Capitalist in Russia

No one likes a good dinner better than Joseph Edward Davies, onetime (1936-38) U.S. Ambassador to Soviet Russia. While in Moscow he loved to serve his Communist friends whacking feeds "with all the capitalistic trimmings." In the U.S., during the past weeks, Joe Davies has been getting many good dinners free, collecting--often at the expense of U.S.

Army officers--bets he made on the durability of the Russian war machine. For, ever since his Moscow mission, Joe Davies has been one of the few U.S. citizens who has insisted that Russia would be hard, if not impossible, to lick.

Joe Davies' prophetic shrewdness was revealed in full last week when he published a collection of his Ambassadorial dispatches, diary entries and correspondence,* a rare collection of almost-current history, by one of the world's friendliest extroverts.

From the outside, Ambassador Davies' *Mission to Moscow; Simon & Schuster; $3. Moscow mission looked like some super Sinclair Lewis saga of a Babbitt among the Bolsheviks. A rich, self-made corporation lawyer from Wisconsin, he ran Woodrow Wilson's Western campaign in 1912, later headed the Federal Trade Commission, in 1913 refused the Ambassadorship to Russia. Accepting the post 23 years later, he took with him his second wife, Mrs. Marjorie Post Close Hutton Davies, who inherited $20,000,000 from her father (Postum), was used to a 54-room triplex Manhattan apartment, owned a massive steam& -square-rigged yacht, Sea Cloud, which bugged the eyes of Leningrad. To be secure from hunger Ambassador and Mrs. Davies took with them 25 refrigerators containing 2,000 pints of frozen cream.

Popularity. But such capitalist baggage did not prevent Joe Davies from giving Russia a detached once-over. The extrovert Ambassador saw Russia, rather than his own prejudgments of Russia. While most Moscow emissaries stayed in their salons and tried to imagine they were in London or Paris, Joe Davies rustled around looking at industry in Leningrad, agriculture in the Ukraine.

Everywhere he went he breezily announced that he was a capitalist, proud of it, willing to argue about it. The Russians called him an "honest" man and were transparently delighted with him. To his table of frozen foods came Russians of many stripes, from the Army to the ballet.

Finally, just before he left, he reached the hitherto-unsealed pinnacle of Moscow diplomatic prestige -- a long, personal interview with Joseph Stalin.

Prophecies. In January 1937 he wrote of the inevitability of European war, noting that Germany and Russia alone seemed to take it seriously. In February 1937 he was told by the German Military Attache in Moscow that the Russian Army was strong, and long before Joe Davies left Moscow he pronounced the Red Army first-class. That February several diplomats told him that, to insure her own peace, Russia might well make a pact with Germany. Joe Davies came almost to expect it, especially after England and France snubbed Russia by leaving her out of Munich.

In March 1937 he "guessed" that "industry back of the line could now support a long war ... to a far greater degree than is expected." In July 1937 he thought Russia's enormous natural wealth would "enable it to absorb waste and inefficiencies to an extraordinary degree." Dictator Stalin himself helped Joe Davies to understanding. Stalin said in June 1938 that "Chamberlain did not represent the English people and . . . would probably fail because the Fascist dictators would drive too hard a bargain." In January 1939 Joe Davies wrote: "Chamberlain's peace is a flop . . . France is all shot." In England, in April 1939, he wrote: "About the only man who really appreciates the real imminence of disaster over here is Winston Churchill." Purges. Joe Davies attended the second Moscow Trial in 1937. He entertained at dinner Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and four Soviet Generals who were later shot in the Army purge of that year. At the Bukharin Mass Treason Trial in 1938 he sat within ten feet of some of the accused--and condemned--whom he had known personally.

The purges shocked Joe Davies as they did millions. He quotes the classic wisecrack of British Correspondent A. T. Cholerton: "Habeas corpus has been replaced here by habeas cadaver." Of the second Moscow Trial, Joe Davies immediately wrote: "The unanimity of their confessions, the fact of their long imprisonment (incommunicado), with the possibility of duress and coercion extending to themselves or their families, all gave me grave doubts as to the reliability that could be attached to their statements." But he arrived "at the reluctant conclusion that the State had established its case, at least to the extent of proving the existence of a widespread conspiracy and plot among the political leaders against the Soviet Government."* Later he came to believe that the purged, in general, were pro-Axis fifth columnists or corrupt party bureaucrats. By May 1937, he says, 56 to 62% of the total Party organization had been replaced.

Joe Davies has this to say of Dictator Stalin and his faithful: "I disagree with them in many respects; but I accord to them that which I assume unto myself, namely, credit for honest convictions and integrity of purpose. ... It is their purpose to improve the lot of the common people."

Payoff. Still, Joe Davies does not agree with them. Stalin said to him laughingly: "Yes, we know you are a capitalist --there can be no doubt about that." Joe Davies told Joe Stalin "that we also wanted to have a fairer distribution of wealth, but we were doing it better in the United States than they were doing it in Russia; that we were holding fast to the best and trying to eliminate the worst in the process of evolution; that we were doing a better job for the common man than they were. . . .

"I asked, as illustrative of the manner in which wealth was being distributed: 'How much of all of Mrs. Davies' property do you think will go to the State and how much to her children and to her heirs?' He manifested interest. I said, 'More than 80% will go to the Federal and State Governments and less than one-fifth of her property will go to her children. . . .' I asked him: 'How much do you suppose I pay to the Government in income taxes alone every year, even including my salary as a Government official--more than 60%; whereas Mrs. Davies pays more than 75%. This obviously surprised Mr. Stalin, for he looked at Molotov with a smile and Molotov nodded." Joe Davies described Russia as a great Country Boy going to town, materially, in a great way. But everywhere he noted wage and privilege differentials, the formation of social classes, the re-introduction of private property.

"The Russia of Lenin and Trotsky--the Russia of the Bolshevik Revolution--no longer exists. Through gradual, stern and often cruel evolution that Government had developed into what is now a system of state socialism operating on capitalistic principles and steadily and irresistibly swinging to the right. . . . This laboratory in Russia must establish in the minds of all honest, intellectual radicals the fact that safe progress comes only through the gradual processes of evolution. Hereditary, nervous, and glandular reactions cannot be destroyed in a generation."

* Philosopher John Dewey's Commission after a minute scrutiny of the evidence, held that the first two Moscow trials were frame-ups, that Leon Trotsky and his son Sedov had not been implicated as charged. But the Commission's findings did not exclude the possibility that some sort of treasonable activity had occurred.

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