SOVIET COLONIZERS
DALLIN, DAVID J.
East and West Soviet Colonizers By David J. Dallin IN My Three Years in Moscow, Walter Bedell Smith has made the pertinent remark that the Soviet leadership usually accuses its opponents of...
...In the course of briefing a group of his officials preparing to go abroad, Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, always frank, even cynical behind closed doors, told them: "You are Soviet colonizers...
...Mixed companies," an excellent windowdressing, had been tried out with the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria, between 1924 and 1935...
...Now friend Al finds that, while he is writing about Li'l Abner, or speaking over the radio, his Aunt Samantha is forever looking over his shoulder...
...WHAT THE KREMLIN ACQUIRED in Germany, however, was far more extensive and important than all the Soviet enterprises in the other satellites...
...The remaining 170 factories in Germany are administered by the Soviet MVT (Ministry of Foreign Trade...
...Mixed companies" mushroomed all over eastern Europe, including East Germany...
...The worst, however, has not come to pass...
...Hungary "shared" her bauxite, oil, iron and steel, chemistry, electricity, railroads, aviation with the Soviet Union...
...There are so many crooks, so many stuffed shirts, so many phonies that we need a man who can start a snorting laugh big enough to blow them right off the stage...
...He went even further in racist degradation...
...There are too many taboos...
...Here we get back to Al Capp...
...It certainly amounts to several billion dollars a year...
...He must have said to himself: We'll build one trade union paper that working people will enjoy reading...
...Later it included more than ninety...
...The tirades against Western imperialism let loose in the last Ave years denounced all the elements of the "exploitation of weaker nations" which were then being employed by Moscow in its relations with its dependencies...
...In Poland, new steel, chemical and cement factories are being built according to plans prepared in Moscow...
...This country is not communist...
...There are articles by Bill Nye, stories about Mark Twain, plenty of poems by Debs' dear friend, James Whitcomb Riley...
...Some of them are about Irishmen, Germans, Englishmen, Yankees, Southerners, Chinese and—yes—Negroes...
...That is the way Tammany Hall used to garner votes...
...These were the industries which, in Soviet parlance, constitute the "commanding heights," and which, according to Marxist concepts, secure political control over aicountry...
...You can just see Debs sitting in his little office and planning the issues...
...1 am talking about humor, the dearth of humor, the danger to humor...
...The horrible charge leveled against the great American Socialist is that he repeated "Negro dialect jokes...
...Debs was, according to high-minded Hall, a pretty primitive and low-minded white chauvinist...
...Economics determine policies—you must be Soviet businessmen, 'Soviet capitalists.' We will help you...
...Ida Harper's Woman's Department aroused real reader response...
...It would do Gus Hall or anyone else good to leaf through the file of the old Locomotive Firemen's Magazine...
...they are treated like everyone else...
...So he blew up about it We have improved in some things, but not in this...
...In 1903 he opposed the passage of special resolutions outlining the wrongs of Negroes and appealing to them to join the Socialist party...
...It came out once a month...
...In 1947, Moscow decided to return thirty units — which were rather burdensome and not lucrative enough—to the German agencies controlling the nationalized industry...
...But every wevk hundreds of railway trains carry to the Soviet land the huge "surplus value" produced by satellite peoples of the West and of the East...
...Debs was brother to all men and women...
...He even went so far as to print such joke.s in the Locomotive Firemen's Magazine when he was its editor...
...More than half the Austrian oil output is in Soviet hands and, according to the agreed parts of the prospective treaty, will remain so...
...In its early days it ran to sixty pages...
...It never could have occurred to him to jnake special little dirty group appeals to any special crowd...
...But it would have been impossible for a deepdown humanitarian Socialist like Debs to descend to the Communist political level...
...Perhaps the ninth or thirteenth or seventeenth freedom ought to be the freedom to laugh, -1 must write to Mrs...
...In those days— back in the so-much-maligned 19th century— a man could make fun of anybody or anything...
...Hall—jokes...
...THE THEME of this essay is not Debs and his detractors, however...
...In Rumania, seven Sovroms (SovietRomanian companies) embrace air, maritime, river and highway transports, banking, lumber, and the important oil industry...
...Hall thinks about either Debs or Ginger is of slight importance...
...A new department of the MVT has been created—the "Chief Administration of Industrial Corporations"—which controls all the "mixed companies" in Europe (Rumanian, Hungarian, Austrian, and German) and...
...The incomparable Al Capp said over the radio the other night: "The great tradition of hard-hitting muscular humor has died...
...The jokes were just like the ones that you will find in the copies of Puck and Judge and all of the papers of the same period...
...He knew that white workers could not win without the help of black workers...
...Greatly expanded, it no longer limits itself to pure commerce...
...It would be longer than a laundry list...
...And there were— to the distress of poor Mr...
...THE INTEREST of Eugene V. Debs in the problems of the Negroes need not detain us long...
...My mind started to work on this business the other day when I happened on a long letter in the Daily Worker...
...But quite unconsciously the careful letter-writer reveals one of the more devastating aspects of communism...
...People who conduct their politics on the red-light level can never be expected to understand the ways or the words of a Debs...
...But the rest of us can—with limitations—laugh...
...Moscow decided that the Manchurian pattern could be applied universally...
...The product of this system of economic ex-, ploitation is a tremendous tribute paid to the Soviet Union by its satellites...
...Roosevelt about it...
...And how it blossomed while it was in the hands of Debs...
...The "mixed company"—an industrial corporation 50 per cent Soviet and 50 per cent the government of the respective satellite {sometimes 51 and 49 per cent)—became the main form of Soviet economic activities abroad...
...this applied also to Japanese property in Manchuria and Korea...
...statistics are a well-guarded state secret...
...Each group was constituted an industrial corporation, with the Soviet government holding1 51 per cent of the shares, and the-Germans (the Communist-controlled agencies of East Germany) 49 per cent...
...Here, as in Hungary, the Soviet 50 per cent often consisted of American, British and French property sequestered by Germany during the war and now, as "Nazi property," taken over by a Sovrom...
...This type of Soviet-controlled police may become significant as a nucleus of a Soviet force, especially in countries presently occupied by the Soviet army...
...That is the crime of Debs: Negroes are not omitted...
...Every man who lived in those days knows the answer to that one...
...The Ministry of Foreign Trade in Moscow has become a ministry of empirebuilding...
...Now what Mr...
...No longer can the American humorist today hit out at the pomposities that abound in American life...
...In addition, by means of a number of secret agreements, the Soviet government has acquired certain privileges for the "mixed companies" which make them in effect tax- and custom-exempt.and also often include the right to maintain their own factory guards...
...East and West Soviet Colonizers By David J. Dallin IN My Three Years in Moscow, Walter Bedell Smith has made the pertinent remark that the Soviet leadership usually accuses its opponents of using the odious means and methods which it intends to employ itself...
...Early in 1946 it was decided to take over two hundred of the largest industrial units, among them the world-famous Zeiss factory (optical instruments), the Meissen factory (porcelain), synthetic fuel, paper, machinebuilding, and even publishing houses...
...But the Communists have reduced it to a science...
...whose main offices are located in Weissemaee (Berlin...
...No figures have been published by either side...
...Color meant absolutely nothing to him...
...There were poems—not too high class —in the style of Casey Jones...
...In particular, it was humanized...
...Gus Hall, one of the eleven defendants whose sturdy figure was part of the scenery in Judge Medina's courtroom, wrote in criticism of the new biography of Eugene V. Debs by Ray Ginger...
...As a Socialist and trade unionist he fought incessantly for union and equality...
...So he struggled for the emancipation and elevation of the blacks because they .are human beings and their help is necessary in the struggle of workers of every color...
...MOSCOW ALWAYS BELIEVED that wealth and capital belonging to Germans or to Germans in Soviet-occupied territories should automatically fall ttrthe Soyiet Union...
...The Home Front The Humor-Haters By William E. Bohn WHAT THIS COUNTY NEEDS is another Mark Twain...
...It would be interesting to make a list of the things no one is supposed to laugh at...
...The Stalinists can keep their own tiny precinct dull as they please...
...Since the end of the war, it deals with every kind of economic activity abroad...
...the usual import and export activity is no longer of primary significance...
...The units were organized into groups, as, for instance* for chemistry, instruments, fuel, etc...
...Debs didn't want his magazine to be as dull as the Daily Worker...
...More important, the Soviet state will be entitled to explore for oil on a great parj of Austria's territory...
...They make it impossible for the humorist to laugh at anything except himself...
...How they do love every crowd from which they can lure a few supporters...
...Humor has not yet been banished to Siberia or buried in a concentration camp...
Vol. 33 • April 1950 • No. 16
