The View from the Metropol Window / The Soviets' NEW MAN
Mayer, Milton
The View from the Metropol Window The Soviets' NEW MAN by MILTON MAYER This is the third and concluding installment of Mr. Mayer's report on his recent journey to the Soviet Union.—The...
...he seems to me to have all he wants, or as much of it as one can expect in this vale of tears...
...Oh, anybody at one of the desks...
...The Russians unanimously rejected the explanation, though they had no other...
...He spoke in English, and I quote his words: "Hope will be possible when Americans believe that the people of Russia want peace very much, and so does their government...
...What keeps the dedication going...
...the rest is done tomorrow, or the day after, or, more often, referred from office to office until it is lost...
...Under our no-system, individualism, with all its glories and evils and all of its sinful and innocent charms, flourished...
...His therapy is bad.' But the sick man says, 'But he came when I called in the night...
...not doctors who are more competent...
...Steffens was a reformer —that is, an absolutist, not a prag-matist—and he meant that it worked for the benefit of those millions whose sole function on the earth, seen from the mountain-top of the elite, is to swell the ranks...
...Droojba y Mir...
...We have waited and waited and waited for the whole Soviet structure to collapse...
...This, of course, is materialism...
...They know they are hated, and they know who hates them...
...The best thing for me to do was to check in at Intourist...
...And so, again at $30 a day, the little woman and I sat in the Intourist office and played chess, just to be sure we'd get the message...
...At Joe's Diner the patrons all die when Joe mistakes a box of toadstools for a box of mushrooms...
...The whole staff was gathered sympathetically around him, while the other complainants (about other difficulties) stood unattended, at $30 a day...
...Will it...
...I asked a rhetorical question, then: "I think that we, who come from the West, agree with you about the sincerity of the people's feeling for peace...
...Last summer, I was in a lather when I went into the Netherlands Tourist Office in Rotterdam...
...We shall see, we shall see...
...Democracy is a perpetual struggle between system and no-system...
...more, very likely, than we will do, in proportion as they are more genuinely ardent than we are...
...And this is the other, and the discouraging, side of Russian self-confidence, as it is of American...
...We say that the ballet will flourish as never before, but the soloist wither...
...When we bemoan the fate of the "gifted child" in the American school system, we are simply saying that the individual has had to suffer while the level of the mass was being raised...
...When...
...We think we bring to the market a polity, democracy, that makes sense in 'the way that sweet dreams make sense, but while we display the polity- in technicolor we support the world's remaining pre-democratic tyrannies...
...He might have been safer to say that it works no worse than the past...
...If there is a widespread ardor in Russia—and there seems to be—I can see ardor leading to the fiercest brutality...
...Our Russian friend agreed with me, and so, on the whole, did the members of our group...
...So those Chinese miners saw him, en masse...
...Why didn't I try some of the floor clerks...
...I shall when I am back in Russia, but I shall remind myself, while I argue, that it took the Land of Liberty two and a half centuries to rid itself of chattel slavery, during which two and a half centuries few of its lovers gave it up for lost...
...Their citation of medical achievement may say the same thing, and, in addition, say that there are simply more competent doctors (more than we have, per population...
...and at mealtime, while we waited an hour, two hours to be served, the waiters stopped serving to kibitz...
...I started at the first floor, and on the fourth I got an envelope...
...leave liberty out of the scale, as they do (except, of course, for its confusion with national independence...
...The Russians seem to want time, to complete the transformation of their country, perhaps even to bring down the purchase price of liberty...
...Why are the students at the University cafeteria glued to their books while they eat their lunch...
...We know how top-heavy and tangled American bureaucracy is...
...Was it to be a man who could find out how to be both free and secure, or a man who could find out how to be content to be secure...
...not Greek, of course, but Latin, in law school and medical school, because Latin is still the world language of law and medicine...
...And now they have a very strong feeling against losing all that they have built...
...Won't it, as expanding technology ineluctably expands its centralization, become unworkable, or, if it stumbles, crash...
...You, too, would have this strong feeling in America, I think, if you had had the long Russian experience of invasion and now you had (as you certainly have) so much to preserve...
...the call would come to Intourist, and they would give the man my room number...
...the Russians do not buy them as allies, but only as satellites, and the photographs of the new German Luftwaffe, spread all over the Russian newspapers, does not bring the reunification of Germany any closer...
...We didn't get it, although, as we learned later, the man had called...
...no-down-payment house is a system corroding the very fibers of individualism...
...The Intourist office was not sure that I would get it if I stayed in my room, because there is no hotel switchboard...
...while, where power is as tightly gathered, as it must be in a state system, a single center, or even occasion, of corruption may be nationally ruinous...
...We are not needed—the individual you, the individual I—but we remain...
...This is the test of socialism, of good socialism and of bad, the test of the fully developed system...
...And I rather think that they were not offended to be received, fed, and flown en masse...
...the shortjterm, quick-turnover risk-takers...
...The visitor to Russia, anti-capitalist and anti-individualist though he is, feels that socialism is failing the test, destroying, with the best of all possible intentions, the free good of the person and replacing it with a collective sentiment which does not nourish the spirit...
...The needy have what they need—be it companionship, correction, confession, or only bread, but they have it from the system...
...As materialists they could not be...
...Spain...
...I have not argued liberty with him...
...And our economy makes no sense at all...
...Two days later I saw the Frenchman, still in Moscow, having, after all, a wonderful time, alive or dead...
...Let me talk to the man in charge," he shouted...
...But temptation, if it is big enough (as it is in the wholly socialized state) always outbids the penalty...
...Take a starving people...
...Who is the man in charge...
...My friend Ger-onski of the Moscow News is the most valuable man in Russia...
...The no-system takes a very dim view of man, but it takes a view...
...The question to the tourist is, "How many are you...
...the Asian and the African (and considerably more than half of the Europeans and Central and South Americans) know that they, and their imaginable descendants, will never own their own tractors, and the Russians show them how they can own tractors socially tomorrow or the day after...
...If we in America will do whatever we think neecssary to stop Communism, certainly they in Russia will do whatever they think necessary to stop anti-Communism...
...As the system is, says Marx, so is the man...
...Perhaps the Americans want them to be, but they are not...
...we can only imagine the Russian, as we proceed from bureau to bureau, trying, not actually to find the right bureau, but to find somebody who can tell us which is the right bureau, who will take the responsibility of pointing to somebody's door and saying: "There...
...The test may be in Soviet Russia, but it is not the test of Soviet Russia, but of system...
...And always given the treatment, the same old showcase treatment everyone always gets abroad when his reactions are considered important to his hosts...
...And a whole state system erected to raise that level, to do precisely what capitalist individualism failed to do, is so necessarily preoccupied that the first and last question asked of any project is, "Is it useful...
...His reckless judgment approaches verification now...
...The Russians bring to the market of the world an economy, socialism, that makes sense, and the only sense,' to all of the world except that fluttering fringe we call the" West...
...And the respectable doctor, who would not get up, says to the sick man, 'Keep away from that doctor...
...If, by any chance, the Russians are deeply afraid of us and our fearful allies, it might not be a bad idea to try to figure out a way to make them unafraid...
...If it is dying, as we suppose it is, it is dying at the hands of system...
...At the desk marked, "Informations," in the lobby of the hotel, nobody spoke anything but Russian...
...You have got to go to the big hotels, there and here, to see who the honored guests are...
...I told the young lady that she sounded like a German, in any language, and that systems always fail...
...The Frenchman's dire case went on up to higher and higher Intourist strata, always through all of the intermediate stages...
...and you have the future, and it can not help but work...
...and all this because they were many and I was one and the Frenchman was one...
...We have something to disbelieve in —Communism...
...The Communists have tried to produce him the easy way, by system...
...There, the long-term, slow-turnover risk-takers with a world to win...
...Then the test, the test of system itself, will be what one of my Russian friends admitted: "Corruption...
...the eternal tour that doesn't include the dungeons and the slums, in Kiev or Manchester or Philadelphia...
...But peace is another word for time...
...and more than he would have had had he been a still greater writer in Russia a century ago...
...Her answer is: "It's useful...
...The system takes none: "Human nature," says Marx, "has no reality...
...becomes a relevant question, and "I am a man" an answer that raises a whole complex of new questions...
...Now we know that it won't and our pragmatists have to decide again whether the test of truth is its workability...
...And human failure, so abhorrent to the Germans, so essential to being human, is the most delightful component of the Russian character...
...Mayer's report on his recent journey to the Soviet Union.—The Editors It doesn't take a whole month in Russia to discover that the Russians are excited about something, to the point of being possessed...
...I was expecting a telephone call from a man I very much wanted to talk to...
...Here, the men of the past...
...In this matter"—I thought I detected a qualifying phrase there, but I'm not sure—¦ "the government represents the people absolutely...
...But the government of a democracy must, if it foresees the possibility of war, do its best to keep the people at a hostile pitch, since it can not count on its capacity, over night, to induce the war fever through a system of communication it does not absolutely control...
...somebody will have the message...
...I've got to get out on that plane...
...a dangerous undertaking, to be sure, but men and nations live dangerously these days, whether they want to or not...
...Is it possible, then, that a generation from now, if peace is sustained and the cold war dissolved, and when those who have the fire of earned achievement are gone, the inherent unworkability of system on so great a scale will test the Soviet system...
...What he does see is the incredible jerkiness at the ordinary administrative level...
...Plane, train, and bus reservations are impossible to get changed...
...but when all the restaurants are Joe's and he mistakes the whole crop of toadstools for mushrooms, all the patrons of all the restaurants will die the same day...
...but when we got to Rotterdam on the 2nd we were informed that it would dock in Amsterdam on the 8th...
...Andre thought, too, that the peace-fulness of a military people, French, German, or Russian, may be deceptive...
...officers on the street, in restaurants, in hotels, and on trains, appear neither to command nor expect any deference...
...the in-and-out freebooters and operators and sharpies you see in West Berlin now...
...He observed, as did the rest of us, that Russian militarism is far less ostentatious than ours in the West...
...But this, the Russian character, is intolerable to the system...
...Lincoln Steffens was wildly premature when he came back from Russia right after the Revolution and said, "I have seen the future, and it works...
...But they do not mean to be attacked again by the Germans, and this is why the Germans they trust in Germany are always Communists and never ex-Nazis...
...On the kind of tentative assay that does not depend very heavily on the view from the Metropol window, I should be tempted to venture that the test of the Soviet system is yet to come, but soon, within the next couple of decades or even sooner, and that what will test it is what will test socialism itself: system, system as such...
...But my month's efforts to locate Simyonov, the retired high commissioner for East Berlin, were futile...
...We suspect, you and I, that the easy way is the wrong way, evoking, indeed, demanding evils equal, if opposite, to those of no-system...
...it is treason, and the penalty against it is capital...
...You buy the Germans as allies dearly," a Pole said to an American in Warsaw...
...Like us, they have every virtue, including independence of spirit, except humility, and therefore every charm except humor...
...Big Press, Big Television, Big Steel, Big Legion, Big Motors, and Big T & T are all system, through which the mesmeric system of McCarthyism was administered, and McCarthy was destroyed by the oldest of all systems: the military system...
...and they traveled, en masse, in the plane the angry Frenchman was bumped from...
...I had written them to ask when and where a student ship carrying a couple of our kids would come in, and they had replied that it would dock at Rotterdam on the 3rd...
...or, whether it flourished or not, was allowed to flourish...
...Somebody said, "Are the Russians willing to go to war for peace...
...The excitement and pride of achievement combined with the fear of attack from without...
...The system is so big...
...If we, with our no-system, die by our own radiation, what is to keep them from dying of suffocation under their own paper...
...Like us, but, with reason, much more so, the Russians worship with work of their hands...
...The system jerks along...
...Marxism, then, or that catchall formula, "Marxist-Leninism," was to produce a new man...
...is not a bad question, nor an un-Christian question...
...But the space was confirmed," a Frenchman was shouting in the In-tourist office at the Hotel Ukraine...
...The Russians may, therefore, be all the more dangerous, believing in what they are doing when they ought to believe in liberty...
...nor, come to think of it, an undemocratic question...
...You ask them if they would still want learning if they could get a good job without it, and, unconsciously dodging, they reply that the Soviet Union always rewards learning...
...what absolutely has to be done, like winning a war or building a dam or a reactor, is done, and is done, like the Suez or Panama Canals, without care for the cost in money or men...
...The dedication so patent to the visitor...
...there the masses, the hordes, the herd, maybe even the men (as George Ill's American rabble turned out to be men) of the future...
...So the ultimate restraint is not law, but dedication...
...I thought that Andre meant he was less worried by the militarism of a peaceful people—the Americans, preeminently—but I did not go on to solicit the compliment...
...What are they excited about...
...Men, nearly always big and hard, and women, always big and hard, of racial conglomeration absolutely un-ascertainable by a Westerner...
...and so, although they are hearty, friendly, peaceful, honorable, what ever you will, they are not very interesting, and something seems to be dying, as it is beginning to die among us, as the system demands always purpose...
...nobody I could reach could find out how to locate him...
...After an enjoyable—but necessarily superficial—mass interview with the minister of education of the Federal Soviet Republic, I tried to get an individual interview with him to press some questions upon an obviously in telligent man...
...We are profoundly impressed by the way it has obviously taken hold of the Russians we have met, not merely in groups but as individuals...
...How many are you...
...it takes so long...
...But I am sure that it answers the first, "How many are you...
...The "new man" fascinated the suffering Russian before Marx was ever heard of, but he was to be produced by a miracle sometimes akin to the miracle promised by the Apostle and sometimes identical with it—by what the Communists call superstition...
...But," he went on, "you should remember, as they do, that defending their country, against the Mongols, •the Swedes, the French, the Germans, has always meant the burning of it...
...My friend Michalkow, the writer, has his own small car, his own small apartment, and his own small house in the country...
...Of course, you say, you don't study dead languages like Latin or Greek any more?—"Oh, but we do...
...Possessed of good, they are terrible, and possessed of evil worse...
...requires only a number and not a name for an answer...
...nothing is ever done right, listed right, or sorted right...
...and they hate well themselves...
...And is there any better explanation of our current American mores, from our school system to our Presidential assistant, than that we are excited about liberty but not about what we are doing...
...and that no-system can't or won't or, in any case, hasn't...
...In another generation of Russian Communists, the dedication will not be what it is among the Founding Fathers and their Founding Sons...
...The Communists are not pacifists...
...Their thought and action, their learning, their art, and their politics, all serve a purpose...
...Dooley called it, was surprised, tardy though.he was for an appointment, to be driven in an arc around the city to the North Shore suburbs and thence downtown via the Lake Front...
...Like us, they believe in things seen and that man is the measure...
...Our Russian friend smiled and said, "I understand your meaning...
...There is no behind-mind in our government propaganda for peace, although Americans may think so...
...They have something to believe in—Communism...
...Check in with whom...
...Nobody knew...
...I suppose the answer is yes, but it is not an easy answer which should make you comfortable...
...There is no telephone book in Moscow, nor is there any central telephone information service...
...We do not, of course, know what to say about your government in this matter, but the propaganda for peace is certainly carried out by your government in every possible way here, and I, for one, think that it would be very difficult, even for a dictatorship, after preaching peace so successfully to its people, to try suddenly to reverse this deep-seated sentiment and call for war...
...When it begins—if it begins—we are lost...
...Under such conditions, when system fails, it fails big...
...We say that the odd-ball, the freak, the genius, the Pasternak is doomed...
...What I wanted was an envelope...
...still, with the whole machinery of communication in its hands, it might feel capable of inducing the war fever over night...
...recognition first of all...
...and they ate, en masse, at the long banquet tables in the hotel while I waited to be served...
...but an hour before you're supposed to board you are told that there is no room...
...think of John Brown...
...This inherited fear they have, and they will have troops in nations at their borders as long as the Americans surround them...
...his schedule was filled with group interviews...
...Their churches—like ours—serve a purpose...
...and can there be a dozen or a hundred publics to own and control in one socialist state...
...They do not willingly hate Americans, who have hardly offended them in the past and have helped them greatly, and who resemble them so much more than do Western Europeans...
...The Soviet rejoinder is not convincing...
...But where power is so dispersed, the no-system is able to sustain corruption here or corruption there...
...A mixed Danish-Russian commission was appointed, and after six months the Danish members concluded that there was only one possible explanation, that the pilot had not understood the control tower's English (the language of all flight in Europe...
...Capitalism is a no-system, based on the principle that systems always fail...
...There simply isn't...
...But what of men unpossessed, men who, if they do not believe in what they are doing, have got to inscribe on their banners a slogan half-emptied of meaning and rest their banners on their armies...
...I don't know...
...give them impatience to move to industrial production—now, and not over two leisurely centuries of advance concomitant with the advance of technology...
...Can it be that we treat our dissenters better than they treat theirs because we are hamstrung by a greater suspicion than they have that the dissenters may be partly right...
...But who are you and I? Pastor Heinrich Grueber is preaching, as Dean of the Berlin Cathedral, to the East and the West...
...They are having hurriedly to be revised, all of them, because the road to Moscow is more heavily traveled every day by people who (as the leader of a group of Peoria businessmen said) want to see for themselves the walking bear...
...A small group of Americans and Europeans met under completely private conditons with a Russian pacifist, an old and learned man...
...where you and I come from, including, as my passport says, "those portions of China not under Communist control," they have not been accustomed to the honor of being received, fed, and flown either en masse or solo...
...The system never fails...
...But afterward Andre Trocme of France—and Andre Trocme is a man to be listened to— made a point to be weighed in the balance: Perhaps so all-out a propaganda for peace is risky (even for a dictatorship) should the government ever decide on war...
...The reason the system—system itself—fails is, of course, what the airlines call "human failure...
...Men possessed may be much more terrible than an army with banners...
...An Austrian trade-unionist, on a State Department exchange tour after the war, asked in vain to see a union headquarters in Detroit...
...Who are the buyers, there and here...
...He was very sorry, but he could not see me, not before winter...
...he has the longest list of telephone numbers of anybody in town...
...You don't know what she means by "we," nor, very probably, does she.—"You get a better job when you know a foreign language...
...When the visitor tells his guide he wants to see a man, an important man, even an important official, his guide asks, "Have you got his phone number...
...When I found somebody in the cashier's office who understood what it was that I wanted, he said that he knew where I could get hotel stationery, but where I could get an envelope—that was harder to say...
...And they show them not in sweet dreams, but in practice...
...But his therapy is a bad (or surely a dubious) therapy...
...They seem to think they have succeeded, or soon will, and that their system will therefore stand the test of system...
...or that he hau seen, in the shame of the American cities, the past and it doesn't work...
...Fools that we were and are, we still print maps of the world, at home and abroad, maps, timetables, and guide books, showing Russia as outer darkness, sometimes with the single grisly inscription, "To Moscow...
...And their education as Communists was ready-made for them in Russia, where one less than admirable woman, the Tsarina Elizabeth, left as her legacy "fifteen thousand gowns and one ruble in the national treasury," and, so profoundly Christian was she and her heirs and her ancestors, that the royal family had not one, but four, great churches within the Kremlin for their private prayers for their miserable people...
...And as Russians they will fight to defend their country, which has been invaded in every century, in some centuries more than once, and by every one of its neighbors and by some who are not its neighbors...
...And the good that is done us by deciding well is surrendered to the system, which, being a system, does not need it and can not use it...
...and, so far from there being sabre-rattling speeches by military men, they stand under the same prohibition against war-mongering (a prohibition, for whatever it may mean, enforced in law) as do civilians...
...Up to now it has worked, but only somehow, and with the most agonizing jerks in the form of purges and terrors and crude, costly reversals...
...All this is handled by a system, and the system never fails...
...and we were informed, further, that this fact was known at the time I was misinformed...
...We say that system can not deal with men, but only with masses, collectives, delegations, teams...
...I was, as I say, in a lather, but I had no personal grudge, and I asked the young lady politely whether she could speak German, French, or English, and when she said, like so many Dutchmen, "I do not care to speak German, and I can speak English," I told her, in English, about my being misinformed, and I showed her the letter which proved my point...
...Ivan and Petrov, if they are 50 years old today, were nine at the time of the Revolution...
...each staff member knew only who was in charge of him...
...The hallmark of our no-system was, and is, pecuniary corruption, the purchase of politico-economic influence rare and even unknown in the systematically bureaucratized polities of Western Europe—and of Soviet Russia...
...A year ago a Russian passenger plane hit a smokestack coming into Copenhagen and crashed...
...Here, the old kings and their foreign ministers and the royal playboys and the cold, fat, manicured men with oil, tungsten, or people to sell for the defense of the West...
...They are better off—better off there, in "bad" times, than here...
...At every corner, in every meeting, and from every masthead, the Russians cry out Mir!—Peace!—and Friendship and Peace...
...Nobody is ever on time...
...or that he had seen the future, and it worked, and he shuddered...
...We need it...
...The G.I...
...the capricious, the deviant, the for-its-own-sake, the in sich—in a word, the sonnet, the dew-drop, the teardrop—is the sinful...
...Intelligent materialism (unlike ours) that retains the useful, even if the useful is Latin...
...But what of those who need to care, you and I, and all men, who need to decide, now, here, and this day, with the hungry man in front of us, whether, without external compulsion, we will share our company, our keeping, our understanding, or only our bread with him, and what of the good that is done us, you and me, when we decide well...
...And I think it has moved us to shame for the lack of such feeling, or even the prevalence of its opposite, among many people in our own countries...
...What keeps the system going...
...where are we...
...In the wholly socialized state, then, corruption is not, as it is in ours, a felony...
...it may be that individualism in science (even in applied science) is "safe" in a way that individualism in morals and politics is not, and is, therefore, not individualism at all...
...Socialism is all system, and Russia is the biggest country on earth...
...Oh, any time, maybe this afternoon, tomorrow for sure...
...But nothing yet has worked well, and the future has no reason (outside the Marxist myth asserted in the opening line of the Communist Manifesto) to consider itself an exception...
...A man is terribly sick in the night," he says, "and he calls the respectable doctor to come to cure him, but the respectable doctor will not get up and go out to help, so the sick man turns to a doctor who is not respectable, and he gets up and goes out to help...
...But this is socialism, public ownership and public control...
...Is it possible that the peace and the time the Russians say they need will be their undoing...
...But when the hungry are fed, "What are you...
...It is impossible," she said...
...Today is his turn to preach to the West...
...Their citation of their scientific achievement may say something unflattering about the nature of science rather than something flattering about individualism in the Soviet Union...
...It is hard to believe, in Russia, that the Russians are now afraid, of anybody, anywhere, or of any combination of anybodies...
...It's a matter of life or death...
...the old treatment, whether there or here, American Express, Cook's, or Intourist...
...Why is the elevator operator studying English, never, having memorized the position of the floor buttons, lifting her head from the book...
...The visitor, of course, sees none of this...
...I am not sure that system—good system or bad—can answer those questions...
...I ask myself if this is not an indication of the sincerity of the Soviet government's peace propaganda...
...The only tentatively tenable answer I can give is that they are excited not about liberty, but about what they are doing...
...That something is the highest attainment of the humble, caring, the Christian caritas...
...You ask them, and they tell you that they want to get ahead, to get good jobs...
...But their legendary dread can not but continue to dominate their attitudes: Big Russia, for more than a thousand years the sitting duck of the neighboring sportsmen as long as it was incoherently organized and incapable of defense, has got to be coherently organized, and that at any and every price, beginning with liberty...
...It was confirmed in Paris a month ago...
...They have something now to preserve, and this feeling greatly strengthens the drive for peace...
...How many hungry men are you...
...Is literacy useful?—Will it, that is, improve methods of industrial and agricultural production?—Self-evidently yes.—Then let us have literacy...
...their pilot must have understood the control tower...
...The Poles and the Yugoslavs are fighting Moscow on the issue of system—of centralized control—and the Russians are actually trying to decentralize some of their domestic controls because of the threatening collapse of communications in Moscow...
...cheek by jowl with your fine Western ladies and your fine Western medical men and architects and astronomers, the delegations (always delegations) of Chinese miners, Egyptian farmers, Japanese students, Italian boilermakers, shirt-sleeved or wool-hatted, sometimes smelly, and somehow at home...
...May not the unpossessed be driven to be more bellicose even than the possessed...
...Having known no other, they accept their country's system exactly as we, having known no other, accept ours...
...and Pandit Nehru, landing at the Chicago airport, instead of being taken to his • downtown hotel via old Archer Avenue, or Archie - Avenue, as Mr...
...The Russians loved us for our chess-playing...
Vol. 22 • December 1958 • No. 12
