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"The Socialist Sixth of the World"

Hewlett Johnson.

The capitalist world serves two masters and "both badly. What we describe as "Christian civilisation" attempts to combine the service of God and of Mammon. It is unfortunately neither Christian nor civilised, an its economic system of profit-seeking, "devil-take-the-hindmost" individualism fails disastrously to produce even material plenty. Christian idealism alleviates but cannot prevent the sufferings produced by this system, poverty, insecurity, selfishness, fear, cruelty, conflict and war, and so cynicism and indifference mock even religion.

Communism rejects the profit system and it is vital for us to know how the new system works. The evidence is wildly, conflicting. The apparent creed of Communists, "You cannot serve God or Mammon" is particularly convenient for Mammon, since he is most valiantly defended by the religious.

That is one reason why the Dean of Canterbury is among the most interesting and valuable of Russia's friendly "Critics, but it is not the only reason. His education and expedience of life have been varied and profound. A science degree, apprenticeship and experience as a working engineer, followed by a honours degree at Oxford, theological training, continuous study or social and economic problems, and his service as curate, vicar and deep, have not left him a mere sentimentalist. He can appeal earnestly to moral enthusiasm and feeling, translate facts and theories vividly into terms of human life, and expound an argument lucidly, but he has a predilection for the evidence of experts, scientists, engineers, economists, educationists who have made a first-hand study of their own specialty in Russia. "The Socialist Sixth of the World" is consciously and deliberately sympathetic; but, as the preface explains, the gloomier side is already amply publicised.

Utopia can be quickly and painlessly conjured up from a few quires of paper and pints of ink; it is not so easily to be produced from the raw material of Tsarist Russia. Traditions: a thousand years of ruthless dictatorship, modified in 1906 by a shadowy powerless Dunia elected on a narrow property franchise. Rigid censorship, secret police, chain gangs, concentration camps exiles, executions, Pogroms - the word is Russian - and oppression of religious and national minorities. Of about 70 millions of subject races only the Finns enjoyed a precarious and intermittent autonomy, though the people of Bokhara did have a native autocrat Illiteracy - 75%. Ignorant, apathetic, inefficient peasants, drunken inefficient workers and corrupt inefficient bureaucrats. Appalling poverty, filth, starvation and disease produced a death rate (29.4) higher even than British India, and more than a quarter of all babies died in their first year of life.

Then six years of war, revolution, civil war and blockade, overwhelming defeats and-dismemberment, foreign invasion destruction and disorganisation culminated in the greatest of Russia's periodic famines in 1921.

"And now", say critics, "why not Utopia?"

In an exhausted and impoverished country the Communists turned to work out and develop an untried system. "Purely destructive", said serious critics; in truth they devoted immense energy, enthusiasm and sacrifice to construction. "Electrification", was Lenin's slogan, and the world mocked back, "Electrification", The Russians drove ahead with social reform, education, industrialisation and collectivisation, heavy though the cost was at first. Already they are being repaid with industrial production nine times that of 1913, more and 'better food, page break increased social services, greater efficiency. One significant detail, the death rate has fallen by 40%, far below India's. Democracy is real as far as freedom to criticise and organise within the limits of general policy goes. All races and both sexes have equal opportunity as far as possible.

These are a few crudely generalised details. The Dean concludes with a brief review of the experience of foreign affairs which largely explains the present Soviet attitude. He finds their organisation of the Five Year Plans scientific in method, idealist in purpose and moral in effect. The Russians have been sacrificing the present to the future, and the future, now become the present, has begun ta reward them.