RUSSIA THROUGH THE EYES OF AN INSIDER
BEALS, CARLETON
Russia Through The Eyes Of An Insider A Russian's 'Basic Record' Of Soviet Life And Politics ONE WHO SURVIVED: The Life Story of a Russian under the Soviets, by Alexander Barmine. Putnam's....
...The manager of the Grand Hotel had just been put under the sod...
...At a time when no food or consumers goods were allowed to be imported into Russia, when the heads of Stalin's personal enemies were rolling into the basket, he was keeping the Soviet diplomats all over the world busy digging up mechanical music boxes...
...The Communist hullabaloo about the United States sending scrapiron to Japan is ironical to say the least...
...FOR all Barmine's moderation in this book, reading it is like strolling through a cemetery and reading names on tombstones, so great, so complete has been the elimination of all top leaders, professionals, and soldiers by Stalin...
...Barmine gives chapter and verse, showing the disgusting personal adulation and cheap boot-lickirig of names of so-called free intellectuals...
...And yet, Barmine points out, these shipments were made on the direct orders of Stalin and the all-powerful Politburo, and Pravda had rung with enthusiastic articles by Mechlis, one of Stalin's private secretaries, and others, that the success of Russian industrialization might be seen in the increased exports of pig iron to many countries, especially Japan...
...The British, of course, and presently the Germans, were using arms and trade for their own particular military and political ambitions...
...It had been his youthful dream to carry Communism and Soviet power throughout the Near Eastern and eastern lands...
...A possible link-up with American tastes is revealed by Stalin's great fondness for juke boxes...
...they had been exiled to the interior, and presently they were destroyed...
...The emphasis is mine...
...Persons to whom I had letters could not be seen...
...Here is the sad moral capitulation of such a great composer as Shostakovich, unable to present his work until he had written a monumental opus on the style of the Eroica, lauding the totalitarian dictator...
...He had been a diplomat...
...Other men confessed and were murdered because of alleged negotiations with Germany and Japan, although Stalin himself was all ready working up a rapprochement with Hitler presently effected...
...Whether history tells of another instance in which a brigadier general has quietly given his services in the ranks, I do not know...
...No picture is given of Barmine, a few years earlier, when he was working as an ordinary hand in the repair shop of Air France at Le Bourget Airport...
...He had been head of a great export bureau...
...It was in that year that the British, from their advance pseudo-colony of Thibet, apparently incited Mohammedan tribesmen to revolt in Sinkiang in the very heart of Asia...
...In the Soviet Union he had built successful factories...
...The heads of the railroad and oil syndicates had just been shot...
...But then, should we be too censorious when one finds the same thing paralleled in the nauseating propaganda of Mission to Moscow by an American diplomat ? One weakness of Barmine's book is that he tends to slur over the pre-1937 terrorism...
...It throws great light upon the inner methods and psychology of the vast Soviet bureaucracy, and has close-up pictures of the names that have echoed in the press before and since the blood purges...
...Barmine, then a diplomat in Greece, escaped kidnaping and assassination, went into prolonged hiding in Paris with the GPU ever on his trail, and finally reached the United States with his new wife...
...Today Stalin's victory tends to conceal and justify 20 years of ever mounting terrorism...
...In addition, it is one of the basic records of our times: of Russia during World War I, of the revolution, the civil wars, the foreign invasion, and of Soviet imperialism...
...Before that he starved and wandered homeless...
...The aim of his bureau was "the conquest of the whole Eastern market...
...3.75...
...THIS book is also a story of the tragedy of human beings, uprooted by revolution and war, and of one man who came through it magnificently without a trace of self-pity, who found a great love in the process, who constantly grew in mind and soul, who learned to be calm and understanding when he should have been bitter and dogmatic...
...Barmine believes that the Stalin brutalities, the general terror among the population, the loss of technical knowledge, etc., made possible the deep penetration of the Nazi armies into the Soviet Union, the probable prolongation of the war by two years at a cost of many million Russian lives and the destruction of much of the wealth of the country...
...Here is a close-up of Stalin of the withered arm and duck toes, his life in his many splendid palaces...
...Only three years later came the big spectacular blood purges...
...As late as 1934 Barmine was head of Auto-Moto-Ex-port...
...and often a mere minor incident is more illuminating of things Russian than many a chapter in a drier book of exposition...
...It is a great story and a great book, an exciting and moving tale...
...BUT do not get the idea that Barmine's book is another typical expose...
...his sorrow is for his people, without freedom of expression, still in the most pitiful poverty, and ruled by men living in oriental luxury...
...he had fought invading Poles and Germans ; he had studied to be an officer in classrooms without fuel in sub-zero weather...
...In his book, purges are incidental to a rich story of a rich life...
...Barmine was especially valuable in this work, for in all the rush and turmoil, he had found time to learn Persian and other Oriental languages...
...Barmine's real grief is the failure of democratic socialism, struck down by lust for power, greedy nationalism, overt imperialism and war...
...When I was in Moscow in 1929 the wholesale massacre of private peasants and the mass deportation to Siberian concentration camps had already occurred...
...Akkady Pavlovich Rosengolz, able Commissar of Foreign Trade, was forced to confess—among other crimes—that he had deliberately exported large quantities of pig-iron to Japan although knowing that Soviet factories were made idle...
...The Donnetz coal basin was still warm with the blood of some of Russia's finest and brainiest men...
...Throughout, he served his country, believed in socialism, and moved to the top circle's of Stalinist power...
...For me one of the most moving and pathetic parts of his volume is the picture of the degeneracy and shame of Russian intellectuals, the stifling of all free thought and creative work...
...he had led some of her major trade negotiations...
...Reviewed by Carleton Beals FACING Page 312 of this book is a photograph of Alexander Barmine in the uniform of an American private...
...It will perhaps surprise many readers that long before Lend-Lease, at a time when the great city of Moscow itself had only a few hundred motor vehicles, and these mostly for the use of top officials, when all Russia had less than 200 miles of decent roads, when diet and living conditions were as low as they had been in a century, that automobiles and trucks were being exported to the Balkans, Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, and Central Asia...
...But even more important in the activities of the bureau was the secret shipment of arms, in decoy crates, of planes, tanks, and artillery to those same regions— for promoting political influence and Communist penetration...
...He had signed some of Russia's most famous treaties...
...The Soviets countered by sending arms to a puppet governor and finally a full-fledged invasion army...
...He throws light on the purges...
...This book is his story...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 37
