IMAGINING AMERIKA
Stalin was fascinated by SShA (Soedinennye Shtaty Ameriki). From the First World War onwards, the United States was the world’s most advanced and powerful capitalist country. Soviet socialism aimed to catch up with and then surpass the USA. Stalin was confident the rationally planned and socially controlled Soviet economy would prevail in competition with American free enterprise capitalism but he was still keen to import superior US technology, mass production techniques and work organisation methods. ‘Do it the Ford way’ and ‘create Russian Americans’ were among the more surprising Bolshevik slogans of the 1920s.286 In his 1924 lectures on The Foundations of Leninism, Stalin talked about the ideal ‘style of work’ being a combination of ‘Russian revolutionary sweep and American efficiency’. American efficiency, said Stalin, was the ‘indomitable force which neither knows nor recognises obstacles’ and ‘with business-like perseverance brushes aside all obstacles’.287 In correspondence with the poet Demyan Bedny that same year, he explained Bolshevik ‘philosophy’ with a quote from Walt Whitman: ‘We are alive. Our scarlet blood boils with the fire of unused strength.’288
When Emil Ludwig commented that in the Soviet Union ‘everything American is held in very high esteem’, Stalin demurred, but said he respected ‘the efficiency that Americans display in everything – in industry, in technology, in literature and in life’. Compared with the old European capitalist countries, remarked Stalin, there was an element of democracy in American industrial practices, which he attributed to the absence of feudal remnants in a young country like the United States.
Keen not only to import but to make the best use of western technology, the Bolsheviks launched a campaign to bring ‘Foreign Languages to the Masses’. Soviet workers were exhorted and supported to learn key foreign languages, such as English and German, that would enable them to understand and use scientific and technical knowledge and products from the United States and western Europe. The Politburo also ensured that foreign languages were taught in Soviet schools and instructed party members to regard foreign language study as a fundamental duty.289
Stalin didn’t exempt himself from this duty. Holidaying by the Black Sea in September 1930, he wrote home to his wife Nadya, who was in Moscow, and asked her to search for his copy of a self-study English-language book by A. A. Meskovsky, a text that was based on the methods of the American educator Richard S. Rosenthal. Nadya couldn’t find it and, fearing Stalin would be annoyed, she sent him another textbook instead.290 Stalin never attended classes or employed language tutors: home study was his preferred method of learning foreign languages, though he never got very far with any of them except Russian.
Stalin was confident that in time Soviet workers would be able to emulate the efficiency and technical expertise of their American counterparts. ‘I consider it impossible to assume that the workers of any particular nation are incapable of mastering new technique,’ he told visiting American progressive Raymond Robins in May 1933, noting that in the United States, ‘negroes’ were considered ‘bottom category men’ yet could master technique just as well as whites.291
By no means were all Soviet images of America positive. In August 1917 Stalin published an editorial in the party press on ‘American Billions’, in which he accused US capitalists of financing counter-revolution in Russia. ‘It used to be said in Russia that the light of socialism came from the West,’ he wrote. ‘And it was true . . . it was there . . . that we learned revolution and socialism.’ But now it was not ‘socialism and emancipation that the West is exporting to Russia so much as subjection and counter-revolution.’292
Thousands of American troops fought on Soviet soil on the anti-Bolshevik side during the Russian Civil War. President Woodrow Wilson may have been a liberal hero in the west; to the Bolsheviks he was the ringleader of a global counter-revolutionary coalition.
During the 1930s Stalin was keen to import American know-how and expertise in many different spheres. In 1935 he sponsored a trip by a group of film professionals to Hollywood, the intent being to industrialise Soviet moviemaking along American lines. In 1936 Stalin’s trade commissar, Anastas Mikoyan, spent two months in America studying its food industry. When it was decided to build a gigantic Palace of the Soviets in the centre of Moscow, the project’s engineers and architects were sent on fact-finding tours of the United States and American consultants were hired to provide further input. While the palace was never built, the project did pave the way for the series of skyscrapers (called ‘tall buildings’ by the Soviets) that were erected in Moscow after the war.293
Of enduring interest to Stalin was the US Constitution. In March 1917 he published an article in Pravda entitled ‘Against Federalism’, a response to proposals that post-Tsarist Russia should become a federal state. Stalin pointed out that the US was federal only in theory. Originally, the United States was a confederation and became a federation as a result of the American civil war. That federal structure did not last long, however, and the US soon became, in effect, a unitary state. Indeed, Stalin favoured a similar set-up in Russia – not a federal state but a strong, centralised one that would allow regions degrees of autonomy.
Following two years of public consultation and discussion, the USSR adopted a new constitution in December 1936.294 Stalin’s speech on the draft showed he’d done some comparative research on the constitutions of other states.295 One of his sources was a section on the United States in a 1935 book, Konstitutsii Burzhuaznykh Stran (Constitutions of the Bourgeois Countries), in which he noted the US Constitution was based on the principle of balance between the Executive, the Judiciary and the Legislature. When the Soviet author of this piece, M. Tanin, commented that America’s entry into the First World War had resulted in a presidency that amounted to a ‘democratic Caesarism’, Stalin circled the phrase and wrote NB in the margin. Then he marked passages describing the role of the different branches of government and the fact that American women had not been able to vote until the ratification of the 19th amendment to the Constitution in 1920. In relation to American ‘Negroes’ he marked a paragraph which stated that, while they had the formal right to vote, it was exceedingly difficult for them to do so in many southern states.
The book reproduced (in Russian translation) the full text of the American Constitution. What caught Stalin’s eye was its first paragraph: ‘We the People of the United States . . .’296
A year after the 1936 constitution was adopted, there were elections to the newly created Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. In his election speech, Stalin highlighted the differences between Soviet and bourgeois-democratic elections:
Universal elections exist and are held in some capitalist countries, too, so-called democratic countries. But in what atmosphere are elections held there? In an atmosphere of class conflicts, in an atmosphere of class enmity, in an atmosphere of pressure brought to bear on the electors by the capitalists, landlords, bankers and other capitalist sharks. Such elections, even if they are universal, equal, secret and direct, cannot be called altogether free and altogether democratic elections.