ABSTRACT
The Five Year Plan was at first not taken seriously abroad. It was regarded simply as agitation, as an attempt to make people work. This scepticism was carried too far; and when it was proved that in Soviet Russia much was actually being done to fulfil the demands 135of the plan, scepticism gave place to astonishment and even, in certain circles, to enchantment. But complete scepticism, no less than immoderate enthusiasm, was unjustified. Only in one respect was the attitude of the sceptics well founded: it was at once clear that the enormous capital expenditure referred to above was 136incompatible with a simultaneous improvement in the general standard of living. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that the communist state, with all resources at its free disposal and resting upon an absolute dictatorship, is the most powerful in the world; while the subjects of such a state, unable to call anything their own, are the most impotent of all peoples. When it was necessarily shown that both goals could not be achieved at the same time, it was possible for the communist state not only to forgo any improvement in the standard of living, but even to depress it; and this to an extent which would have been beyond the power of any bourgeois government. For in a bourgeois state the economic system is subject to laws of its own, which the government must respect; and moreover even an autocratic bourgeois government is compelled to take some account of the feelings of the people.
