Soviet Insecurity

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

As one of many whose questions went unanswered because of time limitation, I should like to offer some comment on the lecture delivered by Mr. Paul Cadbury in the New Lecture Hall last night. Mr. Cadbury was a member of the British Friends delegation which recently paid a two weeks visit to the Soviet Union. I lived in the Soviet Union for twelve years, from 1922 until 1934, as an American citizen. Russian is my native language.

A personal experience, still vividly remembered, may throw some light on the difficulty of obtaining objective information when conversing with Russians through an official Soviet interpreter. I visited the Cheliabinsk tractor factory as a journalist in 1932. Finding that some of the workers were under prison sentence, I asked several what their offenses had been. A peasant said he had been condemned as a counter-revolutionary because he complained at a collective farm meeting that there was not enough to eat. A worker said he had accidentally damaged a machine, and was promptly condemned to forced labor for "sabotage."

At this point, a minor factory boss stepped up and said to me in a distinctly truculent tone of voice: "Are you a Soviet citizen?" When I replied that I was an American, he relapsed into silence. But this experience, and many other which I can recall from my years in Russia, raises serious doubt as to whether an interpreter who was a Soviet citizen would feel free to translate unfavorable comment on the regime without fear of reprisals. It is also a question whether the average Soviet citizen would be likely to express such sentiments to a foreigner through an official interpreter.

Mr. Cadbury's sincerity and goodwill were appealing and disarming. But I could not help wondering how he or any other short-time visitor could feel so sure that the great majority of the Russian people are unaffected by fear of slave labor concentration camps. As there is very substantial evidence from many sources (perhaps best summed up in "Forced Labor in Soviet Russia," by David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky) that millions of Soviet citizens have passed through these camps, it would seem unlikely that many Soviet families could be ignorant of the existence and character of these establishments.

Against Mr. Cadbury's surface impression of happiness and contentment one must set the indisputable fact that hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens took advantage of war and hostile occupation to quit their native country, preferring the hard and uncertain life of stateless refugees.

With all respect for Mr. Cadbury's integrity and his desire to promote friendly relations between the Russian and western peoples, I do not believe that many persons who have lived in the Soviet Union for a considerable length of time, and not as guests of the Soviet Government, would accept the picture of Soviet conditions painted in his lecture as either fully accurate or completely balanced. Sonya Chamberlin