COMMUNIST NUMERICAL STRENGTH
DALLIN, DAVID J.
East and West Communist Numerical Strength By David J. Dallin COMMUNIST PARTY CONGRESSES have recently been held in all member- republics of the Soviet Union, probably in preparation for a...
...West Germany was to have an independent government...
...I don't believe that anywhere else there are such stretches of varied and tender green, such billowing dogwood forests, such tongues of blue water running up into flowering shores...
...From the first intelligible words I heard, unconsciously-given hints pointed backward from the lush Midwest...
...It was the beginning of my long experience with the real New England...
...That this stretch of coast and forest and mountain from Long Island Sound up to the St...
...Reports published so far stress the fact that 70 per cent of the party's membership at present consists of young men who joined during and after the war...
...500.000 Poland...
...Belgium (100,000) and Holland (53,000) also belong to the weakest members of the Communist family...
...They also constitute about 10 to 12 per cent oi the local adult population of Moscow province (whose total population is about 9,000,000...
...If one of our football teams happened to beat Cambridge or New Haven, we would raucously crow that there was now no doubt of our superiority...
...48.000 Norway...
...Or perhaps they didn't...
...But they had something we wanted above all else in the world...
...Education follows the old line of the 1930's, and Stalin's works, especially the Short History of the Communist Party, are being used as the principal texts...
...Most of them fought in the Red army and well remember the wartime alliance with the West...
...the information given should be digested cautiously, however, especially as far as Iron Curtain nations are concerned...
...1.000,000 * ToBrt...
...Perhaps we just thought so...
...700.000 Hungary...
...Their very dialect had been to us a symbol of decadence...
...It seemed to me a singularly sensitive and penetrating tale...
...Out of ar total of about 6,000,000 party members, 10 per cent live in Moscow or Moscow province...
...The Berlin blockade was to come to an end...
...If state universities out there had 10,000 students, 15,000, 20,000, we would shout: "Where now is your Harvard, your Yale...
...And so it is that Point of No Return will remain one of the few novels I want to keep and turn back to now and again...
...You never get a suggestion of it in the tales of Plymouth, but those Puritans discovered a Garden of Eden...
...Most of my contemporaries would deny any such nostalgia...
...They might be smaller back there...
...in Kirghisia, about 46,000 party members out of 1,500,000, or about 3 per cent...
...Here there are only 110,000 party members among a population of 10,500,000, or about 1 per cent...
...But the psychological defense mechanism of the West , melted away when I walked one summer day into the Harvard Library and asked the privilege of doing research work...
...The Home Front Point of My Return By William E, Bohn IHAVE BEEN HAVING a disturbing experience with Point of No Return...
...Since then I have observed the flowering and deflowering of New England from every coast, every lake, every mountain, every valley, almost every town...
...All these things went through my head the other day...
...The same applies to Austria—,, her alleged 150,000 Communists have no relation to reality...
...Such a high percentage cannot be found anywhere else in the Soviet Union, and Moscow's saturation with Communism makes it unique...
...60,000 Total \ 131.000 Despite pressure from hat great neighbor, Finland's Communist party has a membership of only 53,000...
...Crois River and Lake Memphremagog is home for us Westerners—at least those of us from north of a wavering line—there can be little doubt...
...East and West Communist Numerical Strength By David J. Dallin COMMUNIST PARTY CONGRESSES have recently been held in all member- republics of the Soviet Union, probably in preparation for a general congress of the all-Union Communist Farty after a break of ten years since the last one...
...When thoughts of college led to exploration beyond the accustomed round, most young Midwesterners yearned for Harvard or Yale...
...But all the time we chanted our hymn of superiority, we were secretly envious...
...2.283.000 Franca...................................................................-.....1.170.000 , Total 3.453,000 A fictitious membership is given for south Korea—1,000,000...
...1.500.000 Rumania...
...The little coastal town, the people in the old houses on the carefully differentiated streets, the young man working his way up— Boston-New York—the tracing of the impacts of the depression, the curiously naked competition in the bank — and, always, the shy and halfashamed look back at the old town, the old streets, the sostable-seeming world...
...The party membership makes up only 0.8 per cent of Lithuania's 3,000,000 population...
...In a minute I was thinking about John P. Manquand, about why Point of No Return seems especially fine to me.' * * * SOON I BEGAN TO REALIZE that I was concerned with something which went far beyond Marquand dnd his novels...
...Throughout my life the ties have been tightening...
...But I remain a fall guy for anything with a New England accent...
...23.000 Sweden...
...But their speech and wSys were still pure Connecticut and Massachusetts...
...Then, sliding along the Sound toward New Haven, we came upon a town like Clyde...
...I used to hear Easterners scorned as snooty, supercilious, effeminate...
...For instance, in Georgia there are 166,000 Communists out of a population of 3,600,000, or about 5 per cent...
...The Ukrainian Communist Party has grown by only 31 per cent since 1940, as against a growth of about 100 per cent for the entire Soviet Union...
...that of Japan 100,000...
...1,800,000 Worth Korea...
...The figures for Argentina are 50,000...
...What I had really taken on for consideration was the Midwesterner's guilt-feeling for the New England homeland...
...Only 684,000, or 1.6 per cent, are Communists...
...I know that even in the world of letters men from Illinois excel those of the state of Longfellow and Emerson...
...In Latin America only Brazil has a large Communist party—200,000...
...In my youth they had been nearly a century away from their rocky land...
...The ratio is somewhat higher in the eastern republics...
...France and Italy, on the other hand, contain great masses of Communists (the figures are somewhat outdated as they refer to the early part of 1948): Italy...
...They must be re-educated, and thousands of party schools, circles, and training courses are busy teaching them Leninism-Stalinism...
...Just write a book about a Maine cap* tain and there am I to pay out money for it...
...We did, of course, boast of our states, the populations, the wealth, the indusries of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois...
...I put the book aside feeling I had ended a fine experience...
...In the second largest national republic, Bielorussia, the situation is even more striking...
...The Communist Party of India nunw bers 90,000...
...It indicates the membership of the individual Communist parties...
...Nor is Communism a success in the Scandinavian countries: Denmark...
...At these meetings the number of party members was sometimes, yet not always, given/ by localities and nationalises...
...THE UKRAINE, largest of the national republics, has a population of some 40,000,000...
...I could not be expected to keep my eyes on the morning papers...
...Chile 50,000...
...Don't let anyone tell you New England is just granitic coast and mountain...
...I know the statistics on trade «and industry cannot compare with the Midwest...
...When we trudged off to school, there were Whittier's Barefoot Boy and Longfellow's Village Blacksmith, the cozy and rather angular 1 world of the Northeast rather than the wideopen spaces beyond the Alleghenies...
...739.000 Total...
...For the first time in two years I was returning to New England...
...But every time the train stopped at a station, I could hear songsparrows or bluebirds or thrushes...
...Of the three Baltic republics, only the Lithuanian party has so far given out membership figures: 24,000, including a great many Russian Communists who migrated to Lithuania to work in government agencies^ How many Lithuanians there are among the 24,000 is unknown...
...He made me feel at home in that great center of books...
...2.539.000 China 3.000.000 Total in areas undar Communist' government*....................11.739.000 The greatest resistance to Communism is obviously in the two Anglo-Saxon countries, where Communist parties are almost insignificant numerically the United States (56,000) and Britain (43,000...
...It was one of those heavenly, Shakespearean days in May...
...6.200.000 Soviet son* of Germany...
...and Cuba 40,000...
...The Sovietdominated nations and their Communist membership are given as follows: uxecnoUcvalcia...
...It is a distillation of the spirit of a people, a world, which has a special meaning for me...
...The Bradfords, the Alcotts and Kittredges, among whom I grew up, had sprung straight from the old Plymouth and Boston lines...
...THE 1949 EDITION OF AGITATORS INFORMATION, just published in Moscow, contains few significant data on the Communist movement outside Russia...
...Later Emerson and Thoreau opened new worlds of serious thought...
...FOR NEAR FIFTY YEARS NOW I have been going home to these old and rockribbed states...
...Was there ever a man anywhere less effeminate, less snooty, less decadent than he...
...That was in the days of Dean Briggs...
...2,500.000 Bulgaria...
Vol. 32 • May 1949 • No. 20
