Where Fear Is King
BRUMBERG, ABRAHAM
Where Fear Is King By Abraham Brumberg Content Editor of the USIA publication, "Problems of Communism" THE BEACON PRESS is to be congratulated on the publication of these two volumes."* Slim in...
...These books effectively debunk the thesis advanced by many Soviet apologists that, while political democracy does not exist in the U.S.S.R., something called "economic democracy" does...
...Among the most illuminating passages in The Coercion of the Worker are Lenin's strictures against the Tsarist regime, which Rousset cites to illustrate how fittingly they apply to Soviet society...
...where every citizen must possess not only a passport for identification, but also a workbook providing the employer with full information on his "education, vocation, work records, transfers from one enterprise to another, [and] reasons for such transfers...
...Beacon, 63 and 6.t...
...It means that the peasant must be free to go where he wants, to install himself wherever he wishes, to choose the town or the city he prefers, without having to ask permission of anyone whatever...
...Take the following passage from Labor Legislation, a Soviet book published in 1947, on a law prohibiting "voluntary departure of workers from enterprises and institutions": "Certain workers, taking advantage of the absence of unemployment in our country, have interpreted the right to work as the right to choose a job in accordance with their own wishes without considering the interests and the needs of the slate, as the right to run from one enterprise to another according to the principle, 'I take a job wherever I please.' It is against those who used to dash about from one job to another, and in their pursuit of the most advantageous ruble used to provoke an intolerable instability in industry, that this law is directed...
...By David Roussot...
...Police-State Methods in the Soviet Union is equally telling...
...Hence, while many important details have necessarily been omitted, its picture is more arresting and its impact more powerful than, say, Solomon M. Schwarz's masterly Labor in the Soviet Union...
...Slim in size, they nevertheless offer a wealth of material on the rights...
...Inasmuch as both men are former concentration-camp inmates...
...The editor is Jerzy Gliksman, author of Tell the West...
...or, more accurately, the absence of rights...
...Methods in the Soviet Union...
...their sober, factual and thoroughly dispassionate approach merits particular praise...
...1.50 each...
...What does liberty of movement mean...
...a snapshop...
...For example, Lenin condemned the Tsarist system of labor control in these words: "In order not to be penalized in case of a progul [truancy], the worker must furnish proof...
...This is absolutely erroneous...
...It is an opportunist and leftist deviation, a blow against the principle of sole power...
...of the average Soviet citizen...
...They show that, in a totalitarian state, any striving for independence must be crushed, for the very idea of compartmentalizing freedom is absurd...
...Coarcion of the Worker in the Sovier Union and Police-State...
...Some of the author's most graphic material lies in his occasional side excursions, as when he reproduces the text of a verdict sentencing a Soviet citizen to a year in prison for the theft of a loaf of bread (shades of Les Miserables...
...And he had this to say about freedom of movement: "Social Democrats insist upon complete liberty of movement for the people...
...Gliksman as a victim of the GULAG...
...It is a capsule account...
...his word is not believed by the offices when he states that his absence is due to valid reasons...
...Rousset as a prisoner of the Nazis, Mr...
...It is absolutely necessary to get rid of this idea...
...The rule is as severe as if we were dealing with soldiers instead of free men...
...The author of both studies is David Rousset, whose 1950 suit against the French Communist magazine Les Lettres Francaises brought to light some of the most brutal aspects of the concentration-camp system in the U.S.S.R...
...Once again, Lenin's denunciation of the system of arbitrary arrest in Tsarist Russia highlights the cruel sham of present-day Soviet "democracy...
...of Soviet labor...
...It thoroughly documents the extra-legal role of the MVD, which has the power to decide cases by administrative decision instead of in the regular courts, and the mass deportations based on potential rather than actual guilt...
...Coercion of the Worker in the Soviet Union does not pretend to be a definitive study of the subject...
...Or this statement by a Soviet official on the role of trade unions: "Certain factory comrades think today that the unions can intervene in the fixing of wages with the same authority that the administration possesses...
...What would the founding father of Bolshevism have had to say about a country where tardiness is punished by withdrawal of 25 per cent of a worker's wages for six months, and, in case of a second offense, by the loss of liberty...
...Edited by Jorzy Cliksman...
...Trud, July 8, 1933) Tied to his place of work, severely punished for the slightest infraction of "labor discipline," cynically exploited by tools of the Government masquerading as legitimate "trade unions," his status often determined for years to come by the law on state labor reserves (according to which thousands of children are mobilized every year for work in various branches of industry, at lower pay but subject to the same laws as adults), the Soviet worker is by all standards, political, social and economic, a slave of the state...
...He has to procure a medical certificate or a police certificate...
...It means that passports must be done away with in Russia that no gendarme and no zemsky [local policeman] will have the authority to prevent a peasant from taking up his residence and working wherever he chooses...
Vol. 37 • March 1954 • No. 9
