The myth that Russia before the Revolution was an economic desert.

       The widely accepted propaganda cliches have it that under communism, for all its wretchedness, the Russian people are better off than before 1917; that until Bolshevism came to redeem it, Russia was a primitive land of unrelieved political savagery in an economic Sahara.

       To the Kremlin this legend has been tremendously valuable. On the one hand, Soviet accomplishments glow more brightly against a backdrop of "darkest Russia." On • the other, it provides the Great Alibi for failures and depravities, explaining away hunger, concentration camps, cruel officialdom, indeed everything abhorrent, by reference to tsarist legacies and conditioning.

       Russian Bolsheviks don't cease to be Russians. Historic perspective is indispensable. It is important to compare the Soviet half-century with the half-century preceding—and the exercise leaves gaping holes in the communist mythology.

       Not many things about Russia, or about any nation for that matter, are beyond dispute. But one of them is that life under the old dispensation, granting its hardships, was freer and more tolerable than under the new. One need only read a few of the Russian classic novels, even those bitter about the life of their time, to see this. Whatever yardstick is used—-economic, political, cultural, or spiritual— the pre-Bolshevik past stacks up as humanly more attractive. Given a choice based on fact rather than propaganda fable, only Russians with a relish for suffering could prefer the present system. (83)

       One of the prime Soviet victories has been its success in blackening the character of historic Russia. There was, of course, plenty of black in it, but the myth-makers have inked out significant white areas and turned all the grays into a uniform jet black. Russia was backward and reactionary compared to any modern democratic nation— but the comparison is with Soviet Russia.

       A number of circumstances conspired to fix a distorted image of the old Russia on the mental retina of mankind. The most important of these, of course, was the large element of truth in the grim portrait of a country with low living standards, censorship, pogroms, secret police, the Siberian exile system. ln addition, the West drew its limited and selective ideas about Russia from sources which, for high-minded reasons, were intent on exhibiting the country in the worst "possible light.

       To begin with, Russian literature was to an extraordinary degree a literature of protest, using its art to expose and indict the status quo and nourish a spirit of revolt. It was as if the world were to judge America solely by Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Jungle, and The Grapes of -Wrath. Then "there was the flaming propaganda of Russian liberals and revolutionists, at home and in the emigration, during the pre-Bolshevik half-century. Finally, there were the writings and lectures of hundreds of foreign champions of the old Russian revolutionary movements.

       I do not suggest that these sources were false, but only that taken together they presented an exaggerated, one-sided picture. One does not have to perfume the past to recognize that in most things the old order was superior to the new. Its political, intellectual, moral, and spiritual climate was far more wholesome and hopeful than today's. Even in its bleakest periods, such as the reigns of Nicholas .1 and Alexander III, Russia was not remotely the total tyranny it became through Bolshevism. Relatively at least, the life of the mind was strong and creative, the self-respect of the individual and his rights under law better safeguarded.

       There is poverty and oppression in both Russias, the old and the new, but the differences in degree tell the story. (84) Before 1917, open dissent from the official ideology was not only possible but fashionable; social ideas were being ardently explored; cultural interchange with the outside world was wide and unbroken; simple subsistence was taken for granted by the overwhelming mass of people, especially in the villages; a vigorous opposition press and opposition parties were in being; labor unions were active and gaining strength; the frontiers were comparatively open for Russians to leave and foreigners to enter.

       Merely to mention a few such facts is to point up the contrast with Soviet conditions. A Soviet citizen magically transported backward in time to1913 or even 1900 would find personal freedoms and political liberties that are unthinkable in his present setting. He would find evils and injustices—but also that they were recognized as such and that it was possible to protest, fight, and organize for change.

       It is around industrial growth, in the first place, that the communist boasts revolve. Let us therefore begin by examining that aspect.

Economic Upsurge

       The Kremlin has spread the legend that its industrialization began on what Stalin called pustoye myesto, or empty place. It has ignored the fact that "Soviet economic expansion did not improve or enrich the life of the masses but, on the contrary, made their lot more bleak and servile. It ignored the fact that as heavy industry prospered, people were denied simple necessities, including an adequate diet. But even in the dehumanized, statistical terms the legend is warped. For it rests on a false premise about the starting point.

       In truth Russian economy in its last pre-Bolshevik decades was in dramatic upsurge. While the country entered the industrial race late, it made remarkable progress, at a speed greater than that of some West European countries. "The Russian revolution of 1917 came not at the end of a long period of stagnation and decay, but rather after more than a half-century of the most rapid and comprehensive economic progress," according to Dr. Harry Schwartz, the New York Times specialist on Russia. (85) "The average annual rates of growth of industrial output in Russia between 1885 and 1889, and again between 1907 and 1913, substantially exceed the corresponding rates of growth during the same period in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. Rapid development was a characteristic feature of the whole period from 1861 to 1914."

       More than four and a half million people were engaged in the non-agricultural economy before World War I. Despite its technical backwardness, agricultural productivity was growing most impressively since the turn of the century. The peasants were not only feeding the national but providing huge surpluses for export.

       Ironically, it was Lenin, in his book on Russian capitalism, in 1899, who stressed the high tempo of the "technical revolution" then under way. He aligned statistics to prove that industry was expanding faster in his country than in the rest of Europe, and in come respects faster than in the United States.

       In 1912, Russia was second only to the United States in total railroad mileage. General industrial output increased by 19.1 per cent in the last full pre-war year, 1912-1913—which is close to the annual rate in the First Five-Year Plan and higher than in any subsequent year. When quality factors and the dependability of statistics are taken into account, the natural industrial growth was greater than under communism. Moreover, what is important from the ordinary man's point of view, it held true not only for heavy but for light or consumer industry.

       There is no reason for assuming that the same rate of acceleration would have continued without revolution, and without the extreme exploitation and mass slaughter that marked the process under the Soviets. Just before the First World War started, in 1914, one of the foremost European economists, a Frenchman, Edmond Thery, wrote his book, Transformation of Russia. Though he was no admirer of the country in other respects, he concluded that if Russia maintained the [same rate of] growth {that] it had established, it would surely outstrip all other European nations by the middle of this century. (86) He was especially impressed by the rapid rise in farm output, "achieved without the aid of an expensive foreign labor force—as was the case, for instance, in Brazil, the United States, and even Canada."

       The fact is that a normal industrial revolution had been under way for fifty years when World War I and political revolution intervened. In 1900, a Baltic German scholar, Baron Korff, wrote: "In the twenty years since I last traveled along the Volga, much has changed. Villages that then consisted of a few cabins are now towns with forty thousand inhabitants and well-paved streets . . . . The riverboats are huge, with two or three decks, like Mississippi steamers. Samara, Kazan and Nijni-Novgorod resemble the port of Hamburg."

       After the Second World War, in a flare-up of national patriotism, publication of a number of books on the pre-Revolutionary economy was finally permitted. One of these, in 1950, was Development of Russia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, by Professor P. Khromov. It contains tables showing impressive and steady growth from 1860 to 1917 in population, heavy industry, mining, railroads, and foreign trade. These findings have been confirmed by a recent American study, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia, by Theodore H. von Laue, published in 1963 by the Columbia University Press.

       In the nine years between the Russo-Japanese War and the outbreak of World War II, Russian industrial product doubled: It was exceeded in Europe only by Britain, Germany, and France. Many Russian products excelled their foreign equivalents and were in demand all over the world. Russian-made locomotives and railroad cars were among the world's best; high-grade automobiles, motorcycles, and bicycles were being manufactured. The Russian-American aviation pioneer, Igor Sikorsky, has attested that "aeronautical science and industry in Russia before 1914 were on a par "with America in that period. Several world records were established by airplanes designed and produced in Russia at that time."

       Nor were the growing ranks of industrial workers mere exploited robots, in effect helots of the state, as they are today. (87) Labor's awareness of its rights and its power was greater than in the corresponding stage of industrialization in any other country. In her classic American analysis, Workers Before and After Lenin, published in 1941, Manya Gordon wrote: "Every increase in the size of the industrial plant and the number of employees registered a corresponding increase in strikes. In other words, the workers were always conscious of their right to a share of the increase in profits." In some years the number of strikers in plants employing more than a thousand people was more than twice their entire labor force; they struck, that is, more than twice a year. This is not exactly the record of the hopelessly cowed and backward proletariat pictured by a later regime that prohibits and punishes strikes. A Russian law of June 1, 1882, forbade factories to employ children under twelve, and limited work for children of fifteen or under to eight hours a day in two four-hour shifts. In France at that time child labor of twelve hours a day was legal. While a few other countries outdistanced Russia in labor legislation by 1917, it was far more humane and progressive than under the Soviets.

       But the old Russia, its present rulers argue, was heavily dependent on foreign capital and therefore "semi-colonial." This is true—but irrelevant. All young industrial societies have relied on capital and technical help from advanced countries. The United States in an equivalent stage of development also drew heavily on foreign, especially British, capital. Moreover, Lenin was no less eager than the tsars before him to lure foreign money into Soviet industry—witness his policy of "concessions" to outside entrepreneurs. Stalin, although his access to foreign capital was limited, could barely have gotten his Five-Year Plan off the ground without capitalist machinery, plans, management, and skills. Now and always, underdeveloped areas have turned to foreign investors, offering tax and other inducements to encourage them.

       Russian agriculture was still burdened by remnants of feudal practices. All the same, by 1916, small-holdings of 135 acres or less comprised 71 per cent of the cultivated areas; excluding forest-holdings, the percentage rises to 80. (88) Individual peasants owned 82 per cent of all cattle and 86 percent of all horses. "The peasant," Sir Maurice Baring, long-time resident in and student of Russia, wrote, "not only tills the arable land but he owns the greater part of it . . . . Agricultural colleges are spreading and the number of agricultural students is every day increasing."

       In one respect at least, Russian agriculture led the rest of ' the world, namely agrarian cooperatives of every type. By the last year of the Romanoff era, some ten million peasants belonged to cooperative credit associations, and there were over twenty thousand consumer cooperatives with over six million members. A Carnegie Foundation report in 1929, referring to the pre-Revolution period, declared: "No other country possessed cooperative organization as broad in scope and affecting the interests of so many classes of the population." The movement was especially strong in its appeal to farmers.

       Without doubt the old Russia was ripe for change. 'Absolutism and its centralized bureaucracy hampered its economic upsurge. It was necessary to clear the road for dynamic and social forces already in existence. This was universally recognized by Russian economists and many political leaders. Instead, unhappily, the road was not cleared but demolished: the greater absolutism and more centralized bureaucracy of Bolshevism was inflicted on the nation.

       Lenin, as is well known, regarded electrification as the most vital need of Russia. In 1920, his regime set up GOELRO, a planning commission for this purpose. The commission did not have to start from scratch, but admittedly based its work on existing pre-revolutionary plans that included great hydroelectric projects on the Dnieper, in the Caucasus, and other places. In transportation, too, Soviet planners started with projects worked up in the last tsarist years.

       The evidence is conclusive that Russia was preparing vast industrial advances before war interrupted the process. (89) The plain fact is that the Bolsheviks took over a young but vigorous economy, with experienced manpower, technological literacy, an industrious population, an educated class of high intellectual caliber—in a gigantic country well endowed with natural resources. To equate a primitive African or Asian country with the pre-war Russia of 1913, as communist agitators are doing, is preposterous.

       We need only project the curve of progress as of 1914— in industry, agriculture, science, education—into the future for half a century to realize that the country, if it had been spared the agonies of totalitarianism, the colossal waste of collective ownership, and the paralyzing effects of rigid dogmas, would have been far ahead of the present Soviet Union. And this without such lovely "sacrifices" as millions of deaths, slave labor camps, and state-feudal serfs on the land.

       Professor Hugh Seton-Watson has written: "The Soviet Union has achieved magnificent successes by virtue of the great talents of the people and the great resources of the Russian soil, in spite of the dogma of Lenin and Stalin." Notwithstanding the "economic reforms" being reluctantly experimented with nowadays, that dogma and its inherent limitations have not been abandoned, for the simple reason that to do so would undermine and in the end destroy the communist regime.

       The Kremlin cannot reasonably blame its economic difficulties on a low economic base, on the "dark past." The base, as we have seen, was not as low as the legend pretends. Czechoslovakia had one of the most advanced economic systems in Europe, yet when communized it quickly showed the same faults and failures—and is now in desperation resorting to the same reforms—as the USSR. The trouble quite clearly is with communist theory, wherever it is applied.