The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (60 page)

I had felt since our arrival that there was on the part of the Moroccans a greater warmth toward the United States than in other Arab countries but I did not fully understand it until we had talked with the Sultan. This attitude of friendship went back to the time during World War II when Franklin and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met at Casablanca.

The French officials then ruling Morocco paid them a formal call, and when they departed Franklin said: “Now we must see the Sultan.”

Mr. Churchill looked at him without much enthusiasm. “Why should we do that?” he asked. “We have seen the French.”

“We must see the Sultan,” my husband replied, “because this is his country.”

The Sultan was thinking about that visit when he said my husband gave him disinterested advice that convinced him of the friendship of the United States. His attitude of helpfulness had become known everywhere in Morocco and many persons told me that the assurance of the friendship of the United States was a kind of milestone in the Moroccan campaign for independence.

A few days after our talk with the Sultan I witnessed another and unusual demonstration of the friendship of the people when we visited Marrakech and the area in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. Shortly before noon one day we started out from Marrakech in three automobiles. The countryside was parched and dusty and the roads were sometimes mere tracks of dirt. We passed a great assemblage of perhaps two hundred camels as we left the city and later came upon a well where a bullock walked slowly around and around in a circle, drawing water for irrigation of the desert fields. As we bounced across the hills we came upon a wonderful view of the little village of Demnat, which lay on a hilltop beyond a dry, brown plain with the mountains rising up behind.

There were a few travelers on the road, some driving little flocks of sheep through swirling clouds of dust as we drove to the residence of the caid, some distance from Demnat. The leading officials of the town were there to greet us and the caid had prepared the usual Arab feast, great platters of rice and mutton and sweets that must be eaten with the fingers.

After the feast the officials of Demnat accompanied us across the plain to their ancient walled town, one of the oldest in Morocco, dating back to the tenth century. The road was a rough dirt track and the dust was thick and the sun was hot, but a large and enthusiastic crowd had gathered outside the main gate of the town.

“Welcome!” they shouted as our automobile drew up. “Welcome!”

Even more impressive to me was the fact that they had made a crude American flag, which was hung over the gate, and a sign saying, “We always remember President Roosevelt!”

The more I traveled throughout the world the more I realized how important it is for Americans to see with understanding eyes the othei peoples of the world whom modern means of communication and transportation are constantly making closer neighbors. Yet the more I traveled the happier I was that I happened to have been born in the United States, where there exist the concept of freedom and opportunities of advancement for individuals of every status. I felt, too, the great responsibility that has come to us as a people. The world is looking to us for leadership in almost every phase of development of the life of peoples everywhere.

But leadership is a stern, demanding role and no person or state can lead without earning that right. On my visit to the Soviet Union in 1957 I was strongly impressed—I was almost frightened—by many things that showed how hard we must strive if we are to maintain our position of world leadership.

Thirty-seven
    

In the Land of the Soviets

I HAVE WRITTEN
frequently about my enjoyment from visiting many delightful places around the world, including the police-run state of Yugoslavia. I would not want to live in Yugoslavia, nor would anyone who values personal freedom. But I think I should die if I had to live in Soviet Russia. I traveled there extensively for almost a month in 1957. When I went to Moscow, the Stalinist dictatorship had been replaced by the less fearful—in theory, at least—dictatorship of Nikita S. Khrushchev, but the people still existed under a system of surveillance that must cause anxiety and the power over them still seemed to me a hand of steel.

My trip to the Soviet Union was one of the most important, the most interesting and the most informative that I have ever made. I tried to understand what was happening in Russia by looking at the country through Russian eyes, and unless all of us in the free world approach the Soviet Union from that point of view we are going to deceive ourselves in a catastrophic manner. I remembered that only forty years ago this great mass of people was largely made up of peasants living in houses with mud floors and, perhaps, with a farm animal or two in the kitchen in wintry months. They were illiterate. They were oppressed. They were frightened of conquest by the Germans, and for many years they were bound together by a readiness to defend their homeland no matter how hard their lives might be.

We must never forget these things when we look at what Russia is today. I looked and was frightened. My fear was not of the Communist power or philosophy, not of awesome missiles or hydrogen bombs. What I feared was that we would not understand the nature of the Russian Revolution that is still going on, and what it means to the world. If we fail to understand, then we shall fail to protect world democracy no matter what missiles or earth satellites or atomic warships we produce. So I want to explain carefully why I am frightened.

I must start my explanation back in the spring of 1957 when Dorothy Schiff, the publisher and owner of the New York
Post
, invited me to luncheon and posed a question. “Would you like to go to China and write a series of articles for the
Post
?”

“I certainly would,” I replied.

“You make your application to the State Department for a visa and I will make the other arrangements.”

I applied to the State Department and was refused a visa. I was irritated at the time. Later some of my irritation waned. The department has a responsibility to stand behind its visas and to afford protection to citizens traveling abroad on its passports, so I felt they had a right to point out that it was impossible to provide any protection for our citizens traveling in Communist China. However, it seemed to me that the department could say that if newspapermen wanted to go to China under those conditions they were free to go, provided the Chinese government would permit them entry. In any event, I did not get a visa to China and Mrs. Schiff asked me if I would go to Russia instead.

“Yes,” I replied, “but I can’t go until September, and I would want to take my secretary, Miss Corr, and Dr. Gurewitsch. He can speak Russian and his medical knowledge would also be of great importance in connection with my investigation of conditions.”

It took three months to get our visas approved by the Russians. At the end of August the three of us flew to Frankfurt and Berlin, where I was surprised to see how much building had been done since my last visit and how rapid the German recovery had been. From Berlin we flew to Copenhagen early in the morning and there shifted to the Scandinavian airline to Moscow. The plane was so crowded, mostly with American and British tourists, but there were also some Central Europeans from the Soviet satellite countries. We stopped at Riga for passport examination and luncheon but were not allowed to leave the airport. That afternoon we flew on across Russia. I was surprised that so much of the country we passed over was wooded, for I had always thought of Russia as treeless steppes. It was getting dark as we approached Moscow but we could see that much new construction was in progress in the city; in many places the cranes and skeletons of buildings stuck up against the skyline. There were a surprising number of airplanes, most of them two-engine craft, on the ground at the Moscow airport, about the number one would see upon landing at Idlewild or LaGuardia in New York.

Two young men from the United States embassy met us at the airport, and we were also greeted by representatives of Intourist, the Soviet travel bureau, which was arranging my schedule of travel. I was not a guest of the government but was traveling as a reporter. My interpreter was Anna Lavrova, a charming and intelligent young woman who had been my husband’s interpreter when he met with Premier Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill at Yalta in 1945.

My first impression of Moscow was that there was building going up everywhere. We drove past the lower side of the Kremlin on the way to the National Hotel, and it was very impressive with its many lights and high walls.

At the hotel Mrs. Lavrova accompanied me to my apartment, a sitting room, bedroom and bath. The furnishings were ornate and heavy, yellow damask, carved table legs and a generally old-fashioned atmosphere, and the plumbing, while all right, was far from modern.

The food was generally good at the hotel and we ate almost no place else, because prices were extremely high in the few restaurants that we might have patronized. There was borscht with big pieces of meat and much cabbage in it, chicken, and, of course, tea and caviar and cakes and lots of ice cream.

The Russians generally do not dress well. The government has discouraged any display in dressing because it is not important to the economic welfare of the country. Prices of clothes are high by American standards and there is little to be said for quality or variety. As a result, the people, whether on the street or in offices or working at manual labor, are dressed warmly but monotonously, usually in dark clothes and without distinction. About the only word to be used about the dress of the people was “drab.”

The day after our arrival I called at our embassy and then went to the Intourist offices, where I talked with the head of the bureau. We went over my travel plans in detail.

“I want to get as far away from Moscow as possible,” I said, “because I want to see all aspects of the country. I have always been fascinated by Tashkent and Samarkand. Perhaps I could go there unless it is too far off the beaten path.”

The bureau director smiled. “We have a commercial jet airplane service to Tashkent every day. The flight takes four hours.”

So he put Tashkent on the schedule, and Stalingrad, and a boat trip on the Volga, and the Black Sea and Leningrad and Kiev. But once I started traveling I didn’t stick closely to the schedule—much to the dismay of Intourist—and in the end I had to cancel some of the trips because of lack of time. Whenever I decided that I needed more time in some place and changed the schedule, the Intourist people went into a polite tizzy. Most Russian travelers go where they are told to go when they are told to go.

I had made requests for interviews with a number of government officials as soon as I arrived in Moscow but it proved difficult to get specific dates confirmed. When the appointments were made, however, I was received with graciousness and friendliness and was given every assistance, including permission to visit many institutes and projects under the various ministries.

After a few days of seeing the ballet, visiting museums and attending a good one-ring circus, Miss Corr and I were driven to a state farm about twenty miles from Moscow. There are two kinds of farms in the Soviet Union, state farms owned by the government, which hires and pays the workers, who have no personal interest in production; and collective farms, where the land is owned, worked collectively and managed by private owners who elect one of the group as their head. Both types of farm are under state supervision.

Workers on the farms are given a house and a small plot of land which they may cultivate for themselves. Of course, the workers on a state farm do not take the risks that a collective farmer does. The collective farmer is in difficulties in a poor year when the crops fail; in a good year, however, he is able to raise his income considerably.

The state farm I visited was called Lesnie Poljana, meaning Prairie among the Forest. The state-appointed manager told me that they had two thousand acres under cultivation and that they had a breed of milk cows, called Holmogor, for which they raised food.

“There are 550 pedigreed cattle on the farm,” he said, “and 226 of them are milk producers. The milk is all shipped in cans to institutions in Moscow.”

Some 230 persons worked on the farm throughout the year and about 20 others were hired in the busy summer season. Women do what we think of as men’s work all over Russia, street-cleaning and section-hand work on the railroads, and they did much of the work in the cow barns at this farm. There were some milking machines but most of the milking was done by hand. The beef cattle did not look particularly well fattened and throughout Russia I found that the meat is not so tender as ours, apparently because it is not hung so long. Chickens are usually not tender, so that one rarely had roast chicken. It usually was boiled or minced in croquettes or used in soup.

Not long after visiting the state farm we took the jet airliner for Tashkent, where I had a chance to visit a collective farm. Less than four hours after we left Moscow we came down at Tashkent, some two thousand miles away.

There was more desert here than I had expected and the green areas were confined to the source of water or to irrigated sections. Part of Tashkent dates back to the twelfth century, and this old section was being slowly torn down, the streets were being widened and new, modern apartment houses were being built.

The collective farm that we visited was owned by an organization of farmers. Out of the over-all income of the farm, 7 per cent goes to the government in taxes. Another 16 per cent goes for capital reserve, 1 per cent to amortization and the like. Thirteen per cent goes into the operation of services, of which there are many, and the remaining cash is divided among members of the collective. We were told that a man might get about 8,000 rubles a year in cash on this basis, plus shelter, services, food and so on, which meant that he is fairly well off. If the crops fail, of course, he is in trouble.

Cotton was the main crop, but the farmers also raised cattle for meat and milk. There were 1,160 houses and 1,700 able workers, representing a dozen different nationalities brought together in this ancient area of Central Asia. Each farmer annually received about 30 pounds of meat, a considerable quantity of grain, and 150 pounds of potatoes, in addition to which he might raise food for himself in his garden plot and keep a cow, for which the collective provided food.