THE WRETCHEDOF THE EARTHFrantz FanonTranslated from .docx

THE WRETCHED
OF THE EARTH
Frantz Fanon
Translated from the French
by Richard Philcox
with commentary by
Jean-Paul Sartre
and
Homi K. Bhabha
GROVE PRESS
New York
Copyright C 1963 by Presence Africaine
English translation copyright 10 2004 by Richard Philcox
Foreword copyright 02004 by Homi K. Bhabha
Preface copyright C 1961 by Jean-Paul Sartre
Originally published in the French language by Francois
Maspero editeur, Paris,
France, under the title Les damnes de Ia terre, copyright 0 1961

by Francois
Maspero editeur S.A.R.L.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage
and retrieval systems,
without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a
reviewer, who may quote
brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic
distribution of this book
or the facilitation of such without the permission of the
publisher is prohibited. Please
purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not
participate in or encourage
electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the
author's rights is
appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to
photocopy part or all of
the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries
to Grove/Atlantic, rnc.,
IS4 West 14lh Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected]
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fanoc, Frantz, 1925-1961.
[Darnnes de la terre. English]
The wretched of the earth I Frantz Fanon ; translated from the
French by Richard
Philcox ; introductions by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K.
Bhabha.
p.cm.
Originally published: Damnes de la terre. Paris: F. Maspero,
1961.
ISBN 978-0-8021-4132-3
.ISBN 978-0-8021-9885-3
1. France-Colonies-Africa. 2. Algeria-History-1945-1962. I.
Philcox,
Richard. II. Title.
DTl3.F313 2004
960'.097 1244--<1,22 2004042476
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 141h Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.ccm
15161718 18 17 16 15

Contents
Foreword: Framing Fanon, by Homi K. Bhabha VII
Preface, by Jean-Paul Sartre xliii
1. On Violence I
On Violence in the International Context 52
II. Grandeur and Weakness of Spontaneity 63
1IL The Trials and Tribulations
of National Consciousness 97
IV. On National Culture 145
Mutual Foundations for National Culture
and Liberation Struggles 170
V. Colonial War and Mental Disorders 181
Series A 185
Series B 199
Series C 207
Series D 216
From the North African's Criminal
Impulsiveness to the War of National Liberation 219
Conclusion 235
On Retranslating Fanon, Retrieving a Lost Voice 241
On Violence
ationalliberation, national reawakening, restoration of the na-

tion to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used,
whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a
violent
event. At whatever level we study it-individual encounters, a
change of name for a sports club, the guest list at a cocktail
party,
members of a police force or the board of directors of a state or
private bank-decolonization is quite simply the substitution
of one "species" of mankind by another. The substitution is un-
conditional, absolute, total, and seamless. We could go on to
portray the rise of a new nation, the establishment of a new
state,
its diplomatic relations and its economic and political orienta-
tion. But instead we have decided to describe the kind of tabula
rasa which from the outset defines any decolonization. What
is singularly important is that it starts from the very first day
with
the basic claims of the colonized. In actual fact, proof of suc-
cess lies in a social fabric that has been changed inside out.
This
change is extraordinarily important because it is desired, clam-
ored for, and demanded. The need for this change exists in a
raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and consciousness
of colonized men and women. But the eventuality of such a
change is also experienced as a terrifying future in the con-
sciousness of another "species" of men and women: the colons,
the colonists.
1
_______________ A
2 THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

* * *
Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the
world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder. But it cannot be
accomplished by the wave of a magic wand, a natura]
cataclysm,
or a gentleman's agreement. Decolonization, we know, is an
historical process: In other words, it can only be understood, it
can only find its significance and become self coherent insofar
as we can discern the history-making movement which gives it
form and substance. Decolonization is the encounter between
two congenitally antagonistic forces that in fact owe their
singu-
larity to the kind of reification secreted and nurtured by the co-
Ionia] situation. Their first confrontation was colored by
violence
and their cohabitation-or rather the exploitation of the colo-
nized by the colonizer-continued at the point of the bayonet
and under cannon fire. The colonist and the colonized are old
acquaintances. And consequently, the colonist is right when he
says he "knows" them. It is the colonist who fabricated and con-
tinues to fabricate the colonized subject. The colonist derives
his
validity, i.e., his wealth, from the colonial system.
Decolonization never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and
fundamentally alters being, and transforms the spectator
crushed
to a nonessential state into a privileged actor, captured in a vir-
tually grandiose fashion by the spotlight of History. It infuses a
new rhythm, specific to a new generation of men, with a new
language and a new humanity. Decolonization is truly the crea-
tion of new men. But such a creation cannot be attributed to a
supernatural power: The "thing" colonized becomes a man
through the very process of liberation.
Decolonization, therefore, implies the urgent need to thor-

oughly challenge the colonial situation. Its definition can, if we
want to describe it accurately, be summed up in the well-known
words: "The last shall be first." Decolonization is verification
of
this. At a descriptive level, therefore, any decolonization IS a
success.
ON VIOLENCE 3
* * *
In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs
and bloody knives. For the last can be the first only after a mur-
derous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists.
This determination to have the last move up to the front, to have
them clamber up (too quickly, say some) the famous echelons
of an organized society, can only succeed by resorting to every
means, including, of course, violence.
You do not disorganize a society, however primitive it may
be, with such an agenda if you are not determined from the
very start to smash every obstacle encountered. The colonized,
who have made up their mind to make such an agenda into a
driving force, have been prepared for violence from time im-
memorial. As soon as they are born it is obvious to them that
their cramped world, riddled with taboos, can only be chal-
lenged by out and out violence.
The colonial world is a compartmentalized world. It is obvi-
ously as superfluous to recall the existence of "native" towns
and
European towns, of schools for "natives" and schools for Euro-
peans, as it is to recall apartheid in South Africa. Yet if we pen-

etrate inside this compartmentalization we shall at least bring to
light some of its key aspects. By penetrating its geographical
configuration and classification we shall be able to delineate the
backbone on which the decolonized society is reorganized.
The colonized world is a world divided in two. The dividing
line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police
stations. In the colonies, the official, legitimate agent, the
spokes-
person for the colonizer and the regime of oppression, is the
police officer or the soldier. In capitalist societies, education,
whether secular or religious, the teaching of moral reflexes
handed down from father to son, the exemplary integrity of
work-
ers decorated after fifty years of loyal and faithful service, the
fostering of love for harmony and wisdom, those aesthetic forms
of respect for the status quo, instill in the exploited a mood of
~~ rt"IIIII
submission and inhibition which considerably eases the task of
the agents of law and order. In capitalist countries a multitude
of sermonizers, counselors) and "confusion-mongers" intervene
between the exploited and the authorities. In colonial regions,
however, the proximity and frequent, direct intervention by the
police and the military ensure the colonized are kept under
close
scrutiny, and contained by rifle butts and napalm. We have seen
how the government's agent uses a language of pure violence.
The agent does not alleviate oppression or mask domination. He
displays and demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the
law enforcer, and brings violence into the homes and minds of

the colonized subject.
The "native" sector is not complementary to the European
sector. The two confront each other, but not in the service of a
higher unity. Governed by a purely Aristotelian logic, they fol-
low the dictates of mutual exclusion: There is no conciliation
possible, one of them is superfluous. The colonist's sector is a
sector built to last, all stone and steel. It's a sector of lights and
paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with
strange
and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers. The colonist's
feet can never be glimpsed, except perhaps in the sea, but then
you can never get close enough. They are protected by solid
shoes
in a sector where the streets are clean and smooth, without a
pothole, without a stone. The colonist's sector is a sated, slug-
gish sector, its belly is permanently full of good things. The
colonist's sector is a white folks' sector, a sector of foreigners.
The colonized's sector, or at least the "native" quarters, the
shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place
inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, any-
how. You die anywhere, from anytiling. It's a world with no
space,
people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed
tightly together. The colonized's sector is a famished sector,
hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light. The colonized's
sector is a sector that crouches and cowers, a sector on its
knees,
ON VIOLENCE 5
a sector that is prostrate. It's a sector of niggers, a sector of
towel heads. The gaze that the colonized subject casts at the

colonist's sector is a look of lust, a look of envy. Dreams of
pos-
session. Every type of possession: of sitting at the colonist's
table
and sleeping in his bed, preferably with his wife. The colonized
man is an envious man. The colonist is aware of this as he
catches
the furtive glance, and constantly on h is guard, realizes bitterly
that: "They want to take our place." And it's true there is not
one
colonized subject who at least once a day does not dream of tak-
ing the place of the colonist.
This compartmentalized world, this world divided in two, is
inhabited by different species. The singularity of the colonial
context lies in the fact that economic reality, inequality, and
enormous disparities in lifestyles never manage to mask the
human reality. Looking at the immediacies of the colonial con-
text, it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost
what species, what race one belongs to. In the colonies the eco-
nomic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is
effect:
You are rich because you are white, you are white because you
are rich. This is why a Marxist analysis should always be
slightly
stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue. It is
not just the concept of the precapitalist society, so effectively
studied by Marx, which needs to be reexamined here. The serf
is essentially different from the knight, but a reference to divine
right is needed to justify this difference in status. In the
colonies
the foreigner imposed himself using his cannons and machines.
Despite the success of his pacification, in spite of his appropria-
tion, the colonist always remains a foreigner. It is not the facto-
ries, the estates, or the bank account which primarily
characterize

the "ruling class." The ruling species is first and foremost the
outsider from elsewhere, different from the indigenous popula-
tion, "the others."
The violence which governed the ordering of the colonial world,
which tirelessly punctuated the destruction of the indigenous
~~ ...rt1II
social fabric, and demolished unchecked the systems of refer-
ence of the country's economy, lifestyles, and modes of dress,
this same violence will be vindicated and appropriated when,
taking history into their Own hands, the colonized swarm into
the forbidden cities. To blow the colonial world to smithereens
is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of
every colonized subject. To dislocate the colonial world does
not
mean that once the borders have been eliminated there will be
a right of way between the two sectors. To destroy the colonial
world means nothing less than demolishing the colonist's sec-
tor, burying it deep within the earth or banishing it from the
territory.
Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation
of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the im-
passioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamen-
tally different. The colonial world is a Manichaean world. The
colonist is not content with physically limiting the space of the
colonized, i.e., with the help of his agents oflaw and order. As
if
to illustrate the totalitarian nature of colonial exploitation, the
colonist turns the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil.

I
Colonized society is not merely portrayed as a society without
values. The colonist is not content with stating that the
colonized
world has lost its values or worse never possessed any. The "na-
tive" is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the
absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we
say it, the enemy of values. In other words, absolute evil. A cor-
rosive element, destroying everything within his reach, a
corrupt-
ing element, distorting everything which involves aesthetics or
morals, an agent of malevolent powers, an unconscious and in-
curable instrument of blind forces. And Monsieur Meyer could
say in all seriousness in the French National Assembly that we
I We have demonstrated in Black Skin, White Masks the
mechanism of
this Manichaean world.
ON VIOLENCE 7
should not let the Republic be defiled by the penetration of the
Algerian people. Values are, in fact, irreversibly poisoned and
infected as soon as they come into contact with the colonized.
The customs of the colonized, their traditions, their myths, es-
pecially their myths, are the very mark of this indigence and
innate depravity. This is why we should place DDT, which de-
stroys parasites, carriers of disease, on the same level as Chris-
tianity, which roots out heresy, natural impulses, and evil. The
decline of yellow fever and the advances made by evangelizing
form part of the same balance sheet. But triumphant reports by
the missions in fact tell us how deep the seeds of alienation
have
been sown among the colonized. I am talking of Christianity

and
this should come as no surprise to anybody. The Church in the
colonies is a white man's Church, a foreigners' Church. It does
not call the colonized to the ways of God, but to the ways of the
white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor.
And as we know, in this story many are called but few are
chosen.
Sometimes this Manichaeanism reaches its logical conclusion
and dehumanizes the colonized subject. ln plain talk, he is re-
duced to the state of an animal. And consequently, when the
colonist speaks of the colonized he uses zoological terms. Allu-
sion is made to the slithery movements of the yellow race, the
odors from the "native" quarters, to the hordes, the stink, the
swarming, the seething, and the gesticulations. In his endeavors
at description and finding the right word, the colonist refers
constantly to the bestiary. The European seldom has a problem
with figures of speech. But the colonized, who immediately
grasp
the intention of the colonist and the exact case being made
against them, know instantly what he is thinking. This explosive
population growth, those hysterical masses, those blank faces,
those shapeless, obese bodies, this headless, tailless cohort,
these
children who seem not to belong to anyone, this indolence
sprawling under the sun, this vegetating existence, all this is
part
of the colonial vocabulary. General de Gaulle speaks of "yellow
______________ 1"11I
multitudes," and Monsieur Mauriac of the black, brown, and

yellow hordes that will soon invade our shores. The colonized
know all that and roar with laughter every time they hear them-
selves called an animal by the other. For they know they are not
animals. And at the very moment when they discover their hu-
manity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its
victory.
As soon as the colonized begin to strain at the leash and to
pose a threat to the colonist, they are assigned a series of good
souls who in the "Symposiums on Culture" spell out the speci-
ficity and richness of Western values. But every time the issue
of Western values crops up, the colonized grow tense and their
muscles seize up. During the period of decolonization the colo-
nized are called upon to be reasonable. They are offered rock-
solid values, they are told in great detail that decolonization
should not mean regression, and that they must rely on values
which have proved to be reliable and worthwhile. Now it so
happens that when the colonized hear a speech on Western
culture they draw their machetes or at least check to see they
are
close to hand. The supremacy of white values is stated with
such
violence, the victorious confrontation of these values with the
lifestyle and beliefs of the colonized is so impregnated with ag-
gressiveness, that as a counter measure the colonized rightly
make a mockery of them whenever they are mentioned. In the
colonial context the colonist only quits undermining the colo-
nized once the latter have proclaimed loud and clear that white
values reign supreme. In the period of decolonization the colo-
nized masses thumb their noses at these very values, shower
them
with insults and vomit them up.
Such an occurrence normally goes unseen because, during
decolonization, certain colonized intellectuals have established
a dialogue with the bourgeoisie of the colonizing country. Dur-

ing this period the indigenous population is seen as a blurred
mass. The few "native" personalities whom the colonialist bour-
ON VIOLENCE 9
geois have chanced to encounter have had insufficient impact
to alter their current perception and nuance their thinking.
During the period of liberation, however, the colonialist bour-
geoisie frantically seeks contact with the colonized "elite." It is
with this elite that the famous dialogue on values is established.
When the colonialist bourgeoisie realizes it is impossible to
maintain its domination over the colonies it decides to wage a
rearguard campaign in the fields of culture, values, and technol-
ogy, etc. But what we should never forget is that the immense
majority of colonized peoples are impervious to such issues. For
a colonized people, the most essential value, because it is the
most meaningful, is first and foremost the land: the land, which
must provide bread and, naturally, dignity. But this dignity has
nothing to do with "human" dignity. The colonized subject has
never heard of such an ideal. All he has ever seen on his land is
that he can be arrested, beaten, and starved with impunity; and
no sermonizer on morals, no priest has ever stepped in to bear
the blows in his place or share his bread. For the colonized, to
be a moralist quite plainly means silencing the arrogance of the
colonist, breaking his spiral of violence, in a word ejecting him
outright from the picture. 11,e famous dictum which states that
all men are equal will find its illustration in the colonies only
when the colonized subject states he is equal to the colonist.
Taking it a step further, he is determined to fight to be more
than
the colonist. In fact, he has already decided to take his place.
As
we have seen, it is the collapse of an entire moral and material
universe. The intellectual who, for his part, has adopted the

abstract, universal values of the colonizer is prepared to fight so
that colonist and colonized can live in peace in a new world.
But
what he does not see, because precisely colonialism and an its
modes of thought have seeped into him, is that the colonist is
no longer interested in staying on and coexisting once the colo-
nial context has disappeared. It is no coincidence that, even
before any negotiation between the Algerian government and
the
French government, the so-caned "liberal" European minority
__________ .......d
10 THE WRETCI-IED OF THE EARTH
has already made its position clear: it is clamoring for dual citi-
zenship, nothing less. By sticking to the abstract the colonist is
being forced to make a very substantial leap into the unknown.
Let us be honest, the colonist knows perfectly well that no jar-
gon is a substitute for reality.
The colonized subject thus discovers that his life, his breath-
ing and his heartbeats are the same as the colonist's. He dis-
covers that the skin of a colonist is not worth more than the
"native's." In other words, his world receives a fundamental
jolt.
The colonized's revolutionary new assurance stems from this. If,
in fact, my life is worth as much as the colonist's, his look can
no longer strike fear into me or nail me to the spot and his voice
can no longer petrify me. I am no longer uneasy in his presence.
In reality, to hell with him. Not only does his presence no
longer
bother me, but I am already preparing to waylay him in such a
way that soon he will have no other solution but to flee.

The colonial context, as we have said, is characterized by the
dichotomy it inflicts on the world. Decolonization unifies this
world by a radical decision to remove its heterogeneity, by uni-
fYing it on the grounds of nation and sometimes race. To quote
the biting words of Senegalese patriots on the maneuvers of
their
president, Senghor: "We askeel for the Africanization of the top
jobs and all Senghor does is Africanize the Europeans." Mean-
ing that the colonized can see right away if decolonization is
taking place or not: The minimum demand is that the last be-
come the first.
But the colonized intellectual introduces a variation on this
demand and in fact, there seems to be no lack of motivation to
fill senior positions as administrators, technicians, anel experts.
The colonized, however, equate this nepotism with acts of sabo-
tage and it is not unusual to hear them declare: "What is the
point
of being independent then ... r:
Wherever an authentic liberation struggle has been fought,
wherever the blood of the people has been shed and the armed
phase has lasted long enough to encourage the intellectuals to
ON VIOLENCE 11
withdraw to their rank and file base, there is an effective eradi-
cation of the superstructure borrowed by these intellectuals
from
the colonialist bourgeois circles. In its narcissistic monologue
the
colonialist bourgeoisie, by way of its academics, had implanted
in the minds of the colonized that the essential values-mean-

ing Western values-remain eternal despite all errors attribut-
able to man. The colonized intellectual accepted the cogency
of these ideas and there in the back of his mind stood a sentinel
on duty guarding the Greco-Roman pedestal. But during the
struggle for liberation, when the colonized intellectual touches
base again with his people, this artificial sentinel is smashed to
smithereens. All the Mediterranean values, the triumph of the
individual, of enlightenment and Beauty turn into pale, lifeless
trinkets. All those discourses appear a jumble of dead words.
Those values which seemed to ennoble the soul prove worthless
because they have nothing in common with the real-life struggle
in which the people are engaged.
And first among them is individualism. The colonized intellec-
tualleamed from his masters that the individual must assert him-
self. The colonialist bourgeoisie hammered into the colonized
mind the notion of a society of individuals where each is locked
in his subjectivity, where wealth lies in thought. But the
colonized
intellectual who is lucky enough to bunker down with the
people
during the liberation struggle, will soon discover the falsity of
this
theory. Involvementin the organization ofthe struggle will
already
introduce him to a different vocabulary. "Brother," "sister,"
"com-
rade" are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie because
in their thinking my brother is my wallet and my comrade, my
scheming. In a kind of auto-da-fe, the colonized intellectual
witnesses the destruction of all his idols: egoism, arrogant
recrimi-
nation, and the idiotic, childish need to have the last word. This
colonized intellectual, pulverized by colonialist culture, will
also discover the strength of the village assemblies, the power
of the people's commissions and the extraordinary productive-

ness of neighborhood and section committee meetings. Personal
___________ .....<1
interests are now the collective interest because in reality
every-
one will be discovered by the French legionnaires and con-
sequently massacred or else everyone will be saved. In such a
context, the "every man for himself' concept, the atheist's form
of salvation, is prohibited.
Self-criticism has been much talked about recently, but few
realize that it was first of all an Mrican institution. Whether it
be in the diemaas of North Africa or the palavers of West
Africa,
tradition has it that disputes which break out in a village are
worked out in public. By this I mean collective self-criticism
with
a touch of humor because everyone is relaxed, because in the
end we all want the same thing. The intellectual sheds all that
calculating, all those strange silences, those ulterior motives,
that
devious thinking and secrecy as he gradually plunges deeper
among the people. In this respect then we can genuinely say that
the community has already triumphed and exudes its own light,
its Own reason.
But when decolonization occurs in regions where the libera-
tion struggle has not yet made its impact sufficiently felt, here
are the same smart alecks, the sly, shrewd intellectuals whose
behavior and ways of thinking, picked up from their rubbing
shoulders with the colonialist bourgeoisie, have remained in-

tact. Spoiled children of yesterday's colonialism and tcday's
governing powers, they oversee the looting of the few national
resources. Ruthless in their scheming and legal pilfering they
use
the poverty, now nationwide, to work their way to the top
through
import-export holdings, limited companies, playing the stock
market, and nepotism. They insist on the nationalization of
busi-
ness transactions, i.e., reserving contracts and business deals for
nationals. Their doctrine is to proclaim the absolute need for na-
tionalizing the theft of the nation. In this barren, national phase,
in this so-called period of austerity, their success at plundering
the nation swiftly sparks anger and violence from the people. In
the present international and African context, the poverty-
stricken
and independent population achieves a social consciousness at
ON VIOLENCE 13
a rapidly accelerating pace. This, the petty individualists will
soon
find out for themselves.
In order to assimilate the culture of the oppressor and venture
into his fold, the colonized subject has had to pawn some of his
own intellectual possessions. For instance, one of the things he
has had to assimilate is the way the colonialist bourgeoisie
thinks.
This is apparent in the colonized intellectual's inaptitude to
engage in dialogue. For he is unable to make himself inessen-
tial when confronted with a purpose or idea. On the other hand,
when he operates among the people he is constantly awestruck.
He is literally disarmed by their good faith and integrity. He is

then constantly at risk of becoming a demagogue. He turns into
a kind of mimic man who nods his assent to every word by the
people, transformed by him into an arbiter of truth. Butthe
fellah,
the unemployed and the starving do not lay claim to truth. They
do not say they represent the truth because they are the truth in
their very being.
During this period the intellectual behaves objectively like a
vulgar opportunist. His maneuvering, in fact, is still at work.
The
people would never think of rejecting him or cutting the ground
from under his feet. What the people want is for everything to
be pooled together. The colonized intellectual's insertion into
this human tide will find itself on hold because of his curious
obsession with detail. It is not that the people are opposed to
analysis. They appreciate clarification, understand the reason-
ing behind an argument, and like to see where they are going.
But at the start of his cohabitation with the people the colonized
intellectual gives priority to detail and tends to forget the very
purpose of the struggle-the defeat of colonialism. Swept along
by the many facets of the struggle, he tends to concentrate on
local tasks, undertaken zealously but almost always too pedan-
tically. He does not always see the overall picture. He intro-
duces the notion of disciplines, specialized areas and fields into
that awesome mixer and grinder called a people's revolution.
~ .... t"1I
Committed to certain frontline issues he tends to lose sight of
the unity of the movement and in the event of failure at the
local

level he succumbs to doubt, even despair. The people, on the
other hand, take a global stance from the very start. "Bread and
land: how do we go about getting bread and land?" And this
stub-
born, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people is
finally the most rewarding and effective working model.
The question of truth must also be taken into consideration.
For the people, only fellow nationals are ever owed the truth.
No absolute truth, no discourse on the transparency of the soul
can erode this position. In answer to the lie of the colonial situ-
ation, the colonized subject responds with a lie. Behavior
toward
fellow nationalists is open and honest, but strained and indeci-
pherable toward the colonists. Truth is what hastens the dislo-
cation of the colonial regime, what fosters the emergence of the
nation. Truth is what protects the "natives" and undoes the for-
eigners. In the colonial context there is no truthful behavior.
And
good is quite simply what hurts them most.
We have seen therefore that the Manichaeanism that first
governed colonial society is maintained intact during the period
of decolonization. In fact the colonist never ceases to be the
enemy, the antagonist, in plain words public enemy number l.
The oppressor, ensconced in his sector, creates the spiral, the
spiral of domination, exploitation and looting. In the other sec-
tor, the colonized subject lies coiled and robbed, and fuels as
best he can the spiral which moves seamlessly from the shores
of the colony to the palaces and docks of the metropolis. In this
petrified zone, not a ripple on the surface, the palm trees sway
against the clouds, the waves of the sea lap against the shore,
the
raw materials come and go, legitimating the colonist's presence,
while more dead than alive the colonized subject crouches for
ever in the same old dream. The colonist makes history. His life

is an epic, an odyssey. He is invested with the very beginning:
ON VIOLENCE 15
'We made this land." He is the guarantor for its existence: "If
we
leave, all will be lost, and this land will return to the Dark
Ages."
Opposite him, listless beings wasted away by fevers and
consumed
by "ancestral customs" compose a virtually petrified
background
to the innovative dynamism of colonial mercantilism.
The colonist makes history and he knows it. And because he
refers constantly to the history of his metropolis, he plainly
indi-
cates that here he is the extension of this metropolis. The his-
tory he writes is therefore not the history of the country he is
despoiling, but the history of his own nation's looting, raping,
and starving to death. The immobility to which the colonized
subject is condemned can be challenged only if he decides to
put an end to the history of colonization and the history of de-
spoliation in order to bring to life the history of the nation, the
history of decolonization.
A world compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified, a
world of statues: the statue of the general who led the conquest,
the statue of the engineer who built the bridge. A world cock-
sure of itself, crushing with its stoniness the backbones of those
scarred by the whip. That is the colonial world. The colonial
subject is a man penned in; apartheid is but one method of com-
partmentalizing the colonial world. The first thing the colonial
subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its

limits.
Hence the dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams,
dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality. I dream I am
jumping, swimming, running, and climbing. I dream I burst out
laughing, I am leaping across a river and chased by a pack of
cars
that never catches up with me. During colonization the colo-
nized subject frees himself night after night between nine in the
evening and six in the morning.
The colonized subject will first train this aggressiveness sedi-
men ted in his muscles against his own people. This is the
period
when black turns on black, and police officers and magistrates
don't know which way to turn when faced with the surprising
surge of North African criminality. We shall see later what
should
be made of this phenornenon? Confronted with the colonial
order the colonized subject is in a permanent state of tension.
The colonist's world is a hostile world, a world which excludes
yet at the same time incites envy. We have seen how the colo-
nized always dream of taking the colonist's place. Not of
becom-
ing a colonist, but of replacing him. This hostile, oppressive
and
aggressive world, bulldozing the colonized masses, represents
not
only the hell they would like to escape as quickly as possible
but
a paradise within arm's reach guarded by ferocious watchdogs.

The colonized subject is constantly on his guard: Confused
by the myriad signs of the colonial world he never knows
whether
he is out of line. Confronted with a world configured by the
colonizer, the colonized subject is always presumed guilty. The
colonized does not accept his guilt, but rather considers it a
kind
of curse, a sword of Damocles. But deep down the colonized
subject acknowledges no authority. He is dominated but not
domesticated. He is made to feel inferior, but by no means con-
vinced of his inferiority. He patiently waits for the colonist to
let
his guard down and then jumps on him. The muscles of the
colonized are always tensed. It is not that he is anxious or
terror-
ized, but he is always ready to change his role as game for that
of
hunter. The colonized subject is a persecuted man who is for-
ever dreaming of becoming the persecutor. The symbols of so-
ciety such as the police force, bugle calls in the barracks,
military
parades, and the flag flying aloft, serve not only as inhibitors
but
also as stimulants. They do not signifY:"Stay where you are."
But
rather "Get ready to do the right thing." And in fact if ever the
colonized subject begins to doze off or forget, the colonist's ar-
rogance and preoccupation with testing the solidity of the colo-
1 Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders, chapter 5.
nial system will remind him on so many occasions that the great
showdown cannot be postponed indefinitely. This impulse to
take the colonist's place maintains a constant muscular tonus. It

is a known fact that under certain emotional circumstances an
obstacle actually escalates action.
ON VIOLENCE 17
The relationship between colonist and colonized is one of
physical mass. Against the greater number the colonist pits his
force. The colonist is an exhibitionist. His safety concerns lead
him to remind the colonized out loud: "Here I am the master."
The colonist keeps the colonized in a state of rage, which he
prevents from boiling over. The colonized are caught in the
tightly knit web of colonialism. But we have seen how on the
in-
side the colonist achieves only a pseudo-petrification. The mus-
cular tension of the colonized periodically erupts into bloody
fighting between tribes, clans, and individuals.
At the individual level we witness a genuine negation of com-
mon sense. Whereas the colonist or police officer can beat the
colonized subject day in and day out, insult him and shove him
to his knees, it is not uncommon to see the colonized subject
draw his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive look from
another colonized subject. For the colonized subject's last re-
sort is to defend his personality against his fellow countryman.
Internecine feuds merely perpetuate age-old grudges entrenched
in memory. By throwing himself muscle and soul into his blood
feuds, the colonized subject endeavors to convince himself that
colonialism has never existed, that everything is as it used to be
and history marches on. Here we grasp the full significance of
the all too familiar "head-in-the-sand" behavior at a collective
level, as if this collective immersion in a fratricidal bloodbath
suffices to mask the obstacle and postpone the inevitable
alterna-
tive, the inevitable emergence of the armed struggle against
colo-
nialism. So one of the ways the colonized subject releases his

muscular tension is through the very real collective self-
destruction
___________ 4
a
of these internecine feuds. Such behavior represents a death
wish
in the face of danger, a suicidal conduct which reinforces the
colonist's existence and domination and reassures him that such
men are not rational. The colonized subject also manages to lose
sight of the colonist through religion. Fatalisrn relieves the op-
pressor of all responsibility since the cause of wrong-doing,
pov-
erty, and the inevitable can be attributed to God. The individual
thus accepts the devastation decreed by God, grovels in front of
the colonist, bows to the hand of fate, and mentally readjusts to
acquire the serenity of stone.
In the meantime, however, life goes on and the colonized
subject draws on the terrifying myths that are so prolific in
under-
developed societies as inhibitions for his aggressiveness:
malevo-
lent spirits who emerge every time you put one foot wrong,
leopard men, snake men, six-legged dogs, zombies, a whole
never-ending gamut of animalcules or giants that encircle the
colonized with a realm of taboos, barriers, and inhibitions far
more terrifying than the colonialist world. This magical super-
structure that permeates the indigenous society has a very
precise

function in the way the libido works. One of the characteristics,
in fact, of underdeveloped societies is that the libido is prima-
rilya matter for the group and family. Anthropologists have
amply
described societies where the man who dreams he has sexual
intercourse with a woman other than his Own must publicly
confess his dream and pay the penalty in kind or in several days'
work to the husband or the injured family party-which proves,
by the way, that so-called prehistorical societies attach great
importance to the unconscious.
In scaring me, the atmosphere of myths and magic operates like
an undeniable reality. In terrifying me, it incorporates rne into
the
traditions and history of my land and ethnic group, but at the
same
time I am reassured and granted a civil status, an identification.
The secret sphere in underdeveloped countries is a collective
sphere that falls exclusively within the realm of magic. By
entan-
gling me in this inextricable web where gestures are repeated
with
ON VIOLENCE 19
a secular limpidity, my very own world, our very own world,
thus
perpetuates itself. Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than
colonists. And the problem now is not whether to fall in line
with
the armor-plated world of colonialism, but to think twice before
urinating, spitting, or going out in the dark.
The magical, supernatural powers prove to be surprisingly ego

boosting. The colonist's powers are infinitely shrunk, stamped
by foreignness. There is no real reason to fight them because
what
really matters is that the mythical structures contain far more
terrifying adversaries. It is evident that everything is reduced to
a permanent confrontation at the level of phantasy.
In the liberation struggle, however, this people who were
once relegated to the realm of the imagination, victims of un-
speakable terrors, but content to lose themselves in hallucina-
tory dreams, are thrown into disarray, re-form, and amid blood
and tears give birth to very real and urgent issues. Giving food
to the mujahideen, stationing lookouts, helping deprived fami-
lies and taking over from the slain or imprisoned husband-such
are the practical tasks the people are asked to undertake in the
liberation struggle.
In the colonial world, the colonized's affectivity iskept on edge
like a running sore flinching from a caustic agent. And the
psyche
retracts, is obliterated, and finds an outlet through muscular
spasms that have caused many an expert to classify the
colonized
as hysterical. This overexcited affectivity, spied on by invisible
guardians who constantly communicate with the core of the
personality, takes an erotic delight in the muscular deflation of
the crisis.
Another aspect of the colonized's affectivity can be seen when
it is drained of energy by the ecstasy of dance. Any study of the
colonial world therefore must include an understanding of the
phenomena of dance and possession. The colonized's way of
relaxing is precisely this muscular orgy during which the most
brutal aggressiveness and impulsive violence are channeled,
transformed, and spirited away. The dance circle is a permissive

circle. It protects and empowers. At a fixed time and a fixed
date
men and women assemble in a given place, and under the sol-
emn gaze of the tribe launch themselves into a seemingly disar-
ticulated, but in fact extremely ritualized, pantomime where the
exorcism, liberation, and expression of a community are gran-
diosely and spontaneously played out through shaking of the
head, and back and forward thrusts of the body. Everything is
permitted in the dance circle. The hillock, which has been
climbed as if to get closer to the moon, the river bank, which
has been descended whenever the dance symbolizes ablution,
washing, and purification, are sacred places. Everything is per-
mitted, for in fact the sole purpose of the gathering is to Jet the
supercharged libido and the stifled aggressiveness spew out vol-
canically. Symbolic killings, figurative cavalcades, and
imagined
multiple murders, everything has to come out. The ill humors
seep out, tumultuous as lava flows.
One step further and we find ourselves in deep possession. In
actual fact, these are organized seances of possession and
dispos-
session: vampirism, possession by djinns, by zombies, and by
Legba, the illustrious god of voodoo. Such a disintegration, dis-
solution or splitting of the personality, plays a key regulating
role
in ensuring the stability of the colonized world. On the way
there
these men and women were stamping impatiently, their nerves
"on edge." On the way back, the village returns to serenity,
peace,
and stillness.

During the struggle for liberation there is a singular loss of
interest in these rituals. With his back to the wall, the knife at
his tluoat, or to be more exact the electrode on his genitals, the
colonized subject is bound to stop telling stories.
After years of unreality, after wallowing in the most extraordi-
nary phantasms, the colonized subject, machine gun at the
ready,
finally confronts the only force which challenges his very
being:
colonialism. And the young colonized subject who grows up in
an abnosphere of fire and brimstone has no scruples mocking
zombie ancestors, two-headed horses, corpses woken from the
ON VIOLENCE 21
dead, and djinns who, taking advantage of a yawn, slip inside
the
body. The colonized subject discovers reality and transforms it
through his praxis, his deployment of violence and his agenda
for liberation.
We have seen that this violence throughout the colonial period,
although constantly on edge, runs on empty. We have seen it
channeled through the emotional release of dance or possession.
We have seen it exhaust itself in fratricidal struggles. The chal-
lenge now is to seize this violence as it realigns itself. Whereas
it
once reveled in myths and contrived ways to commit collective
suicide, a fresh set of circumstances will now enable it to
change
directions.

From the point of view of political tactics and History, the lib-
eration of the colonies poses a theoretical problem of crucial
importance at the current time: When can it be said that the
situation is ripe for a national liberation movement? What
should
be the first line of action? Because decolonization comes in
many
shapes, reason wavers and abstains from declaring what is a true
decolonization and what is not. We shall see that for the politi-
cally committed, urgent decisions are needed on means and
tactics, i.e., direction and organization. Anything else is but
blind
voluntarism with the terribly reactionary risks this implies.
What are the forces in the colonial period which offer new
channels, new agents of empowerment for the violence of the
colonized? First and foremost, the political parties and the in-
tellectual and business elite. However, what is characteristic of
certain political groups is that they are strong on principles but
abstain from issuing marching orders. During the colonial
period
the activities of these nationalist political parties are purely for
electioneering purposes and amount to no more than a series of
philosophic-political discourses on the subject of the rights of
peoples to self-determination, the human rights of dignity and
•
Conclusion
Now, comrades, now is the time to decide to change sides. We
must shake off the great mantle of night which has enveloped
us, and reach for the light. The new day which is dawning must
find us determined, enlightened and resolute.

We must abandon our dreams and say farewell to our old
beliefs and former friendships. Let us not lose time in useless
laments or sickening mimicry. Let us leave this Europe which
never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its
street comers, at every corner of the world.
For centuries Europe has brought the progress of other men
to a halt and enslaved them for its own purposes and glory; for
centuries it has stifled virtually the whole of humanity in the
name of a so-called "spiritual adventure" Look at it now teeter-
ing between atomic destruction and spiritual disintegration.
And yet nobody can deny its achievements at home have not
been crowned with success.
Europe has taken over leadership of the world with fervor,
cynicism, and violence. And look how the shadow of its monu-
ments spreads and multiplies. Every movement Europe makes
bursts the boundaries of space and thought. Europe has denied
itself not only humility and modesty but also solicitude and
tenderness.
235
Its only show of miserliness has been toward man, only to-
ward man has it shown itself to be niggardly and murderously
carnivorous.
So, my brothers, how could we fail to understand that we have
better things to do than follow in that Europe's footsteps?

111isEurope, which never stopped talking of man, which never
stopped proclaiming its sole concern was man, we now know
the
price of suffering humanity has paid for every one of its
spiritual
victories.
Come, comrades, the European game is finally over, we must
look for something else. We can do anything today provided we
do not ape Europe, provided we are not obsessed with catching
up with Europe.
Europe has gained such a mad and reckless momentum that
it has lost control and reason and is heading at dizzying speed
towards the brink from which we would be advised to remove
ourselves as quickly as possible.
It is all too true, however, that we need a model, schemas and
examples. For many of us the European model is the most elat-
ing. But we have seen in the preceding pages how misleading
such an imitation can be. European achievements, European
technology and European lifestyles must stop tempting us and
leading us astray.
When I look for man in European lifestyles and technology I
see a constant denial of man, an avalanche of murders.
Man's condition, his projects and collaboration with others on
tasks that strengthen man's totality, are new issues which
require
genuine inspiration.
Let us decide not to imitate Europe and let lIS tense our
muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us endeavor to
invent a man in full, something which Europe has been inca-
pable of achieving.

Two centuries ago, a former European colony took it into its
head to catch up with Europe. It has been so successful that the
United States of America has become a monster where the
flaws,
CONCLUSION 237
sickness, and inhumanity of Europe have reached frightening
proportions.
Comrades, have we nothing else to do but create a third Eu-
rope? The West saw itself on a spiritual adventure. It is in the
name of the Spirit, meaning the spirit of Europe, that Europe
justified its crimes and legitimized the slavery in which it held
four fifths of humanity.
Yes, the European spirit is built on strange foundations. The
whole of European thought developed in places that were in-
creasingly arid and increasingly inaccessible. Consequently, it
was natural that the chances of encountering man became less
and less frequent.
A permanent dialogue with itself, an increasingly obnoxious
narcissism inevitably paved the way for a virtual delirium where
intellectual thought turns into agony since the reality of man
as a living, working, self-made being is replaced by words, an
assemblage of words and the tensions generated by their mean-
ings. There were Europeans, however, who urged the European
workers to smash this narcissism and break with this denial of
reality.
Generally speaking, the European workers did not respond to
the call. The fact was that the workers believed they too were

part of the prodigious adventure of the European Spirit.
All the elements for a solution to the major problems of hu-
manity existed at one time or another in European thought. But
the Europeans did not act on the mission that was designated
them and which consisted of virulently pondering these ele-
ments, modifying their configuration, their being, of changing
them and finally taking the problem of man to an infinitely
higher plane.
Today we are witnessing a stasis of Europe. Comrades, let us
flee this stagnation where dialectics has gradually turned into a
logic of the status quo. Let us reexamine the question of man.
Let us reexamine the question of cerebral reality, the brain mass
of humanity in its entirety whose affinities must be increased,
whose connections must be diversified and whose communica-
tions must be humanized again.
Come brothers, we have far too much work on our hands to
revel in outmoded games. Europe has done what it had to do
and all things considered, it has done a good job; let us stop ac-
cusing it, but let us say to it firmly it must stop putting on such
a
show. We no longer have reason to fear it, let us stop then envy-
ing it.
The Third World is today facing Europe as one colossal mass
whose project must be to try and solve the problems this Europe
was incapable of finding the answers to.
But what matters now is not a question of profitability, not a

question of increased productivity, not a question of production
rates. No, it is not a question of back to nature. It is the very
basic
question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him,
of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and
unhinge it. The notion of catching up must not be used as a
pretext to brutalize man, to tear him from himself and his inner
consciousness, to break him, to kill him.
No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. But what we want
is to walk in the company of man, every man, night and day, for
all times. It is not a question of stringing the caravan out where
groups are spaced so far apart they cannot see the one in front,
and men who no longer recognize each other, meet less and less
and talk to each other less and less.
111e Third World must start over a new history of man which
takes account of not only the occasional prodigious theses main-
tained by Europe but also its crimes, the most heinous of which
have been committed at the very heart of man, the pathological
dismembering of his functions and the erosion of his unity, and
in the context of the community, the fracture, the stratification
and the bloody tensions fed by class, and finally, on the
immense
scale of humanity, the racial hatred, slavery, exploitation and,
above all, the bloodless genocide whereby one and a half billion
men have been written off.
--
CONCLUSION 239
So comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states,
institutions, and societies that draw their inspiration from it.
Humanity expects other things from us than this grotesque and

generally obscene emulation.
If we want to transform Africa into a new Europe, America into
a new Europe, then let us entrust the destinies of our countries
to the Europeans. They will do a better job than the best of us.
But if we want humanity to take one step forward, if we want
to take it to another level than the one where Europe has placed
it, then we must innovate, we must be pioneers.
If we want to respond to the expectations of our peoples, we
must look elsewhere besides Europe.
Moreover, if we want to respond to the expectations of the
Europeans we must not send them back a reflection, however
ideal, of their society and their thought that periodically sickens
even them.
For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we
must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and en-
deavor to create a new man.
-
BEHIND THE URALS
John Scott
ARNO PRESS & THE NEW YORK TIMES
New York • 1971

•
Reprint Edition 1971 by Amo Press Inc.
LC 70-115583
ISBN 0-405-03137-8
Russia Observed
ISBN for complete set 0-405-03000·2
Reprinted from a copy in
the Pennsylvania State Library
Manufactured in the United States of America.
A Day in Magnitogorsk 41
IX
ABOUT six
o'clocka dozen or so young workers, men and women,gathered
in the Red Corner with a couple of balalaikas and a guitar.
Work was finished for the day, supper was on the stove, it was
time for a song. And they sang! Workers' revolutionary songs,
folk tunes, and the old Russian romantic lyrics. A Tartar
worker sang a couple of his native songs. A young Ukrainian
danced. The balalaikas were played very skillfully. I never
ceased wondering at the high percentage of Russian workers
who could play the balalaika. They learned during the long
winter evenings in their village mud huts.
Then a discussion sprang up. 'Why don't weget more sugar?

We've received only two hundred grams' (half pound) 'per per-
son this month. Tea without sugar doesn't get you anywhere.'
Ahnost everybody had something to say. One young fellow ex-
plained that the sugar crop wasbad this year. The sugar indus-
try fulfilled its plan only fifty-some per cent. Somebody else
pointed out that the Soviet Union exported a great deal of
candy, which meant sugar.
42 Behind the Urals
'We still have to export a lot to get the money to buy rolling
mills and other such things that we can't make ourselves yet.'
Some of the women remained unconvinced. There had always
been sugar except during the war. There was no war now.
There ought to be sugar. The older women particularly had
not yet become accustomed to having money which could not
. buy what they wanted. Previously money had always been a
measure of their material situation. A good payroll meant the
best of everything. This had been true all through the late
twenties, particularly in the industrial districts of the Ukraine
where workers with jobs usually ate well. Now, however, the
meaning of money had changed. The size of the pay envelope,
the number of bank notes under the mattress, no longer deter-
mined living standards. Everybody had money, but what one
ate or wore depended almost exclusively on what there was to
buy in the particular store to which one was attached. If one
were a foreignspecialist or a party of GPU top flight functionary
attached to the exclusive foreigners' store, one had caviar,
Caucasian wine, imported materials, and a fair selection of
shoes, suits, etc. Engineers, foremen, people like Syemichkin
and Kolya, had cards for a technicians' store where they could
buy bread and occasionally meat, butter, fish, and some dry-

goods. The majority of the people, however, like Popov, were
attached to workers' stores where bread was the only thing one
was reasonably sure of getting with any regularity. Occasion-
ally there was no bread for several days; but most of the work-
ers, schooled in famine, had a small supply of hoarded crusts
which tided them over temporary shortages.
I had a card in the workers' store and would have got along
as best I could with that had it not been for Kolya, who insisted
that I go get a book for 'Insnab,' the famous and fabulous
foreigners' store. Kolya arranged it, though according to the
letter of the law I was not entitled to it, as I had not cometo the
SovietUnion under contract with Amtorg, but onmy ownhook.
My main difficulty was in getting to Insnab to buy things. I
usualiyarrived late and found the store closed. Still, what with
my Insnab book and Kolya's many dining-room cards and
technicians' store cards, wemanaged to eat fairly well,certainly
better than most of the peoplein our barrack, and incomparably
better than most of the workersin the sprawlingcity of Magni-
togorsk.
Food conditions were the subject of constant discussion at
l
spontaneous little meetings in the Red Corner at the barrack
beforeor after dinner. There was nearly always someoneto ex-
plain the officialposition and the majority wasusually satisfied.
,Just wait five or ten years and wewon't needonesinglething
from the capitalist world,' said Anya, a young woman welder.
'Then we won't have to export food. We'll eat it all ourselves.'
'In five or ten years there won't be any capitalist world,' said

ayoung rigger, waving hishand. 'What do you think the work-
ers in the capitalist worldare doing? Do you think they are go-
ingto starve through another ten years ofcrisis,even supposing
there is no war during that time? They won't stand it.'
'Of course they won't. They'll revolt,' said another. 'And
we'll help them when the time comes.'
Then a more prosaic subject was discussed. Belyakov, the
administrator of supplies in the Blast Furnace Construction
Trust, was a bureaucrat. Everybody had a bad wordfor him.It
was one thing to freeze your hand on the job or to do without
sugar; such inconvenienceswerecaused by distant and objective
considerations like the climate and the general policy of the
Soviet government, about equally removed from the will of the
individual workers. But to have to put up with a bureaucrat
likeBelyakov, who seemedto take delight in acting like a gen-
darme or a mediaeval landlord, that was too much.
44 Behind the Urals
x
IT WAS nearly seven
o'clock when Kolya got home and stuck his nose into the Red
Corner. 'Jack, we must go if we're going to be on time.' We
went into our room to get our books. Kolya had already eaten
supper at the technicians' dining-room down at the mill for
which he had three cards.
'I stopped in at the hospital to see Vaska,' said Kolya as he
changed his grimy work valinkis for another pair. 'He looks
pretty low. The doctor told me he would probably die this

week.'
Vaska was a welder who lived in our barrack and worked in
our gang. He had fallen and crushed his chest two weeks before
and had been lying between life and death in the hospital since.
I had been to see him twice, but it was not a pleasant place, and
I tried to postpone my next visit as long as possible. It was cold
and dirty. The nurses were besheepskinned village girls who
had become completely indifferent to the pain and suffering
they saw around them in the surgical ward: men burned with
pig iron, who invariably screamed for three days before dying,
men rolled like flies in or under cranes or other heavy equip-
ment; they were all just nuisances. Vaska was treated fairly
well because his crushed chest permitted of no screaming and
because he was a nice fellow, but some of the other patients
were not so lucky.
'I haven't been to see him for four days,' I said.
We took our books, wrapped in newspaper, and started offfor
school.
Many people were leaving the barrack; some were going to
thecinema,someto the club, but the packages ofbookswrapped
innewspaperunder the arms ofmost of them told of their desti-
nations. They were going to school. Twenty-four ,men and
womenin the barrack were students in someorganized school.
I attended the Komvuz. The course took three years and
included Russian, arithmetic. political economy. Leninism,
history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, history of
the revolutionary movement of the West, party structure, and
dialectic materialism. Most of the graduates of this school be-
came professional propagandists or functionaries in the local

political or administrative organizations. Most of the students
entered the Communist University as semi-literates. The en-
trance requirements were those of the fifth grade in elementary
school. but actually only reading and writing were rigorously
demanded. The academic level of the Komvuz was conse-
quently low. Textbooks caused a great deal of trouble. par-
ticularly for subjects like dialectic materialism. where the
only book in print was that of Bukharin, which had been
declared 'opportunist' and banned for use in schools. To
give students with a very limited general education 'Anti-
Duehrung,' 'The Dialectics of Nature,' or 'Materialism and
Empiro-Criticism' to read was only to invite blatant superfici-
ality. The teachers were. therefore, in a difficultposition. The
dialectic materialism teacher in the Communist University was
changed four times in the academic year 1988-84. In each case
'deviations' caused removal. and in two cases. arrest. 'Devia-
tion hunting' was one of the main tasks of the director of the
school. And if his efforts in this direction produced no results,
he was liable to get into trouble himself for 'complacency' or
'harboring enemies.'
I entered the Komvuz when I had been inMagnitogorsk only
three months in order to get somehelp in Russian. Then I be-
came interested in the material of the courses. The history
46 Behind the Urals
particularly was fascinating. Every experience in history was
black or white, trends and tendencies were simplified. Every
question had a perfectly definite answer. Not only that, the
formulation of the answer must be thus and so. When you fol-
lowed all the rules, everything made sense. It was a system
built up likearithmetic. The onlytrouble with it wasthat often
it did not always correspond to objective realities.
I rememberone altercation about the Marxian law ofthe im-

poverishment of the toilers in capitalist countries. According
to this law as interpreted to the students of the Magnitogorsk
Komvuz, the working classes of Germany, Britain, and the
United States, as well as those of all other capitalist countries,
had becomesteadily and inexorably poorer since the beginning
of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. I went
up to the teacher after class, and told him that I happened to
have beenin Britain, for example,and that it seemedto me that
conditions among workers there were unquestionably better
than they had been during the time of Charles Dickens, or at
the time when Engels wrote his treatise on the 'Conditions of
the Working Classesin England.'
The teacher would have none of me. 'Look at the book,
Comrade,' he said. 'It is written in the book.' It mattered
nothing to this man that' the book' wouldbe declared counter-
revolutionary next month. When it happened he would be
given another book. The party made no mistakes. He was
given a book by tbe party. That was enough.
Kolya attended the Technicum, a schoolwith slightly higher
academic standards than those of the Communist University.
The entrance requirements were seven years of schoolingand
the applicants were weeded out by competitive examination.
The curriculum included algebra, physics, chemistry, mechan-
ics, strength of materials, mechanical drawing and designingof
structural steel, reinforced concrete and wooden structures,
withemphasis on those types of construction needed for Mag-
nitogorsk. Most of the teachers were engineersworking in the
designingofficeor on the job. They came to do their teaching
after a day's work and were often tired and unprepared. The

strain on the students waseven greater, inasmuch as they stud-
iedfour nights a week,whereas the teachers usually taught less.
Thestudent body waspickedwithout regard to party affiliation.
Akomsomol, a non-party worker, were admitted on the same
basisas a party member. 'Class enemies' and members of their
Ifamilies, however, were rigorously excluded. Shabkov,
whosefather had been a kulak, could not enter the Technicum.
This
deprivation of rights of higher education to 'lishentsi' (dis-
franchised citizens) was enforced till 1936,when a decree from
Moscowgranted equal educational rights to all.
Half a dozen other schoolswere attended by workers from
Barrack No. 17 every evening: the chauffeur's school; an
'Osoaviakhim' course, including various military subjects;
special courses to train economists, planners, midwives, post-
officeworkers, and telegraph operators. These schoolswererun
by various trusts and organizations.
School expenses, lighting, heating, teachers' salaries, and
ometimesevenbooksandpaper for the students, weremet from
the large fund for training technicians and skilledworkers. The
students paid nothing. They even got specialprivileges,longer
vacations, time off from work during examinations.
At this time Magnitogorsk boasted very fewfull-time adult
schools. Most ofthe workers,likeKolya and myself,studied in
the evenings. There wastoomuch work to bedone, the pressure
was too great, to release several million young workers from
Soviet industry and send them to school. Within five years,
however, the evening professional schools practically disap-
peared and were replaced by bona-fide full-time institutions,
whoseacademic standards weremuch higher. Students of these

48 Behind the Urals
institutions received allowances from the State, ranging from
forty to five hundred roubles a month. This was true until
1940, when the government, faced with the necessity of raising
billions for armaments, instituted tuition for all schooling over
the seventh grade.
/ The tremendous investment made by the Soviet Union in
.education was necessitated by the lack of trained people in
every conceivable field. The Revolution, civil war, and mass
emigration of •old' elements left Russia in the early twenties
even more illiteracy and fewer trained people than she had
before the war. The increasing complexity of economic, com-
mercial, and political life in the early thirties made it absolutely
essential for the government to create a Soviet intelligentsia.
This was the basic reason for the tremendous effort to educate
and train which found expression in Magnitogorsk in the alloca-
tion, according to the general construction budget, of almost
one hundred million roubles to the training of skilled workers.
This sum was conceived and listed as capital investment just
as was the similar sum spent on blast-furnace equipment.
The necessity of training a Soviet intelligentsia had even more
sweeping effects than the outlay of millions of roubles for
educa-
tion. The graduation of wages, the increased differential be-
tween the wages paid to skilled and unskilled, educated and
uneducated, was largely an attempt to stimulate the desire to
study. In doing this, the lethargy and traditional sluggishness
of the Russian peasantry had to be overcome. The population,
and in particular the peasants, had to be made to want to study.
To some extent this desire was already present as a reaction to
centuries of deprivation of educational opportunities and as a
result of the natural curiosity of man. But additional stimulus
was necessary. If pay were the same for shepherd boy and
engineer, most peasants would graze their flocks and never
trouble Newton and Descartes.

Q( In 1933 wage differentials were approximately as follows:
Theaverage monthly wageof an unskilled worker in Magnito-
gorsk was something in the neighborhood of 100 roubles; a
skilled worker's apprentice, 200; a skilled worker, 300; an
engineer without experience, 400 'to 500; with experience, 600
to 800; administrators, directors, etc., anywhere from 800 to
3000. This heavy differentiation, plus the absence of unem-
ployment and the consequent assurance of being able without
difficulty to get a job in any profession learned, supplemented,
and stimulated the intellectual curiosity of the people. The two
together were sopotent that they created a student body in the
Magnitogorsk night schoolsof 1933willing to work eight, ten,
even twelve hours on the job under severest conditions. and
then come to school at night, sometimes on an empty stomach
and, sitting on a backless woodenbench, in a room socold that
you could see your breath a yard ahead of you, study mathe-
matics for four hours straight. Of course, the material was not
always well learned. Preparation was insufficient, conditions
were too bad. Nevertheless, Kolya, after having studied two
years in the Technicum, coulddesign a truss, calculate volumes,
areas, and do many other things. Moreover, he knew from
personal experience the concrete practical application of every-
thing he had learned.
Kolya and I walkeddownthe hill toward school. Itwascold,
the wind bit our cheeks, and within fiveminutes the moisture
from our breath began to freeze on our eyebrowsand eyelashes.
We walked fast, as it was nearly seven o'clock.
'What do you have tonight?' I asked.
'Mechanics,' Kolya answered.
'Did you do your problems?'

Kolya sworeunder hisbreath. 'When the hell do you think I
could have done them?'
We went on in silence. The Komvuz schoolbuilding was a
50 Behind the Urals
barrack very similar to the one in which we lived, except that it
was cleaner and the rooms were larger. As we approached the
door, we heard Natasha, the janitress, come out of her room
with her cowbell in her hand, ringing it vigorously. Just in
time. Kolya went on to the Technicum. I went into my class-
room. There were twenty-four students in the group. The age
range was from fourteen to forty-five. The teacher was a sharp-
looking little man with glasses who worked as a designer during
the day.
We began with party structure. Before five minutes had
passed the big riveter sitting in front of me was sound asleep
with his chin on his collarbone. There had been some
emergency
work to do in his gang and he had had no sleep for forty-eight
hours.
Popov did not go to school. He went to the miners' club
which was a ten-minute walk from Barrack No. 17. There was
to have been a cinema, but for some reason the film had not ar-
rived. He spent a half-hour in the clubroom reading a story in
the literary newspaper, then went to the district bathhouse for
a shower. The queue was too long, however, he would have had
to wait at least an hour, so he trudged home to write a letter to
his brother in the Red Army in Kazakhstan.

I
82 Behind the Urals
XI
ONE afternoon I
was sent to the large Trade Union Hall to hear a speech by
Lominadze, the secretary of the party. I was one of several
foreigners picked out because of knowledge of the Russian lan-
guage to attend and then to tell the others what the party chief
had said.
Lominadze's speech was the usual pep talk, sprinkled with
interesting examples of shortcomings. But afterward I had a
chance to meet the man and established an acquaintance which
lasted until his death nearly two years later.
Lominadze, former head of the Young Communist Interna-
tional, was an enormous Georgian, whose huge body was cov-
ered with rolls of fat. He was'very shortsighted and squinted
continually. His biography was an interesting one. He had
done underground Communist work in Germany, had helped
to organize political strikes in Canton in 1927, where, according
to his own words, he spent the best days of his life. Returned to
Moscow after the fall of the Canton Commune he became leader
of the YCI (Young Communist International), which position
he held until 1930. At this time he developed deviations. He
and Sergei Sertsov were the leaders of the 'right-left bloc,' the
last opposition group which made any attempt at open activities
inside the Central Committee of the Party. The issues on
which they disagreed with Stalin were relatively unimportant
questions of policy in the villages. There were other differ-
ences, however. Lominadze, Georgian though he was, had been
in many countries and was a thoroughly cultured person. He
knew German literature well, was a fine critic, and something

The Story of Magnitogorsk 83
ofa writer. He had absorbed too much of Western European
bourgeoiscivilization to be able to witness the ruthlessness and
cold,colorlessdogmatism of Stalin's leadership without protest.
Be this as it may, the 'right-left bloc' was suppressed in 1930.
Lominadzewas expelledfrom the Central Committee, relieved
ofhis post in the YCI, and sent 'down' to a'factory committee
to work. He became the party organizer of an important avia-
tion motor plant. He worked so well that in two years he re-
ceived the Order of Lenin and was sent to Magnitogorsk as
headof the district party committee. At the Seventeenth Party
Congresshe was permitted to read a sell-abasingdenunciation
of his deviations. In Magnitogorsk, from the first day of his
arrival, Lominadze worked like a beaver. An excellent orator,
he made speech after speech to functionaries, engineers, and
workers; explaining, persuading, cajoling, and encouraging.
He demanded the greatest sacrifices from his subordinates.
These, incidentally, he tended to choose from a circle of per-
sonal friends, many of whom had, like himself, at one time or
another been associated with some opposition group.
As head of the party organization, Lominadze held in his
hands a multitude of threada. Every shop, office,bank, rail-
road station, every schooland mine had its party cell. Directors
and managers of industrial units were usually party members.
The authority of the party among the workerswas high. Thus
Lominadzecouldmake his weight felt amonghundreds of thou-
sands of people in every walk of life. The party carried on
ceaselessagitation and propaganda, teaching the workers what
they were working toward, and showing them how to attain
it. The party was the source of initiative and energy which
drove the work forward. The party sometimesblundered, and

often made trouble with its unnecessary intriguing and heresy-
hunting, but by and large, Magnitogorsk would not have been
built as quickly or as wellwithout it.
84 Behind the Urals
The Young Communist League (Komsomol), the trade
unions, and the Soviet organizations worked much less effec-
tively than the party. These organizations did not hold mem-
bership meeting for months at a time. The leaders sat in their
offices,almost completely out of touch with the memberships
and passed resolutions. With the exception of the Barrack
Soviet, a body of five elected by all the residents to decide do-
mestic barrack questions, the Soviet meant little to the workers
of Barrack No. 17.
The socialinsurance laws,whoseapplication wasdirectly con-
nected with the trade unions, workedwell. Paid vacations, sick
money, free medical attention, rest homes, were universally
enjoyed and taken for granted. This service was generally ap-
preciated, but usually attributed to the Soviet powerin general,
to the Bolshevik regime, rather than to the trade unions.
XII
PART FIVE Masha
I
BACK at my job I
was immediately set upon by Kolya, who wanted a vacation
himself. No one around the mill seemed capable of replacing

him, except some of the engineers and technicians who had
other work to do. And so, in spite of my reluctance, I found
myselfinstalled as acting foreman. It was difficult at first, but
I did the job as well as anyone else available at the time could
have done it.
When Kolya returned six weeks later, the gang was split
into two and I continued as foreman of one, pushing twenty
to twenty-five welders around the structural steel of the blast
furnaces and their auxiliary equipment.
Two years passed, during which I became a husband and a
father.
II
ONE evening I left
the mill after working several hours overtime and staggered
through the snow to the Komvuz as usual, only to find that I
118 Behind the Urals
had heard the wrong whistle and had come an hour early. All
the classrooms were dark and cold, and no one seemed to be
';round. I walked into the office, where the director, a very
good fellow by the name of Jamarikin, and his two secretaries
carried on their work of planning lecture hours, calculating
teachers' pay, and checking the political quality of the aca-
demic material being poured into future party functionaries
and administrators.
I said hello to J amarikin, sat down on a stool next to the
stove, and dozed off immediately, only to be awakened by
Anya, one of the secretaries. 'Comrade Scott, do you know
integral calculus?' she asked. 'Our new secretary studies in

the mathematics institute and is having a hell of a time finding
anyone to help her with her problems.'
Ipleaded not guilty to calculus, and took a sleepy look at the
new secretary, who was grinning sheepishly, as she penciled
figures and symbols on a piece of ragged scrap paper. I saw
an open-faced girl in her early twenties. She bad a very ruddy
complexion and wore her bair in two long pigtails down her
back.
'This is Masha, our new part-time secretary,' said Jamarikin,
with a grin.
Masha seemed to be a nice peasant girl, like so many others
who had come from some village to work and study in Magnito-
gorsk. The fact that she was working over integral calculus in
a town where very few people had any clear idea what algebra
was intrigued me. But I was very tired, and whatever calculus
I had ever known was hopelessly rusty. I made some apologetic
remark and dozed off again.
Masha's first impressions of me were more interesting than
mine of her. She wrote as follows in her hapbazard diary:
'When I first went to work in the Komvuz I was filing a pile
of applications from tbe previous year when I came across one
Masha 119
written in such an impossible handwriting that I could hardly
read it. I finally made out the name John Scott, and further
learned that he was an American and had recently arrived in
the Soviet Union. I had never seen an American and Wasmuch
interested by the prospect of seeing this John Scott, who had,
no doubt, come from the land of capitalist oppression to find

a homein the land of Socialism. I imagined him as being tall,
handsome, and very interesting. I asked Anya, the other sec-
retary, to point him out to me.
'The next evening a stringy, intense-looking young fellow
came into the office and sat down near the stove. He was
dressed in ragged brown working clothes and had a heavy
brownscarf around his neck. His clothes and his big tattered
valinkis were absolutely grimy with blast-furnace dust. He
lookedvery tired and lonely. When Anya told me in a whisper
that it WasJohn Scott, I didn't believe her at first. Then I
wasvery disappointed, and then I became sorry for him.
'The first American I had ever seen, he looked like a home-
lessboy: I saw in him the product of capitalist oppression. I
saw in my mind's eye his sad childhood; I imagined the long
hours of inhuman labor which he had been forced to perform
in SOmecapitalist factory while still a boy; I imagined the
shamefully low wages he received, only sufficient to buy
enough
bread so that he could go to work the next day; I imagined his
fearof losing even this pittance and being thrown on the streets
unemployed in case he Wasunable to do his work to the satis-
faction and profit of his parasitic bosses.'
III
ISAW Masha in
school from time to time. but got to know her only in the
spring,when the snowsmelted and warm windsbeganto blow.
and when the pressure ofwork in the mill decreased. Wewent
to the theater once or twice; she took me to the Central Hotel

whereshe livedwith her sister and brother-in-law; andwewent
for walks over the steppe. I found that she was three months
my senior,and had beenborn and brought up in a villageunder
circumstances as strange and incredible to most Americansas
my actual background was to her.
Her father was a poor peasant. He went to war in 1915,
leavingbehind his wifeand eight children, the oldest ofwhom
was fourteen. The mother was left to get along as best she
could. 'Zhivi kak khochesh,' or 'Live as you like,' as the Rus-
sians say in such cases. The children, six of whom weregirls,
workedin the fields as soonas they were old enough to hold a
hoe or a pitchfork. They lived in a one-and-a-half-room
woodenhut. and Masha remembersthat they werehappy when
there was as much bread and salt as they wanted. Tea, sugar.
and meat were great luxuries.
The family lived in the Tverskaya Gubernia, roughly half-
way between Moscow and Leningrad. a part of Russia where
poor soil and long winters have always kept agricultural pro-
duction lowand the population correspondinglypoor. Masha's
mother and father were both descended from serfs, and were
both illiterate. They were determined, however, that their
childrenshouldgoto school.and so, often barefoot and ragged,
Masha and her brothers and sisters started to study in the local
Masha 121
villageschool, whichwent as far as the fourth grade. By the
time Masha went to school, in 1920,her oldest sister was the
teacher.
During the civil war there were no military operations in
Masha's village, but her elder brother went to the front. and
her father arrived home, wounded and sick with a trench

malaria which never left him. The village livestock was
requisitioned and sent off to Moscow and Leningrad to feed
the revolution. Masha's second brother worked for a while in
the town of Udomlya, some fivemiles fromhome, taking care
ofthe requisitioned stock until it couldbe shipped off. Every
eveninghe would comehome with a pail of milk, which was
drunk dry immediatelyby the many children.
The new Bolshevik government sent inspectors to every
village to look for hoarded bread. There was famine in the
country, and foreign and white armies were pressing upon it
onmany fronts. The inspectors foundnothing in Masha's hut.
In 1924, just as the civil war gave place to Lenin's New
EconomicPolicy, Masha finished the four-year village school.
She wanted to study further. Her older brothers and sisters
hadgone off to distant towns to go to schools,whichwerenow
everywherefree. They lived as best they could.
Masha and her third sister decided that they too would go
to Vyshny-Volochok,get jobs as maids, and study in the eve-
nings. But they had neither clothesnormoney. They went to
work cutting wood for the local kulak. In two weeks they
earned three roubles, at that time about seventy-five cents,
and started offwith all their belongings in a torn burlap bag,
andlapties, homemadebark sandals, ontheir feet. Itwasabout
forty miles to Vyshny-Volochok,and it took them three days
to walk it.
They spent sometime in Vyshny-Volochok,but found that
it wasimpossibleto workasmaids and study at the same time.
They spent their money on two cotton dressesand somebread,

then returned to their village.
Shortly a 'secondary' schoolwasorganized in Udomlya, and
Masha enrolled. It was five miles each way every day, and
when she was fourteen Masha got her first pair of shoes.
During the middle twenties things got better. Masha's older
brother and sister were finishing college and working, he as
engineer, she as teacher. The redivision of the land had given
Masha's father better fields,and he was no longer chronically
in debt and hungry. Masha got a new dress every year, and
her little niece got what no one in the family had ever had -
a store-made doll.
From the incredible poverty and suffering of the civil-war
period, the Russian people were working their way up to a
higher standard. All Masha's family were enthusiastic. Sev-
eral of the children joined the Komsomol, and after years of
argument, the mother succumbed to the pressure of her chil-
dren and took down the iconsfrom the walls of the hut. Then
she too decided to study. Masha's mother learned to read
and write at the age of fifty-five. She was taught by her
youngest daughter.
On finishing the eight years of the secondary school in
UdomIya, Masha decided to go to Moscow to continue her
studies. Onebrother and onesister were there already, and had
secured a room in a cellar. One by one during fifteen years
the younger brothers and sisters came to Moscow,and lived in
that little roomwhilethey went through one ofMoscow'smany
higher educational institutions. Masha went to the capital in
1929. At that time the industrialization of the country was
just beginning. Russia's rapidly expanding economy was
crying for every kind of professionalskill, for engineers,chem-
ists, teachers, economists, and doctors. The higher schools
paid stipends to their students, and aided them in every way

Masha 123
to get through their courses and out to factory and laboratory.
Masha finished up her preparatory work, and then entered the
Mendelyeyev Institute, where she worked part-time as labora-
tory assistant to make a few roubles for bread.
In 1932 Masha's second oldest .sister graduated from the
Moscow University, married, and went off to Magnitogorsk.
The following year, for personal reasons, Masha followed her.
She went into the junior year of the Magnitogorsk Teachers'
College,majoring in mathematics and physics. She lived with
her sister, and got a job in the local Komvuz, where she spent
four hours a day, most of it engaged in preparing her lessons
for her next day's classes.
Masha was very happy in Magnitogorsk. She felt that the
world was at her feet. She slept on the divan of her sister and
brother-in-law's tiny hotel room, she had two or three dresses,
two pairs of shoes, and one coat. In two more years she would
graduate from the teachers' college. Then she would teach,
or perhaps take graduate work. Not only this, she was living
in a town which had grown up from nothing just as she herself
had. Living conditions were improving as the pig-iron produc-
tion of the mill increased. She felt herself a part of a going con-
cern. Hence her spontaneous pity for me, whom she first saw
as a cast-off from a bankrupt and degenerating society.
IV
The Battle of Iron and Steel 161

VII
k THE Stakhanov move-
ment took its name from a Donbas coal miner and became very
important after Stalin addressed the first Stakhanovite con-
ference and pointed out that improved living conditions and
technical training of industrial personnel had created the basis
for drastic increases in productivity, which should be realized
without delay.n It was true. Life had become 'better and more
joyful' as
I Stalin put it. There was more to eat, more to wear, and every
indication that the improvement would continue.
The Stakhanov movement hit Magnitogorsk in the fall of
1985 and was immediately made the subject of various meet-
ings, press notices, administrative orders, and endless conver-
sations, private and public. Brigade and shop competition was
intensified. Banners were awarded to the brigades who worked
best, and monetary remuneration accompanied the banners.
Everyone went nosing around his department, trying to uncover
'reserves of new productivity.' Wages rose. Production rose.
Magnitogorsk was animated by a boom.
The Stakhanov movement in Magnitogorsk produced very
marked results during the latter half of 1935and almost all of
1936} The coefficient of blast-furnace work, furnace volume
divided by daily production, improved from 1.13 to 1.03; the
production of steel per square meter of hearth increased on ev-
ery single hearth, the average improvement being by 10.5
per cent, from 4.2 tons to 4.65 tons. On the rolling mills pro-
ductivity rose and costs fell.

Asa result ofthe improvedwork,the Magnitogorsk combinat
showed a profit for the last quarter of 1936 of 18,800,000rou-
bles. Even before this, in October, 1985, the combinat had
made a few thousand roubles' profit, and Zavenyagin with a
quixotic gesture had expressed his confidence in his ability to
get along without State subsidies,which were immediately dis-
continued, and without which the finances of the combinat
suffered seriously through the first half of 1936. The plant's
most seriousliability was the open hearth, which, in the words
of Zavenyagin, 'ate up millions every month.' In February
alone the combinat ran a deficitof 4,000,000roubles. Zavenya-
gin had to cover this by taking money from city construction
budgets. But by and large, 1936,the Stakhanovite year, was a
great success. The nominal profit for the year was 112,000,000
roubles. (It is difficult thoroughly to credit these figures, be-
cause of the numerous systems of bookkeeping in use for differ-
ent purposes. This figure, however, appeared in the Magnito-
gorsk Worker for December 24, 1936.)
While this improvement was going on, negative forces were
1 See Appendix iii.
The Battle of Iron and Steel 163
being created. In the first place, the norms were raised in the
fall of 1936after a publicity campaign and a speech by Stalin
himself. This created a restlessness among many workers who
had received the impression that all improvements in produc-
tion would reflectthemselves in direct wageincreases, and that
the norms wouldnever be changed.
Technically, also, many things were done which stored up
trouble for the future. Equipment was overtaxed, current
repairs were neglected. It was decided, for instance, to put
two hundred and forty tons of steel into the Magnitogorsk open

hearths, which were projected to hold one hundred and fifty
tons. This necessitated a certain amount of reconstruction of
the hearths themselves, and endless difficultieswith the ladles
and ladle cranes. It was found necessaryto pour the melting
out into two ladlesat once with the help of a Y-shaped canal.
One side of the Y continually got blocked and the steel was
spilled all over the shop a hundred times.
Transport equipment, both rolling stock and rails, was sadly
overtaxed. This wasseennot only in Magnitogorsk inner plant
transport, but in the transport system ofthe Soviet Union as a
whole, where dailycarloadings roseto 100,000in a Stakhanovite
boom under Commissar Kaganovich, and later went down to
75,000 where they still'hovered in January, 1939. (After 1939,
no figures werepublished.) All the rollingmills were given very
hard plans, repair time was cut down, and equipment suffered
accordingly.
In March, 1936,a conference of leaders of metallurgical in-
dustries from the whole Union met in Moscow to redefine the
project capacities of various aggregates in the light of the
achievements of the Stakhanov movement. On the basis of
these new project capacities, new norms and plans wereworked
out for every unit of each combinat in the Union, including, of
course, Magnitogorsk.'
1 See Appendix 23.
ter-revolution, and had relatively little chance of buying one's
self out.
Unquestionably some genuine sabotage went on in Mag-
nitogorsk. Here are two examples which I knew of personally:

A certain foreman in the blowing house of the blast-furnace
department was rather outspoken in his criticism of the Soviet
power. He was a heavy drinker, and under the influence of
vodka his tongue would sometimes run away with him. Once
he boasted openly in the presence of several foreigners that he
would 'wreck the works.' One day not long afterward a heavy
stilson wrench was found in the mashed blades of one of the
imported German gas turbines. The frame of the machine was
cracked and the whole thing ruined, involving a loss of several
tens of thousands of roubles and a good deal of labor. Several
days later the foreman was arrested and confessed that he had
done the job. He got eight years.
Another case I ran into personally which would be termed
sabotage in any country, was the following:
The second part of the power house in Magnitogorsk was
under construction, and two large (24,000 kilowatt) turbines
were being installed. The reinforced concrete work - founda-
tions, walls, and grouted roofs - was done by ex-kulak labor.
As on many Soviet construction jobs, the erection of the equip-
ment started before the building was completely finished.
Consequently, when the big turbine was already in place and
the mechanics working on it, the ex-kulaks were still around
pouring concrete.
One morning the mechanics found the main bearings and
some of the minor grease cups of the big turbine filled with
ground glass. This substance will ruin a bearing very rapidly.
Investigations were made immediately, and several pails of the
glass were found near the shack where the ex-kulaks reported
when they came to work in the morning. It was there for the
Administration and the Purge 187

IV
THE purge struck
Magnitogorsk in 1937 with great force. Thousands were ar-
rested, incarcerated for months, finally exiled. No group, no
organization wasspared.
This purge waspart of a vast Union-widestorm which went
on from 1935 until 1938. The causes of this purge have been
~y discussed - I offer the following:
lJ/The October Revolution earned the enmity of the old
aristocracy, the officers of the old Czarist army and of the vari-
ous White armies, State employees from pre-war days, business
men of all kinds, small landlords, and kulaks. All of these peo-
ple had ample reason to hate the Soviet power, for it had de-
prived them of something which they had had before. Besides
being internally dangerous, these men and women were potenti-
~
ll ood material for clever foreign agents to work with.
~. eographical conditions were such that no matter what
. of government was in power in the Soviet Union, poor,
thickly populated countries like Japan and Italy and aggressive
powers like Germany would leave no stone unturned in their
attempts to infiltrate it with their agents, in order to establish
their organizations and assert their influence, the better to chip
pieces off for themselves. They sent fifth-columnists of all
kinds into Russia, as they did into every other country. These

E
-ts bred purges.
3. For centuries Russia was governed and administered with
. elp of a secret police. Their methods were traditionally
clumsy, brutal, and inefficient. It was considered worth while
to condemn nine innocent defendants in order to get one guilty
one. Sometimes whole villages of innocent people were de-
stroyed in order to get some 'guilty' peasant leader. For cen-
turies the attitude toward foreigners was one of fear and mis-
trust.
The October Revolution changed many things in Russia,
but the abovementioned century-long traditions and habit
patterns are still present in the Soviet Union. They condi-
tioned the character and the successful execution of the purge,
which might well have caused an insurrection or a civil war in
England or the United States.
Administrationand the Purge 189
A large number of spies, saboteurs, and fifth-columnists were
exiled or shot during the purge; but many more innocent men
~
women were made to suffer.
4. Bolshevik intolerance toward opposition leads to con-
s . acy and purges. To enlarge, twenty years of underground
activity under the despotic conditions of Czarist Russia, the
arrests, the Siberian exile, the agents provocateurs were
dominant

factors in determining the form and character of the party of
Lenin. At the Second Party Congress in 1903 in London, Lenin
demanded a 'party of a new type,' which was not to be a dis-
cussion group, but a disciplined army of revolutionary soldiers;
members must work actively in some party organization; they
must obey the decisions of higher party organs; after a vote the
minority must stop talking and get to work - carrying out the
decisions of the majority. Lenin's group became the Bolshe-
viks, and these general principles have dominated the Bolshe-
vik Party ever since.
In England or the United States, if a member of the govern-
ment disagrees with its policy he can object, appeal, protest,
resign. He can then take the matter to the voters, and the-
oretically, at least, has a chance of coming back after elections
with a majority on his side, and putting through his ideas.
This opposition function is recognized as an important feature
ofgovernment.
But in the Bolshevik Party there is no appeal after a decision
has been reached. There is no protesting, no resigning. The
only chance of the opposition, after they have been voted down.
is conspiracy.
This method of dealing with opposition sowed the seeds of
purges.
VI
Administration and the Purge 195
THE immediate ef-
fects of the purge were diverse and sometimes paradoxical. In
cases where numbers of responsible workers and functionaries

THE WRETCHEDOF THE EARTHFrantz FanonTranslated from .docx

THE WRETCHEDOF THE EARTHFrantz FanonTranslated from .docx

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to THE WRETCHEDOF THE EARTHFrantz FanonTranslated from .docx

Similar to THE WRETCHEDOF THE EARTHFrantz FanonTranslated from .docx (9)

More from christalgrieg

More from christalgrieg (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

THE WRETCHEDOF THE EARTHFrantz FanonTranslated from .docx