ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL BANQUET THIRTIETH ANNUAL MEETING VIRGINIA STATE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE RICHMOND, VIRGINIA APRIL 9, 1954

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP70-00058R000100250071-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 14
• Document Creation Date: November 17, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 7, 2000
• Sequence Number: 71
• Publication Date: April 9, 1954
• Content Type: SPEECH

ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL BANQUET
THIRTIETH ANNUAL IM EETING
VIRGINIA STATE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
APRIL 9, 1954
It is a great pleasure to be with you tonight in the historic city of
Richmond.
In my job as Director of Central Intelligence, public addresses are
the exception as far as I am concerned. But when your distinguished Senior
Senator and also your fellow-townsman, ~:? ssistant Secretary of State
Robertson, joined in asking me to meet with you I could not refuse.
The Central Intelligence t.gency has no better friend in Washington
Jp than Senator Byrd. j -,s one of the senior members of the E rmed Services
Committee, I see him often on the affairs of the I gency. He has always
been understanding and helpful.
I s for Walter Robertson, few men who have come to Washington, in my
experience, have made a deeper impression than he by over-all competence
and mastery of his subject. If any person thinks that Mir. Robertson has an
easy job these days, as the State Department official most directly responsible
for dealing with our day by day crises in the Far East, I am sure that W.WValter
Robertson would be gtad to let that person take a crack at his job.
Those who are directing our foreign policy these days have a double
problem. They need to know the facts bearing on our international relations
and then they must decide what to do about them.
Until the Communists introduced the idea of building a kind of Chinese
0 Wal l around their domains, it wasn't so difficult to get a reasonable idea as
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to the facts in a given situation. Generally we can get, through normal and
overt means a fair idea of the power potential of the various countries of
the world and their intentions and policies can be deduced within a reasonable
margin of error.
Today, however, there is a vast area of the globe -- the entire Soviet
and satellite world, including Corrmtinist China -- which is, in part; a
no-man's-land of knowledge.
The Communist world deliberately plans it so. They want to keep us in
ignorance of their plans and of their timing and of their power to carry out
their plans. IVeanwhile we in the free world continue along, with the full
light of publicity on what we are doing and of course our major plans in the
international field 1pnerally require advance approval of the Congress in one
fora or another.
In a free society this is more or less inevitable and I would not suggest
that we can or should change it even though it puts us at a disadvantage
vis-a-vis a possible antagonist. Sometimes, however, it seems to me that
in the field of technical developments we tell the world, and hence the
Communists, more than we need to. This seems to go with our national
temperament. Cur people like to share with others the satisfaction of our
accomplishments, sometimes without realizing how quickly this knowledge
can be turned against us.
Of course, one of the main objectives of the Central Intelligence 1.gency
is to try to get at the facts about the Soviet orbit -- the name we generally
use to cover the Communist dominated area that extends from the Elbe River
in the heart of Germany to the Yellow Sea and deep into Indo china in the Far
East.
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I do not propose to disclose where in this quest for knowledge we are
having successes and where we are running up against a wall of uncertainty.
To do so would merely help the Soviet to close off existing sources of
information. I can say, however, that in this work we have come across
some facts that lead me to believe that here in the U. S. A. we have some
popular misconceptions about this Soviet orbit.
Tonight I should like to discuss some of these misconceptions with you.
,EA little over a year ago Stalin died. Many were then inclined to believe
that his death would be a great shock to the Soviet system and would probably
leave the USSR weaker than before. That thinking was wrong. It is true that
in a totalitarian society, where there are no clear rules of succession except
the rules of brute power, the death of a dictator always brings problems. The
Soviet, temporarily at least, surmounted the problems of the Stalin succession
with less of an internal convulsion than had been anticipated.
It is now quite apparent that Stalin's demise brought vast relief to the
ruling Communist circles. Never have a group of men labored harder to
deflate their national hero, than have Stalin's heirs and successors. The
aging Dictator, during his latter years, had become more of a tyrant than
even the members of the Politburo relished. He had dealt arbitrarily in
matters of foreign policy and had been ruthless in forcing the Soviet economy
into armament production in disregard of the needs of the Soviet people for
consurr,er goods.
Those who try to tell us that human nature can be ignored, even in the
strictest of totalitarian states, are certainly wrong. It is true that armed
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revolution may be out of the question as long as the army supports the
government, but no people, no matter how ground down by dictatorship, can
be pushed beyond a certain point without seriously weakening the regime.
Clearly Stalin, in his latter days, was close to that danger point.
Even men like Malenkov and Molotov became fearful of the trends of
Soviet tyranny under Stalin. While Beria shortly followed his master to the
grave -- probably because he was a threat to Ma.lenkov's position -- Stalin's
other successors quickly realized that the over-emphasis on industrialization
for armament, as practiced by Stalin, had meant the neglect of the consumer
goods industries and of agriculture. They also seemed to wake up to the
fact that the individual productivity of labor was decreasing because the
average Russian citizen was being called upon to work too hard for too little
a return. The Malenkov government began to realize that the Soviet economy
was seriously unbalanced and that drastic action was required.
E story, of Soviet origin, illustrates this dilemrr.a. It seems that a
Soviet officer was telling a peasant how the Soviet Union intended to deal with
1.merica. " Y!"G will pack twenty atom bombs in 20 leather suitcases and
distribute them all over 1. merica, " he said. The peasant nodded doubtfully,
whereupon the officer asked hirr., indignantly if he didn't believe the :Russians
ha.d 20 atom bombs. "=oh, I wasn't thinking of the bombs" the peasant
answered. "But where are you going to get the 20 leather suitcases "
Thus even a monolithic state like the Soviet Union has its stresses and
strains. The Soviet people have not become such complete automatons that
the Kremlin can safely act in complete disregard of their human needs.
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A second misconception, tis I see it, lies in our appraisal of the
capabilities of the Soviet people individually and collectively. I believe we
have a feeling that the Soviet brain is somehow inferior to our own and that
in many fields they cannot do the things that we can do.
In all totalitarian systems the denial of freedom, and of private
initiative and the curb on individu^.1 resourcefulness have serious consequences.
But don't make any mistake about this. Those who succeed in the ruthless
power struggle that exists in the Soviet Union are persons to be reckoned
with. However cynical and corrupt they may be, when they get to the top in
that "dog eat dog" system they are men of outstanding force and ability.
Wei hen the Soviet State determines to tackle a particular objective, take
for example in the field of industrial production or of scientific development,
and lays down the ground rules for the work to be done, Soviet scientists and
technicians have proved to be surprisingly efficient in getting results. Of
course in some fields they have profited by aid received from foreign
scientists, particularly German; from espionage; and sometimes from pro-
totypes obtained from abroad.
It is high time we should disabuse ourselves of the notion that the
Soviet are only good as chess players, as musicians, or in the ballet, apart
of course from their demonstrated courage and tenacity as soldiers when
defending their own country. We have now had it clearly demonstrated that
they have high ability in the field of atomic energy, electronics, in aircraft
engine design and construction. Here and in several other fields they have at
times surprised the rest of the world.
In my own work, I find it far safer to assume that in technical tasks the
trained Soviet citizen can do what we can do. And when we find certain areas
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in the field of science and development where we are really ahead of tthem,
we can put that down as a happy plus -- but we do not need to tell the F ussians
where this is.
The disturbing thing about the Soviet effort is that their scientific
and productive achievements are almost exclusively directed toward
developing engines of destruction for military purposes. We, on the other
hand, devote the major share of our inventiveness and of our production to
improving the way of life of the ordinary human being by making better
automobiles, refrigerators, television and the like. Here, the Soviet are
quite prepared to let us do the pioneering with the idea that they can always
copy our products and then, of course, claim the credit for the invention.
As we review Soviet achievement in the field of science and technology
and the emphasis they are placing on getting their ablest young people into
scientific work, we have no real basis for complacency or for assuming an
air of superiority. If we do, we are in for a sad awakening. You may be
surprised to hear that available statistics indicate that Soviet advanced
educational institutions are now turning out more graduates in scientific
fields than we are here in the United States.
If possibly Soviet progress in science and technology has been over
discounted, on the other hand, there has been a tendency to minimize their
problems in another field where normally one would expect them to be
strong, namely, in the field of agriculture.
1-..s we look at the map and see the great reaches of the Soviet orbit
and further take into account that they can appropriate, at will, the product
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of the normally agricultural satellite states such as Poland, Roumania and
Hungary, we would naturally assume that food in the Soviet orbit should be
the least of their worries, except possibly in China which has perennial
agricultural problems. Such is not the case. Today, agriculture is an over
all headache in the Communist
This requires a little explaining:
In 1944, at the height of V orid ' .%ar II, Josef Stalin confided in ;Winston
Churchill, as the latter tells us, that the Soviet Union's battle with the
peasant farmer had been a more dangerous and formidable undertaking than
the defense of Stalingrad. This was quite an admission. In point of fact, it
was probably an understatement. Since the battle of Stalingrad had been won,
this implied that the battle with the peasants had likewise been won. Today,
however, after twenty-five years of that battle, the new leaders of the Soviet
again admit that the far rr problem is still unsolved.
When the Bolsheviks inherited this problem from the Czars in 1918, as
the aftermath of a disastrous war, they had formidable difficulties to face.
The first attempt at solution was the easy one of merely dispossessing the
landlord.
t s always proves to be the case when this simple remedy has been
applied, it has tended to create rnore problems than it has solved. The
peasants didn't know what to do with their new estates and did not have the
meagre capital necessary to develop them. In most cases they lacked the
incentive to produce more than was essential to keep themselves and their
families alive. This left the city population to starve.
In 1930, after a period of prolonged hesitation, the Soviet Communist
party decided to strike a final blow against private agriculture, even th_it of
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the small peasant farmer. It decreed the liquidation of the kulaks and
announced its aim of complete collectivization within three years.
The objective was threefold: first, to gain political control, for
party purposes, of the country population by cutting the roots from under the
wealthier peasants who were hostile to the regime; second, to provide the
hungry industrial population with minimum subsistence and over and above
this to procure some grain for export and, third, to put an end to small scale
peasant agriculture which had proved unable economically to use modern
machinery and scientific farming methods.
Apparently it was first intended that this process of collectivization
should be one of persuasion. The farmer everywhere, however, is a
temperamental individualist and the Russian farmer balked at the idea of
entering the collectives. -ersuasion was ineffective and certain 'pressures',
to use a polite term, were put into play. The State largely controlled the farm
machinery, the seed and manufactured goods, all of which it could distribute
to the farmers as it saw fit. t ny peasant who resisted official policy ran the
risk of finding himself classed as P. kulak and deported to Siberia. r he
might simply find that he and his family ware deprived of all means of making
a livelihood and reduced to starvation.
In spite of all this, passive peasant resistance brought about .? sharp
reduction in farm output and in the winter of 1932 a serious famine faced much
of the country. In the space of the following four years, the peasants
slaughtered almost half of the total herd of livestock and during the period
between '1932 and the outbro k of the was in 1941, some 18 million horses had
been consumed by the hungry population or had perished. The manure supply,
vital to the marginal agriculture of north and central Russia, was dangerously
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diminished. The propaganda about the virtues of the collective farm system
continued to flow copiously. To the farmers, this had somewhat the same
odour as their fertilizer but lacked any appeal for their crops.
In the terror that ensued in the 1930's, about 5 million peasants were
deported to Siberia and a large proportion of them are said to have perished.
This brutal policy of forced collectivization had some results, so that by the
time of World War II practically all of the arable land of the Soviet Union was
subject to the collective farm system.
Thus Stalin "won" his victory against the peasants. But let us
recapitulate the cost: 5 million peasants uprooted and deported including the
most energetic and industrious farmers; 30 million cattle slaughtered; loss
of 18 million horses; a farm population frightened, sullen and lacking
incentive to produce.
Certainly Stalin minimized the situation when he compared this battle
with that of Stalingrad. The peasant was subdued -- the problem. remained.
The World V.Tar and the postwar era brought no lasting remedy and when
Josef Stalin died in March of last year he left to his successors an
agricultural problem largely unsolved.
'Last ugust, after having taken care of the immediately pressing
problems following Stalin's death and liquidated Beria, the Soviet leaders
turned to agriculture as their number one problem. They began by announcing
a series of new incentives for the farmer. x- it the same time, they ordered
more tractors, farm machinery and fertilizer and decided to send scores of
technicians back to the farms.
ill this, however, did not mean any relaxation of the basic Communist
system of supervision over agriculture. In fact, it was to be tightened.
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x rom the Soviet viewpoint, the ideal solution is to treat the farmer like a
factory worker. Herded into "farm cities" at night, they would be deposited
by trucks and buses in the morning at assigned strips of land and given
their materials in the form of seed, fertilizer and supplied with tractors.
Thus they would do a daily stint on a piece-job basis and be carted back at
night to their city or village domiciles. In this way the farmer would be
divorced from his land and his crop as completely as the factory worker is
divorced from the tank, the aeroplane or the tractor once it is built. The
bait that was to be held out to the farmer by W.'alenkov was increased consumer
goods and better housing.
The Soviet have not as yet achieved this program but it is the logical
conclusion of the steps they are now taking. It is true that in some of the
Satellites they have been forced to back track on their measures to complete
the program of collectivization; not so in the Soviet Union itself.
I- is their present program got under way it was necessary to tell the
farmer about it and in doing so Malenkov and his chief party aid, Khrushchev,
also had to tell the world. In this way we have begun to learn the truth about
the Russian food situation. Here are some of the facts: --
In the years following the war over-all agriculture production had
failed to keep pace with an increasing population and many vital crops had
fallen off. Furthermore the cattle herds, as of January 1, 1953, had dropped
over 10 million head from the 1940 figures and were even 15% below those in
1928, while dairy herds had dropped by 27%. Cheep and goat herds were 4%
short of the 128 level. These are the Soviet's adn itted figures. b eanwhile
of course the Soviet and satellite population was steadily incre~,^sing and the
Soviet had acquired an implied responsibility for its Chinese ally with its
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perennial food problem and an over-all agricultural output which in 1953
was below that of 1936.
According to the Communists' own admissions, it appears that the
only area in the field of agriculture where a real increase is to be noted is
in "red tape".
The Central Committee of the Communist Party admits that bureaucratic
practices in the handling of agricultural problems have developed to a point
where main attention is "concentrated on compiling various directives,
resolutions, letters, and so forth. "
Even the Communist newspaper, "Pravda", complained that district
farm offices were literally inundated with all kinds of paper. the regional
executive complained that hours were needed daily to read the government
directives and the rest of the time was taken up with a series of unnecessary
conferences.
The Soviet leaders have admitted quite frankly the serious nature of
their agricultural problems.
First - the USSk is not richly endowed with agricultural resources. The
land area where both climate and soil are at all favorable for farming is
small relative to the population, and most of it is in use. Hence, expansion
of output requires more intensive cultivation.
Second - in pursuit of industrialization, Soviet economic policy has
starved agriculture of capital and drained it of labor. This drain of labor
has been largely male labor. D n the Soviet farms today about 80 percent of
the work is done by women. The balance of the workers are old men, war
cripples, and children. Few boys over 16 are seen on the farms.
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Third - the record of Soviet planning of agricultural production has been
consistently unimpressive. agricultural goals set by the Five Year Plans
regularly proved excessive and stop-gap emergency measures generally
failed to achieve the results demanded. The official reaction to these failures
was to attain output plans by demanding greater shares of output from the
farmers. With farm incomes already low,, these measures did much to
increase the demoralization of the Soviet countryside.
As an illustration of what happens to those who are continually faced
with unrealistic plan requirements, there is the case of the clever Soviet
factory manager who in order to fulfill his monthly production quota was forced'
to "borrow" a day or two from the next month. This solution worked very well
until after a year he owed the government a month's production. He hasn't
been heard from since.
Fourth - the newly adopted "new look" has apparently been delayed until
the chronic problems of Soviet farming had taken an acute turn in some
important branches. This deterioration will have to be stopped before the
new expansion can begin. Yet the measures were decreed too late last year
to affect 1953 production and it seems most doubtful that enough of the additional
investment planned for agriculture will be supplied in time to have much effect
on this year's crop production.
E11 this justifies considerable skepticism as to whether the new program
stands much chance of succeeding on schedule. Moreover, there are good
indications that it has actually got off to a slow start, with bureaucratic
bottlenecks about as numerous as ever.
Vat we have just seen in the sphere of agriculture shows the effects
of having a strong dictatorial government extend its hand far beyond the
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strict field of government itself. The attempt to eliminate private property
in the Soviet's productive wealth has not resulted in socialized property but
in property in the hands of the dictatorship. Ls a result, the leading
members of the Communist party control the uses of productive wealth,
direct the process of investment to suit themselves, decide how large a
part of the national income the masses will receive, and are in a position
to see to it that their own economic welfare remains at a level satisfactory
to them. The gulf between the incomes of the elite in the Soviet Union and
the ordinary workers is appalling.
If we feel that we here in the United States have our problems because
of farm surpluses, we might well ponder with some satisfaction the con-
sequences of the Soviet agricultural system with a crippling bureaucracy
and critical farm s hortages. At lease we need to have no misconception
about the fruits of Communism in agriculture.
In conclusion, I would mention one further misconception about the
Soviet world that I believe is shared by many. Here I am glad to report
that the evidence indicates that any apprehensions are not well fou nded.
Many people seem discouraged at the fact that totalitarianism has
lasted so long in the Soviet Union. They tell us that in a totalitarian state as
new generations come along with no experience of the meaning of freedom,
the yearning for it may just die away.
This idea is based on the thought that the love of liberty might come
largely from enjoying the fruits of it or from observing the experience of
one's neighbor who lived in liberty. There seemed to be some reason to doubt
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whether there was here an inherent attribute of men and women apart from
past experience, knowledge or upbringing.
During recent years in my present work I have had a good deal of
experience, direct and indirect, with persons who have sought asylum in the
West from the conditions of human slavery that exist behind the Iron Curtain.
I have had contact with young people who have fled to free countries and who
had never known any form of life except Communist totalitarianism. Yet
somehow they have had a yearning for something better and had experienced
a feeling of basic revolt against what they had been taught and against the
manner of life they had been forced to live. The two young Polish fliers
who brought their planes to freedom not so long ago are good examples of
this. They have taught the Soviet and the satellites that it is not safe to
expose any of their peoples to the breath of freedom.
This has created a basic problem for the Soviet in handling their
military, their diplomatic and their security service personnel, some of
whom must come in touch with the free world to carry out their official
duties.
-ft least here is one misconception about the Communist world of which
we can all disabuse our minds: If we press forward with a vigorous defense
of the liberties for which this country and the free world stand, we have no
need to fear that we are in a losing race against the totalitarian way of life.
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