Maurice Gerschon Hindus (; February 27, 1891 – July 8, 1969) was a Russian-born American writer, lecturer, newspaper correspondent, novelist, and commentator on Soviet and Central European affairs.
Hindus is best remembered for a series of popular-selling books on the Russian peasantry published during the early years of the Russian Revolution, based on his first-hand reporting. Lauded as some for his sociological, anecdotal approach to history-writing, Hindus has been criticized by others for underplaying and rationalizing the brutality that was an inherent part of Soviet collectivization.
A public speaker on Russian themes throughout his life, Hindus also authored four novels, none a critical success.
Biography Early years
Maurice Hindus was born into one of the four Jewish families of Vialiki Bykoŭ, a village in modern-day Belarus, then part of the Russian empire. According to his own account, his father, Jacob Hindus, was a wealthy peasant — a kulak.Maurice Hindus, Green Worlds: A Story of Two Villages. London: Collins, 1939; p. 9. Historian Ronald Grigor Suny recounts the Hindus saga with more exactitude, writing that his father "had once been prosperous but had drunk his inheritance down to a single cow, a horse, and a large house with a shingled roof."Ronald Grigor Suny, "Maurice Hindus and Red Bread," in Maurice Hindus, Red Bread. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988; p. ix. His father died during his boyhood years. Maurice learned Yiddish and Hebrew through a tutor employed by the Jewish families of his village and was later enrolled in a Russian school in the nearby town of Slutsk.
His mother, Sarah Gendeliovitch Hindus, bore eleven children.Who Was Who: Volume 6, 1961-1970. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1972; p. 531. In 1905, with his father already deceased, the 14-year old Hindus, his mother, two sisters, and a brother left Russia for America, relocating to the Lower East Side of New York City.Suny, "Maurice Hindus and Red Bread," pp. viii–ix. Maurice attended night school to learn English — an unfulfilling decision, as he later recounted in his 1938 memoir:
"Nearly all the students were adults, some in their middle age. Working people, nearly all of them, after a day's labor in the shop, school obviously was too much of a tax on their depleted energies. In consequence, many of them dozed off during the lessons...
"I wondered why young boys like myself had to be put in the same classes with grownups, who worked much harder than we did and therefore had less energy and less eagerness for study. I could learn more by poring over my books at home and playing around with the boys I had met on the block or on the roof of our house than in night school, so I too quit going to classes."Hindus, Green Worlds, p. 100.
A critical step in Hindus' education came when he ventured into a public lecture on Herbert Spencer by a Scot named Edward King. A dedicated bibliophile and passionate public speaker, King had made it his mission to help educate the newly arrived immigrant population of the Lower East Side, and befriended the young Hindus.Hindus, Green Worlds, p. 102. King convinced Hindus to abandon his previous autodidactic method of memorizing words in a dictionary to learn English, but to instead begin to read a book for pleasure, preferably a novel, and to look up any words which he failed to understand.Hindus, Green Worlds, pp. 102–103. The method proved successful and King's energetic weekly lectures for an interested public served as a model of sorts for Hindus' future life.
To help pay the family's bills, Hindus found a job running errands for a garment shop.Hindus, Green Worlds, pp. 104, 111. After about a year in the United States, Hindus felt his English had improved enough to enter high school, and at the urging of friends he approached the principal of Stuyvesant High School and was successfully enrolled.Hindus, Green Worlds, pp. 108–110.
In the spring of 1908, Hindus saw an employment agency advertisement seeking a farm laborer in Upstate New York and moved to the town of North Brookfield, where he would work, learning the basics of agriculture over the next three years.Suny, "Maurice Hindus and Red Bread," p. ix. While working in North Brookfield he attended high school, showing scholastic promise.
Hindus entrolled at Colgate University, a private liberal arts college in Hamilton, New York, in 1911, studying literature. He gradually gave up his original intention of being a farmer, deciding upon a literary career. He graduated from Colgate with honors, in 1915.
Chautauqua speaker
After graduation, Hindus worked as a lecturer on the Chautauqua circuit. Chautauqua was a network of privately operated lecture tours, popular in the days before widespread adoption of radio and television, which combined elements of touring vaudeville entertainment, Protestant camp revival meetings, and modern TED talks. Generally taking place in idyllic rural settings beneath tents during the summer months, Chautauqua participants would pay admission to spend one or several days listening to music and entertaining lectures by subject experts. As with vaudeville shows, these experts were usually contracted for the season and were shuttled from event to event. As an articulate, college-educated former Russian peasant, Hindus was in a position to offer rural American unique insights on his area of expertise — the Russian peasantry.
During time on as a Chautauqua lecturer, Hindus met some of the public speaking stars of the day, including Helen Keller and popular Nebraska politician and former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Hindus was himself warmly received as a speaker and popular interest in his topic convince him to pursue further academic training.
Hindus enrolled at Harvard University, where he studied under historian and Yiddish linguish Leo Wiener. As a Harvard student, Hindus studied agricultural economics and history during the dramatic years of World War I and the Russian Revolution, ultimately compiling research material which would yield his first book.
Literary debut
Hindus' first book, The Russian Peasant and the Revolution was published by Henry Holt and Company in 1920, and help to establish Hindus as an authority on village life in the overwhelmingly agrarian country of his birth. Hindus was quick in staking out the rural-centered, pro-revolutionary orientation that would typify the first 15 years of his literary work. In the tumultuous year of 1920, with the first Red Scare raging, he wrote:
"Many of us in our indignation with the capers of the Revolution, have visited our wrath upon the leaders of the movement, have blamed them for the mishaps that have befallen the once mighty empire. Such an attitude, however sincere, will not advance our understanding, nor enlarge our appreciation of the problem in Russia today. Leaders, of course, have their failings. Yet it cannot be too often nor too vigorusly emphasized that the cause of Russia's calamities lies rooted, not purely in the stupidity or villainy of individuals, but fundamentally in the infirmities which centuries of despotism have wrought in the social and economic organization of the country. Is it Bolshevism that wrecked Russia? Or is it wrecked Russia that created Bolshevism?"Maurice G. Hindus, "Preface," The Russian Peasant and the Revolution. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1920; p. viii.
Hindus' upstart writing career was boosted by a lengthy article on his first book in the New York Times book review and magazine section. In it the unnamed reviewer declared that "Mr. Hindus has the qualification of having been a Russian peasant himself" and had made an effective argument that the peasantry, far from blindly following a handful of political leaders, "knows exactly what he wants and is by his nature rebellious rather than submissive.""The Real Power in Russia," New York Times Book Review and Magazine, Aug. 22, 1920, pp. 18, 21. The reviewer added that this peasantry was "no more committed to the Bolsheviki than to the Cadets or to the vanished nobility."
Echoing the opinion of sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross in the book's introduction, the unnamed Times reviewer declared that he "had not been able to find a trace of propaganda in it, and can find nobody but the observer and the historian. Featuring that most unusual of literary accoutrements for the era — an actual bibliography running the gamut from historians Vasily Kliuchevsky to agricultural economists Pëtr Maslov and Isaac Hourwich to politicians crossing ideological lines, such as Lenin, Nikolai Valentinov, Victor Chernov, Karl Kautsky, and Alexander Kornilov — Hindus was lauded more than six decades later for having produced "a monumental treatise."
With his reputation as an expert on rural sociology beginning to grow, Hindus penned a series of articles for The Century Magazine, one of the popular monthly magazines of the era, including a piece on the unlikely topic of the Dukhobors, a dissident religious movement of Russian emigres making a home in western Canada.Suny, "Maurice Hindus and Red Bread," p. x. He was persuaded to write a second book on the Russian peasantry by Century editor Glenn Frank, later president of the University of Wisconsin, and in 1923 the 32-year old Hindus made his return to his native land, now under Communist rule.
Return to Russia
Hindus is best remembered for a series of four popular non-fiction books published between 1926 and 1933, dealing with the tense and rapidly evolving situation in the countryside of the Soviet Union and the veritable civil war that would ensue over collectivization of agriculture.
In 1923, Hindus made his first trip to Russia after the Revolution — the first time he had set foot in the country in 19 years, never having returned since immigrating as a 14-year-old boy. He arrived during the first phase of the New Economic Policy (NEP), finding a "shabby" and "unsightly" country in which still "building after building showed the ghastly ravages of the civil war."Hindus, "Preface to New Edition," Broken Earth. Second edition. New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1931; p. vii. He made another trip to the country in 1924 on behalf of The Century Magazine, generating magazine articles and another tour on the Chautauqua circuit.The Last Word from Russia: Maurice G. HIndus, Whose Recent Articles in Century Magazine Caused National Comment, Coming to Chautauqua," Inyo [CA] Register, May 22, 1924, p. 3.
Hindus stated that went not to interview political leaders hoping to reveal plans and plots, or to catalog atrocities, but rather "to hear the people talk."Hindus, Broken Earth, 2nd edition, p. 4. Arriving in Moscow with an American passport properly visaed, Hindus traveled down the Volga River, through the Tatar Republic, Ukraine, Belorussia, Central Russia, and through the Cossack region, traveling by train, horse, and foot.Hindus, Broken Earth, 2nd edition, p. 6. This included a visit to his home village of Bolshoye Bykovo, an enclave of about 180 families "tucked away in the mudlands of Central Russia, about half a day's journey from the railroad, when the road is dry."Hindus, Broken Earth, 2nd edition, p. 7.