The Reconstruction of Moscow

In essence these people preached not proletarian, but petty-bourgeois socialism. There was even a theory that propounded the so-called "constrained mobility" of the population of the Soviet Union. The "profound substance" of this false theory was that the mobility of the urban population of the Soviet Union is greater in cornparison with the largest capitalist cities only because the population is not distributed prop- erly, and because the services at its disposal are not well organized. These would-be theoreticians regarded the growing ihobility of the Soviet population not as a progressive, but as an extremely abnormal phenomenon. It is now clear to everyone in the Soviet Union that these people were preaching outright bourgeois views, that they were propagandists of the most reactionary, anti- proletarian ideas in the sphere of developing socialist cities. But at that time there were many adherents of these views who were not averse to any artificial measures for retarding the rapid development of urban transporta- tion facilities in Soviet cities. Blind to the great achieve- ments of the Revolution, they greatly exaggerated certain negative features which actually existed in our cities. Before the Revolution the faqtory worker, the office employee and the clerk worked, as a rule, eleven, twelve and more hours a day. The wife of the worker or office employee was a domestic slave, fettered to the kitchen and the cradle. Culture was beyond the reach of the mass- es ; in its stead there were the church and the pub. The workers in the suburbs were very poorly served by municipal transportation facilities; besides, their wages were too small to permit them to ride every day. Not far from the factories, in everlasting filth, soot and smoke were the so-called workers' barracks, "dormitories,"

55