Soviet News

In his excellent book, Stalin and His Hangmen, Donald Rayfield comments acerbically on the silence of the Western press and intelligentsia regarding the slaughter that accompanied the Soviet collectivization of the early 1930s.

Nazi persecution of the Jews began as Stalin completed his genocide of the Russian peasant. We are still shocked today by Europe's connivance at Nazi racism but, compared with Europe's indifference to the introduction of slave labor in Russia and to the eradication of the Russian peasant, its murmurs about Nazi atrocities seem like an outcry.

Rayfield holds journalists partly responsible for this indifference. In particular, he singles out Walter Duranty of the New York Times. Rayfield accuses Duranty of being "suborned by [Genrikh] Iagoda" - head of the Soviet secret police (OGPU).

In the Columbia Journalism Review, Douglas McCollam reaches a more measured conclusion regarding Duranty, noting the difficulties that he faced coping with Soviet censorship. Nonetheless, McCollam concludes that Duranty, in the face of accurate reporting by others, sought to downplay the extent of the famine caused by Stalin's collectivization:

Duranty did not simply write watered-down stories about the famine. Others, including later critics like William Henry Chamberlain of The Christian Science Monitor and Eugene Lyons of UP, filed similarly bland reports, correcting the record only after they were out of the country. No one, it appears, both reported the depths of the famine and managed to stay inside the Soviet Union. But Duranty did more than equivocate; he repeatedly cast doubt on whether the famine was taking place, relying on scarcely more than official Soviet press reports. In so doing he allowed himself to become a vehicle of Soviet propaganda. When he was finally allowed to tour the region in September of 1933, Duranty played up the big harvest that was by then under way, and wrote that "the populace, from the babies to the old folks, looks healthy and well nourished."

In fact, according to The Black Book of Communism, more than six million people died as a result of the famine and, as Rayfield describes in detail, the horrific brutality that accompanied the collectivization.

So what did press coverage in late 1935 disclose about life in the Soviet Union? The December 16, 1935 issue of Time featured Stakhanov on the cover. According to the accompanying story:

Last week the Soviet Union was busy winding up 1935 with Russia's most recent and most sweeping innovation since the so-called "liquidation of the kulaks" and "fulfillment of the First Five-Year Plan." The great new addition to vocabularies: Stakhanovism. To liquidate the kulaks was a bloody, brutal process in which Russia's more prosperous small farmers were shot by the thousands and deported to Siberia by the hundreds of thousands for opposing Dictator Joseph Stalin's will to force every last Russian peasant into a collective farm (TIME. Nov. 26. 1928 et seq.). Today a fresh battle has opened over Stakhanovism and thus far enraged workers have done most of the shooting.

Aleksei Stakhanov was a miner and later mine director who was reported by the Soviet regime to have mined 227 tons of coal in a single shift. Not surprisingly, his feat was used as an example for other workers and the term Stakhanovite was applied to those workers who exceeded work quotas by extraordinary amounts. According to this site:

Day by day throughout the autumn of 1935, the campaign intensified, culminating in an All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites in industry and transportation which met in the Kremlin in late November. At the conference, outstanding Stakhanovites mounted the podium to recount how, defying their quotas and often the skepticism of their workmates and bosses, they applied new techniques of production to achieve stupendous results. They called for the general adoption of these techniques via socialist competition and, to bursts of applause, thanked Comrade Stalin for, as Stakhanov put it, "the happy life of our country, the happiness and glory of our magnificent fatherland."

Not surprisingly, Stakhanovites were not always popular with their fellow workers. As Time reported:

In coal mines, factories, railways and even on the Dictator's favorite collective farms in recent weeks desperate Russian workers have slain Stakhanovites.

A different view of Soviet reality was provided by Louis Fischer in The Nation. In an article in the issue of October 23, 1935 entitled "The Russian Giant in 1935", Fischer reported:

I have just completed another Soviet journey of 5,000 miles from Leningrad down to Armenia and back to Moscow. Everywhere there is change and progress; nowhere stagnation or retrogession.

According to Fischer, Soviet peasants were no longer tempted by the city as their village lifestyle had enormously improved since collectivization. "The peasantry is talking and thinking in Bolshevik terms." This was on account of improved education available in villages - as well as significant improvements in health care. In fact, "[t]he village cinema and even theater are becoming customary."

In fact, as Rayfield concedes:

By 1934 the main slaughter was over, and a relatively good harvest provided enough grain for the surviving peasants and the townspeople.

The irony, of course, is that Time more accurately reflected the reality of Soviet society in its reporting - although its domestic coverage often reeked of racism. The Nation frequently exposed racism and reaction in the U.S. but was willing to overlook the crimes of Soviet leaders.

George White's Scandals

Perhaps the most notable new stage musical of January 1936 was Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 which we discussed below. On Christmas Day 1935, George White's Scandals of 1935 opened at the New Amsterdam theater and ran for 110 performances. A similarly named film - George White's 1935 Scandals - had been released in March 1935. It featured the first major film appearance for Eleanor Powell. The film starred Alice Faye and Lyda Roberti. (Roberti had appeared in the stage version of Roberta). Three songs written for the film - including "I Like It with Music" and "Sweet and Lowdown" were cut from the film at the insistence of censor Joseph Breen.

On Broadway, Bert Lahr appeared in the show as did a dance team known as Sam, Ted and Ray. who were praised for their "excellent tap dancing" by The Nation. They apparently performed a number called "Selassie and His Army." Time heartily approved of their act:

High point of the performance: three Negroes called Sam, Ted and Ray, two of whom wear neat Ethiopian regimentals, while the third affects the sun helmet, black cape, gold-braided tunic and umbrella of Man-of-the-Year Haile Selassie, clogging for dear life atop a small dais.

Robert Benchley in The New Yorker had a similar reaction. He noted that the show features a "remarkable team of colored dancers known as Sam, Ted, and Ray, who, representing a suspiciously nimble Haile Selassie and his army, stop the show with smiling ease."

Sam, Ted and Ray were Samuel Green, Ted Fraser and Ray Winfield. They also danced under the sobriquet "Tip, Tap and Toe" and in 1937 appeared in the film You Can't Have Everything with Don Ameche and Alice Faye. Their performance in that film is said to "anticipate" those of the Nicholas Brothers.

The songs for the show were written by Ray Henderson. Henderson had been writing for Broadway since he did the music for George White's Scandals of 1925. Henderson was born in Buffalo and attended conservatory in Chicago. According to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, into which Henderson was inducted in 1970, Henderson is best known as the composer of such standards as "Life Is a Bowl of Cherries", "Bye Bye Blackbird" and "You're the Cream in My Coffee."

In the same issue in which it reviewed Scandals, Time named Haile Selassie "Man of the Year." Consistent with its overall tone of condescending racism, Time commented as follows regarding the Emperor of Ethiopia:

Above all, Haile Selassie has created a general, warm and blind sympathy for uncivilized Ethiopia throughout civilized Christendom. In the wake of the world's grandiose Depression, with millions of white men uncertain as to the benefits of civilization, 1935 produced a peculiar Spirit of the Year in which it was felt to be a crying shame that the Machine Age seemed about to intrude upon Africa's last free, unscathed and simple people. They were ipso facto Noble Savages, and the noblest Ethiopian of them all naturally emerged as Man of the Year.

In the arts and entertainment field, Time noted that "independent exhibitors" named Shirley Temple as the greatest box office draw of 1935. Clark Gable was third and Astaire and Rogers fifth on the exhibitors list. Later in January 1936, Time announced that film critics had chosen David Copperfield as the top film of 1935. Top Hat was seventh on the list followed by Broadway Melody of 1936 (which featured the Nicholas Brothers) and Roberta. Clearly, dancers and dance films enjoyed a popularity and critical acclaim in the 1930s which, sadly, has dissipated in the years since.