ONE afternoon I drove back from the American datcha with the wife of an official in the German Embassy. She told me she believed a European war inevitable, owing to the fact that the German economic system was designed for one thing and one thing alone: expansion.

“Of course, if we could get an agreement with Russia, perhaps it would serve as an outlet for us. Many people in the German Foreign Office favour it, but Hitler is so anti-Bolshevik, he won’t give his consent.”

“But what about the Soviets?” I said in surprise. “Surely they wouldn’t consider it?”

“Oh yes. The Russians are willing. They are afraid of coming up against Germany.”

That was February 1939, six months before Russia signed her non-aggression pact with Germany. At the time I didn’t take the rumour seriously; too much bitterness seemed to block the way. But observers were already noting significant changes in Russia’s policy. It was swinging, pendulum-like, from an aggressive policy of world revolution to a negative policy of self-defence. That February, the army discarded its oath to the world proletariat and, for the first time, bound its allegiance solely to the Soviet Fatherland. It was also noted that when Hitler attacked Czechoslovakia in his pre-Munich Nuremberg speech the Soviet press dismissed the occasion with only four lines. What was happening? Was Russia forsaking Communism and going Fascist herself?

The answer to Russia’s policy, both internal and external, both then and now, lay in one thing: those empty shops, those queues and those dark, overcrowded dwelling-houses.

The struggle in which the Soviet Union was involved that winter, on the eve of its swing-over to Germany, was the same struggle upon which the country embarked in 1928 when it announced its five-year plan; namely, the struggle to industrialize a vast backward agricultural country with a mixture of dozens of nationalities and a largely primitive people.

But in 1939 the problem had become more acute than ever. Heavy industry was showing little increase, a fact which foreign engineers attributed to the workers’ inability to handle highly complicated machinery; to wastage, bureaucracy, and a general lack of co-ordination—difficulties which were a result of an attempt to superimpose twentieth-century industrialization from above rather than let it develop gradually from below.

The Soviet Union was discovering gradually and painfully that Marxism was not a philosophy designed for an agricultural country; it was a philosophy of distribution rather than of production. The expert engineer was proving far more important to Soviet industrialization than the zealous party man; and for this reason the power of the Communist party was steadily declining. Although Communism was still the philosophy of the nation, in 1939 the party resembled nothing so much as a vast publicity organization to sell the Stalin régime to the worker.

These salesmen were invaluable in bolstering up the sagging morale of the people; impressing on them the iniquities of the capitalist system and assuring them they were better off than the workers of other countries. But the Communist theory “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” had been discarded for the more workable, but un-Communistic, slogan “from each according to his ability, to each according to his worth”.

This meant that the majority of Soviet workers and peasants were paid not regular salaries but by piece-work and labour days. The average worker’s wage was estimated at 240 roubles a month, but the minimum wage was sometimes as low as 130 roubles. The purchasing power of the rouble was roughly estimated at threepence. (The official exchange was 25 roubles to the pound.) Food prices were so out of proportion that if meat had been available every day (which it was not) it would have cost the average working man a quarter of his weekly salary.

The majority of workers and peasants lived on bread, which was kept at a low fixed price, on cabbage, soup and porridge. Although rents were cheap, in Moscow it was impossible for a worker to rent more than a few feet of floor-space. Sometimes three or four families shared the same room. When a Russian girl (who worked at one of the embassies), known to be unhappily married, was asked why she didn’t divorce her husband, she replied that since the law forbade her to turn him out of their living quarters she was afraid he might get married again and add an extra person to an already crowded room.

The important Soviet police official or bureaucrat had none of these inconveniences. He was rewarded not only by a far larger salary than an ordinary worker, but in his ability to get a room or a flat to himself; to get vegetables and meat without standing in a queue; to have a car and chauffeur at his disposal rather than waiting endlessly for overcrowded buses. When manufactured goods appeared on the market, he had the first and usually the last choice. Since positions of power in the Soviet Union carried with them privileges which in other countries would be considered everyday necessities of life, the struggle that went on for bureaucratic jobs was fierce and ruthless.

Although the Communist party performed an indispensable job as Stalin’s “super-salesmen” they had little power in running the country. Stalin ruled and he ruled by means of the secret police. G.P.U. agents were interwoven in the fabric of every dwelling-house, of every factory and village. Any rebellion or dissatisfaction with the régime was conveniently bracketed as ‘anti-Communist’. Although the constitution of the Soviet Government proclaimed freedom of speech, a volume issued that winter, entitled A History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, carefully explained that disagreement equalled diversion; that diversion equalled dissension; and that dissension equalled sabotage. Thus, when it was considered advantageous to liquidate a rival it could always be done on an orthodox basis.

In view of the difficult conditions, and the fact that the Soviet Union was abandoning many Socialist principles in practice, there is little doubt that some of the old Bolsheviks  came into disagreement with Stalin on methods of procedure. There even may have been plans to take the control of the government in their own hands. Since it would have been impossible for Stalin to eliminate Lenin’s “old guard” on grounds of disagreement, it became necessary to fabricate stories of treason and connivance with foreign powers. It is interesting to notice that Mr. Ivanov, one of the defendants in a trial in 1938, was accused of ‘wrecking’ by means of putting ground glass and nails in the butter. This evidence was received with immense satisfaction, as it seemed to explain the great scarcity of butter throughout the country.

The purge not only swept through Soviet political and army life, but continued like a mighty avalanche through the industrial life into the most humble home. The Russian imagination had been fired; and with ambition and envy playing a prominent part in the ‘denouncing’ of rivals, the purge continued until it grew out of all proportion. In the winter of 1939, Yezhoff replaced Beriya as the head of the G.P.U., and there was an effort to bring it to a halt. But it was too late. Russia was weak and exhausted. The question as to whether the Soviet Union was abandoning Communism could be answered in a single phrase: the Soviet Union was struggling to keep alive.

One of the articles I had been sent to Moscow to write was a review of the Red Army. How had this internal upheaval affected the Soviet striking force? The Red Army was numbered at over two million, with an estimate that, in the event of a general mobilization, twelve million men could be placed in the field. Many people, overwhelmed by these figures, regarded the Soviet Union as one of the most powerful forces in Europe.

As Soviet garrisons and armaments factories were closely guarded secrets, there was no opportunity to get first-hand information; one could only draw deductions. But the breakdown of agricultural machinery, the lack of repair shops, the irregularity of fuel supplies, and the fact that a Soviet-manufactured car could not be relied upon beyond 7,000 miles led one to doubtful conclusions. Most of the railways had been left in the same condition as when they had been taken over by the Bolsheviks. The total mileage of paved roads in the whole of the Soviet Union was equal to the paved mileage in Rhode Island—the smallest of America’s forty-eight States.

Judging from these things alone, in an article which was published in the New York Times, I wrote:

Apart from the economic conditions there was also the purge to reckon with. The purge had cut a deeper swathe through the Army than through any other branch of Soviet life. That winter, military experts calculated that 75 per cent, of the officers of the rank of colonel and above had been liquidated in the two previous years. The extent of this sweep became significant when, out of the eight officers who court-martialled Tukachevski and his seven colleagues, six were themselves later executed; that when the Red Army paraded past Stalin in November 1937, officers were not allowed to carry guns in their holsters.

Stalin’s accusations of treason rang a false note throughout the world and there seemed to be no logical explanation for the motives compelling him to disrupt the very forces upon which the security of the nation rested. Upon examining the gradual change in the structure of the army during the past twenty years, however, one found a thread of consistency running through the Soviet upheaval.

In 1937 the officer class of the Red Army represented a privileged and powerful clique. This was a far cry from the early twenties, when, under the guidance of Trotsky, little distinction was made between officers and men. In those days officers received the same pay as their subordinates: they wore no badge or rank, they cleaned their own boots, shared the mess-rooms, and took an oath which bound them to the International World Proletariat.

The change in the structure of the Red Army was largely due to the influence of German militarism. Until Hitler came into power in 1933, the Soviet Union worked in close collaboration with Germany. As early as 1923 German aeroplane factories were constructed in Russia, while from the date of the Rapallo Treaty onwards hundreds of German military experts conducted training schools in the Soviet Union. Beneath the methodical German influence fraternizing between officers and men ceased and the officers gradually became segregated into a class of their own.

Although military collaboration between Russia and Germany ended with the advent of the Nazi party, the Soviet Union continued to build on the established foundations. Ideas once considered bourgeois gradually crept back; officers’ pay was increased, medals were reintroduced, and many of the old uniforms revived.

In 1937 Stalin was suddenly confronted by an army clique with a visibly swelling power. Although it is extremely doubtful that members of this group were conniving abroad, there may have been dissension among them as to the methods which Stalin was employing in his ruthless and whirlwind efforts to industrialize the country. It is apparent that Stalin foresaw a force which might eventually threaten his own position; and waging the same preventive war with which he stripped the Communist party of its leaders and, later, rid industrial forces and police organizations of their chiefs, he struck a blow at the Army.

Indeed, there was evidence that for some time Stalin had been concerned in transforming the Army into a thoroughly passive instrument. In 1925, 85 per cent, of the Army was composed of peasants, and the remainder of industrial workers, which was more or less in proportion to the nation’s division of labour. Since the famines of 1932–33, however—a direct result of the Government’s ruthless collectivization of the land—the loyalty of the peasant population was evidently considered of a dubious character, for now nearly 50 per cent, of the Army was recruited directly from the ranks of industrial workers. Also significant was the fact that the number of Communists had increased from 19 per cent, in 1925 to over 50 per cent, in 1939; in fact, most of the motorized troops were recruited exclusively from among the latter.

Although the Soviet Government argued that the purge had strengthened the army by the elimination of dissenting elements, it was obvious it could scarcely have increased its technical efficiency. The promotion of junior officers to fill the gaps in the higher commands created such a dearth in the lower ranks that Vorishiloff was forced to order 10,000 cadets, who had not completed their courses at the military schools, to be enrolled as lieutenants.

The reintroduction of political commissars was also a factor of significance. The functions of the commissars were more or less obsolete until they were revived by a decree in May 1937. From that date on, they had equal authority with the commanding officers. They countersigned all orders and in extreme cases could even veto plans for an attack. An indication of their power was revealed by the fact that Red Army soldiers took an oath binding their allegiance to “Commanding Officers, Commissars and Superiors”.

The efficiency of an army operating under such dual control was obviously questionable. In 1918 when the commissars were first installed to prevent the desertion of White officers who were forced to serve in the Bolshevik ranks, the difficulties arising from the dual relationship were revealed in a letter written by Trotsky:

There was no reason to suppose that in twenty years the human element has altered to such an extent that difficulties such as these would not arise again. But it wasn’t until I went to Finland the following winter that I had a chance to judge the Red Army from experience rather than hypothetical reasoning.