A Rare Work Detailing the Minor but Important Social Aspects of Life in the USSR, 1933

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2815

Here's a very unusual and interesting pamphlet that I just found, and partially read. Philena Weller Montgomery and John Ferguson Montgomery wrote Traveling Hard Through the USSR¹, a travelogue on their trip through the old country in the mean and bitter summer of 1933. They printed the pamphlet themselves in 1934, giving their address as 1105 Morrison Ave, Bronx, NYC.

They produced a remarkable major-minor work, I think, making hundreds of small observations on the little bits and bobs of everyday life that one usually does not see in a work like this. For example, they walk around Stalingrad and rather than remark on the great sights and vistas they report on the state of window displays—that there were unrelated objects on display, like urinals with lamp lights and pictures of clothing for sale that the storekeep didn't have, and that the windows were dirty and hadn't been cleaned in months or years, and that the broken ones were fixed with metal and rivets; that sort. That's the real strength of this work, I think; the ability of the writers to see the small local, personal detail—they weren't interested so much in a grand building, but rather the women who were scrubbing the marble floors with some evil-smelling something because there was a shortage of soap; and not so much the boat they were passengers on, but rather the shabby dress whites of the captain and how he moved through the crew and how the crew responded to that; not the grand vistas of old St. Petersburg but rather the dirty shop windows that displayed pictures of items that they didn't have in stock.

The authors left with a group of 10 other people (fellow students?) for a loosely-guided trip through the Soviet Union. This was not a North Korean-style tourist experience for this group; they write that even though they had a guide that they were in no way constrained from wandering off or speaking to anyone they wished; they felt that there was no control over their activity outside of the route they were following for their visit. The fact that they saw so much poverty and hardship, and interviewed whomever they pleased, attests to the limited control the state placed on their tour.

Their adventure begins in Leningrad, and moves to Moscow, Gorki, Kaza, Samara, Saratov, Stalingrad, Rostov, Yalta, Odessa, and then back west via Kiev. The authors write that if the USSR were really trying to control what the visitors saw that they would positively not send people out of or into the country via Kiev because of the state of the city and the people.

I'm sharing this here just in case anyone out there knows anything about this work—I do plan on posting the full work here in the near future.

Here are some notes from my reading:

Kiev

• pale children working elevators at night of their hotel;

• more Bezpreysosny (orphans) here than they saw in all the rest of the Soviet Union combined;

• city swarmed with red Soldiers and OGPU;

• shop windows displayed odd assortments—corks, urinals, bridge lamps, washboards, side-by-side, with very little consumer goods;

• buildings were shabby as were the people, especially the children, “who show the effects of suffering”';

• visit to a Jewish collective farm

• prophylactorium mostly for the peasants

• doling out gold colored safety pins to a throng of 30 women;

• Pechersk Monastery, with a translated story of the 1905 Revolution;

• the authors remarked that if the Soviet government wanted to give a good impression of their country that it would be best for them to leave Kiev out of the picture, as it “leaves a bad taste in your mouth”.

Yalta

• visiting paid beach where men and women separated by board fence that extended into water;

• sunbathing regulated with female attendants, no sunbathing allowed after swim;

• visited rest home for Uzbeks;

• interaction with “American negro [sic] who complained that central control of the area farming was detrimental;

• sanitarium for tubercular children;pioneer camp for kids;

• Soviet determination to mechanize everything is carried to extremes (p64);

• sex matters discussed with freedom and seriousness;

• sex is not capitalized in advertised or advertising.

Sevastopol and Odessa

• visits to collective farms and open market (for junk and mostly-nothing objects).

Leningrad

• traveling “hard class”—third of three classes of travel);

• captain of the boat which took the party to Leningrad dressed in unpressed and dirty white jacket, walked among the crew with hands in pockets, and how crew regarded him; asked after wages of the crew and treatment;

• first images of the city watching nondescript workers, not shabby, standing in a drizzling rain and reading a newspaper nailed to a pole;

• many Red Army troops, but “rarely had a military manner”, sloppy, bad shoes;

• window decorations scarce on the grand streets, lacking consumer goods, some having “actual” clothing for sale, though most didn't and display pictures of what they didn't have in the store window;

• many windows not cleaned for months, with the broken windows repaired with metal and rivets;

• women cleaning marble scrubbing with evil-smelling black earthy substance, polishing the floors afterwards by attaching brushes to the feet and skating along the floor;

• rough streets, worked out apartments;

• visit to and description of Institute for the protection of children and adolescences and children sanitarium;

• 50% of the children of Leningrad sent to summer camp for a month;

• children's village.

Black Sea Trip

• comments on a movie, witnessing a “red Funeral” with band, rough-hewn red coffin.

Volga Boat trip

• passengers rush ashore to purchase cucumbers, bread, milk, dried fish, sold to them by crowds of peasants;

• no carrying grain onboard unless the government gets its share—everyone including children carried a bundle;

• description of “devoted” family group, the husband with his head in wife's lap as she pulled lice from his scalp;

• nude sunbathing on boat

Kazan

• there were 60 churches and 5 mosques not long ago, now down to 4 churches and 1 mosque.

Samara

• Quaint story of one of the authors receiving a Russian everlast pencil as a gift and returning the favor to the peasant by gifting a pair of socks.

Stalingrad

• Hot, dusty, dirty, though the parks were well maintained and sprinkled; many beggars who were listless and simply held out hand for money or food;

• visit to tractor factory where 40% of workers were women who worked in shorts and who did all manner of work save for pouring steel. Men with most difficult jobs got four weeks rather than two vacation and worked six hour shifts;

• to treat inhalation of noxious fumes there was a recovery “inhalation” room.

 

Rostov

• witnessing of a trial for thieves and agitators

• Zernograd state farm, getting to it and riding through innumerable poor villages of mud huts with thatched roofs;

• building some structure on the ground of an old walled cemetery;

• many Bezpreysorny;

• soldiers present to protect wheat.

Notes:

1. 11”x 8.5”, 77 leaves (printed on one side only), approximately 35-40,000 words, printed from the typed originals by mimeograph (?), with occasional line drawings in text by the authors. WorldCat locates only one other copy (Antioch, where the two Montgomerys went to school). It seems to me that the work was printed but not published, as there is no trail for the work, anywhere. This copy is from the Library of Congress, and I suspect that the authors sent at least one copy there for the sake of posterity, and another copy was left with alma mater. I cannot find any reference to this work in any of the standard histories of this period.