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p “But why Russia?" they exclaimed. And I replied, "Because I wish to be in the most interesting place in the world at the most interesting time of the world.” I would be for even the briefest period in the swing of this momentous event of history, this pioneer experiment of changing the economic basis of society. The danger is past—for the moment, the doubt is entirely past, the goal is assured, but the thrill, the inspiration, the wonder of it still are felt, in what may appear to the [un]imaginative a hum-drum workers’ world. Just here are the thrill and the inspiration. It is a workers’ world. They are working for themselves and not for a "boss.” They are building for their children and not for an alien generation of the future. They are building, not a hum-drum world but one that offers to the workers all the fullness of life that now is in the grasp of only the privileged. And the very word worker is shedding the limitation of its meaning and coming to signify the whole people working together constructively, peasants and industrial workers, artists, teachers and scientists, without distinction of class or of reward, with equal educational opportunities and equal share in the cultural advantages that are the sum of modern civilization.

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p The danger and doubt are past, but outside they are still wondering, Why Russia?—why that dire and dangerous land? They warned me of every possible calamity, from chronic intermittent revolution as they conceived it, through famine and disease, to espionage, that bogey of the guilty conscience. They urged every precaution, from smallpox injection to bobbing my hair. Being no more venturesome than my advisors, but because of sympathetic investigation rather better informed, I neglected these precautions, and yet in the words of a home-town Liberal, was "lucky enough to get in and out in safety.” To me it was rather logic than luck. I have no dangerous adventures, no hair-breadth escapes of which to boast,—much nevertheless that is inspiriting to remember, much that is satisfying to know, and beautiful to cherish, a knowledge at first hand of the idealistic reconstruction, through struggle and sacrifice, toward a new and juster world. Curious! —that just this Communist group, rejecting the old beliefs founded on faith in divine revelation, and basing its creed squarely on science,—rejecting a God and the divinity of a Christ, yet carries Christian principles, as no Christian people has done, into economic relations, interpreting the brotherhood of man not in mystic but in economic terms, establishing production not for profit but for use, substituting for the Capitalist concept of a society of exploiters and workers, that of a fellowship of workers for the benefit of all alike. They make no claims, however, to an ethical idealism. Quite frankly they recognize the sordid classstruggle and the slaves’ need of breaking their own way to freedom.

p To get a fair impression of progress, one must note 11 not only at what point a people has arrived, but must consider how far it has come, what sort of way it has traveled, and Russia in the last decade has traveled a rough and perilous road from almost nowhere. I did not seek miracles, but it seemed I had found them. Remember Czarist Russia, that enormous backward country, sprawling over a sixth of the earth, its vast resources hardly touched, its horizoned steppes hardly furrowed with the crude peasant ploughs, with almost no agricultural development, and a huge illiterate population of many races and tongues. The peasant masses, nominally freed from serfdom, were yet held by their obligations to the land-owners, receiving only enough of the product of their toil to keep alive. The same feudal concept that held the peasant in peonage to the landlord dominated the idea of domestic relations and the civil status of women, and the function of the church. The industrial workers formed a new and minority class just evolving into importance for the development of the country.

p To this unwieldy Russia, with its semi-feudal character and its inefficient government, came the war. And as a result of the havoc and misery wrought by the war, came the Revolution, the spontaneous revolt of the ignorant masses against unendurable conditions, and then the redemption from chaos through the seizure of control by the able Communist leadership. Came then counter-revolution and civil war, and foreign invasion, came drought and famine and epidemic,—and the blockade. Not only could no food enter, no drugs or medical aid, but almost more fatal, no machinery for field and factory and reconstruction. There was no transportation even, to carry the 12 scanty crops from one end to the other of the faminewasted land. The devastation was complete. The Imperialist Powers had been remorseless in their determination to wreck the new government and discredit the Communist idea. This is the Nowhere from which Workers’ Russia has staggered. This is the Nothing on which the Sovyets have had to reconstruct. By some miracle, the government has weathered this tornado of destruction, this curse of drought and plague, and has struggled steadily forward, until today Russia appears to be the only country of Europe on the rising path.

p But there is not yet Communism in Russia. When the Revolution was established, and for a period maintained, the critics of Marx used that very fact to discredit Marxism. For Marxian theory holds that Communism cannot be established independently in any one country against the opposition of the Capitalist world, least of all in a country that is industrially backward. The Bolsheviks had hoped for world revolution to establish their own, but the world proletariat failed them, failed itself. The German was captured by the bourgeois Social-democrats, the Italian by the Fascisti, our own needed no recapture, as it had never ventured to run at large, feeding tamely from hand in the paddock, meekly responding to the bit and spurs. With this disappointment, Marxian theory triumphed,—sorrily triumphed,—and the first effort failed for the time. There was a period of so-called Military Communism, when each citizen gave compulsory service, receiving his payok from the Government,—hardly enough to hold existence in those famine days, but at least no one feasted while others starved.

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p Then at last, when military intervention and starvation failed to break this determined government, the Capitalist Powers tried to kill it with kindness. This may seem a harsh accusation, and yet what other interpretation can be placed upon their policy of feeding the starving children who had in part escaped death for disease and deformity, through the year’s blockade these Christian Powers had maintained against them? Relief parties went in to "show them our way,” trade relations were established, and country after country of Europe, for its own commercial good, recognized this very obvious government. With these new conditions, Russia in 1921 temporarily adopted what is known as the New Economic Policy, or, as it is called, the N. E. P. or Nep, permitting private trade, and encouraging private capital, for the purpose of developing its resources and building up its industries, but keeping control of all such development. The Government owns practically all the land and housing, the transportation and public utilities, all the resources and basic industries, so that the new policy may not result in a reversion to the Capitalist system of exploitation and individual profit. At the same time it disfranchises the trader and profiteer, and establishes the transitional "Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” In the flexibility that such a policy illustrates, lies the strength of Sovyet statesmanship. They do not force abstract theory unyieldingly against an existing situation. They face facts, they meet realities, they deal with conditions as they are.

p Thus all conditions in Russia today are transitional, all policies tentative. This is as true of human relations as of economic relations. Art and education are 14 experimental. The psychology itself of the people is in transition from its old feudal viewpoint. This the Government has had to keep in sight in establishing all its laws and acts. This we too must have in mind in considering Sovyet policies. In this transition which Russia is experiencing, she seems to have skipped many of the historical evolutionary steps which theoretically must be made. The rapid economic development of the world, the growing insolence of world imperialism may have been factors, historical experience perhaps another,—the ability gained to analyze the failure of the attempted proletarian revolutions of the past, especially that of France, and its conversion into a bourgeois victory.

p And the immediate Proletarian Revolution has made possible many minor transitions which elsewhere are still slowly in process. As Russia has leapt across the period of the bourgeois revolution, lived through in our own and other countries, straight from feudalism, as it were, to Communism, as she missed the slow evolutionary industrial period, and received her industrial system full-grown from the West, as her women, unawakened to the struggle for equality which our Western women still wage, received it automatically with the economic freedom of the workers, so too is religion undergoing a rapid and fundamental change, without the intervening struggle the Western Church is making. While our intellectuals of the church have long been striving valiantly to retain the old beliefs in modified form, by “reconciling” them with science, and so to save religion from the total,wreck the fundamentalists would make by their inflexibility of interpretaion, the same effort in Russia has been sudden and feeble, and already has 15 almost ceased. The Communists reck little of " modernism" and “fundamentalism”—their fundament is economics, their modernism science. The new "Living Church" •shows little vitality, and the young generation has made the leap from superstition direct to atheism without effort, while we flounder in an intellectual struggle that gives promise of a long transition, coexistent with the bourgeois state.

p Through all this confusion of change and compromise, through slow advance and strategic retreat, never for a moment does Workers’ Russia deviate from the path toward Communism, never for a moment does the Government forget the basic class-struggle, nor neglect to fortify the country industrially, militarily and psychologically against world imperialism.

p These are the general ideas I have gained of Sovyet Russia. Against this background my impressions were formed. And perhaps these impressions can be most vividly shared by setting them down in their freshness as I recorded them in the form of diary letters,—facts and occurrences, and my own immediate reactions. The most interesting place in the world at the most interesting time of the world,—I found it nothing less, a whole great nation "reasoning together" to establish a system from which should be eliminated the exploitation of man by man, to work out a logical scientific theory by practical application. The mere elimination of the profit motive, that is what Revolution means to them, that is what Sovyet Russia stands for. Naturally the exploiters will not join in such a reasoning together, and so first they must be deprived of economic control. Hence the violence and destruction 16 and chaos of the Proletarian Revolution, the rising of the workers, and the armed resistance of the bourgeoisie. And after the dual terror,—the victory of the oppressed, the government of, by and for the "workers-by-hand-andbrain.” I found what I went to seek,—the most interesting place at the most interesting time of all history.

p A self-appointed educational mission was my excuse for credentials, obtained—after three years’ futile effort for “recognition”—through a complaisant agricultural unit, whose project includes education, and whose educational aims rather remotely include music, and so, relevantly though somewhat casually, included me. For Russia is not hospitable to the merely curious, to the idle traveler. No one is welcome who cannot prove that he will be of more help than hindrance, and above all, that he has no counter-revolutionary purpose. Our party sailed on a little boat from New York direct to Libau, and as the passenger list was small, we formed a fair proportion. Many of the others too were Russia-bound,—returning Russians, and small American groups going out for reconstruction work. So properly my impressions began en route, and are recorded as an integral part of my experiences.

If there seems too strong an accent of Youth in the picture, too great an insistence on banner, tramp and drum, —well, youth with the spirit and challenge of youth is the most conspicuous feature of Moscow. The banners flaunt its hope and faith, the roll of drums is the constant revolutionary call to the proletarian youth of the world, to the builders of the future.

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A MOSCOW DIARY