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what's the matter with RUSSIA?
5
"Now by contrast to that, foreign reporters in America are free to go wherever they Hke. Russian reporters representing the Russian news agencies can cover all of the seamy side of American life — and they certainly do! . . . Now all that I think we should not only ask for — but insist on — is exactly that right that we allow to them: that our people should be free to send press representatives of our own choosing to Moscow and to Russia, to report it from our point of view. That we don't have."
William White knows this from personal experience. Almost the moment his Report on Rxissia appeared in the Reader's Digest, a commentator in the Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, took up the attack! From Moscow he accused Mr. White of "premeditated intention of spreading calumny, deceiving Johnston, and abusing the hospitality and confidence of the Soviet Union." Naturally, Mr. White foresaw this reaction. But being an honest reporter, he reported Russia as he saw it.
Their Far East, he says, is a great deal like our own Great West. "Novosibersk reminded me in many ways of Kansas City. It's got a great big beautiful new Union Station, on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. And wandering around in this station, we could see what at first I thought were some of the Oklahoma Indians up here spending their allotment money; only they turned out to be exactly the same thing — except that they were Cossacks. They were in about the same stage of culture as our Indians were — maybe a little higher,
but not much; nomadic, hunting tribes, and the Russians subdued them, more or less as we did. They don't herd them into reservations — they herd them into 'collectives.' But in general, they have pacified, civilized the country, and built up a great and beautiful empire out there.
"We found no freedom in the country in our sense of the word. That was the discouraging thing about it. The complete slavery of thought, the complete obsequiousness to the rulers and in particular, to Stalin. I regard Stalin as a great leader. I think he's guided Russia wisely. But there's a difference between that and being able to agree with the worship accorded him — which is abnormal. . . . You can tell you are in a totalitarian dictatorship."
Someone at this point asked a question: "Are there any individiml farmers (in Russia) now, or is it all collective farming?"
"Everything we saw was collective," Mr. White answered, "and I would say — I'm guessing now, but I think it's a reasonably accurate guess — that certainly not less than nine-tenths of the land is collectivized. I think that in some of the outlying Republics you will find land that has not yet been organized — back up in the mountains, along the river streams, you'll find land owned by individual farmers, and things like that. But everything — practically all of it is — almost no individual farmers, particularly in the civilized portions of the country.
Another questioner mentioned an incident in Mr. White's Report on