The moratorium on Marxist ideology lasted until victory appeared certain. Communism was revived as a living faith just before the war ended. The press and radio then launched an intensive campaign for the revival of Marxism. New theoretical publications were issued and the anticipated purge of the Party, industry, and arts was on.

The ideological revival and housecleaning, now three years in development, were dramatized in August by Andrei Zhdanov’s severe blast against Georgei Alexandrov, Party philosopher and chief of the powerful Central Committee’s Press and Propaganda Department.

Zhdanov, after conferring with Stalin and the country’s most eminent philosophers, declared Alexandrov too “idealistic" in his views and too much under the influence of foreign thinkers. To be subservient to foreign thought is now a capital sin in the Soviet Union. Consequently, Alexandrov’s popular book on the history of philosophy, which had previously won the approval of the Party theorists, was adjudged inadequate in its treatment of materialism and was relegated to the steadily swelling red “Index Expurgator ius.”

Incidentally, Zhdanov, who was isolated in Leningrad during the siege, has re-emerged as the ideological generalissimo of the Soviet Union, a role he played before the war. He is now universally considered the number two man in the Party hierarchy while Molotov is Stalin’s first deputy in the government. Should Stalin pass out of the picture, it is generally believed that the country would be run by a directory of which Molotov and Zhdanov would be the key men.

“The Soviet Man”

To adjust the post-war Soviet citizen to his new world, the Kremlin, under Zhdanov’s generalship, has thrown its immense agitational apparatus into high gear. The Party and government machines have been purged of ideologically unsuitable officeholders, corruption and inefficiency ferreted out of high and low places, and all propaganda facilities organized to cultivate the freshest creation of Soviet literature — the Soviet Man, carefully distinguished from the Capitalist Man of the West.

The late President Mikhail Kalinin was the first since the German invasion of the U.S.S.R. to make the Russians publicly aware of their doctrinal and political isolation from the West. In a significant private address to Moscow District Party leaders in 1945, which was later published, Kalinin reminded them of the unique economic system of the Soviet Union and of the dangers of “capitalist encirclement.” Although such dangers were recently declared by Stalin to be nonexistent, everything in Soviet propaganda points up the “perils” lurking beyond the frontier.

Russia’s leading scientists, educators, and writers have organized themselves into a new “All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge,” under the directorship of physicist Sergei Vavilov, president of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. The Society, launched early this summer, has already enlisted among its active members practically every articulate Soviet intellectual who can lecture or write. It has taken over the largest auditoriums in the country and will develop a full program of adult education this autumn and winter.

President Vavilov has said that “systematic and intensive labor is required to raise the cultural level of the workers. Fully to eradicate the survivals of capitalism in the consciences of men we must struggle relentlessly and work energetically on the communist education of the people. . . .

“We propose,” he continued, “to explain the foreign policy of the Soviet state, decisively to expose the provocateurs of new wars and aggressions, to unmask the falsehoods and limitations of bourgeois democracy, to show up the reactionary character of the ideology of the contemporary imperialistic bourgeoisie and its reformist lackeys [presumably social democrats]. ... We must disclose the superiority of the Soviet social and political order over capitalism and the achievements of Soviet science, literature, art.”

Soviet housecleaning

Zhdanov’s housecleaning is not a phenomenon in any way comparable to the mass purges of 1936-1938, which involved the physical liquidation of the opposition, mass expulsions from the Party, and thousands of arrests. Little or no opposition to the regime is involved now.

The notorious epithet “enemy of the people” has not been heard since the tragic days of 1938. Archpurist Zhdanov is simply doing a job neglected during the war. In the ideological field, at any rate, no cases of arrest are known. Writers and artists who have not toed the new cultural line have been simply reprimanded and given another chance.

Arrests are apparently confined to extreme cases of dereliction of duty by state officials who succumbed to wartime temptations when the law-enforcement machinery was inadequate, who took graft, falsified their accounts, or otherwise abused their offices. The economic purge is not under the jurisdiction of the security police but under the new Ministry for State Control.

Penalties, except in cases of embezzlement, are unusually mild for such offenses and ordinarily carry no political implications. It is a reflection of the maturity of the Soviet regime that violations of the law and mores which a few years ago would have been labeled “counterrevolutionary” and severely punished are now no longer considered as menacing the state. They are often dismissed as mere “survivals of capitalism.”

The purge of the Party ranks is apparently nothing but an attempt to weed out members who entered between 1941 and 1944 when the rules were relaxed to admit persons who had distinguished themselves in the war effort without reference to their ideological background. Thus the Party, which had been a fairly exclusive fraternity in 1939, with a membership of 3,800,000, grew to a total of nearly 6,000,000 in 1945. Upon investigation many of the new Communists were found deficient in political knowledge.

In the areas which had been under German occupation there was the additional factor of possible alien influence. In the Ukraine, for example, within two years after liberation, more than 50 per cent of the Party officials were replaced for inefficiency, incompetence, or Ukrainian nationalism.

The writers take their cues

The growth of nationalism was somewhat tolerated during the war, but soon after victory a return to the more orthodox Marxist attitudes was demanded. The latest manifestation of the campaign against what the Russians term “bourgeois” nationalism, as distinguished from the Soviet conception of “national consciousness,” occurred at the July Congress of Soviet Writers.

At that time playwright Alexander Korneichuk, who is also a prominent member of the Ukrainian government, announced the expulsion from the Ukrainian Writers Union of the Jewish writer, Isaac Kipnis, for publishing stories with a Zionist bias. Zionism is still considered a form of Jewish chauvinism or “ bourgeois” nationalism, in spite of the fact that the Soviet government in May officially declared its sympathy for a Jewish national state in Palestine.

The Congress of Writers also took stock of the literary situation since Zhdanov’s 1946 order to rid literature of alien influences and found that the basis for his criticism had been removed. The delegates, of course, approved the Central Committee’s condemnation of: —

1. General adulation of the West and subservience to foreign literary schools and forms.

2. Predominance of plays by foreign dramatists on the Soviet stage.

3. The portrayal of the Soviet Man as “primitive and uncultivated.”

4. The “apoliticalness” of writers.

The Party now requires not only writers and artists, but musicians, scientists, and athletes to be polit ically conscious. Art for art’s sake, sport for sport’s sake, jazz for jazz’s sake are equally taboo. The interests of the people, as defined by the Central Committee, must be served at all times. A writer must glorify the Soviet Man and Soviet patriotism.

Less than a year after Zhdanov’s drastic directive the Congress of Writers has been able to list a substantial number of books in fulfillment of the new line. Among the outstanding examples are Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Tempest and Konstantin Simonov’s Smoke of the Fatherland. Ehrenburg’s novel, whose plot covers wartime France and the Soviet Union, depicts Soviet culture as much superior to that of the West. In Simonov’s book, the hero has lived in the United States and returns to find life in the Soviet Union much more attractive.

Simonov’s play The Russian Question, which is devoted to the portrayal of the depravity of American journalism, is still a smash hit in hundreds of Soviet theaters. Royalties from the play, estimated in the thousands per day, have made the author the richest man in the Soviet Union. A more recent play with an American theme has been completed by Vadim Kozhevnikov. It is highly critical of American occupation policy in Italy.

The regimentation of youth

The Communist Party is making particular efforts to redirect the thinking of post-war youth. The training of youth is the special province of the Komsomol, the Young Communist League, which has an estimated membership of 20 millions. In a recent article Alexei Mikhailov, secretary-general of the Komsomol, argued that “spontaneity” could be no factor in such education because it “might open the door to the contamination of youth by bourgeois ideology, foreign to us.”

Mikhailov expressed the fear that since the end of the war among part of the youth “there have begun to penetrate moods of demobilization, self-satisfaction, philistinism, moods in which the great social tasks facing the people tend to be forgotten. . . . Soil for such moods can arise only when there is no struggle against indifference to politics and the emptiness belched forth by reactionary, bourgeois culture and ideology.”

Three decades after the Revolution, Soviet youth appears less regimented intellectually than German youth probably was soon after the advent of Hitler. Some of the official utterances quoted above have been precipitated by the intellectual and spiritual ferment among both the older and younger generation in the Soviet Union.

Normally, in the absence of ideological prodding, a rich escapist literature might have developed. But if Zhdanov and Mikhailov have their way, as they will, nothing like A Farewell to Arms, Death of a Hero, or All Quiet on the Western Front will be created.

Retreat and mysticism are being ruthlessly discouraged, and potentially disintegrating forces are being successfully combated by the urgency of reconstruction tasks and the “cultural offensive” on all the fronts. The mood the Soviet leadership seeks to engender is expressed in the “March of Youth,” a new, patriotic, popular song: —

Is Russia looking through the curtain?

A series of significant articles appeared during the spring and summer in Pravda which caused some foreign observers to speculate on whether Russian theorists and tacticians are regaining their hope of revolution in Western countries. Such hopes were highest after World War I, particularly for countries like Germany, Italy, France.

On April 17, on the thirtieth anniversary of Lenin’s return from Switzerland to Russia and the enunciation of the famous “April theses" on the Bolshevik seizure of power, B. Ponomarev wrote a long essay on the reasons for Lenin’s success. Comparing the present “revolutionary” situation with the one after World War I, Ponomarev said: “Now, after World War II, the popular masses in foreign countries are also seeking ‘a better social order.’

“The old, pre-war order, characterized by the universal domination of monopoly capital, is fully bankrupt and the wounds inflicted by the war, by German occupation and the transition to peacetime economy, in conditions of planless, anarchistic production, are day by day bringing new sufferings to the people. The answer to the burning question as to which political order can best alleviate the sufferings of the people can be given only by the theory of scientific socialism, by the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.”

Later in the summer, Ponomarev wrote a series of articles in which he bitterly scored the policies of European socialist parties, especially in England and France. He accused them of preparing the ground for fascism and nazism in the past, of boycotting the united-front movements, and, finally, of “selling out” to the American, British, and French “reactionaries.” Belatedly, he proposed a union of Western socialists and Communists in order to avoid a repetition of the events that followed World W ar I.

The suggestion for a new united front has not proved acceptable to British and French socialists. And with the advent of the Marshall Plan, and with its apparently wholehearted acceptance by the Western socialists, the gulf between them and the Communists has widened. An intensification of the ideological warfare between socialists and Communists on a world scale appears to be inevitable. It will not be surprising if a revival of the doctrine of world revolution follows.