Give Me Liberty

I was in Transcaucasian Russia at the time, drinking tea with cherry preserves in it and trying to hold a lump of sugar between my teeth while I did so. It’s difficult. My plump Russian hostess and her placid, golden-bearded husband beamed at me, and a number of round-cheeked children stared in wonder at the American. Their house was a century old, and charming. Icons hung on thick walls whiter than snow; featherbeds rounded upward in the bed-niche of the large brick stove, which was also white-washed. Every fabric was embroidered; my host’s collar and his wife’s gown were works of art. There was an American sewing machine, and the samovar was a proud samovar.

The village was communist, of course; it had always been communist. The sole source of wealth was land, and it had never occurred to these villagers that land could be privately owned.

These plains of Russian Georgia are a great deal like those of Illinois. The Russians came into them as pioneers about the same time that Americans were moving into Illinois. They came in the same way, on foot, goading the oxen that pulled the slow wagons over roadless prairies. Industrious, thrifty, good-natured and eminently sensible people, the Russians moved in groups, settled in villages, cultivated the good land in common, and prospered.

In Illinois, every settler paid for his land. There was no free land for Americans until 1862. Here in Russia, the land was free. Each village cultivated as much as it needed. Within the village, each family tilled an allotted acreage. When in the course of natural events, the size of the families altered so that the division of land was unsatisfactory, all the villagers assembled in town-meeting and wrangled out a new division. This happened every ten years or so, depending on births, marriages and deaths.

These people had never been oppressed by land owners; most of the villages had no experience of land owners and none of them had had any real contact with the Czar’s government. Once a year, in the fall, they had been accustomed to paying a tax-collector a tenth of the year’s yield from the grain-fields. The tax-collector came riding across the plains, collected the taxes in ox-wagons, and rode away. The young men occasionally went to war, usually to a little private war with a Tartar village. Most of these Russians were primitive Christians, opposed to war; they had come or had been driven from old Russia because they would not send their sons to the Czar’s armies. But with the passing of a century their opposition had weakened; the young men had sometimes been willing enough to be conscripted for war. Thus, occasionally, an officer rode into the village, young men rode away with him, and when some returned months or years later they brought the news of where they had been and what they had done and seen.

I had before me the spectacle of a virgin country, free land, rich soil, to which the pioneers had brought communism. They had lived here for a hundred years, undisturbed. I met in these villages many old men who asked me what had been the result in my country when the Czar of the world died. I met young men who had been in German prison camps, and who explained to pop-eyed neighbors that I came from America, a fabulous land to which you might write a letter asking for anything—for food, for cigarettes, for socks, matches, sugar, even for a coat—and it would come.

And they were not at all stupid. They were the best of farmers and dairymen, they were good mechanics; they were fine housekeepers and cooks. They were open-minded and experimental. One village had imported a Swiss, at a good salary, and built a Swiss chalet for him and his family; he was employed to raise the breed of milch cows and to make cheese in the village cheese factory. There was one village two miles long and one street wide, lighted by electricity from the village electric plant; its women did not do their washing in the river, but in a village laundry.

Crops had been good that year; the cattle were fat, the granaries overflowed, and all the open house-lofts held piles of red gold pumpkins. Of course, there was not a poor mart in the town. Everyone worked, and—weather permitting—everyone who worked was abundantly fed. No communist could have desired better proof of Communism’s practical value than the prosperous well-being of those villagers.

The Bolsheviks had then been nearly four years in power and the village taxes had not been increased, nor any more: young men taken for the army than during the Czar’s regime. These villages depended hardly at all upon Tiflis, the nearest: city, but even Tiflis was at the moment reviving under NEP, Lenin’s New Economic Policy of a temporary breathing spell for capitalism.

My host astounded me by the force with which he said that he did not like the new government. I could hardly believe that a lifelong communist, with the proofs of successful communism thick about us, was opposed to a communist government. He repeated that he did not like it. “No! No!”

His complaint was government interference with village affairs. He protested against the growing bureaucracy that was taking more and more men from productive work. He predicted chaos and suffering from the centralizing of economic power in Moscow. These were not words, but that was what he meant.

This, I said to myself, is the opposition of the peasant mind to new ideas, too large for him to grasp. Here is my small opportunity to spread a little light. I could understand simple Russian, but I could not speak it well, and through my interpreter I explained in primer words the parallel between the village land, as a source of wealth, and all sources of wealth. I drew for him a picture of Great Russia, to its remotest corner enjoying the equality, the peace and the justly divided prosperity of his village. He shook his head sadly.

“It is too big,” he said. “Too big. At the top, it is too small. It will not work. In Moscow there are only men, and man is not God. A man has only a man’s head, and one hundred heads together do not make one great head. No. Only God can know Russia.”

A westerner among Russians often suddenly feels that they are all slightly mad. At other times, their mysticism seems plain common sense. It is quite true that many heads do not make one great head; actually, they make a session of Congress: What, then, I asked myself dizzily, is The State? The Communist State—does it exist? Can it exist?

I wonder now whether that ancestral home, that village, have yet been wiped from the soil of Russia to make way for a communal farm, worked in three daily eight-hour shifts, plowed by tractors and harvested by combines, illuminated at night by enormous arc-lights. Do my host and his wife eat, perhaps, in a communal dining hall and sleep in communal barracks?

Certainly their standard of living was primitive. In a hundred years, it had not changed. They had no electric lights, no plumbing. They bathed, I supposed, only once a week, in the village bath-house, and perhaps it wasn’t sanitary. How many germs were in their drinking water, no one knew. Their windows were not screened. Their dusty roads were undoubtedly fathomless mud in rainy weather. They had no automobiles, nor even horses; only ox-wagons. Their standard of living, in a word, had remained that of the pioneers of Illinois a hundred years ago. Possibly their standard of living has already been raised. It may be that in time every tooth in Russia will be brushed thrice daily and every child fed spinach.

But if this is done for the people in former Russia, it will not be done by them, but to them. And what will do it? The State?