Pravda predicts Red Star will shine over Canada
In the summer of 1947, the Moscow newspaper Pravda sent correspondent G. Sobolevsky to North America.
One of his dispatches was about Canada, and on Aug. 22, 1947, it was reproduced in The Vancouver Sun.
“Canada reminded me of the dear motherland with her vast reaches of fertile steppe and virgin forest, her mighty rivers and mountain ranges,” he wrote. “I fell in love with Canada. It is a beautiful, promising land.
“But its population is small. With strong organization of its people and of its industrial capacity, and with a dynamic government such as our own (in the Soviet Union), Canada soon would be filled up with sturdy Slav workers and turned into a potent force for good in the world.”
It isn’t clear whether these “sturdy Slav workers” would be imported from Russia and the Eastern Bloc or whether Sobolevsky thought Canadian workers could be miraculously transformed into sturdy Slavs once they rejected “the so-called democratic system” for a “political organization and leadership which will give firmer control of the state.”
That would be communism, with a capital C, like in Russia. And Sobolevsky thought the conditions in Canada were ripe for a change.
“Workers are striking continuously in all parts of Canada for higher wages and better working conditions, aided by our zealous party comrades,” he wrote. “This of course is unnecessary and unimaginable in our beloved Russia, where we all have complete security and complete faith in Comrade Stalin and the men around him.”
Would that be the same Stalin that is now seen as one of the 20th century’s most ruthless dictators, a psychopath that let millions of Soviet citizens starve to death in famines and executed scores of his rivals in the notorious show trials of the 1930s?
Yep, same guy. But to be fair, Sobolevsky probably had to write Stalin into his script or risk being sent to a Siberian prison camp himself. Pravda was the Communist party’s house organ, not some independent newspaper.
In any event, it’s interesting to see how Sobolevsky saw Canada through Soviet eyes.
“In Canada the industrial bosses drive about in high-powered eight cylinder cars, while the workers can only get small six-cylinder cars,” he wrote. “The bosses wear suits made especially for them by scab tailors, while the workers have to take whatever they can get from the long racks in the department stores.
“But conditions are changing for the better, as the workers take things into their own hands by striking for their rights and breathing defiance in the very face and citadel of reaction.”
There were many card-carrying Communists and fellow travellers in Canadian unions at the time. Sobolevsky was told: “I would find several good comrades” at the Canadian Seamen’s Union (CSU), “a militant organization dedicated to the liberation of badly treated merchant seamen.”
But his endorsement may have backfired for the union. The CSU’S alleged Communist affiliation was given as one of the reasons the American Seafarers International Union entered Canada in 1949 and violently, and successfully, fought to take over the unionization of merchant ships.
Sobolevsky then delved into Canadian culture.
“The Canadians do not go to church as their fathers did, which is another good sign,” he said. “They go to the films, and always laugh when the prime minister’s picture is shown. They love a silly form of dancing, car driving, bowling and beer drinking.
“They read the sports and comic pages of the newspapers and read little else except picture magazines and crime stories. There are many sex crimes and murders.”
He was encouraged that “children seem to have little respect for their parents and other old people,” because “when the youth cease to respect old-fashioned Christian ideas, they soon can be taught to respect the revolutionary code.”
He concluded: “It will not be long before that great young country will replace Christ’s cross with the Red Star.”
But he was wrong. And seven decades later, his story reads more like a satire of Stalinism than journalism.