Sci-Fi, Utopias and Socialism (2021)

From the September 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘We have described a World-in-which-we’d-love-to-live… The way we see it, this is a world where creative labour is the ultimate satisfaction and the source of happiness for people. Everything else is built on the foundation of this principle. People are happy there when they manage to actualise this main principle. Friendship, love and work are the three main pillars that support the happiness of such humankind. We could not imagine anything better than that, and why would we want to?’ Boris Strugatsky.

What kind of society would appeal to a socialist? What kind of life would we actually enjoy once the logic of capitalism driving the world of today releases its grip not only on the resources of Earth – material or human – but also on the minds of its inhabitants? I believe that in order to promote the socialist cause, we need to have a clearer understanding of answers to these questions. There is a caveat there, of course, that what is appealing to people today may not stay the same in the future.

Dystopias

I have to confess, I am a sucker for sci-fi. And when it comes to sci-fi, I am omnivorous, reading and watching anything I can get my hands on. There is probably a hidden yearning for a better future in this passion, as I am particularly interested in the fiction about Earth-like worlds, especially those that are more developed than ours. But I have recently noticed an interesting feature of the vast majority of the sci-fi visions of the future: they are overwhelmingly dark, presenting rather a failed world than a successfully developed civilisation. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or his post-World War II fascist America in The Man in the High Castle… Cyberpunk is a good example of a genre that produced enormous quantities of dark sci-fi works, and post-apocalyptic fiction writers have been prolific on this topic as well. Seems like the future people foresee in fiction as the most likely is not very bright at all. Beginnings like ‘after an ecological catastrophe wipes out most of humanity…’ or ‘It’s the future, and the planet is a dusty, radioactive wasteland…’ sound like a cliché in a film about the future. And technological breakthroughs gone horribly wrong are a really popular theme, with many examples brilliantly shown in the Black Mirror series.

Of course, there is a sub-genre that focuses specifically on the stories about ‘perfect’ worlds – Utopias. Ironically, when searching for utopias on Google, it is quite hard to find any – the search engine stubbornly shows ‘best dystopias’, and even articles on utopias often discuss mostly dystopian books and films. My first several ‘utopian books’ searches returned the Vulture’s 100 Great Works of Dystopian Fiction, Tales About A World Gone Wrong and a BBC article Science Fiction: How Not To Build A Future Society. Maybe a good drama needs suffering, and this is why tragedies have always enjoyed more popularity than comedies? Whatever the reason, the number of utopian worlds seems to be surprisingly small. Do any of them offer appealing visions of a socialist or a socialist-like world?

There are some notable examples, such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. These and some other novels describe interesting social innovations, which are often very close to socialist ideals. For instance, the utopian world in Woman on the Edge of Time promotes such values as common ownership and (gender) equality; the inhabitants of the Walden Two community are free to choose their vocation and have no police force that could enforce their will through violence; and on the moon of Anarres in The Dispossessed, everyone is free to start their own productive enterprise, where there is no incentive to grow production or compete since there is no market, so all production is aimed solely to fulfil everyday needs.

While many ideas described in these and other books are worth discussing and thinking about, some details are questionable or even disturbing. For example, Skinner’s Walden community has a set of guardians who are somehow wiser than the ‘common people’. Skinner himself believed in the need for elitist rule: ‘We must delegate control of the population as a whole to specialists – to police, priests, teachers, therapies…’ (John Staddon, The New Behaviorism, 2014, p.125). The utopian agrarian community of Piercy’s Mattapoisett (Woman on the Edge of Time) shows a governmentally decentralised egalitarian society, mostly based on feminist and anarchist ideals. The world of Mattapoisett at times comes through as a fantasy, a feverish dream in the mind of a person in a mental institution under the influence of heavy tranquillisers, propelled by the feelings of powerlessness and grief. We are never told in the book if the visions the protagonist had are true or not. Would I want to live in Mattapoisett? Probably not. It seems quite focussed on offering the alternative to the patriarchal and exploitative capitalist ways of life, but more in the way of renouncing something negative rather than by offering something viable and attractive in its own right.

Importantly, it is still not clear on how this set of communities (or the one on Anarres in The Dispossessed) is supposed to work: both rely on self-governance and the structures of meeting and discussion, which might function well on the level of a town but certainly not a planet. Ursula Le Guin is perhaps more realistic in her novel, because Anarres in The Dispossessed is not shown as a Garden of Eden. It is a barren and dirty world, where life is decidedly hard for its inhabitants. Do any of them offer appealing visions of a socialist or a socialist-like world? They also have problems with their PDC (Production and Distribution Coordination), which exhibits some signs of government. In any case, it is probably not the best example to illustrate the advantages of a socialist society. But I guess my biggest problem with most utopias is that they simply don’t appeal to me; I wouldn’t want to live there myself.

I understand, writing utopias is hard. Unlike dystopias, it is not as simple as to show some horrors of destruction or societal decay (which could be easily borrowed from a daily tabloid). New ideas have to be created and, on top of this, put together in a coherent system that would look realistic. When thinking them up, authors would undoubtedly lean on their own life experiences, environment and cultural upbringing. For many of them, the best vision of a progressive society not corrupted by consumerism or greed would be inspired by communities in the countryside, or perhaps by stereotypes of preindustrial self-sufficient settlements. Many utopias share these elements of ‘environmental wisdom’ or even a pre-technological biblical paradise, for example, in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, citizens aim for a balance between themselves and nature. Callenbach himself said of his book, in relation to Americans: ‘It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now… [But] we’d better get ready. We need to know where we’d like to go.’

‘Noon Universe’

There are a couple of authors – two brothers – who borrowed their ideas from a different cultural environment: that of the post-war Soviet Union, and about how their utopian world came out different as a result.

The Strugatsky brothers, Boris and Arkady, wrote their books collaboratively. They needed to pass Soviet censorship in order to get published, so they came up with an ‘approved’ setting for many of their books, called ‘Noon Universe’, in which communism has triumphed globally. Of course, they both loathed the constraints of state capitalism and totalitarianism on the lives of Soviet people, so their utopias went much further, painting a world free of money or coercion – a world where they would themselves want to live and work. Most of those books were written in the 60s and 70s, but to this day a more compelling, believable fictional world of the future where people are happy and lead dynamic lives has yet to be written – at least in the Russian science-fiction literature.

The Noon Universe, named after Noon: 22nd Century, chronologically the first novel from the series, also features in the following books: Hard to Be a God, The Inhabited Island, Space Mowgli, Beetle in the Anthill, and The Time Wanderers, among others. To give you an idea of some features of the future social organisation Arkady and Boris Strugatsky presented in their Noon Universe, without giving away any spoilers, here is a brief overview:

• unequivocal victory of socialism: no monetary system, all production for common good
• absence of institutionalised coercion, such as police or military
• advanced technological progress, ubiquitous robotic assistance
• everyone is engaged in a profession that inspires them

This fairly common set of features then goes on, now with a somewhat different focus:

• the system of education is given utmost importance: students spend at least as much time or more at school than at home; they have very small class sizes and have personal Mentors that lead them on the path of learning about both the world and themselves; they must reach a high level of scientific knowledge, societal responsibility and creativity (arts and humanities)
• ethics/morality is given a very important role, on a par with technological competence
• a new kind of human (intellectually and ethically superior to most modern humans; importantly, much more socially responsible) is raised, who deeply cares about the planet and all its life forms, and is thus willing to both drive and accept societal progress

Finally, what makes this world both believable and appealing, is this combination of on the one hand a democratic and science-based social system without exploitation, and on the other, individuals raised to support such socialist society:

• this way of raising responsible individuals makes it possible to avoid coercion and resolve issues collaboratively, based on evidence and rationality
• this society does have some structure / governance where a number of meritocratic High Councils composed of the world’s leading scientists in each particular field of specialisation provide guidance and rules of functioning

Unfortunately, apart from The Gulag Archipelago, the legacy of Soviet literature is largely unknown in the Western cultural sphere, and the Noon Universe with its bright and highly optimistic vision of the future has not been popularised through films or comic books. I have tried to search for similar utopian universes in English or American books, or shown in films, but, as described in the beginning, found mostly dystopian sci-fi or stories of societies that went backwards ‘to the cradle of nature’ in their attempts to invent a fairer and wiser world. Perhaps the closest to the creation of the Strugatsky brothers comes the Earth in Star Trek: The Original Series, and even that is rife with militaristic and patriarchal themes.

From the vantage point of the 21st century, there are several issues that could also be improved in the Noon Universe, of course. For example, we might want to introduce some features of Marxist feminism and gender equality, and environmental considerations could have been described more convincingly. But the main features seem to all be there: technological progress comes hand in hand with societal progress, which is in turn driven by personal betterment of every member of that society. It might seem utopian, but I think it is fully socialist in spirit, more coherent and credible, and it really makes me want to step into that world and start living there right now.

(Talk given at the Socialist Party Summer School last month.)

Leon Rozanov

Blogger's Note:

There is some discussion of this talk over at the SPGB website.

Mixed Media: The Master and Margarita (2013)

The Mixed Media Column from the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Simon McBurney directed the Complicite Theatre Company in a ‘phantastic’ dramatisation of the novel The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov at the Barbican in London recently.

Bulgakov was writing in the USSR in the 1920-30s when Stalin ruthlessly pursued state capitalist industrialisation. Although Stalin personally liked the works of Bulgakov, the author faced prohibitions of his plays by Glavrepertcom (censorship committee) for concerning himself with the fate of intellectuals and Tsarists in the revolution and civil war. Bulgakov politically was a ‘liberal conservative monarchist.’

The Master and Margarita is a fantasy and political satire on Soviet society under Stalin and critiques the literary establishment, highlighting the corruption, greed, narrow-mindedness and paranoia in Stalinist Russia. Bulgakov looks at the relation of the individual artist to the state, censorship (‘manuscripts don’t burn’), the power of love, good and evil and human frailty. The novel was not published until 1966. Bulgakov was inspired by the play, Faust, by Goethe, the opera, The Damnation of Faust, by Berlioz, and his ‘Margarita’ is modelled after Goethe’s heroine, ‘Gretchen’ in Faust. In his ‘Confessions’ for Jenny and Laura Marx of 1865, Marx lists Goethe and Gretchen as his favourite poet and heroine.

Bulgakov has ‘Professor Woland’ (Lucifer) with his demonic two-legged black cat ‘Behemoth’ (Biblical monster in Job 40:15) visit Moscow where he exposes greed, bourgeois behaviour and the superficial vanities of modern life. Bulgakov portrays Satan’s Spring Ball where the notorious in human history such as Caligula are gathered with ‘the kings, dukes, chevaliers, procuresses, jailers, executioners, informers, traitors, and spies.’ In 1935 Bulgakov attended the Spring Ball at the US Ambassadors home in Moscow along with senior Bolsheviks such as Bukharin. The Master and Margarita was the inspiration for the Rolling Stones song, Sympathy for the Devil, and Salman Rushdie has credited the ‘magical realism’ of the novel as an inspiration for The Satanic Verses.

Bulgakov has a second plot involving the trial of ‘Yeshua Ha-Notsri’ (Jesus of the Nazarene sect) in ‘Yershalayim’ (Jerusalem) before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. Bulgakov was inspired by the parable of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ in The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. Bulgakov focuses on Pilate’s words as he washes his hands in Matthew 27:24: ‘I am innocent of the blood of this righteous person,’ and the debate between Jesus (‘wanderer and mad philosopher’) and Pilate is drawn from Pilate’s question in John 18:38: ‘And what is truth?’ This Christian theme is explicit in The Master and Margarita with Pilate’s spiritual need for Jesus spelled out clearly at the conclusion of the play.

Steve Clayton

Stalin's Successors & Censorship (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

  In this, our age of infamy, 

Man’s choice is but to be  

A tyrant, traitor, prisoner. 

No other choice has he.

                               (Pushkin)

Under the capitalist system we are not free from material want, and neither are we free from intellectual oppression and the blue pencil of censorship. “All over the world censorship is being employed as an instrument of government”, writes the editor of Index, a journal published by the Writers and Scholars International.

Index performs a useful rôle in exposing those who seek to burn and ban books or to purge and prohibit art. Its first issue indicates the universality of this mediaeval practice, as universal as the social system which leans on it so heavily. There are laws to prohibit publications “that threaten the national interest” (Antigua) and in Brazil “the discussion of ideas” may land you in jail. French journalists are given a police chaperon when covering demonstrations and Portuguese journalists have to be state-registered, like prostitutes. So much for parts of the “free world”. What of the rest of this planet? It is worth examining practices in the so-called “socialist countries”.

Russian censorship has been blatant and crushing in its effects, both cultural and political. It has enabled the so-called Communist Party and its collaborators to portray Russia as a Workers’ Paradise throughout the Thirties and the post war years and even, it must be said, right up to now. Long ago, Orwell attacked the Left on this point. The sin of the Left, he said, is that it wants to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian. This is still true: even now, the Left concentrates its attacks on Greece and Spain, Portugal and South Africa. Yet there is no form of atrocity practised by these governments which is not practised by the Russian State. Imprisonment of opponents, torture, deportation, forced labour, exile, racism—all these are common practices in Russia.

It is almost incredible that people still accept Soviet lies at their face value even now, even after Krushchev and “de-Stalinisation”. Evidently many left-wingers practise doublethink. They knew of Krushchev’s revelations about Stalinism made at the 20th and 22nd Congresses of the CPSU (1956 and 1961) but gradually, as “neo-Stalinism” took over in Russia, as Krushchev fell and was replaced by Brezhnev and Kosygin, they gladly accepted the comforting new dogma that those regrettable mistakes and massacres were all a weird consequence of the “cult of personality”, a relic of a bygone age.

Unfortunately for the Kremlin’s fan-club, there are many Russians who are not content with such facile explanations. They want to know who were the jailers, the prosecutors, the judges; like Yevtushenko they demand to know where these “heirs of Stalin” are now, and they want guaranteed protection from State terror. They publish underground journals such as the Chronicle of Current Affairs and circulate samizdat (do-it-yourself) copies of unpublished novels, poems, plays and essays. They have also formed a Committee for Human Rights in the Soviet Union and have built an active alliance of writers, historians, musicians, film-makers, artists and scientists. Together they effectively expose and publicise the régime’s policy of terror and despotism.

Illusion of Freedom

It is doubtful if such a movement could have developed without the thaw. This term relates to the period of “de-Stalinisation” which started in 1956 and, in terms of cultural freedom, began to die in 1962.

But why did Stalin’s heirs find it necessary to "de-Stalinize” in the first place? Certainly not from feelings of benevolence or remorse! And equally certainly, not very willingly either—they knew they ran considerable risks in this policy.

When Stalin died in 1953 the economy was stagnating and the people were sullenly apathetic. Something was desperately needed to jog them into co-operation and increased efficiency. This applied especially to workers like engineers, managers, planners and bureaucrats, since their apathy or its reverse must have a considerable effect on the economy. Stalin’s old method had been the stick—fear of the camps and the KGB—but this had evidently lost its former effectiveness. So the new bosses decided to try the carrot. They promised material incentives—better living and working conditions—and at the same time they offered political reform—more personal freedom and security. Reassurance was needed that this was for keeps (Stalin had a bad record in such matters) and, as Abraham Rothberg comments wryly in his The Hours of Stalin: Dissidence in the Soviet Union 1953- 1970, “One startling and effective way of reassuring the people was to inform them of some of the truth about Stalin’s tyranny’’ (p. 5). Very reassuring indeed!

What About the Others?

The first startling revelations were made only to the Party and a few key people outside the Party. But in 1961 Krushchev washed the dirty linen publicly, to use his own expression. The shock produced by the 22nd Congress showed how little the general public in Russia had been told in the eight years since Stalin’s death. Significantly the crimes that Krushchev was exposing were “repressions against Party, government, economic, military and Komsomol personnel” (our emphasis) — not against Ivan Denisovich, proletarian, and the millions like him who perished without record in Stalin’s extermination machine. As Yesenin-Volpin said of Sinyavsky and Daniel: “They are lucky for their case has been taken up by the whole civilised world. There were so many others about whom the civilised world knew nothing—knew as little as people know of a rabbit eaten by the wolves in a forest” (quoted in Rothberg, p. 158).

The reforms were first conceived as an internal Party and top management concern, in the hope that these people would succeed in galvanising the economy. The connection with economic policy is underlined by the Twentieth Congress’s approval of the Sixth Five Year Plan and the announcement of the campaign to catch up America in the production of meat, milk and butter, which “would mean at least trebling Soviet output”.

Freezing Again

The thaw in cultural life resulted from the régime’s mobilisation of writers to illustrate the theme of “de- Stalinisation.” Many key works appeared, notably Dudintsev’s novel Not by Bread Alone, Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw and his memoirs, Yevtushenko’s poems Babi Yar and Heirs of Stalin, Bondarev’s novel Silence, and, in November 1962, Solzhenitsyn’s prison-camp story, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This became a barometer registering official attitudes to “de-Stalinisation” and is now almost unobtainable in Russia. However at that time, backed as it was by Krushchev personally, it received accolades from most official publications.

Soon however the regime began to crack down. At the Manezh art gallery, Krushchev announced bluntly: “Gentlemen, we are declaring war on you!” Since then the Kremlin has tried persistently to close the slightly opened door. There have been trials of writers like Sinyavsky and Daniel, of historians like Amalrik and scientists like Medvedev. The penalties have been draconian, including hard labour in Arctic concentration camps, psychiatric prison and perpetual exile. And, just to make things quite clear to all concerned, in 1966 Brezhnev and Kosygin added to the Criminal Code two new articles to make spreading “slanderous inventions about the Soviet State and social system, and disturbance of public order punishable offences”—a portmanteau law which conflicts with Article 125 of the Soviet Constitution which theoretically guarantees “freedom of assembly, including the holding of mass meetings” and “freedom of street processions and demonstrations”.

Question and Answer

Next year will be the twentieth since Stalin’s death and these questions are still debated in Russia.. Were the instruments of repression—the secret police, the camps, the bureaucracy—were they caused by the “cult of the individual” and, if so, why are they still operating nearly a generation after that cult officially ceased?

The régime’s answers are contradictory and muddled. For instance, in 1956 the Central Committee’s resolution On Overcoming the Cult of the Individual and Its Consequences (Soviet News Booklet No. 50) speaks again and again of the “grave consequences of the cult of the individual”, “the cult of the person of Stalin, with all the attendant adverse consequences” and “the negative consequences of the cult of the individual”. But it also significantly disputes this superficial view:

  To think that one personality, even such a great one as Stalin, could change our social and political system is to lapse into profound contradiction with the facts, with Marxism, with truth, is to lapse into idealism.

Precisely! Stalin alone was not the cause of the terror, any more than he was the ultimate cause of the leadership cult. The cult and the terror were both resultant from the “social and political system”—the state capitalism used to industrialise backward Russia. So that the Russian State of the twentieth century continues to repress the intelligentsia who have continued their traditional rôle—one of lament and protest, the mouthpiece of political and social debate under the new despotism just as they were under the old.

Charmian Skelton

Fact from Fiction (1950)

Book Review from the April 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Novelists and story writers create fictional characters, but, unless these characters are to appear ludicrous, they must be portrayed against a background of the social conditions of the period and part of the world that is the scene of the story. The characters must eat, dress, play and behave in the manner of their time, their country and their class. They must live in buildings and travel by the transport facilities available in their day and to those of their social status. Thus, the writer of fiction can present us with a picture of living conditions in different parts of the world at varying periods of history. The more correctly he describes the living conditions, the more real will his characters appear and the better will be his work. He that sets the story in the conditions in which he himself lives has a simplified task.

Vera Fiodorovna Panova is a Russian authoress who writes of her own times. She has received official Russian awards and prizes and for her first novel she received the Stalin Prize of 10,000 roubles. In 1948 there was published in Russia her second novel entitled “Kruzhilika.” This has now been translated into English and is published by Putnam & Co. under the title “The Factory." The blurb on the jacket of the book says, “Obviously it has to be reckoned with in any portrayal of Soviet life."

The story has no plot to be cunningly unfolded. It is simply a series of interlinking scenes of everyday life in Russia, centred around a factory. Naturally, in such a setting, the majority of the characters are workers and it is mighty interesting to learn how they live.

In the early pages of the book we are treated to a view of a meeting of the “town party executive,” where most of the time is taken by a trade union official who complains that the factory directors do not allow the Trade Union to play a sufficiently important part in the affairs of the factory. The main function of the Trade Union appears to be to assist in improving production, suggesting technical improvements, and complaining because ”. . .  the director does not pay enough attention to the voice of the masses.”

The factory director lives a vastly different life from that lived by the factory workers. The following extract from pages 257-258 illustrates. The director, Listopad, is driving around the town in his car because he wants to think about his new girl friend. The car is driven by Mirzoev (Akhmet), his chauffeur.

“The car glided softly up the steep street, swam up to the turning into the high road and dashed away from the settlement. A tram was climbing up the street very slowly, it seemed to be standing still; a small tram with people clinging to it—those who lived in the settlement and worked in the town—returning home. If a man worked in the town, thought Listopad, he ought to live in the town. Only those who worked in the factory ought to live in the settlement. Otherwise they had to go through this misery twice a day—waiting a long time in the frost, crowding on the steps, hands freezing as they hung on the rail."

Listopad then goes on to soliloquise about the housing shortage and ” . . . these hideous brick cubes with two hundred flats in each and five stories without a lift.” Then his thoughts come back to his girl friend and the prospects of having her in the car with him. He speaks to his driver;

"Akhmet.”
Mirzoev turned to the director.
“ Tell Averkiev to get me another car rug. A good one—wolfskin."

All the characters in this book are interesting. There is the demobbed soldier who returns home, gets married. spends his gratuity and then has to sell some of his old clothes in the market to raise enough money to get a meal. In the market we meet the usual marketplace patter, sales talk and trickery.

We read the troubles of the Trade Union collector who has the week’s subscriptions stolen from his pocket in a tram. He borrows from friends and relatives to make up the money, and.

" . . . from then on, three-quarters of hit earnings went to pay off what he owed. The remaining quarter was not sufficient even for the barest necessities and be got heavier and heavier behind."

We are given a picture of the workers spending their Sundays digging their small allotments in order to grow potatoes to help eke out their wages. They make the day a family outing, taking sandwiches for dinner. We also read of the young factory worker who was awarded a bonus of 19,000 roubles for special work one month. With that money he left the job, to the great annoyance of the factory chiefs who regretted the loss of so useful a worker, so good a pace setter. This incident suggests to us that the Russian State chiefs found it more beneficial to give medals and diplomas for exceptional work.

Whilst reading this book one is struck by the idea that, except for the climate, the vodka and the queer sounding names, this is a story of workers in any part of the world. Despite the claims of the Communist Party and their supporters, it appears that the lot of the Russian worker during the years 1945 to 1948 differed but little from that of workers in other countries. They were poor, overworked and ill-housed, just as the victims of capitalism the world over. Like good patriots they sacrificed for the war effort and they hated German workers like hell. The voice of Joe Stalin over the radio is received like the voice of the Pope by a devout Catholic. The State is their religion. They work till they drop for their church and their Pope—and their wages.

W. Waters

From a Russian prison camp (1972)

From the January 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Alexander Solzhenitzyn, the Soviet novelist, is a "prophet without honour" in his own country, while in the West his magnificent novels are bestsellers and one has received the ultimate accolade: it has been made into a film.

We are not concerned here with his stature as a writer but rather with the way he adds to our sketchy knowledge of Soviet society. 

In 1945 he was sentenced to 8 years for comments he made about Stalin. His first year he spent working on construction sites around Moscow. He was then transferred to a secret research establishment—which he describes in The First Circle—but in 1950 he was transferred to a camp for political prisoners at Karaganda, in Central Asia till his life in 1953. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was published in Russia in '62 in Novy Mir, but his other novels only circulated in manuscript form among friends till they reached the West,

His three novels dealing with the Soviet scene are One Day . . . , The First Circle and Cancer Ward. Respectively they describe the world of the manual worker, the intellectual and the chronically sick.

In One Day we learn how starving and frozen prisoners labour on a construction site (temperature minus 39 degrees), queue for fuel, munch their ration of dry bread and try to wangle a smoke or an easy job. As in the outside world, "you feathered your own nest as best you could". You knew that you were cheated of your rations by all who handled them. Graft was everywhere, and so were the informers. But prisoners spared their energy, needing it for survival.

In The First Circle, he describes an expensive top-secret research institute in Moscow where class enemies, saboteurs and other top scientists, imprisoned in the Thirties and Forties, enjoyed relative luxury. Yet the State is cruelly oppressive here too: the cruelty is of a different type, that's all. At Karaganda it was physical cruelty—hunger, cold and overwork; at Mavrino it is psychological—pressure to meet impossible deadlines successfully, dread of a transfer back to labour camps and fear for their persecuted families. As at Karaganda, and as in all parts of Russia, informers abound—the hallmark of a police state. 

If you ever wondered what has happened to ordinary Russians, these books will tell you much. In the two books together, Solzhenitzyn has covered a lot: from the lowest camp drudges, the wives at home on the collectives, ex-Party members who helped collectivize the countryside at gunpoint and their wives, unable to get work without disowning their husbands, right on up through the secret service rat-race to the Minister, Abakumov, and the Immortal One himself.

Finally in Cancer Ward he underlines the idea that his real subject is not a prison society but Soviet society. The whole of Russia is a sick society, all alike are sick—doctors and patients, jailers and prisoners. All Russia is a prison where every fifth man is an informer.

For all Russians, he says, life is an endless sentence without amnesty, measured by months of deprivation and humiliation. The proletarian is everywhere a prisoner of the system: we are all doing time. Some prisons are plush like Mavrino "the first circle of hell." Others are unspeakable. His explanation of the lush conditions at Mavrino applies equally to the so-called middle-class here: "It has been shown that the better sheep are fed and looked after, the higher their yield of wool."

Solzhenitzyn earned the right to claim: "I've got an advantage no spy can make me lose: what I've been through, and seen others go through, should give me a good idea of what history is about, don't you think?"

Any who doubt the existence of these camps is welcome to try to organise a Socialist Party of the Soviet Union: the only Socialists he will meet there will be in the camps, the special prisons and the psychiatric hospitals. And it is no more safe to talk in prison, than it is outside.

Charmian Skelton

"Cement.": A Bolshevik Novel (1929)

Book Review from the February 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Cement," by Feodor V. Gladkov (Martin-Lawrence. 7s. 6d. and 3s. 6d.)

This is the much-heralded novel of Bolshevik Russia, translated into English by A.S. Arthur and C. Ashleigh. It has run through many editions in France and Germany and is widely read in Russia itself.

The author takes as his background Russia in 1920-21, and his chief character is a Red Army soldier returned from the Front to find the local cement factory ruined and the workers idling their time away and the children almost starving.

His wife has no longer any time for him, being occupied in Party and Soviet work, besides having turned to other men in his absence. A good deal of the work is occupied with the efforts of the returned Red soldiers to get the Communist bureaucrats to get the factory restarted. This part of the book brings out the shortcomings of a Communist Dictatorship of Intellectuals who dominate with merciless discipline the mass of the workers and their wives, etc.

The more or less vague practice of "free love" running through the story seems unreal and far-fetched under the circumstances of the time, and the fetish of the Red women that they are free to choose new mates at random is poorly worked out by the author.

The sex life of the hero and his wife is continually brought to our attention, but the book finishes without any definite attitude between them.

For a glimpse of Russia at the opening of the era of the New Economic Policy, the book is interesting, but a real novel of life in Russia under Bolshevism is not yet written, or perhaps we should say translated, into English.

A. Kohn