A. Possibly no authority, but a good deal of experience. I was for two years a correspondent in Moscow, from 1925 to 1927--that was during the NEP--and thereafter made three long trips and visited every part of the country from Vladivostok to Odessa and Leningrad to Tiflis. I was the first correspondent to visit the huge industrial plants of the First Five-Year Plan from the Urals to the Caucasus, and after a 17,000-mile trip which lasted three months I wrote a series of twenty-four articles, which were given a Pulitzer prize. That was in 1930, and I made another study trip in 1934 and another in 1937. I keep up as well as one can by diligent reading and contact with friends fresh from the Soviet Union and it appears that the conditions there today, aside from the war, are about as they were when I was last there. Most capitalist critics of the Soviet Union oppose it because it has done away with the institution of private property and of profit, and substituted a collectivist system. It would not make much difference to these capitalist critics whether the Soviet collectivist system worked or not. What irks them is that it has eliminated the form of economic organization which has enabled them to become well to do. This is not of any interest to me. The only thing that interests me about the Soviet collectivist system is whether it works or not. If it works better than ours, to bring more happiness to everybody in the community than our system, then let us have it. But the trouble with the Soviet collectivist system is that it simply does not work to make men happier. It’s only success has been to make men fight. That is what we need now, but it is not enough. Q. _Can you prove that the Soviet system does not work?_ A. I am not going to try to do it with statistics. I have played and worked and sweated with Soviet statistics as much as the next man, but if there ever was a country on earth where the old saying, “Figures don’t lie but liars figure,” is true, it is the Soviet Union, where avowedly and openly it is announced that the Statistical Office must consider itself in the service of propaganda for the national good. I can give you only a reproduction of the impressions I had, and which you would have had if you had been with me. The two chief impressions you get from the Soviet Union are its extreme poverty and the all-pervading Terror. True, the Terror diminishes as one gets away from Moscow and the large cities, but it is present in greater or less degree everywhere. The population as a whole is desperately poor and always afraid. I thought when I read of the German attack on the Soviet Union, and then of the valiant initial Soviet resistance, that the war must have come to the Soviet population as a sort of release.