Soviet Communes. by Robert G. WessonReview by: Ethel DunnSlavic Review, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Jun., 1964), pp. 349-350Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2492946 .

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Reviews 349

ROBERT G. WESSON, Soviet Communes. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963. 275 pp. $7.50.

Soviet Communes attempts to trace the origins of the commune movement which was a factor in Soviet agriculture during the years 1917 to 1933 and to describe Communist Party policy toward it and its effect on agriculture. The points made are heavily footnoted, and one of the best aspects of the book is that a hitherto obscure part of Russian history can be so thoroughly documented from sources in this country's libraries. But while Mr. Wesson has demonstrated that he is a gifted and industrious researcher, his book is open to serious methodological criticism.

Above and beyond any difference of interpretation, he lacks a point of view. He seems to feel that if communes fail, they come to grief oftenest over the property instinct and the human desire for individuality. He illus- trates this thesis by reference to several "non-Russian communisms," and in so doing introduces misleading Western parallels. His desire to avoid giving a purely political slant to the narration of events is in itself laudable, but because he does not know what to put in place of politics, he stumbles among concepts and theories without ever really coming to grips with the central question and contradicts himself more than once.

The politics is perhaps well enough known; the agricultural situation during these years has not received the same publicity from this or the Soviet side. During and before the period Mr. Wesson considers, an impasse had been reached: when there was land enough for subsistence, there was not sufficient livestock; and when livestock sufficed, land was lacking. The first tentative use of machinery on farms was hindered by extreme shortages. Peasants responded by seeking nonagricultural work, either for the entire year or for the slack agricultural season. Immediately after the revolution, workers and soldiers returned to claim the land promised them, but for all the ferment and turmoil, many sections of the country were ignorant of the new land laws, and the countryside remained more or less the same, with the best workers soon going back to the cities.

The extent to which Mr. Wesson has taken account of these socio- economic factors is often unclear. He has tried to explain the reasons for the decline and extinction of the communes, but his conclusions are a trifle nebulous. This reviewer would very much like to know what kind of a book would have resulted if Mr. Wesson had considered the commune as a cultural phenomenon reasonably firmly rooted in certain areas of the future Soviet Union before the Bolsheviks were even in a position to manipulate it for their own purposes.

Had he used cultural perspective he could have done more with the thesis that "the absence of representative institutions and political free- doms, together with the lack of education among the peasant masses, forced protests into a religious form" (p. 66). And he would not have made the mistake of supposing that after 1905 the growth of Sectarianism halted; it did not, as he himself notes a few pages further on. His tendency to mini- mize Sectarianism is a serious defect, for it does not allow him to see possible reasons why the ordinary peasant would avoid the communes, or why the

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350 Slavic Review

communes, with such a relatively high proportion of party members, were not always amenable to party control.

It is particularly unfortunate that Mr. Wesson has all but buried certain facts about commune life. Commune members "used an average of four- teen times as much meat and twice as much milk as the average for the peasants of the country" (p. 232). Doing away with communes in favor of the kolkhoz system (in which a significant proportion of the agricultural produce sold to the state comes from the private plots of kolkhoz members) has kept peasant nutrition both traditional and noticeably deficient. Which means that in this area, too, culture change under the kolkhoz system is limited.

As Mr. Wesson remarks in another connection, the commune system was never given a chance to prove what it could do on a long-term basis. Never- theless, he cites statistics whose cultural significance he should have pon- dered at greater length: the commune was more completely collectivized than either artels or tozes, had more machinery, greater productivity, more cultural services for the populations concerned. In other words, the com- munes were slowly (and by and large successfully) solving problems which still plague the kolkhoz system-adequate nurseries for children whose mothers must work, technical training of personnel, adequate payment for work done. It is unfortunate that Mr. Wesson can devote several pages to the system of payment in communes without reflecting that under the kol- khoz system, the trudoden' was until very recently paid both in money and in kind, and in some areas the conversion to simple money payment was considered a mistake from the nutritional standpoint.

Finally, the reviewer is left with the impression that Mr. Wesson believes that communes were turned into artels because of some caprice of Stalin's. Mr. Wesson should have struggled longer to understand the cultural signifi- cance of the communes' exclusivism and the threat to the family posed by them. Both these factors deserve further (and more sophisticated) treatment.

Fordham University ETHEL DUNN

ALEKSANDER HERTZ, Zydzi w Kulturze Polskiej. Biblioteka "Kultury," Vol. LXVI. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1961. 284 pp.

zydzi w Kulturze Polskiej ("Jews in Polish Culture"), a book written by a distinguished Polish sociologist, Dr. Aleksander Hertz, who since World War II has resided in New York, is not only highly interesting but also a very important one, as it fills a gap in the studies pertaining to the so-called "Jewish Problem in Poland." The majority of the works written on this subject depict the Jews as a separate group, detached from the broader Polish cultural background. Hertz shows us various ways of correlating the two cultural elements, Polish and Jewish. He presents Polish Jewry as a caste within Polish society and considers this a factor determining all the phenomena of Jewish life in Poland. According to Hertz the Jews lived as a caste during all their stay in Poland, that is from the tenth century to the German invasion in 1939, followed by the "final solution." The author draws a close parallel between the way of life of the American Negroes in

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