Gareth Jones
[bas
relief by Oleh Lesiuk]
BOOKS
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TOPICAL
GENERAL
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News
Chronicle, London, Friday, October HTTP/1.1 100 Continue
3rd, 1930
The
SNOBBERY
of SOVIET RUSSIA
- - -
By
an Englishman recently returned from Moscow
- - -
Special interest is
given to this article by the repeated reports in the last few days of the
‘execution’ of
‘specialists’ on a charge of sabotaging the food supply
of Soviet Russia.
Stalin
There are many kinds of snobbery. There
is the snobbery of the old lady who reveres of a title and adores blue blood.
There is the snobbery of the American who places the successful
money-maker on a pedestal. Bloomsbury has its own special brand, intellectual snobbery.
Finally there is that snobbery, which, is rampant in Russia today.
THE PRIVILEGED
CLASSES.
The town-worker is the aristocrat the Union of Socialist Soviet
Republics. He sits in the forefront
of the Opera House. He gets the first place in the queue when meat is short.
He alone is sent to a Rest Home or a sanatorium.
It is he who prides himself most upon his birth.
To be able to boast of a working-class origin is far more important to a
Russian than the possession of Norman blood ever was in England. This domination by one small class, the town proletariat, was
the feature, which struck me most during a. recent visit to Soviet Russia. where
a knowledge of Russian helped me to get beneath the surface.
THE BADGE OF RANK.
“What is your father? Is
he a worker or a bourgeois?” How
many Russians asked me that question! A
fat Red Army officer who promised to visit me in London when the World
Revolution broke out, was exceedingly anxious to find out whether I was tainted
with Capitalism or not. When I
disclosed that I was bourgeois he treated me with pity.
He foresaw a grim future for me when the World Union of Socialist Soviet
Republics came into being. Still
he said, since I was an “intellectual” rather than a “capitalist” my
fate might not be so bad.
The new aristocracy of Russia has many privileges.
The greatest of these is the trade union card.
British trade unionists will find it hard to realise what a precious
possession this is; so precious, indeed, that a roaring business has been
carried on in the forging and illicit sale of these cards.
If you have a worker’s trade union card, you receive a far larger share
of bread or meat or butter (if there is any!) than the poor bank clerk or post
office assistant or waitress or shop-girl!
You have reduced prices in cinemas, theatre, concerts, gardens and
restaurants. You only pay two-pence
to visit the Anti-Religious Museum or the Museum of Revolution, whereas the
common herd has to pay four-pence!
FAUX
PAS.
There is a complete
reversal of values in the esteem in which one’s occupation is held, and, of
course, in one’s social position. This is reflected in the language of today. The pre-revolutionary
equivalents of “Monsieur” or “Mademoiselle” are now taboo, and have been
replaced by “Comrade” or “Citizen.”
A small incident in a chemist’s shop in Moscow will illustrate the
change in the forms of address. A
girl who stood next to me, and was probably from the provinces, made the great
faux pas of shouting to the shop-assistant
“Baryshnia” (Mademoiselle)
instead of saying “Comrade” or “Citizen.”
I shall never forget the shocked faces of the customers who heard her,
nor her blushes when she realised that she had given away her bourgeois origin.
An East End costermonger’s wife would not be more embarrassed in a
Bond-street jeweller’s shop than was this middle-class or maybe noble girl in
the Communist co-operative chemist’s store.
BLUE
BLOOD COUNTS.
One evening I went to a Moscow theatre, and was struck by the
snobbishness, which the play revealed. The
impression, which the performance left on me was that in Russia far more stress
is laid on what your father was than on what you are yourself.
The heroine of the drama was an energetic Communist girl, who inspired
all her companions in the factory with enthusiasm for the Five-Years’ Plan.
When things were going badly and output was low, it was she who rallied
the workers and saved the situation. Then
came a bombshell. A drunken man
disclosed the disgraceful fact that her father had been nothing else than a
Tsarist policeman! Sensation.
“Throw her out of the Party,” was the cry. And out she had to go.
Often Soviet snobbery degenerates into real cruelty.
I was chatting with a Russian caretaker and his wife and watching some
dirty little children at play. “Look
at those children,” said the woman. “They
have been born to misfortune, because the fathers are not workers. They will never get on in life.
When they grow up they will not be able to go to a university, and now
they cannot have food until the workers’ children have had their fill, poor,
unhappy ones!”
Of
all kinds of snobbishness the Communist is the worst, for it is not a
superficial airing of class superiority, as in England, that wrecks the lives of
many Russians, whose only sin is to have been born of other than working-class
parents.
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