In 1928, Irish author and academic Violet Conolly published ‘Two Months in Soviet Russia’ between December 1928 and March 1929. Broad in scope, the author provided her first-hand experiences as she travelled from Reval (now Tallinn) to Leningrad, Leningrad to Moscow, and onwards to Crimea; and discussed the daily life she witnessed – from shopping and religion to education and culture.
Almost a decade later, Conolly published ‘On Revisiting Soviet Russia’ in 1937, covering her return to the country in 1936. In contrast to her first article, Conolly describes how her visit was limited by a tourist visa under the control of the Soviet Intourist organisation. She notes both massive booms in industry and development, as well as vast economic inequalities. The full allegiance to the cult of the leader, and the lack of social freedoms, are set in contrast against achievements in literacy, gender equality, and education opportunities. Modern readers may experience a rising familiarity with certain modern geopolitical attitudes towards tourism, immigration, journalistic and academic freedoms.
Little is known about Conolly herself. Published numerous times in Studies in the late 1920s and 1930s, her work covered a broad geographic span – notable not only for the time, but particularly as a female writer. The majority of her academic output comes as contemporary analysis of Soviet life in the first half of the 20th century, with much of her research focused on Soviet economic policy and global trade links.
Violet Conolly, ‘On Revisiting Soviet Russia’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 26, No. 102 (Jun., 1937), 297-309. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30097409
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My last prolonged visit to Russia was in 1928, before the first Five-Year Plan had cast its dynamic spell over the country. I was back for a short time in 1934, but only in south Russia. Then in 1936, when the second Five-Year Plan was already partially completed and the new Constitution was imminent, with socialisation triumphant in all spheres of activity and collectivisation ruling in the country, the moment seemed ripe for a long visit to Russia – to try and chew the cud of all these changes. It was not as easy as it seemed. I was most anxious to get a consular visa, so that I might at least be free to live as I pleased – preferably with Russians, as I had done before. A tourist visa ties you inextricably to Soviet hotels and Soviet meal coupons, which must be paid for in foreign currency before leaving for the U.S.S.R. And should you stray from the clutches of the Intourist organisation, the visa legitimising your presence in the Soviet Union automatically lapses. So they literally have their victims by the neck.
Anyhow the dingy cosmopolitanism organised for the convenience of foreigners on this basis is not Russia at all, and I wanted to avoid it. “Do you know that all foreigners visiting the U.S.S.R. on consular visas are specially invited by the Soviet Government?” inquired the Soviet sifter-in-chief of visa applications in London, when I tried to push the closed door open. I did not or I would certainly not have expected such courtesy. On the other hand I didn’t believe it either. “We don’t like your books,” continued the young inquisitor, “and if you want to return to the U.S.S.R., your only way is with Intourist. In your book on Soviet economic relations with Eastern countries you inferred that our policy in certain respects is no better than that of the Tzarist regime, is it not so?” – fixing me with a hostile eye. It was.
So that was the rub and Intourist the penalty for a minor offence in terms of a book which few would read. If the book were more popular, they would no doubt withhold the visa altogether. Protest was useless under the circumstances; so willy-nilly I accepted an Intourist visa for three months to travel in Central Russia, the Caucasus and Armenia.
I have related this incident not for its own sake, but to illustrate the whip-hand which the Soviet Government has and firmly uses in such cases. There can be no doubt that the steady improvement in Soviet stock in recent years is largely due to these measures. In spite of the periodical trial scandals, a smoke-screen has been very subtly constructed around the real Russia. The Moscow correspondents of the world press are securely muzzled by the fear of being sent out of the country. Their best stories, as anybody knows who has listened to them talking among themselves, never get by the censor. Specialists, whose business is Russian history, Russian economics, Russian policy in any field entailing regular contact with Soviet Russia and its archives, must watch their step when they leave Russia, or they will find the door closed to them the next time they want a visa. Few are prepared to take such a risk. And because they want to go back to Russia, they will compromise with truth by softening the harsher angle of criticism about the Soviet Regime.
Moreover, since Soviet Russia joined the Geneva institutions, her participation in both the work of the Secretariat and of the International Labour Office is strongly desired, and great care is taken in official publications not to wound the sensibilities of the Bolsheviki. Then there are of course the professional friends of U.S.S.R., whose game of camoflage is played in the most unexpected places. The cumulative effect of all this soft-pedalling is very great on the impressions of the general reading public, which has no idea of the extent to which the Soviet Government can call the tune about Russia.
Remembering Moscow as it was ten years ago, the first impression is of improvement – of construction on a vast scale everywhere. The shops are more attractive, the people better clad, the old wood and cobble pavement replaced to a large extent by asphalt. But ten years ago, though life was in general much harder, you could take pot-luck with the Russians; you could meet them and make friends among them. Now that is all changed. For months before and after the recent horrible series of trials the atmosphere of terror has been so strong, particularly in Moscow and Leningrad, that a foreigner has no chance of seeing old Russian friends (if he has any, and I had many) or of mixing with Russians informally at all. They are all scared to death of even being seen with a foreigner, lest this should one day lead to trouble.
After a month in Moscow this winter, knocking my head against a stone wall, as far as normal Russian life was concerned, I was at last driven to the Russian trains, as a means of hearing Russians talk among themselves and of talking to them. For six weeks I roamed up and down the Soviet Union from Leningrad to Erivan in far-away Armenia. Here in these hermctically sealed third-class carriages, packed with talkative people, eating and sleeping in common, was some thing of the old Russia. I had travelled widely in Russia before, but I was nevertheless amazed at the psychological changes in this people. They are still the most kindly travelling companions in the world, but intellectually, how intolerant, superficial, banal. “We are happy. We are free (with a dark look at bourgeois me). Life is getting better and gayer here” – they would exclaim, bubbling with optimism and freedom. It was hopeless to try and tie these words down to any particular fact in their lives. Stalin had launched this “better life” slogan and that was enough for them…
…Conversation was chiefly concerned with the Five Year Plans and the superiority of the Soviet Union to the rest of the world. Items of absorbing interest like the big political trials are never discussed, nor is there any gossip about the leaders, such as might be heard about the figureheads of any other country. One woman said to me rather nervously that her son was in the same class as Stalin’s son and that he was not very brilliant. But such personal notes are rare. Adulation of Stalin knows no bounds of restraint or congruity. He is their father, hero, friend, leader, and a dozen other things as well…The automatic conformity to the fluctuating party line among the Russian masses is amazing, whether it is abortion (now strictly forbidden) or the Christmas tree (now widely encouraged after a decade of denunciation) that is in question.
Soviet Russia is a land of such glaring contradictions at the present time that you can find almost anything you are looking for, if you are content to ignore the other side of the picture simultaneously. There is one feature of our capitalistic civilisation, however, which few would look for and none expect to find in Soviet Russia, and yet it obtrudes itself painfully upon you from the first. This is the persistence in the Soviet Union, as in capitalistic countries, of an underworld of abjectly poor people, badly fed, miserably clad, living in slums…But at the same time full tribute must be paid to the amazing results achieved in the campaign for the liquidation of illiteracy. According to official statistics 78 percent of the Russian population was illiterate in 1914. This was reduced to 8 percent in 1935, and judging by the energy and interest of all concerned, there will probably be no ‘dark people’ in the confines of Soviet Russia in a decade or so. Few, if any western countries offer such varied educational opportunities to all their people as are now available to the citizens of the Soviet Union. Free compulsory education is from 8-15, when students showing the necessary ability for a university career may decide to finish the additional three years secondary school course preparatory to entering the university…From the earliest stages to the highest technical institutes no distinction whatever is made between the two sexes.
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But the workers are also consumers, and their story as consumers is not quite so bright. They are “exploited” right and left owing to the high prices and low standards of Soviet industrial production and the rigid foreign trade monopoly. This is the other side of the complacent Soviet slogan: “We have eliminated the exploitation of man by man”, “We have destroyed private industry and private trade”. I was in Odessa during the winter when the temperature was far below zero. There wasn’t a warm stocking or glove in the town, and hadn’t been for weeks, though the shop windows were full of bathing costumes. This, in the ironic Russian phrase, is the too-familiar “compulsory assortment”. On the other hand, should any enterprising citizen set up a private knitting machine and provide the necessary gloves and stockings, while the state distribution system was in abeyance, he would be arrested immediately as a speculator.
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The ideal of love of the land and of country for itself is foreign to Bolshevik ideology. The young people are trained to have the same enthusiasm for mechanisation in the country side as for machinery in the towns. The churches which formerly were an unfailing landmark in the villages are now not only for the most part closed, but are being very rapidly demolished stone by stone. In this way the younger generation are not even reminded of the problem of religion by a closed church, though in fact the history of the Soviet revolution would suggest that the Orthodox Church had very slender roots in the Russian countryside, at any time. And it is in the towns rather than in the country that the people still rally round the church. There has latterly been a considerable abatement in the ubiquitous Soviet anti-religious propaganda. The reason for this is obvious. Soviet Russia today is overwhelmingly anti religious or, perhaps more accurately, religionless. I asked numbers of casual acquaintances in Russia (where curiosity about the most intimate matters is the order of the day) whether they believed in God or religion. “Ya kulturni chelovek!” (I am a cultivated person) was the invariable reply – culture and belief of any kind being absolutely incompatible in their minds. Many added: “What do we want with a Church? We have the Party.”
By and large there has been no change in the fundamentally Marxian anti-religious policy of the Soviet Government, but they are far too keen realists to waste their time flogging a dead horse. The promulgation of the new Constitution in December 1936, with several clauses concerning religion, brought the religious issue once more before the Soviet people. Prior to this date and since the Soviet Constitution of 1918, “monks and priests of all denominations” were automatically disenfranchised – with the far-reaching civil disabilities implied thereby in the U.S.S.R. According to the new Constitution “every citizen has the right to elect and be elected irrespective of his race or nationality, his religion,…social origin, or past activity”. With the franchise, ministers of religion have also acquired all those social and civil rights from which they were debarred, “as members of a hostile class,” since 1918. Theoretically, at least, this means that they are also eligible for old age pensions and for all other social insurance benefits – open to various categories of Soviet workers. Thus the formerly numerous group of the disfranchised is now reduced to those directly disfranchised by decree of court. As far as the clergy is concerned this extension of the franchise comes too late to benefit many. The great majority of the Russian popes and of the Catholic and Protestant clergy are either dead from hardship or still subsisting in the inhuman conditions of the Soviet concentration and labour camps, where recant publicly or rot is the rule. There has been no amnesty for these imprisoned priests; and in the rare cases of release from prison their passports, bearing the ominous red strips of political prisoners, are like milestones round their necks for the rest of life…
…Catholics never were very numerous in Russia, but they have withstood the Soviet persecution with comparative success. A fair number of Catholic churches are still “working”, to use the Soviet cliche, and in few cases have they been demolished…I happened to go into the little Catholic church of St. Pierre in Odessa one Sunday in January. It was crowded far beyond the seating capacity, with old and young especially young girls…One old woman, seeing that I was a foreigner, came over to me and asked me with tears in her eyes whether I thou ht there was any chance that a priest would come to them before she died. My mind strayed back to the Istituto Orientale in Rome where many young priests are being trained in the Greek Catholic Rite for mission work in Russia – whenever that day dawns…How many of these old men and women will survive to greet them?
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