Visiting the Land of the Soviets (October 1930)

While doing some research for work, I came across a condensed transcript of a speech to The Commonwealth Club of California eight decades ago in which an American clergyman and journalist reports on his trip to the Soviet Union. He went with expectations of finding wonderful things, but his experience is pretty awful. I found it fascinating to read his commentary, especially in light of the worship of Russian communism by Western marxists, as well as all of the post-Cold War revelations of how monstrous life was in the time of Lenin and Stalin.

I wanted to share this speech, so I figured I should get permission to run it here – and then I thought, hey, I'm the VP of media and editorial at The Commonwealth Club; I'm the person who grants reprint permissions. Thus, I granted myself permission. (I think the Pope feels like this sometimes.)

I don't know how accurate some of this is, such as the 18-times married woman, but much of the rest (and much worse) has been confirmed long since.

"The Spirit and Face of Bolshevism"
October 17, 1930
Dr. Louis Richard Patmont

When I started for Europe this past winter, I looked with favor upon the experiment that was there taking place. Like many other Americans, I was a victim of the favorable propaganda that has been spread over the United States.

Perhaps Russia was a paradise for the worker. I was inclined to discredit unfavorable reports, and to give those reports which put Russia in a favorable light my full credence.

Getting into Russia, I found to be my great problem. In Berlin, the Soviet Embassy refused me a visa because I was a minister and a newspaperman. But they kept the money which I had advanced.

In Warsaw, Poland, I met with equal success. And in Latvia, again; and in Esthonia [sic], again. I decided then to get in Russia, cost what it may.

It was in desperation that I finally attempted to obtain a Russian visa on my passport. I decided to change my occupation. Last year I was fortunate enough to have been engaged in some paleontological work in Mexico, so for the benefit of the Russian embassy, I became a paleontologist.

I told them I intended to study the bones of some mammoths. And I refused to speak in Russian. And so they let me in.

I had been in Russia previously during the Czarist regime. The contrast was striking. When I was in Leningrad this last time, streets were out of repair, houses were dilapidated, people in rags.

I avoided the tours that are arranged for American tourists. Most visitors are virtual prisoners while in Russia. They see only what they are allowed to see.

Throngs of people, four abreast, waited for food all day outside the 'magazines.' Little red tickets were in their hands, allowing them so much bread. It was a pitiful sight. Hundreds were hungry. …

Several families lived in the same room. Little girls, of from 12 to 15, babes in their arms, walked the streets, victims of the loose moral code.

In Moscow I went to one of the big American hotels. The next morning the secret police called. An American tour was starting. Luckily I had a toothache, and for several days I searched for a dentist, absorbing meanwhile all the intimate details of this Soviet city.

People lived in dugouts and in sewers. Children crowded into the railroad station for shelter. Russia is suffering, and there are millions who are ready to throw off the soviet yoke.

As I left Moscow, I saw hundreds of freight cars, loaded with prisoners. These men were on their way to the White Island in the White Sea, where they will be interned. They were contra-revolutionists.

I met a woman who said she was on her way to be married. She had been married eighteen times previously. Marriage is easy in Russia, and a divorce can be secured within ten minutes after the marriage ceremony. Merely register at the police station, and direct a postcard to your former wife, telling her you have secured a divorce.

Fatherless children are cared for in homes. They are raised scientifically, say the Russians. Sickness, they say, is unnecessary because medicine has been socialized. But the children are huddled together without regard for sex, and social disease is prevalent. Most of them run away when they can.

There is a three-fold war going on in the Land of the Soviet. First, there is a war against the peasant or property-holder; second, a war against family; third, a war against religion.

And despite lack of food, despite deplorable living conditions, Russia has the most efficient, well-organized army in Europe. She is a menace to the world, this spreading sore of humanity.

Important Omission from China's Official Reports of Berlin Wall Anniversary

In the English-language web site for Xinhua, China's official news agency, the report about today's 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is a nice overview of the celebrations today, a bit of information about the wall's founding, and a note of some of the leaders in Berlin for the celebration.

There is even this interesting paragraph:

The Berlin Wall was erected during the night between August 12-13 of 1961 to divide the Berlin city as well as East Germany and West Germany. The wall is the symbol of so-call Iron Curtain for the Cold War. 

What's missing from that paragraph and in fact from the entire article? How about the single word communist or its relative communism? That China's communist leaders wouldn't want to note the fact that the wall's fall was a mass rejection of a failed communist party, ideology, and police state isn't surprising. What's worrisome is that many people will probably read Xinhua's article and not even notice the omission.

Berlin Wall -- Past and Present

The Brandenburg Gate, once the famous place for Western leaders to make anti-Wall speeches. (2001 photo by John Zipperer.)

In the former eastern sector of Berlin, there is a memorial known as the Mauerpark -- Mauer is the German word for wall. Though almost all of the communist-built wall that separated this city for 28 years has disappeared, this park serves as a reminder of several things: the wall itself, the communist regime that ran the former GDR, and the lasting scars of the horrible war started and lost in that capital city.

On August 4, 1961, just days before the Berlin Wall's construction would begin, UPI President Frank Bartholomew spoke to The Commonwealth Club about the dilemma Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev faced with his post-war empire in Eastern Europe.

In Berlin this July, I was able to understand Khrushchev's attitude toward Berlin and why he created the crisis. From his viewpoint, it is completely logical. ... Berlin is cracking the Iron Curtain. It's a showplace of Western prosperity 124 miles inside the Communist zone, and it has become absolutely intolerable to him. ... The billboards in East Berlin extol the benefits of Communism as against the slavery of the West, but 40,000 East Berliners go West each day for their employment. ... The defections are depleting the population of East Germany. Three weeks ago, defections were 4,000 a week. Now reports say they have stepped up to 1,500 daily. ... Khrushchev faces 100 million enemies in the Iron Curtain countries and is making no progress at persuading them to the Russian way of thinking.

Today, Germany is hosting celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. Leaders from across the European Union -- nations that were locked in a fight to the death 65 years ago, and that were divided by a lethal iron curtain for about 45 years after that -- gathered to commemorate the event that, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel noted, was part of the continental struggle to lift off the repression of a number of communist regimes. Those leaders have been joined by some other significant leaders, including Russian President Medvedev, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former Polish President Lech Walesa, who arguably established the first crack in the Iron Curtain when he led the shipyard strikes against Poland's communist government almost a decade before the Wall fell. In her comments right before a re-enactment of the crossing of the border, Merkel noted the "incredible encouragement" East Germans got from Poland's Solidarity movement.

When Walesa spoke at The Commonwealth Club in 2004, after receiving The Club's Medallion award, he downplayed the role played by Gorbachev and suggested that it was the late Russian President Boris Yeltsin who really made the changes of 1989 stick:

The process could have been reversed, and at this point we were lucky to have Yeltsin - not Gorbachev, but Yeltsin. Because Gorbachev, when he realized what was happening, made this attempt to reform communism. Perestroika and glasnost are nothing but a reform of communism. .... This is precisely what he admitted in the presence of President George Bush Sr., [German] Chancellor Kohl, [Czech] President Havel and others. But that was a time when Yeltsin was antagonistic with Gorbachev. As you may remember, the majority of you supported Gorbachev at that time; however, this antagonism allowed Yeltsin to prepare Russia and then withdraw her from the Soviet Union, which he actually did. I'm not sure whether he did it when sober or when drunk, but he did it. Had he not done it, I am sure that I myself, and Chancellor Kohl, would be rebuilding the Berlin Wall even faster than we had pulled it down sometime before, with strong encouragement from the United States. [Listen to complete Walesa audio.]

Yeltsin, of course, is unable to attend today's festivities, but Walesa's views do not seem to have moderated in the last five years. He recently told German newsweekly Der Spiegel that "the first wall to fall was pushed over in 1980 in the Polish shipyards. Later, other symbolic walls came down, and the Germans, of course, tore down the literal wall in Berlin. The fall of the Berlin Wall makes for nice pictures. But it all started in the shipyards."

In his own speech to The Commonwealth Club on the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czech President Vaclav Klaus noted that the revolutionary events of the end of communism in eastern Europe had given way to a changed landscape that required continued -- but not revolutionary -- change: "The Czech Republic has become already -- structurally -- a standard, which means normal, European country, and as a result of this it has typical European problems, if not to say European diseases. They cannot be solved by means of another revolution, because we are already in the middle of the process of a spontaneous evolution of basic social structures. This evolutionary era, of course, is less radical, less dramatic, less headlines-creating, but -- paradoxically -- more controversial and even more ideological." [Listen to Klaus event audio.]

Tear Down This Wall

Another important figure who was not able to make it to this year's celebrations is the late U.S. President Ronald Reagan, who famously sparred with the Soviets during his first term in office, only to forge a partnership with Gorbachev. Reagan is often quoted for his challenge to Gorbachev, delivered at the Brandenburg Gate along the Wall, to "tear down this wall."

The writer of that speech, Peter Robinson, told The Club in 2004 that he had a conversation with President Reagan before the speech, in which Robinson tried to get feedback from the president that would help him formulate a strong speech.

I said, "Mr. President, I learned when I was in Berlin that they'll be able to hear the speech on the other side of the Wall, by radio – and if the weather conditions are just right, I was told, they'll be able to pick up the speech as far east as Moscow itself. Is there anything in particular that you'd like to say to people on the other side of the Wall?" And Ronald Reagan thought for a moment and then said, "Well, there's that passage [in the draft of the speech] about tearing down the Wall – that's what I'd like to say to them: that wall has to come down." [Listen to complete Robinson audio.]

Today, "Berlin Wall" is a "trending topic" on Twitter, which means that it's one of the phrases used most often on that social media service. Thousands of "tweets" are noting the anniversary, sharing memories, and pointing to news stories on the celebrations in Berlin. One person tweeted the question, "What would it have been like if Twitter had existed when the Berlin Wall fell?" Probably not much different would have happened, but it might have given an answer to the other person -- a teenager, judging from his profile photo -- who tweeted, "Who cares about the Berlin Wall?"

The crowds who accompanied Merkel, Walesa, and Gorbachev across the bridge in their re-enactment of the first East German crowds to surge across the border in 1989 care, that's who. And they are making another point about how what people on the ground can do to make history, or at least to push their leaders in the direction they want to go. The New York Times reports that, as Merkel noted the large crowd that turned out for the crossing today, despite rainfall, she appreciated the milieu:

“It’s perhaps as chaotic as it was in 1989,” Mrs. Merkel said of the crowd thronging around the leaders so that it was sometimes barely possible to distinguish the politicians from the people. “I’m very happy that so many people turned up. ... Everyone who is present here today has a story to tell,” she said. “They are part of freedom.”

[I originally posted this article here.]

What Were You Doing When the Berlin Wall Fell?

What were you doing when the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago and Germany zoomed toward reunification?

I saw that question asked (in slightly more boring wording) somewhere on the internet yesterday. But as Germany celebrates the momentous events of two decades ago and fetes the three big world leaders who made it happen -- West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, American President George "I'm not my son" Bush, and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev -- it does bring back memories of where I was, what I was doing, and even why newspapers are such a wonderful thing.

I was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison at the time. I was also an editor of the independent daily student newspaper, the Badger Herald. A group of my fellow editors and friends from the Herald headed over to the main student union on campus (the one in a beautiful old building on the lake) for breakfast, and we each brough a different paper from somewhere else in the country. The scrambled eggs, bacon, and English muffins were delicious. And there we sat, at a big round table, eating breakfast and trading facts and comments we gleaned from the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Milwaukee Journal, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wisconsin State Journal, and probably a few other papers. Considering the high level of un-checked flotsam and jetsam that passes for breaking news and information on the internet, I don't think we'd have been better informed if the web had been in wide popularity back then.

Perhaps the best part of that memory is that I was with other people who understood what an exciting time in history that was. Everyone knew something big happened, that the world in which we'd grown up was changing significantly and -- thank god -- for the better. No one thought it was insignificant; nobody preferred to chat about whatever the Britnet Spears of the day was. We talked Cold War and the end of communism and people being handed copies of Der Spiegel (or was it Stern?) as they crossed the border into West Berlin and whether the Soviet Union itself would fall in our lifetimes.

It was a great time to realize that sometimes huge, life-changing events happen that are beyond our control but that are nonetheless good. And having a stack of that morning's daily papers gave us the fuel for wonder and argument and astonishment. A great time.