I am well aware that there is material in this book which will
be misused by fools both white and red. That is not my
fault. My object has been narrowly limited. I have tried by
means of a bald record of conversations and things seen, to
provide material for those who wish to know what is being
done and thought in Moscow at the present time, and
demand something more to go upon than secondhand
reports of wholly irrelevant atrocities committed by either
one side or the other, and often by neither one side nor the
other, but by irresponsible scoundrels who, in the natural
turmoil of the greatest convulsion in the history of our
civilization, escape temporarily here and there from any kind
of control.
The book is in no sense of the word propaganda. For
propaganda, for the defence or attack of the Communist
position, is needed a knowledge of economics, both from the
capitalist and socialist standpoints, to which I cannot
pretend. Very many times during the revolution it has
seemed to me a tragedy that no Englishman properly
equipped in this way was in Russia studying the gigantic
experiment which, as a country, we are allowing to pass
abused but not examined. I did my best. I got, I think I may
say, as near as any foreigner who was not a Communist
could get to what was going on. But I never lost the bitter
feeling that the opportunities of study which I made for
myself were wasted, because I could not hand them on to
some other Englishman, whose education and training would
have enabled him to make a better, a fuller use of them.
Nor would it have been difficult for such a man to get the
opportunities which were given to me when, by sheer
persistence in enquiry, I had overcome the hostility which I
at first encountered as the correspondent of a "bourgeois"
newspaper. Such a man could be in Russia now, for the
Communists do not regard war as we regard it. The
Germans would hardly have allowed an Allied Commission
to come to Berlin a year ago to investigate the nature and
working of the Autocracy. The Russians, on the other hand,
immediatelya greed to the suggestion of the Berne
Conference that they should admit a party of socialists, the
majority of whom, as they well knew, had already expressed
condemnation of them. Further, in agreeing to this, they
added that they would as willingly admit a committee of
enquiry sent by any of the "bourgeois" governments actually
at war with them.
I am sure that there will be many in England who will
understand much better than I the drudgery of the revolution
which is in this book very imperfectly suggested. I repeat
that it is not my fault that they must make do with the eyes
and ears of an ignorant observer. No doubt I have not asked
the questions they would have asked, and have thought
interesting and novel much which they would have taken for
granted.
The book has no particular form, other than that given it by
a more or less accurate adherence to chronology in setting
down things seen and heard. It is far too incomplete to
allow me to call it a Journal. I think I could have made it
twice as long without repetitions, and I am not at all sure that
in choosing in a hurry between this and that I did not
omit much which could with advantage be substituted for
what is here set down. There is nothing here of my talk with
the English soldier prisoners and nothing of my visit to the
officers confined in the Butyrka Gaol. There is nothing of
the plagues of typhus and influenza, or of the desperate
situation of a people thus visited and unable to procure from
abroad the simplest drugs which they cannot manufacture at
home or even the anaesthetics necessary for their wounded
on every frontier of their country. I forgot to describe the
ballet which I saw a few days before leaving. I have said
nothing of the talk I had with Eliava concerning the Russian
plans for the future of Turkestan. I could think of a score of
other omissions. Judging from what I have read since my
return from Russia, I imagine people will find my book very
poor in the matter of Terrors. There is nothing here of the
Red Terror, or of any of the Terrors on the other side. But
for its poverty in atrocities my book will be blamed only by
fanatics, since they alone desire proofs of past Terrors as
justification for new ones.
On reading my manuscript through, I find it quite
surprisingly dull. The one thing that I should have liked to
transmit through it seems somehow to have slipped away. I
should have liked to explain what was the appeal of the
revolution to men like Colonel Robins and myself, both of
us men far removed in origin and upbringing from the
revolutionary and socialist movements in our own countries.
Of course no one who was able, as we were able, to watch
the men of the revolution at close quarters could believe for
a moment that they were the mere paid agents of the very
power which more than all others represented the stronghold
they had set out to destroy. We had the knowledge of the
injustice being done to these men to urge us in their defence.
But there was more in it than that. There was the feeling,
from which we could never escape, of the creative effort of
the revolution. There was the thing that distinguishes the
creative from other artists, the living, vivifying expression of
something hitherto hidden in the consciousness of humanity.
If this book were to be an accurate record of my own
impressions, all the drudgery, gossip, quarrels, arguments,
events and experiences it contains would have to be set
against a background of that extraordinary vitality which
obstinately persists in Moscow even in these dark days of
discomfort, disillusion, pestilence, starvation and unwanted
war.