Last autumn MacDowell[1] came back from a trip through North Caucasus, saying, "Commune Seattle is a good place to live.  There's a bunch of boys that you just can't down.  They've known bureaucratic meddling; they've gained success and seen it smashed by the stupidities of others.  But they're going strong, with good spirit.  They know how to combine hard-boiled business sense with real communal devotion."

Everyone knows Mac--Mac with the Order of Lenin.  And Mac knows farms in all parts of the USSR.  In more than ten years, from Kuzbai to Rostov, he's worked on them, good farms and bad farms of every kind.  So I heeded his words when he spoke of Commune Seattle.  Though I had visited it twice before, I resolved to go again, and study its success at greater length.  Located in North Caucasus marked last year by so many failures, what qualities brought Commune Seattle, under the same surroundings, to success?

I have a right to a personal interest in that commune, for its members left my home town, Seattle, not long after I did, coming to North Caucasus eleven years go.  A bunch of Finnish-Americans from the logging camps and logged-off farms of Washington state, they pooled resources, bought machinery and took up land under the Soviets.

They settled, with goods and machines, on the open prairie some 150 km. east of Rostov, where a certain number of squatters, who had settled on these unclaimed lands during the casual days of wartime, had just been moved off by administrative decree.  This act, in a territory fairly full of anti-Soviet Cossacks, left the Commune in such bad relations with its neighbors that for the first two years they could hardly buy a chicken from the surrounding villages.

This early handicap, given them by act of others, has long since been lived down by the Commune.  Its energy, industry and helpfulness to all about it have won it a reputation far and wide.  Thousands of applications for membership come to it yearly.  They tell you at the railway station of Tselina:  "Nobody can work like that Commune Seyatel," for the name "Seattle," once Indian American, has become, for Russian purposes, "Seyatel," or "Sower."

 

Hitch Hiking Successful

The friendly atmosphere surrounding the commune is noticed first at the station 12 km. away.  Going to the elevator I asked if the commune's truck had been there, that I might ride back after they had delivered their grain.

"They've been twice this morning," was the answer (it was then ten o'clock), "and they won't be delivering to us any more today.  They deliver chiefly to the Semenovod, the Seed Trust, for theirs is good grain usable for seed.  We suggest you stand by the road near that barn yonder and hail the first truck going west.  Any truck will get you down to Commune Seattle."

I had just come from a farm where chauffeurs of trucks were a law to themselves, never showing courtesies even to workers of their own state farm.  In other districts I became accustomed to the lofty scorn shown by these lords of auto-trucks to humble supplicants hailing from the road.  Nonetheless the "hitch-hiking" worked.  It's the only place I've known it to work.

I stopped a machine which turned out to be the ambulance of the "Gigant's"[2] hospital.  The man sitting in its tonneau, head of the oil supply for the township, smiled at my comments of surprise.

"All trucks in this district have orders to help each other's transport," he said.  "I have three trucks but they're off on other business, so I'm taking the Gigant's auto on its return trip.  They all stop when anybody hails them.  Naturally they won't take you on till you explain your business, and they won't go out of their way, but they'll pick up people working anywhere along their road.  Saves a lot of time and strength of people needed for the harvest."

 

Prosperous Appearance

The ambulance dropped me at the cross roads to the Commune, with less than a kilometer to go.  Two towering silos rose from a background of green trees and a foreground of dairy barns as I drew near.  The Commune's privately made road was graded by their own machines.  This first effect of opulence and order was strengthened as I turned a corner and saw a neat little office bearing the name of the place in both English and Russian.

The office, I saw, was also the post-office; even as I entered a postman was delivering a great pile of yesterday's "Molot" (the Rostov paper) and of "Pravdas," "Isvestias," and "Moscow Daily News" some four days old.  With them was a copy of "Country Gentleman" marked August 1933, arriving all the way from America by the sixth of August.

Saulit, the president, noted my surprise at the latter magazine and commented:  "A friend of mine in America sends it.  Maybe you think it's too reactionary for us--but there's not much politics in it, and what politics it has is too silly to affect us, while there are amusing stories for my wife and often some really good farming hints for us."

Behind the office lay the central grounds of the Commune laid out with wide rows of trees, planted 11 years ago and shading neat one- and two-story buildings of plaster-covered brick.  Garden plots of flowers between the buildings, great squares of vegetables and orchards and a "park" of shade trees just beyond them, were bounded farther off by sunlit fields of wheat.  Five thousand hectares--12,500 acres [19.5 square miles]--while they do not put this commune in the class of the big state farms, yet make it a sizable place.

 

Care for Workers

"They want to give us more land," said Saulit, "Yakoviev offered us a slice from the fields of the 'Gigant.'  We won't take it.  Not till they first give us buildings to house our people.  We have more than we can harvest with our own labor; we have to hire more than 100 seasonal hands, and that doesn't look nice in a Commune.  Give us decent accommodation for more members, and we'll take on some more land."

As I saw more of Commune Seattle, I realized that this care for a decent living standard for members was a keynote of its success.  Its dining-room tables were piled high with thick slabs of fresh bread, bread without ration-norm, bread as much as you want.  Pitchers of milk, hot and cold, carrots, potatoes, and a big bowl of pork and beans--these formed my first supper, topped off with a plate of 10 apricots, big as peaches, ten for a person.

"Our trees came into bearing unexpectedly this year," they said.  "In the sugar shortage we can't put them up [i.e., can them], so we're having a fruit feast while they last."

Next day I saw an example of the conservation of workers' strength.

The slogan this year for collective farm field brigades is "Sleep in the Fields During Harvest," to avoid the delays due to preparing breakfast and walking long distances to the fields.  Commune Seattle does not sleep in the fields, but it gets to them just as early.  Roused from comfortable beds by a gong at 3:30 a.m., they troop to the dining hall, devour a breakfast of porridge with milk, bread and tea, and are loaded by 4:15 into big trucks which drop them off at their stations in the fields.

At 10 a.m., when lunch-time comes in the commune and the workers in gardens, orchards and barns gather in the dining-hall, a special lunch truck starts its round of the fields.  It bucks its way not only by road but by furrow to the very side of the combines or threshing gangs.  No field group has to walk even 100 yards; wherever men are working; even if they are only five in a group, the lunch truck comes.

"Brigade 2A, 12 people," says the chauffeur, checking the number off without leaving his seat.  And someone from Brigade 12A lifts from the truck a galvanized iron box neatly marked with name and number, and containing not only bread, but hot food in a thermos, and bowls, knives and spoons for the brigade's members.  The chauffeur continues to the end of his route, waits there while the last gang eats, then picks up the dishes.  And back he comes through all the groups, collecting dishes, which are washed in the kitchen ready to start out on the three o'clock dinner again.  At 8 p.m. a fleet of trucks picks up all field gangs, bringing them back to the Commune, where they eat their supper together in the central dining-hall.

From dawn to dusk they harvest; at certain seasons a night-shift also ploughs.  Many of them do a "double norm" measured by the usual collective farm standard.  But they do it on good food and good rest, made possible by the efficient organization of transport and meal service.  Every ounce of energy of the harvest workers is saved for the harvest.

For several days I visited the properties of this commune.  The 60-foot silage towers with the dairy barns attached--big windows giving light, sloping cement floors giving cleanliness, wooden platforms for the cows, giving comfort and warmth.  The sheep shed for 360 head, the pig pens with their 1,200 pigs, the bath-house, bakery, granary, machine shop.  The carpenter shop, the corn bins, the open-air saw-mill attached to cut logs for their buildings.  The brick-kiln, school house, day-nursery, the two water-reservoirs with windmills.  The big dining-room and club house, recently furnished.

 

"We Did It Ourselves"

Under trees planted 11 years ago, an old timer recalled the days of 1922.

"Nothing here but grassy plain," he said.  "No buildings, no cows, no pigs--nothing.  The government gave us the land and a train from Leningrad, without charge.  After a couple of years they lent us 3,000 rubles to buy cows.

"First we built a well for water and a dug-out cellar where we slept and ate.  From the first two years we took no wages out at all.  By 1925 we had a pretty good life.  Bread, meat, sugar, all you liked for several years.  Then it began to be hard again in 1930, when the country started to build.

"Nobody helped this country build.  We had to do it all outselves.  We had to cut down our bread and meat so the workers could be fed, but that wasn't all.  We had to give enough to make up for the slackers who didn't give.  We had to fight the wreckers and give enough to make up what they wrecked.  That's what we had to do in the country."[3]

 

(Tomorrow:  A Talk with President Saulit.)

 

 

Commune Seattle, one of the best-managed farms in the Soviet Union, showed the point of view of the well-run farms.  Their good crop of the previous year had been six times drained by grain collections to make up the township quota.  "Compel us?" said the president [Saulit], in answer to my sympathetic question.  "Nobody had the power to compel us.  We ourselves voted in general meeting for each of those extra collections.  It took a lot of arguing, for it meant sacrificing a year’s litter of pigs and putting prize dairy cattle on a grainless diet.  But when the state gives you credits and the workers give you tractors you can’t shirk a common emergency.  The ones we were annoyed at were those slackers who left it to us to do their share; and especially those Ukrainian beet-growers who left us without sugar for two years.  But we have bee-hives, and life can be very sweet without sugar."  I wrote a hero story on Commune Seattle, but even this material was very guardedly handled by Moscow Daily News.