Trip Details:

Excepted from Kirk Niergarth “Through the Looking Glass and Back: Non-Communist Canadian tourists and the Soviet Union in the 1930s,” A paper to be presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Fredericton, 2011.

A New Plan: Graham Spry in the USSR, May-June 1936

….In the Spring of 1936, E.J. Urwick, Head of Political Economy at the University of Toronto, decided to subsidize a vacation for Spry by assigning him to study whether democracy and centralized planning were reconciled in the Soviet Union. $150 of Urwick’s $500 grant/gift was immediately ploughed back into the perennially-strapped Canadian Forum, but Spry felt he could make up this “embezzlement” by writing articles for the Toronto Daily Star and the Southam chain of newspapers about his Soviet experience. During a brief sojourn in England, Spry met with notable fellow travellers, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, authors of Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. Sydney provided him with a letter introducing him to the head of “Gosplan” as “one of the most competent Canadian Socialists and a supporter of Soviet Communism” (Spry found this description amusing, suggesting to Biss that it would confirm the suspicions of the conservative Mail and Empire while surprising the head of the Communist Party of Canada, Tim Buck). Spending eight days in London meeting with “innumerable people of every class and kind, from labor leaders to cabinet ministers, trade unionists and colonial governors,” Spry noted widespread pessimism about the hope of reversing the effects of the Depression or avoiding war. The opposition Labour party, in Spry’s view, was “lacking in unity, aggressiveness, and militancy.” Spry found much more optimism aboard the Co-operazia when he embarked on 14 May, bound for Leningrad.

As it would be for many other visitors, a few days aboard a Soviet ship made a profound impression on Spry. It was, he wrote, “the first lesson in something new.” There were no distinctions between officers and crew and no orders were given (except when a German destroyer fired across the bow of the ship). “Team play” was the spirit Spry observed of the crew carrying out their duties, and even the Captain was addressed as “tovarishch” [sic] or comrade. The recreational facilities for the staff – phonograph player and billiards tables – were superior to that provided to the passengers. There was dancing and swimming for passengers, but the crew, too, enthusiastically participated. When the crew referred to the boat as “our own,” Spry thought, it meant something very different than a “similar expression on a CPR, Cunard or other boat.”

Spry wrote his first article for the New Commonwealth about the Soviet Union before he arrived in Leningrad. While a letter to Biss noted some of the apparent manufacturing deficiencies in the Soviet-made ship, Spry’s article for New Commonwealth contains no sentence that is less than entirely enthusiastic. Spry was particularly interested in the range of social services provided to Soviet citizens and, according to the crew members he interviewed, “from the lives of the farmers and workers of Soviet Russia…all fear has been banished.” Freedom from fear was the theme Spry returned to over and over in this article and in his later articles and correspondence about his Soviet tour (i.e. those written after he arrived!). While his interlocutors wanted to impress him with statistics about the progress of the second five-year plan, Spry was most interested in the basic social services and social insurance that, he claimed, the crew took for granted. “The great inspiring, dominating fact that this boat drills into my mind is the comradely, free, co-operative spirit of the men and the women who run it, and their total lack of fear, fear of the future, fear of insecurity, fear of superiors, fear of unemployment, fear of increased responsibilities. From birth to death, the socialist state cares for its citizens.” At the end of Spry’s shipboard celebration of the Soviet system, he allows (in what, in retrospect, can only be regarded as a wild understatement) that “some of my statements may be in detail a little inaccurate, for the basis of them so far on this trip is what the men on this boat have told me.” The details, though, Spry wrote, “for the moment do not matter” and, ultimately, it was the big picture, not the small details, Spry attempted to keep before his mind for the next three weeks in the USSR, a picture he had painted to his own taste before he set foot on Soviet soil.

Three days into his stay, Spry was convinced he had entered a “new world” filled with “vigor and tremendous hope.” In both Leningrad and Moscow, he saw “building building building” – a stark contrast to the city scenes he had left behind in Canada. It was, he wrote, “a land of statistics. They are showered at foreigner and citizen alike from billboards, radios, and newpapers.” Spry jotted down, it seems, as many of these as possible, particularly as they related to social services. In Moscow, in 1935 “74 new schools were built and this year $150 million is being spent on a medical centre that will eventually have 5,000 doctors.” If the health services he had seen become universal in the Soviet Union, “within twenty five years, the Russian will be the healthiest people on the average of any major power.” Population was likely to increase to 225 million at a minimum within a generation, and that next generation would be “the freest people economically….freest from fear of insecurity, freest from material want of any important kind.” Barring the outbreak of war, why would this country ever suffer “such a catastrophe as a depression?” Perhaps, he allowed, “after all, this is still a matter of faith…perhaps it is not a matter for argument but for experiment. Well, I have made my choice, and Soviet Russia re-enforces the faith I had when I made that choice.” This comment is telling. Spry’s faith had already developed, and his choice made, before he made his observations of the Soviet “experiment.” What he saw, though, reassured him and kindled his hope.

Spry’s belief in a bright future for the Soviet Union, coupled with his perception of its dark past, coloured all the shades of grey he observed in the Soviet present. “The people have suffered and show their suffering,” he wrote, “They are, in a measure, suffering now according to even the standards of those on relief in Canada, especially, for example, in housing. But the public feeling is that all this…is but temporary, and that as the days pass one by one, everything is getting better, getting obviously better.” This description of visible “suffering” comes from a letter to Biss. Spry expressed his observations in slightly different terms in his article for New Commonwealth entitled “Wealth production in the Soviet Union.” There was, he wrote, “overcrowding in the cities…and no little discomfort. But there is a fair standard of living for everyone, there is a real measure of economic security, and the propaganda that describes suffering and even starvation has now no validity today.” While his letter to Biss compared Soviet conditions unfavourably to those facing Canadians on relief, in New Commonwealth Spry suggested that Soviet citizens were poor compared to “well-paid, skilled workers in Canada.” Even this relative poverty, however, represented a “standard of living Russia never knew before.”

On the streets of Moscow, Spry was particularly struck by the “fantastic” ethnic diversity of the crowds and the work of women in occupations that would seem out of the ordinary in Canada. “Today I saw two teams of bricklayers race each other,” he recounted to Biss. “The two men laid the bricks while women with sleeves rolled up and shawls around their heads passed the bricks to the men laying them…They were working at great speed and were laughing and talking like two teams of children building nothing more serious than sand castles. And why not, they were building for themselves or for people like themselves and nobody was going to make money out of their efforts.” Spry was convinced that racial prejudice was abhorred in the USSR. In a Moscow theatre, he watched Alexandrov’s film Circus which celebrated the marriage of an American circus performer, Marion Dixon, to a “negro” and their decision to live and raise their child in the Soviet Union where they would be free from prejudice. Spry stood and cheered the film with his fellow audience members. He found “the sentiments in favour of racial and colour equality were quite astounding.” Here, he thought, “there was more than legal equality, there was a real sentiment.”

Spry, like most other visitors to the Soviet Union, did not speak Russian. He was guided by an interpreter provided by VOKS – the All-Union Society of Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. Spry’s guide was a young woman – “a graduate of Moscow University in social science and languages.” She was, Spry thought, “very bright and intelligent” and she “faithfully led me around by the hand to offices, institutes, museums, picture galleries, and theatres.” In reports submitted to her superiors at VOKS, she would have made careful note of his comments and reactions to these attractions and assessed the probable reports of the USSR Spry would publish when he returned to Canada. Spry travelled to the USSR at the end of the period – 1934-1936 – when such tours by foreign intellectuals were at their height. This popularity coincided with an increase in the structure and control that VOKS attempted to impose on tourist experiences. While visitors in the late 1920s and early 1930s were relatively free to set their own itineraries, after 1933, Ludmila Stern writes, “deviation from the official list of sites would no longer be tolerated and visitors could no longer be allowed to wander off unsupervised.” Spry’s tour included many favoured VOKS destinations: a communal farm, factories in and around Moscow, public health facilities, theatres, museums, and the Bolshevo prison commune. Not all, to be sure, met with his approval. The Museum of the Revolution, for example, he recognized as a “sheer propagandist place” and he thought the Museum of Fine Arts “very poor.” The village at the collective farm “must be as bad as the Red river valley for mud on a rainy day” and “looked poor, shabby, desolate.” Spry’s most unfavourable impressions of the Soviet Union, however, were spurred by his frustrated desires to meet with high-ranking officials in state-planning offices, namely GOSPLAN. Meetings of this kind, evidently, were not part of VOKS standard repertoire.

In spite of his letter from Sydney Webb, Spry was not granted a meeting with Mezlauk, chief of the State Planning Commission. To his dismay, Spry spent entire days waiting for VOKS to make arrangements on his behalf. When Spry expressed his complaints about this wasted time, his interpreter assured him that there had only been a series of miscommunications or minor snafus, that prevented him from being escorted to meetings that had been arranged for him. After several days spent largely in waiting and eating, Spry wrote home that “the inefficiency in the smallest things is beyond belief.” He had become “convinced my mail is not reaching me, nor my mail getting delivered” and heard from others who had been longer in Moscow that “all foreign letters were censored, if there was time to censor them, if not, they just disappeared.” Nevertheless, Spry did believe that the difficulty in arranging meetings was because the planners were “very busy,” and not because the information he sought was not “freely available.”

Ultimately, Spry was granted meetings with two planning officials. A woman, named Revzina, who was the director of the Institute of the Economics of Agriculture, was a “vigorous” leader, Spry thought, but, then, “all the leaders here are vigorous.” Spry thought Biss would be pleased to know about women occupying positions of leadership in the Soviet bureaucracy, and he “tried to ask all the wise questions” that Biss from her “economic height” would have asked. He took copious notes as Rezvina cited statistics about “farm credits, interest, crop insurance, price setting, collective farmers’ markets,” and so on. Naturally, there was not time to answer all of Spry’s questions, which would have “taken hours.” Spry had a more leisurely visit with Kraval, the vice-chairman of Gosplan, who, like Rezvina, exuded an “incredible atmosphere of energy, decision, firmness, and discipline.” Though there were evidently demands on Kraval’s time, Spry was received warmly, served tea and biscuits, and Kraval made Spry feel that their conversation was “positively a help to him.” Smoking his pipe, Kraval “poured out statistics with precision, emphasis and good humour.” Finally, VOKS arranged for Spry to meet with a Professor of Economics as Moscow University, who Spry found “interesting rather than useful.” Spry was not impressed with the Professor’s “parboiled Marx” and Communist phrases. At least the Professor, like Rezvina and Kraval, wanted Spry to send him a copy of Social Planning for Canada – these requests greatly pleased Spry.

Spry’s meeting with Kraval was the only one Spry specifically described in his articles for the New Commonwealth and he fails entirely to mention the difficulty and delay he experienced in trying to obtain meetings with officials. In his article, Spry explains how, as he was leaving Kraval’s office, he was given a series of volumes of reports published by the bureau of statistics. While “propagandist documents may be given to [some] visitors,” the ones provided him “were the cold official statements of administrators for administrators.” After his return to Toronto, Spry studied these documents at length with the assistance of a translator. The conclusions he reached supported the “evidence of one’s eyes in market place and store: The evidence is proof of a colossal and rapid increase in the production and distribution of wealth in [the USSR]….The Soviet Union has established and developed the principles of an economic system from which the disastrous defects of capitalism have been removed.” Spry’s article certainly did not reproduce any of the economics professor’s “Marxian phrases.” Indeed, Spry explicitly put distance between Soviet economics and Marxism. “Marx may have inspired Soviet leaders or influenced the Russian masses to take power by revolutionary means,” Spry wrote, “but Marx has as little to do with the actual economics of the five year plans as Adam Smith or John D. Rockefeller. The five year plans are the products of ordinary common sense.”

This comment – the first part of which, in retrospect, was depressingly and ironically accurate – was consistent with Spry’s political thinking, which was in most cases practical and tactical, rather than theoretical. He was an evolutionist, not a revolutionist, and he believed that socialism would come to Canada through a rational awakening, rather than a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. The Soviet Union, by contrast, he envisioned evolving towards liberal democracy. “The more I see, the more I hear, the deeper I recognize that within its framework (which is rigidly maintained by propaganda, law and sanctioned by force),” Spry wrote in a letter to Biss, “there is the most extreme democracy everywhere here….The shoe factory I saw was John Stuart Mill incarnate. Soviets, subject only to the limitation of attacks by word or deed on the structure of society are liberal, essentially liberal.” In the interim – in the present state – Spry was aware of the oppressiveness of what he called the “framework.” Writing only a few months before the first large-scale Moscow show trial (of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and 14 others), Spry noted that there was demanded of Communist Party Members the “most intense Puritanism in sex, smoking, drinking and personal conduct…. [Once a Party] decision is taken, for party members of course, it becomes a duty and persistent weakness means reprimand in committee or even expulsion in a purge. I have mentioned Mill, I add, at this point, Cromwell.”

Here we see that while Spry was largely naive about life in the Soviet Union – and, in many ways, duped by the sites and experiences of his orchestrated tour – he was not entirely so, and his letters reveal that he did ask himself hard questions about the nature of the society he was experiencing. “I see colossal mistakes, waste, inefficiency, sloppiness, inexperience and so far as the structure of society is concerned, final and dictatorial authority,” he wrote to Biss, “….The structure is autocratic and enforces its authority with prompt, arbitrary use of force. Whether that is permanent, i.e. part of planning, or only temporary, i.e. part of the revolution, I cannot now say, but I would guess and with conviction that the new constitution which grants universal franchise, direct elections at all stages, secret balloting and a parliament…will give this federation as free a government as Canada or the United States. And I doubt not that there will be parties, but very different from our parties.” Spry would have lost that bet, but, at that moment, he thought it showed the “boldness” (rather than ruthlessness) of Soviet leaders that “the present [was] being sacrificed on a magnificent scale for the future.”

His Soviet tour caused him no end of what he called “mental convolutions” and he found himself staying up until he could see the sun rising over Red Square, typing a long letter to Biss, asking questions about what the future held for the Soviet experiment:

What is the Soviet concept of education going to mean? This ruthless, universal emphasis…on three principles, do things yourself, help the weaker fellow, work together cooperatively? What will the family be with no necessary legal marriage, with the freest most universal knowledge and availability of contraceptives, with divorce a matter of three rubles and abortion a matter of entering a hospital? What will result from the most generous and and universal encouragement of any talent, musical, artistic, literary, technical, inventive…mean?…What will the most universal education, rapidly becoming freely available at every stage mean?….What will racial equality mean, racial equality that sees no reasons against negros and whites marrying, Tartars commanding brigades of blond northerns, Jews serving in armies or factories with Cossacks, Uzbeks, Germans Kazeks, or White Russians? What will the result be of women commanding divisions in the army or serving and living with the men in a tank corps or becoming a wing commander of an air force or forming battalions and machine gun brigades of their own or being the minister of finance or directors of great institutes? These questions and scores more pour into my stretching, aching convolutions….And if socialist planning really means a steady rise in production and in individual wealth and then to a steady fall in the hours of labour and so to more leisure than labor, both free from the wild gyrations of capitalism, how long will other peoples refuse to be forced to be free; and once freed, and once on the road, in a matter of a few generations, what will the human animal, so long inured to the domination of the sullen task of filling his stomach, do to occupy his time?

For all his convolutions, though, for all the new possibilities the Soviet Union suggested to him, Spry’s tourist experience ultimately had only a very limited, if any effect, on his personal politics. He returned to Canada, as he left, a convinced Social Democrat who opposed any Popular Front unity on the Left between the CCF and the Communist Party.

Shortly before departing for his trip, Spry had written an article for New Frontier, a publication inspired by the Popular Front, in which he argued that the CCF was Canada’s sole anti-capitalist party with any chance of achieving power. Recovering from his trip in Stockholm, where he enjoyed chocolates and other “bourgeois comforts” he had lacked in the Soviet Union, Spry thought again about his attitude towards cooperation with the Communist Party and became “firmer, not less firm, in my opposition to it.” Socialism, he thought, “must be international, not cosmopolitan, a federal world, not a unitary world.” In Canada, he thought, we ought to rely on “our own judgements over our circumstances…, not [those of] the 3rd Int. and an exec. of it in Moscow.” He sought “a sort of synthesis between the enthusiasm I deeply feel for the Russians’ experiment and the necessities of our Canadian situation” and concluded that “constitutional means” were “the only, if seemingly slow means.” Spry’s ideas about the were further confirmed on his trip home by what he was able to observe of the functioning of the Popular Front government in France, which he was convinced “the Communist Party will wreck…for its own purpose.” Still, Paris left him more optimistic than his brief stop in Berlin which, as might be expected, “filled [him] with despair.”