Evening star., 1935-04-21
Continued From Third Page.)

Of undernourished, tattered and over
worked laborers, standing all day in
water or mud up to the knee, sleeping
at night in unheated, overcrowded.
| insect ridden barracks and dying by
the thousands, were building the in
dustrial giants" which, somehow, in
variably would operate at a loss and
prove to have been built in the wrong
way and in the wrong place.
Millions Of peasants, forcibly driven
into collective farms" pitilessly
robbed Of their grain ano completely
bewildered, ceased to work and
starved in their villages. Millions Of
kulaks (better-off peasants), the last
remnant OF the pre-revolutionary in
dividualism. were banished to north
ern labor camps to starve and freeze
there. In word. victorious Stalinist
Socialism was ravaging Russia like Q
plague.
The second new man, who had to
drive and order these millions about,
shared. or pretended to share, their
! privations and sufieringS. He. too, was
hero Of labor" Ostentatiously
wearing khaki shirt and high boots,
drowning in papers and statistical
data, he banished from his vocabulary
such bourgeois" words as enjoy
ment. pleasure, comfort. etc. His
only Joy. you see. was the Joy of
creation" His private life? He had
none-he had no time to think of
such nonsense.
The second new man spread the
atmosphere Of oppressive, life-killing
boredom and grayness over Moscow.
Most Of the light amusement places
which flourished in the city between
1922 and 1925 were closed (the few
left open were chiefly for foreigners).
Dancing, Of which, in his later years,
the flrst new man had been very
fond, was branded as one of the worst
capitalistic indulgences. Soviet lit
erature degenerated into unbearably
monotonous official propaganda
In this atmosphere the second new
mans chief concern was not to rise
in any way above the level of general
obscure mediocrity, not to be a per.
sonality, an Il" For to have a per-
sonality, to think for oneself, meant to
display individualistic tendencies and
to deviate from the line of the party.
So it went on for five or six long,
bleak years.
Then the invisible cataclysm''-
that cataclysm Of which I spoke in
the opening paragraphs Of this ar.
ticle-took place. The second new
man suddenly began to vanish; a
third new man has VIGOROUSLY
emerged on the stage. He personifies
the reaction against his predecessor
and against the whole epoch of the
flve-year plan.
The Third Is Normal.
If the first new man was a fire.
eating revolutionist, if the second was
an ikon of labor enthusiasm, the
third new man wants to be merely
human being-a normal, healthy
and civilized man not unlike civilized
Europeans and Americans. He has
lived through the frenzy Of revolu-
tionary destruction; he has lived
through a no less horrible frenzy of
socialistic construction-and he is
tired of it all.
SoiVCiuPtAuAy LuUWlue uSluC tIlc
hitherto sanctified khaki blouse,
washing himself unceremoniously of
the proletarian dirt and donning, with
q fastidiousness hitherto unseen in
Soviet Russia, q European suit with a
clean white collar and q smart tie, he
says with an undisguised challenge:
"Proletarian Asceticism? Self-de-
nial? To h with it! Do not try to
fool me any longer by asserting that
that Is socialism. Socialism Is COM
Portable, civilized, cultured life. Be-
sides, why do have to sacrifice my
self to future generations as you have
been forcing me to do for years, when
I am in no way worse than these
generations and have IS much right
to happiness as they? Not that I
want to indulge in debauchery or
things like that. But I do want to
be happy, to enjoy myself as q cul-
tured, intelligent man and, above all,
to live!"
Il take these words almost verbatim,
only condensing them, from "Lichnaya
Zhizn," or Private Life" q play by
v. solovyov which lately has been
enjoying an enormous success In Mos
COW and Leningrad.)
-Four years ago. to pronounce such
speeches would have been the surest
way Of getting arrested.