Assignment in Utopia (2+2=5)

На этой странице глава из книги «Assignment in Utopia» Лайонса.

Нашел её здесь - http://books.google.ru/books?id=ZXLhwVJvfXMC&printsec=frontcover&hl=ru#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Нашел только английскую версию, поэтому пришлось отсюда перевести в текст с помощью онлайн сервиса распознавания текста, а потом перевел с помощью  http://translate.google.com.

Можете ввести здесь http://translate.google.com вместо текста адрес этой страницы, чтобы перевести оригинальный текст или читать полученный таким образом перевод ниже.

Преимущество онлайнового перевода в том, что при наведении будет отображаться оригинальный текст.

Местами гугловский переводчик переводил явно что - то не то, но я не стал исправлять, чтобы не исправлять на новые ошибки. В принцыпе гугловский перевод вполне сносный и главное, что я хотел выяснить я выяснил. Лайонс и в содержании утверждал, что лозунгами индустриализации был 2+2=5, а не 2+2+энтузиазм рабочих=5 как было судя по всему на самом деле.

Разница огромная, потому что 2+2=5 получается какой - то абсурдный бред, а 2+2+энтузиазм рабочих=5 правильное с арифметической точки зрения уравнение при решении которого получаем, что переменная "энтузиазм рабочих" = 1 году.

 HENKS_DVD/Interesting_books/George_Orwell/1984/2x2( 2x2=5 )

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Перевод Yandex

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XV. Два Плюс Два Равно Пять

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аллилуйя!

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аллилуйя!

2

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аллилуйя!

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XVI. Войны Никто Не Знал. 

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XV. Два плюс два равно пяти

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Аллилуйя!

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Аллилуйя!

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Аллилуйя!

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XVI. Войны никто не знал

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XV. Two Plus Two Equals Five

INDUSTRIALIZATION went forward with a great roar and frenzied war whoops. Reports of building, factory output, new collectives and state farms elbowed all other news off the front pages. There was a constant beating of alarm drums: a breach on one or another economic front, cries of sabotage, sudden arrests and shooting of engineers and administrators. Notwithstanding, plans were everywhere being fulfilled and even surpassed. New energies and enthusiasms, new threats as well, were having their effect. Food shortage was not yet at its acutest and the sapping of physical strength and working morale through undernourishment had not yet set in fully.

Optimism ran amuck. Every new statistical success gave another justification for the coercive policies by which it was achieved. Every setback was another stimulus to the same policies. The slogan "The Five Year Plan in Four Years" was advanced, and the magic symbols "5-in-4" and 2 + 2 = 5 were posted and shouted throughout the land.

The formula 2 + 2 = 5 instantly riveted my attention. It seemed to me at once bold and preposterous—the daring and the paradox and the tragic absurdity of the Soviet scene, its mystical simplicity, its defiance of logic, all reduced to nose-thumbing arithmetic. . . . 2 + 2 = 5: in electric lights on Moscow housefronts, in foot-high letters on billboards, spelled planned error, hyperbole, perverse optimism; something childishly headstrong and stirringly imaginative. . . . 2 + 2 = 5: a slogan born in premature success, tobogganing toward horror and destined to end up, lamely, as 2 + 2 1/4 = 5. . . .

The preliminary triumphs which evoked the slogan 2 + 2 = 5 were in many ways disastrous. They corroborated the taskmasters' inherited conviction that any miracles could be worked through the sorcery of naked force. At the same time the first triumphs encouraged a costly revision of plans upward beyond the range of

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On the agrarian side the same excess of zeal prevailed. The hope for the collectivization of one-tenth, then one-fifth, of the peasantry by 1933 had seemed over-ambitious when announced earlier in the year. Now it was ordained that fully one-half the peasantry must be herded in collectives by 1932. With class war as the persuasive weapon, wielded by the G.P.U. and the Red Army where necessary, great peasant masses did rush blindly for shelter under the collective roofs. From every village in the nation came boastful accounts of peasants erasing the boundary lines between their private strips of land, pooling their animals and their implements for joint cultivation. Always the boasts concluded with grim references to kulaks and "kulak agents" who blocked collectivization and must therefore be destroyed.

In great glee I cabled the statistical triumphs to the outside world. The derision of capitalist economists when the "astronomical figures" were first announced could now be thrown in their teeth. Their own deepening economic crisis made these bourgeois experts so much more vulnerable. Their self-esteem was at low ebb.

But under the roar of industrialization life was increasingly muted. The modest indulgences of the year before seemed long, long ago and rather incredible. A full meal became life's central preoccupation for the mass of the population. Overhead the heavy artillery thundered and spat fire; in the trenches of everyday existence people stepped cautiously, doused their lights and spoke in whispers. The laconic announcements of executions lost their power to interest, let alone move people. On a day when I had counted

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hallelujah!

He glanced through his Pravda again conscientiously and decided, "No, nothing important."

"Nothing important? Just count up the death sentences at Novorossiisk, Krasnodar, Rostov—"

"Oh, that!" and he smiled wryly.

Executions were no longer news. In 1928, a report of five or ten kulaks put to death deserved a line or two in the day's dispatches. From 1929 forward, we totaled the deaths during a week or two weeks. The censorship permitted us to send whatever was published but we could not hint that the published items were a negligible part of the total. How many deaths we mentioned in our cables depended largely on how many papers we read and how carefully we counted them. Only the more important cases were mentioned in the central press: hundreds of official shootings were recorded in the provincial press or did not get published at all.

A methodical German correspondent subscribed to several score of local newspapers and employed several extra secretaries to read them for interesting items. In weeks when our totals of executions, based on Moscow's press, came to a mere twenty or thirty, our German colleague tallied a hundred or more. He was proud of his advantage.

It was inevitable that the "war on superstition" should be intensified at the same time, particularly in the villages where religion and the priesthood retained considerable influence. The Godless Society had been lying low during Nep. It now roused itself to the greatest campaign of its career. The drive for collectivization became strongly anti-religious in character, since the priest, deacons, and church-goers in most villages corresponded roughly to the older, more conservative portion of the population. In thousands of villages, local communists and Comsomols called meetings which voted over the heads of the congregations to demolish churches, melt down the bells for scrap metal or turn church buildings into granaries, lunchrooms, nurseries, libraries. A semblance of popular consent was thus obtained. When brigades

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Anti-religious parades were organized throughout the country for Easter Eve. Edward and Harriet Deuss, of the International News Service, Billy and I tramped the muddy streets, from crowded church to crowded church. Tens of thousands of young and older people marched everywhere under flares and banners, laughing, singing, cheering. As the parades passed a church, voices rose to a shout, flares were brandished aloft, and the blasphemous anti-religious tunes blanketed the sonorous chanting of the priests and acolytes. The believers, walking round and round the church in the traditional fashion, shielded their tapers a little more intently, huddled closer to one another and pretended not to notice. They did not look up to see the grotesque floats and cardboard effigies of priests, deities, and kulaks in ludicrous postures.

At the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, toward which the parades converged, an open-air motion picture screen was erected at the very entrance. Anti-religious films were being shown on one side of the door while thousands chanted "Christ has risen!" on the other side. Many a young person hesitated uncertainly between the free show outside and the solemn proceedings within.

Early in the morning of July 30, 1929, I was wakened by the telephone. An American friend at the Grand Hotel informed me in an excited voice that the celebrated Shrine of the Iberian Virgin, visible from the hotel windows, had been demolished during the night.

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hallelujah!

For three or four days Moscow buzzed with talk of the shrine. Legends about it coursed through all of Russia. Then it was forgotten. No clearer demonstration of the general indifference to religion and the helplessness of the dwindling number of believers could have been given. Russians were infinitely more concerned with the loss of their strips of private land and other economic possessions than the demolition of their icons.

The renewed drive against religion drew more attention abroad than any other phase of Stalin's great offensive. Inside Russia it was a very minor note in the picture, the business of a handful of fanatic Godless and a small sector of the believers.

2

My Russian friends and closer acquaintances were most of them writers, actors, dancers, technicians. I saw a good deal of the impact of the mounting difficulties of living through their effect on these people. The promises of higher living standards meticulously outlined in the original plan were never so much as mentioned now. Human destiny seemed reduced to impersonal figures and skeleton percentages. Amusement and the simple amenities of life were politically immoral. The theater and literature took on a more somber, desperate tinge—became, in fact, as coldly abstract as the graphs and percentages on the front pages. Plays carried

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The depredations of know-nothing fanaticism in the domains of culture occupied a large place in my personal view of the Soviet landscape. My own interests and contacts were disproportionately in those areas of Russian life. The increase of literacy among the Uzbeks or Samoyeds was automatically bracketed in my mind with the rapid deterioration of literary and journalistic standards; reading was not an abstract value but related to the books and papers available to the newly literate. I could not help viewing those figures on enlarged cinema and theatrical facilities for remoter towns in direct relation to the type of pictures and plays permitted by the censors.

But the afflictions in the cultural domains ran truly parallel with conditions in most other departments of life. Under the dictator-ship of the proletariat, existence is so integrated that close observation of one sector gives an accurate clew to all the rest, just as the pulse may be taken on any vein as an index to the condition of the whole body.

The novelist, Boris Pilnyak,* was singled out for an organized attack on the literary front. He had been overtaken by the worst disaster that can befall a Soviet writer: he was being praised by the wrong people abroad. Accidentally the manuscript of his story Mahogany had gotten to Berlin and been published there before it was issued in Moscow. It was a too realistic description of the difficulties and desperations of life in a Soviet provincial town, and the Russian emigre press was moved to say nice things about it. No sooner had one Soviet paper given the signal, therefore, than the entire press and the whole writing fraternity converged on Pilnyak in a yelping pack.

The politicians of literature, organized in RAPP (Association

* "Disappeared" in 1937; either exiled or otherwise "liquidated."

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RAPP (in English the name is singularly appropriate) had set out to achieve "the seizure of power in literature." The narrow orthodoxy of this period made that objective all too easy. According to its catechism it was not enough for an artist to approve and celebrate the communist goal; he must devote himself to the prescribed details of the immediate economic and political methods for reaching that goal. Indeed, emphasis on the freedom and beauty to come was in RAPP's opinion a waste of artistic energy that should be invested in practical tasks. "Enough of the sky and the strangeness of things! Give us more plain nails!" the RAPP poet Bezimensky shrieked. The artist who dared to look at the sky and betrayed an awareness of the strangeness of things, who could not conceal his intuitive sense of life and human destiny as larger than the plain nails, was a cultural kulak. It did not suffice that he admitted the importance of plain nails if he dared hint that the sky was studded with stars.

At the head of RAPP, and by that token the Stalin of Soviet culture, was a certain Leopold Auerbach,* whose literary style, according to Max Eastman, "has that rare and generous quality that you sometimes find in a business-college sophomore studying to become a publicity writer for a scenic railway." That good-natured pedestrian pedant, Sergei Dinamov, was raised to editor-ship of the all-powerful Literary Gazette. Third-rate journalists with a talent for toe-licking and a good memory for the latest official "theses" became the tsars in every branch of creative art.

I met Pilnyak about this time. A big, blond, unwieldy fellow, with a huge smile and a huge appetite for wine, women, and life.

*Arrested for "counterrevolution" and embezzlement in 1937

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The attack on Pilnyak was a warning that the time for half-loyalties was over. Novelists, poets, playwrights, even musicians and painters, must devote themselves specifically to the advancement of the Five Year Plan or be branded outlaws. A few preferred to stop writing, painting and composing; the rest rushed for the proletarian bandwagon.

The last spark of Moscow's literary bohemianism expired. Dom Gertsena, the Artists' Club, and other gathering places of the creative intelligentsia turned into drab, hushed restaurants. The spirited Pava no longer pounded the piano, except in private under safe auspices. She taught Billy her favorite songs, and her vibrant voice echoed through our remodeled stable.

Stories or poems which did not raucously celebrate the glories of industrialization, iron discipline, death to class enemies, could no longer find publication. The agitka, or crude propaganda work, until then recognized as a useful form but treated a little condescendingly, now became the prescribed and exclusive literary fare. Those who could not or would not manage it might as well throw away their pens.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, a burly bellowing fellow who had traveled all the way from his pre-war futuristic poetry to the blood-and-iron of proletarian poetry, popularized the phrase a "social order" for his fellow-writers. He laughed at "inspiration" and "moods" and introspection. A "social order" from the Communist Party was all the inspiration that a Soviet poet required. There was no place for dreamers and spinners of images, he insisted, poetry must be pounded out with sledge-hammers and ironed into shape with tractors. Mayakovsky dressed and swaggered like a

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hallelujah!

"Social orders" sent bewildered authors scurrying to electric stations, factories, collective farms, scientific expeditions, tasting the new Soviet life like literary adolescents. They exchanged their inspirations for notebooks and painfully concocted dull books and plays ordered by trusts and commissions. Pilnyak himself went off to Central Asia to retrieve political respectability by writing about the Five Year Plan in that part of the country. Literary mediocrity had never in human history touched such heights of power or such depths of drabness.

It was at this time that the more fanatical notions of "collective authorship" were put forward. Any collective of workers, the theory ran, could turn out a literary masterpiece if it made the effort. A miner could do a masterpiece about mining, a collective farmer about farm life. Genius and natural talents were outmoded
inventions of individualist bourgeois exploiters. Down with the pretensions of artists! The purpose of evoking latent talent in simple workers and peasants was sound enough, but it was vitiated by a disdain for talent as such and a tendency to eulogize trashy manuscripts if they were grubby with proletarian fingerprints and boldly ungrammatical. The theory did not go much farther than stupid fulmination. But it was indicative of the revolt against culture and intelligence: part of the same hatred of the better-educated and more sensitive human beings which was manifest in the persecution of engineers, arrests of professors and scientists, baiting of aged Academicians.

There arose a vogue for simon-pure collectivism in the more idealistic and optimistic strata of the population. Real communism was presumably around the corner. Groups of workers in factories and students in their barracks anticipated its arrival by forming voluntary collectives. They pooled their earnings and drew from the common fund according to their needs. Entire factories in some instances decided to merge their incomes and equalize wages. In the plans for new housing certain ideologically correct architects disdained the old-fashioned individual kitchen, bathroom, or nur-

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Few of these things went beyond the theoretical stage or touched more than a fevered few in the population. These ideas, however, are clews to the illusions of the moment. The communist millennium seemed to a few faithful just over the horizon—but they were the few who wielded the power of the state and could enforce their distortions upon a sixth part of the globe. It was a mood which stopped at nothing to attain its objectives. Something of religious hysteria—the hysteria of a Mohammedan army fighting infidels—was in it.

The news of the Wall Street crash and the capitalist Depression that it ushered in came as confirmation of the communist prognosis. The capitalist structure was tottering. Against the background of mounting unemployment, crashing banks, riots and doles, the Soviet effort gained dramatic significance. The press did not conceal its glee. It jeered at the famous American prosperity and the vaunted capitalist "stabilization." It ridiculed those communists who had doubted that world revolution was "the order of the day."

Practically, the depression hit Russia as hard as the rest of the world. Its foreign trade, an important element in the Five Year Plan, was undermined. The prices of machinery it imported went down, but the prices on its exports sank much faster. Lack of "valuta," foreign capital, became the greatest stumbling block on the road to industrialization and internal inflation assumed disastrous proportions. But psychologically and politically, the depression had its uses. It gave the Kremlin new confidence. It evoked a cocky, boastful, derisive attitude toward the outside world which made Russia impervious to foreign criticism and more smugly self-righteous than ever in its ruthlessness.

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XVI. The War Nobody Knew

It began early in spring with Chinese charges that Russia was using the railroad personnel and railroad funds for communist propaganda in Manchuria. Toward the end of May, the Man-churians raided the Soviet consulate at Harbin in search of documentary proof of what everyone in Moscow assumed to be true: that an insurrectionary movement under Feng Hu-Siang, the so-called "Christian General," had Soviet encouragement. Soviet officials and citizens were arrested. In a few thrusts in the following months the Chinese ousted Russians from the railroad and other strategic economic positions, arresting thousands in the process.

Red Army units were mobilized; one after another classes of reserves were called to the colors; and a Special Far Eastern Army was created. That army remained on a permanent footing, vastly strengthened with every year and perhaps destined ultimately to test Soviet strength against Japan. General Bluecher,* the tall, soldierly fighter whose prowess was a by-word in his country, was placed in command. Several years before, the same Bluecher, under the nom de guerre of General Galen, had been the mysterious Russian genius behind the victorious northward march of the Kuomintang revolutionary armies in China. He had guided the hand of a young half-literate peasant soldier who was now virtual dictator of Nationalist China, the same Chiang Kai-shek who now protested to the world against Soviet entry into

*Reported "liquidated" in 1939.

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