Soviet leaders sat in old Tsarist offices, lush with the architecture of autocracy, but now crowded with the excitement of their socialist ambitions. Lenin would tell Nadezhda Krupskaya that he rarely had a moment of peace. Someone or the other would rush in with a decree to be considered or a crisis to be averted. In June 1920, two Japanese journalists – K. Fussa and M. Nakahira – arrived in Moscow after a long journey across the Asian region of the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They were eager to see Lenin but were not confident that he would have time for them. After a brief wait in Moscow, they were allowed to interview him. Nakahira remembered the interview in his dispatch to the Japanese readers of Osaka Asahi. ‘I interviewed Mr. Lenin at his office in the Kremlin’, he wrote. ‘Contrary to my expectation, the decoration of the room is very simple. Mr. Lenin’s manner is very simple and kind – as if he were greeting an old friend. In spite of the fact that he holds the highest position, there is not the slightest trace of condescension in his manner.’
Lenin was interested in Japan, asking Nakahira a series of pointed questions about Japanese history and society: ‘Is there a powerful landowning class in Japan? Does the Japanese farmer own land freely? Do the Japanese people live on food produced in their own country, or do they import much food from foreign countries?’ Lenin asked Nakahira if Japanese parents beat their children as he had read in a book. ‘Tell me whether it is true or not. It is a very interesting subject,’ he said. Nakahira told him that there might be exceptions, but on the whole ‘parents do not beat their children in Japan’. ‘On hearing my answer’, Nakahira wrote on June 6, 1920, ‘he expressed satisfaction and said that the policy of the Soviet Government is to abolish this condition’. The Soviets had banned corporal punishment in 1917. On October 31, 1924, the USSR’s penal legislation would further lay down that punishment of children, in particular, should not be for the purpose of ‘the infliction of physical suffering, humiliation or indignity’.
Red Star Over the Third World
Vijay Prashad, November 2017
