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Jewish Life in Russia yi Fearless Analysis of Jewish. Life in the USSR. By Pierre Van Paassen P ARIS: Men and women from every coun try on earth and of all the conceivable polit ical and social schools have been visiting the Soviet Union in the last few years. I do not re fer merely to those enthusiastic labor delegations who had scarcely an opportunity to use their crit ical faculties because their breath was literally taken away by the spectacle of the stupendous achievements of the New Russia in the industrial field. I mean sober-minded, trained and inde pendent investigators, businessmen, scientists, so ciologists, artists and intellectuals of every nuance and color. Many of these, if not the majority of them, took strict precautions that no suspicion of having been shepherded or conducted by official Soviet agencies should cling to the record of their observations. My stay in Moscow and Leningrad, for instance, coincided with the visit of those two distinguished sociologists, Sydney and Beatrice Webb (our old friend Lord Pass- field of the 1929 Arab embroglio, and his wife) and I saw 1 day by day how scrupulously these two were in carrying out their own plans and program, insisting to be taken here and there to all sorts of men and places and institutions, which do not figure on the customary itinerary of tourists. This also, I learned, had been the mode of procedure of countless others. And yet so far as I know* there has not been a single case among all these independent investigators of a man upon his return from the USSR setting about to support or substantiate the destructive judgment or the hateful accusations of the anti- Soviet press. When I speak of independent investigators I mean men like Professor Julian Huxley. Sen ator Vermeylen of Belgium, Frans Masareel, Stefan Zweig, Joris Ivens, Arthur Holitscher, Reuben Brainin, Egon Irwin, Kisch, Bernard Shaw, Barbusse, Waldo Frank, Professor Dewey, Lliam O’Flaherty, Ludwig Renn, to name but a few men of widely different temperament and antecedents I have in mind. Looking at their books or published statements after their return Workers’ Apartment-Dwellings Jew.sh life in Russia, written exclusively for The Southern Israelite the Seven Arts Feature Syndicate by Pierre Van Paassen, the noted foreign correspond ent. Mr. Van Paassen’s authoritativeness is recog nized by Jews and non-Jews alike. He has just returned from an exhaustive investigation of condi tions in Sovietland. His impressions will arouse controversy. For those who have followed his career as a fearless newspaperman, his articles on Russia will merely confirm that he is one of those few in dependent observers who tell the truth as they see it, regardless of consequences. from the USSR, it seems that all of them have felt as by one common accord that it is a very grave matter indeed in our time for any intel lectual to damage the Soviet Union or to place additional obstacles in the path of its Govern ment, which, under leadership of Joseph Stalin, has transformed the life of 170 million of people. That these men assumed the attitude they did, Modernized Plowing by Home-made Machinery. is due, I think, to a realization on their part that in Russia immense and nameless difficulties, an attempt is under way to build a new' order of so ciety. Common to all seems to be the conviction that it would be a sin against the spirit and an injustice to humanity to discredit the heroic be ginnings that have been made in the new' Russia by judging men and events over there in the light of a short-sighted egoism or in the spirit of a cramped dogmatism. Personally 1 feel that in spite of the terrific misery, engendered by the Czarist w’ar and the civil wars, in spite of the unimagina ble sufferings and sorrow resulting from Russia’s economic and moral isolation, something of precious and incomparable value has been ac quired in the USSR. I have no longer any doubt about it that the future will acknowledge this enter prise, which has now surpassed the stage of experimentation, in spite of all the errors, hardships, frightful ness and ruthlessness in connection W’ith the founding of the first Social ist State, as an achievement of the highest moral power, as an expe rience which makes life w'orth liv ing. And this, too, I must say: Even if the new Soviet edifice now rising aloft were to be throwm to the ground, by reason of the fact that the world’s humanizing forces are not so well organized as the ele ments of destruction, and the whole PIERRE VAN PAASSEN a fearless newspaper man thing w'ere to be wiped out “in torrents of blood 1 —as General Miller, the leader of the Czari$j| Emigration in Paris, declared it to me personal!, j to be his intention if he only can find allies—< vn if this should happen tomorrow', the w’orld will | be the same again. Millions have now never caught a glimpse of the human ideal. If the Soviets go down, men w ill never forget the hope they held out. In that sense the new life- ia Russia is even now immortal. 1 am going to be quite frank in these articles. I Jew's w’ould scarcely expect anything else of me.1 Nothing I know will serve us better than thtl full truth. We must have clarity to see the road! which millions of our fellows are traveling, well as the path we are treading ourselves, fori the tw'o are bound to intersect, cross each other! or run parallel at times. 'Phis then is the only! reason 1 went to the Soviet Union: to shed a I little more light, if possible, on the gigantic cn l terprise which envelopes the lives of three million^ Jews. There was no political thesis for me to I refute or substantiate in Russia. I w r as not out! to confirm anyone’s pet notions or to deny them! I w’ent with an open mind, of my own accord.! without having been delegated by any Jewish 1 organization. Nobody paid my expenses, I not the guest of the Soviet Government or of the 9 Society for Cultural Relations. Nobody drew up a plan for me. Nobody guided my footsteps. No body hampered my movements, either. In fact, no I notice w'as taken at all of my comings and goings 1 w'hilc in the USSR. I had no troubles or dif-1 ficulties w r hile traveling from place to place. Jewrtl spoke to me frankly, openly, without fear or hesi tation. In fact, I heard more criticism of Soviet ways in Russia than I ever heard in America or Europe combined. One of the first things I did in the USSR after seeing Jewish agricultural colonies in the Ukraine and in the Krimea w'as to apologize to Dr. Joseph Rosen for the foolish article I wrote years ago in the New’ Palestine, wherein I condemned the w'hole scheme of J. D. C. colonization without knowing anything about the facts. I acknowledged my error in the presence of Dr. Ezechiel Grower of the Agro Joint. And Dr. Rosen, that gruff and burly man, in whose heart burns a flame of idealism as beautiful and ardent as that w'hich ani* I mated St. Francis, heaped coals of fire on my head j by offering me the use of his automobile while in g Moscow'. It was in the colonies and later in Minsk, Pol- tawa, Odessa and Moscow' w-here I watched the Jews and questioned scores of them, that I began to grow gravely disquieted, not over the fate of the Russian Jews, but over the intransigent^ 1 bitter attitude among American Jew's tow. rd the Soviet efforts to ameliorate conditions of Jew ish life in the USSR. I felt that it was not all due to ignorance or to being misinformed ab ut j- the reality of the sit- (Please turn to page 15) ft THE SOUTHERN ISRAELI fS