Where the News Ends

...This was especially true during and after World War II...

...These letters, however, served the practical purpose of reasserting the primacy of the Russian language and curtailing linguistic autonomy in the non-Russian Soviet republics...

...Anything in the nature of Russian chauvinism was frowned on...

...As this writer well remembers from his time of residence in Moscow in the Twenties and early Thirties, all the resources of the Soviet cultural dictatorship were employed to defame and discredit the Russian past...

...The Soviet workers had to be driven to produce not only by piecework methods of payment (which Marx had denounced as a special method of capitalist exploitation), but by a whole series of police checks and restraints on freedom to quit work and change occupation...

...So, also, completely imaginary achievements are attributed to the ancient ancestors of the Russians, the Scythians...

...Second, there was clearly no such change in human consciousness and human nature as Marx had foreseen after the advent of socialism...

...As Mehnert puts it: "Nothing at all that has ever happened on what is today Soviet soil can be allowed to trace its development authoritatively to foreign influences...

...Everything that had occurred in Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution was painted in the blackest colors, except for a few cases of revolutionary activity...

...WHERE the NEWS ENDS How Stalin Dethroned Marx By William Henry Chamberlin The dethronement of Marxism by Stalinism, an eclectic mixture of opportunist ideas, is an important event in the development of the Soviet Union...

...Fifth, the industrial working class, in whose name the Revolution had been made, was increasingly pushed into the background and replaced by a new political, economic and military ruling class...

...As Mehnert suggests, Stalin, finding that the Marxist motor was no longer adequate, built into his state machine a new motor of Russian chauvinism...

...Gross overestimation of the achievements of the Russian past followed the gross underestimation that had prevailed in the first years of Soviet rule...

...The author has searched through Soviet historical and scientific magazines and has come up with the most ludicrous examples of historical falsification, all designed to prove that the Russians are "more equal" than other peoples...

...But, as Mehnert shows, the pattern of Soviet life, in five important points, went contrary to Marxist specifications...

...A brief, competent and witty analysis of this process is to be found in a book which seems to have received less attention than it deserves, Klaus Mehnert's Marx Versus Stalin (Macmillan, $2.00...

...Tchaikovsky's opera, Eugene Onegin, based on Pushkin's famous dramatic poem, was officially censured and subjected to censorship because it depicted "idyllic relations between the landlords and the peasants...

...Mehnert is a Russian-born German, now editor of a magazine in Stuttgart, who specializes in Soviet affairs...

...Third, religion proved more resistant to a communist economic environment than had been anticipated, and the Soviet Government found it expedient to conclude an unofficial concordat with a tamed and subservient Orthodox Church...

...Stalin entered the field of linguistics with a series of letters which are total charlatanism from any scholarly standpoint...

...First, although it was a principle of Marx that socialist or communist revolution could develop successfully only in countries where capitalism had exhausted its productive possibilities, Russia was a country where capitalism was still in its infancy at the time of the Bolshevik seizure of power...

...Soviet scholars, of course, felt obliged to emphasize their "extraordinary importance to philosophy, logic, psychology, the natural sciences and sociology...

...An experienced journalist, he displays the newspaperman's gift for picking out the important aspects of the story he has to tell and concentrating on these to the exclusion of secondary details...

...Instead of exaggerated boastfulness about the national past, there was exaggerated denigration...

...All the Communist leaders in the first years of the Soviet regime regarded the Russian Revolution as only the beginning, and perhaps not the most important part, of a world proletarian revolution in line with the theories of Karl Marx...

...The very word "Russia" was eliminated from the official title of the new state, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics...

...Mehnert has effectively brought out the contradiction between Marxism, which could have an international appeal, and this type of isolationist Russian chauvinism, which could not...

...A beautiful opera by Rimsky-Korsakov, The Tale of the Unseen City Kitezh, was banned because it ends with a miracle, with the city and its people escaping the rage of the Tatars by being shifted bodily to the bottom of a lake...

...Fourth, the state, which was supposed to wither away in the conception of Marx and Engels, became steadily more powerful...