TRAUBI, editor of Podolsk Truth, is quite unlike any Middletown editor I have come across in the States. Stuffy, provincial-minded creatures, most of them, who considered themselves big frogs that unkind circumstance had landed in little ponds. Traubi is as red-headed as Jack, with energetic, restless movements, and a range of interests that stretches from Podolsk's Main Street clear around the world.
Originally a Baltic sailor--and with all the tattooing!--he relates for us many of his amusing experiences in German ports, as well as gripping incidents of civil war days. In the Red Fleet he was advanced from A.B. to fireman, then to commercial assistant to the captain, taking charge of the ship's loading of cargo. When off duty, he would sit among the men who were sunning themselves on the upper deck, scribbling notes for the ship's paper. Later he was sent to the Party school for seamen in Leningrad.
His articles for the wall paper had attracted attention. "How would you like to train as an editor?" he was asked. He scratched his head, hitched his trousers, and reached for his pencil. "Sure, let's give her a try." That was several years ago. Before coming to take charge of the Podolsk regional paper, he was editing the daily sheet put out by the huge Electrozaiod plant in Moscow.
His job gives him no chance to go stale. Every seek he travels up to the Red Capital for conferences and interviews. He knows every nook and corner of his region, and acts local corresponded for Pravda. Since he has been all over, as he puts it, the local Workers' University pressed him into teaching a course in Economic Geography.
Sometimes he misses the sea. His present work, though, has a fast hold on him. "You bet I like it. I've been at it twelve years. The main thing," he confesses, "I want more chance to study."
To study! The universal cry of 160 millions. In the ten months I have spent in this country, traveling some twelve thousand miles, this phrase has continually rung in my ears like an unconscious byword. When a whole union of nations goes after learning like a dog on a hare's trail, what is to stop them from leaping across centuries of backwardness, devouring the wisdom of ages, forging a new culture whose first beginnings are already astounding the world?
Traubi has been told by the Party that his wish will soon he realized: he will be sent to the land's highest university, the Institute of Red Professors. He is wavering between two of its branches which are open so him: the Institute of World Politics, and that of Literature. The point is, he wants to do both !
Getting out a Soviet paper is not the job of a handful of writers stuck to their desks, with cub-reporters scouting around the city for "scoops" and "all the dirt that's fit to print." A Soviet paper is a mass product. Podolsk Truth has eleven hundred volunteer "shock-brigade reporters," organized around the paper's aim of seeing the Five-Year Plan through in every enterprise and community throughout the region. News and articles from these worker-correspondents pour into the office, while small brigades go out on the paper's assignments to cover and report on developments in other organizations in their town.
Traubi points out that two of yesterday's volunteer reporters are today members of the staff. One of the frequent conferences of this young army of reporters with the editorial force took place while we were in town: a lively, enlightening affair.
Podolsk Truth, in consequence, throbs like a dynamo, with the every-day struggle to build socialism. Its news is concrete, pointed, and usually whetted with the sharp edge of self criticism--that dauntless weapon whereby old ways of life are being reshaped to the new.
There are sports items, international notes, "news from the industrial front," speeches or articles by Stalin, Molotov and Kalinin; biting, witty cartoons on the League of Nations or same local bureaucrat: but no sensational Peaches Browning stories, baby kidnappings, nor brief items of another unemployed family snuffed out by turning on the gas.
Rather, Soviet "scandal" consists in exposing a local co-operative's careless manager who let a winter supply of potatoes rot in a damp cellar, high waste in a factory department, or a jam in the building trust which has left a Podolsk nursery standing half-built for almost a year.
Americans, whose sensations have been falsely played upon so long by the yellow type of journalism may think, "How flat those papers must seem!" On the contrary, the population of Podolsk, as in Moscow, await their paper's arrival ans even scrap over the last copies with an eagerness that is as unmistakable as that of the crowds jamming Forty-Second Street and Broadway watching the latest baseball scores. New times--new values.
The paper has its weaknesses. Recently it called for "A Meeting of the Machines." A sort of production conference from a new slant, where the machines speak to their operators, telling how they aren't managed so as to give more and better products. A fine idea, yet so poorly carried through that Moscow's Pravda made it very uncomfortable for Podolsk Truth by comparing its affair with the well-prepared conference held at the same time in the Donbas.
We find ourselves frequently dropping into this sailor-editor's office, around eight in the evening, after the rush of Papers are cleared from the table, the kettle begins to hum. Those of the staff waiting around for late news and tomorrow's issue to come from the press, gather round, consuming amazing quantities of scorching hot tea and ruminating over events of the day. Or, we go around the corner to a small cafe for a late supper. The cafe, very European, with low, tinted walls, is quiet and trim as a pin. For an hour or so, we are treated to penetrating analyses and entertaining sidelights on Podolsk life. My notebook and memory are full of them.
"Building socialism is no lazy man's job," Traubi ruminates. "It is a fierce struggle, every step of the way. A struggle for technique, for better organization, for culture. A struggle through which man is being re-made. And history is with us." His neighbour reaching for a match takes up the trend of thought. "You remember what Lenin said, that in the west it would be harder for you to make the revolution than it was for us! Once made, it would be much easier and quicker for you to create a socialist society. In America and western Europe, you have the technical groundwork laid, a numerous well-trained proletariat, and a more educated population. We however, inherited an extremely backward economy, and a country with more than a hundred million semi-literate peasants. There was one forward motive force--our working class, well-disciplined, and steering steadily by the principles given us by Marx and Lenin. Our successes are a double proof that the workers, together with their allies, can shape a new world."
The human factor plays a big part in the present struggle.
There are different levels within Russia's fast-growing working class. Its more advanced sections of city and countryside, especially the Communists, are striving hard to bring the masses of workers who have just come from the village up to higher levels of culture and self-discipline. Seasoned workers, highly class-conscious, are straining every nerve, day and night, for the swift development of their new society. At the same time, there are those among their shopmates who are content with having put in a good day at the machine, spending their free time digging their gardens, minding their cow. They are still villagers, self-centered, individualistic, with only the beginning of a broader social consciousness. What can they have to give in the way of ideas at shop meetings! Rather it is they who have to be enthused, brought to a clearer insight in to what it is all about. Then there are the drags--every factory has them--who loaf on the job, are careless about their machines, and think that "to take a day or so off now and then is no harm;" the "wage-hogs," the habitual heavy drinkers, and the "flitters" who move from place to place on the lookout for a snap job with more pay. Most of them are in their late thirties or forties, with leftover habits from the old days.
There are those hardy remnants of the past to be combated, such as the "nichevo" (never mind), and "zavtra" (tomorrow) attitudes.
Sometimes bitter arguments occur between the more advanced worker and new arrivals who can't shake off immediately the ways of the old village. A good shock-brigader who gives even from his free time, when he thinks necessary, to guarantee that his shop will fulfil its quota, to whom his machine is like a live person to be tended as a mother watches after her child, may easily lose his temper when he finds some machine spoiled because its thoughtless operator forgot that it required oil.
Likewise, in the course of daily living, there are sharp clashes between old superstitions and modern science and hygiene. In the new dormitory for the cement factory, everything was fresh, spotless throughout. White walls, doors scrubbed every day, new mattresses, blankets, fresh linen. Everybody, but a few, were delighted. These grumbled, "Why all this fuss? Don't feel at home here. No place to spit." Some put newspapers on their pillows at night, so as not to soil them.
Nevertheless, after a few months of the new life, it is not rarely that you hear a former villager telling some newcomer what's what. I remember one such incident that happened in a Dubas mining town, which could just as easily have happened in Podolsk.
With a young miner, three of us were making a trip through one of the dormitories for single men. Everything was well kept, we could see little difference between the men's and women's quarters, except in the latter there were more pictures and colour about. We soon learned, that this order was not achieved without some difficulties. Knocking on one door, it opened to reveal two men seated on their cats, one smoking, glum, the other laughing. A third was strolling up and down, declaiming in a loud voice, waving his arms.
Taking us for an inspection brigade, he addressed his grievance to us, watching the others from the corner of his eye. "Comrades, tell this chap we've got to live cultured. He came last month from the sticks, and won't mind our house rules. He smokes in this room, though there are five of us living there. How could we breathe decent if all of us did that? There's the rule posted, right under his nose, to take your smokes in the hall. And he is afraid of fresh air, the peasant! Every time I open the window he shuts it. What a fuss it is to make him keep his things neat. To have to live with such a fellow!" He gave an eloquent, maddening shrug.
The other jumped up. "Aw, shut up. I'm a miner now as good as you, ain't I?" He walked majestically, with his smoke, into the hall.
This is one side. On the other, are the shock brigaders, the network of study circles, thriving evening schools and universities, and the hunger for culture.
In Podolsk, there is an average of two papers to every adult, and one magazine. Each day three truckloads of papers make their deliveries, as regularly as the bread vans make their rounds. Bookstalls are forever moving in fresh stocks. Their turnover is sixty thousand rubles a month, an average of two rubles per adult. Forty-five hundred radio sets are registered, flooding Podolsk homes with Litvinov's speech on the Soviet proposals for disarmament, lessons in gymnastics, concerts of the best music, and talks on child care.
Traubi gives his neighbour a light from his cigarette. "Yep, it's a stiff job we're tackling. But by gosh, it's exciting. Life has a punch to it, dazzling perspectives! Notice how everybody is talking, dreaming like a school boy about his girl, over the prospects of the second Five-Year Plan?"