[Cowd]

A planned, international community

The Bolshevik insurrection had counted on European revolution for its own survival. And indeed, internationalism was the basic principle of the Communist movement. The economic plan, which fused together the Central and East European and Asian economies (After the German October, Austria, Bulgaria and Romania fell, so to speak, automatically - Poland had to be "assisted" by the Combined Red Armies, a still controversial act) had its parallel in the intermingling and development of the Soviet cultures, and the union of the various Communist Parties with a minimum of conflict. National culture was not strangled in a bureaucratic vise but given full freedom to develop as well as encouragement to enrich and be enriched by the conglomerate of Soviet and world culture. The majority opinion, although far from unanimous, was that socialist culture had to be built not from scratch, from a "clean sheet", but on the basis of the massive cultural body developed under capitalism and previous class society, in the same way as socialist technique and thought. This was seen as the stepping stone to a peaceful, progressive federation of the world under a democratic planned economy.

The Chinese and Persian revolutions posed with renewed force the questions of an all-Soviet second language and a new, secular-rational system of timekeeping to replace the Christian and Islamic calendars. Fierce debate raged in the Communist International and in Soviet society at large. The two major linguistic contenders were Esperanto and Ido, the latter of which won out after Lenin's promotion of Ido as "Esperanto with the chinks ironed out". Taught to Soviet children from preschool on, this fully regular, streamlined, "Spanish-sounding" planned language rapidly became the world's most spoken. This was helped by its being an order of magnitude easier to pick up than, say, English. Today it is spoken by more than 96% of humanity, with 59% listing it as their 'second first language'. It is the language of the Plan, of the Infonet, of the Communist International, not to mention millions of original works of literature. It features next to the local national language on every roadsign and every restaurant menu in the world. There is a growing fear in certain quarters that the youth is actually losing its national heritage thanks to the immense preponderance of Ido - symptoms include the frequent erroneous transfer of Ido grammar and spontaneous direct translation of Ido idioms - but this is a hotly contested issue, being supported by many Communists and other progressive types.

The socialist calendar was introduced by referendum in 1933. It tried to kill two birds with one stone by abolishing Sunday and at the same time granting more days off - one in every six instead of every seven (there is presently heated debate about whether to extend the weekend from three to four days). It divides the year into twelve months, each with five weeks of six days. The months are childishly simple: Unmo, dumo, trimo, quarmo, kinmo, sesmo, sepmo, okmo, nonmo, dekmo, dekunmo and dekdumo. The days of the week descend into true banality: Undi, dudi, tridi, quardi, kindi and sesdi. The remaining five or six days constitute la semano komunia, Communion Week, a global year-end festival. Years were intially counted from the 1917 Russian Revolution (ero revolucia), but a later referendum changed it to 1968, the year of the World Communion's founding - ero komunia, Communion Era.

The German and Chinese revolutions, even moreso than the Russian, roused the hopes of the poor and oppressed of the world, thrown into war, starvation and poverty by aristocrats and capitalists. The international Five-Year Plan showed the superiority of socialism, as Trotsky put it, "not in the language of Capital, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity". But capitalism wasn't dead yet.

(To be continued...)