FACE TO FACE WITH BOLSHEVISM
I have already, I think, mentioned the fact that I have been three times
a prisoner of war. Some people contract the habit of getting captured,
and apparently I am one of them.
On the last occasion when I was captured in war I had been searched
very thoroughly, and my captors had been insatiable in their thirst for
information, first of all military information about the other side, and
then information about myself personally. On this occasion the Bolsheviks
never asked any questions, and made no enquiries about passports, maps,
or documents of any kind. They did not bring us before any superior
officer. They did not ask us to sign any papers. They did not search us.
In the beginning one of them manifested some slight interest with regard
to our names and our nationality, but this curiosity seems to have been
entirely a personal matter with him, for no details bearing on these
points were placed on record. The Reds forgot all about us, and during
several days we lived in our carriage unmolested and apparently ignored.
This state of things affected us differently according to our age and
our temperament. Some of the younger officers promptly decided to escape
by walking eastwards along the railway or southwards to the Chinese
frontier, but they allowed themselves to be dissuaded from this mad
enterprise when it was pointed out to them that they were being very
carefully watched by a number of Red soldiers, that a whole Red Army was
now on the railway to the east of them, and that they could never hope
to reach the Chinese frontier owing to the deep snow, to their lack of
transport and of food, and to the spells of intense cold which invariably
visited the Krasnoyarsk district in mid-winter As a matter of fact the
thermometer fell, a few weeks later, to 49° R. below zero.
Owing to the snow alone, escape was as much out of the question under
the circumstances as would have been escape, by swimming, from an
Atlantic liner in mid-ocean or escape in light attire, and without ski or
dog-sleigh, from an exploring ship at the Pole. We had once, during the
journey, made a short trip from the train with our rifles and equipment,
but, after wading a few hundred yards up to the waist in snow, were
uncommonly glad to get back again. Notwithstanding this, and despite
the lesson taught us by our terrible sleigh-ride, some of my young
companions, especially one who had been captured at Mons and four years a
prisoner in Germany, were so ashamed of being taken that they wanted to
risk it; but I succeeded in dissuading them, and their parents have since
thanked me for doing so.
Some of us then began to visit the town and to ascertain the Bolshevik
point of view, and these soon realized, to use the words of one of us,
that we had “struck the queerest outfit this world has ever seen.” We had
“struck” a people who did not believe that there was any such thing as
nationality, religion, or private property, and who were working towards
the abolition of the family also. In their view mankind was divided
not into nationalities, but into two classes: the Proletariat and the
Parasites. All religions, treaties, and international arrangements about
prisoners of war had been “scrapped” long ago, and had as little bearing
on present conditions as had the religious ordinances of the ancient
Egyptians on the subject of cat-worship.
Seldom since the Crusaders came into conflict with the Saracens did
two schools of thought more diametrically opposed to one another find
themselves face to face. We had been accustomed to a society which
regarded money and birth with a considerable amount of respect, and had
a vague impression that the main lines of the capitalist system had been
laid down somewhere in the Bible. We had had a prejudice against people
who ate with their knives, or had relatives in the tailoring business, or
had been in jail, or had had a Board School education, or who, to put it
briefly, were not Sahibs.
They disbelieved volubly in God, in the Bible, in Sahibs, and even in
money. They had swept all banks out of existence in Russia, and they
calmly announced their intention of abolishing currency altogether. They
regarded with considerable suspicion a man who had been educated at Eton,
and who was the son of a parson, a squire, an officer, or a business
magnate. To say that one was the son of a duke would create the same
painful impression in Bolshevik circles as the admission that one was
the son of a greengrocer would make in the best Mayfair society. A man
who had been in jail for a political offence was sure of a warm welcome,
and the more numerous his convictions the warmer his welcome. If he had
had the sentence of death passed on him by a “capitalist” Government for
revolutionary or seditious action, he was regarded by the Bolsheviks with
that deep respect which we show to men who have won the Victoria Cross. I
imagine that when Lenin’s court is in working order, precedence will go
by the number of “previous convictions.”
Most of these points of view I gathered while living among the Bolsheviks
afterwards. I bring them all together here for the sake of general
contrast, and I shall go into the subject again later on and in more
detail to show how sincerely they are held. I have known British Labour
Members who, in their heart of hearts, “dearly love a lord,” though they
manage to dissemble that affection in their public utterances; but that
inconsistency cannot be laid to the door of any Bolshevik whom I met.
Three months later I met a Bolshevik leader—he was one of the heads of
the Extraordinary Commission in Moscow—who expressed grave doubts as to
the genuineness of a certain foreign Bolshevik then in Moscow. “He talks
like a thorough Communist,” said this Red leader, “but his father is a
wealthy man.” It was no use urging that, notwithstanding this, the father
might have been honest. A sorrowful and profoundly dubious shake of the
head was the only reply. On the same day I met in Moscow an Englishman
who had not been home for many years, and whose Toryism seemed to date
from the time of Queen Anne, for he expressed surprise at my having got a
commission, though not belonging to any of the old county families.
To give another story illustrating the profound differences of view
between the Bolsheviks and ourselves in the same connection, I was once
in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs at Moscow trying to
get my notebooks censored by a Russian Jew, who had been a tailor in
England, but is now a Commissar in Moscow. Entered an elderly English
lady who was extremely anxious to leave the country, but who, having
married a Russian, was a Russian subject, and therefore not entitled to
claim repatriation. The poor lady tried all her wiles on the ex-tailor,
and had almost succeeded in persuading him to let her leave, when she
suddenly spoilt everything by saying, in a tone of great mystery: “Do you
know what my maiden name is? Now, guess. I’m sure you wouldn’t imagine.”
Then bending forward, she added triumphantly: “It’s D——.” Surprised and
disappointed to see that the expected effect was not produced on the
stolid countenance of the ex-tailor, she added: “Surely you know the name
D——! Mr. Justice D——. _Well, I’m a cousin of Mr. Justice D——._ Now, then!
You wouldn’t think it to look at me, would you?”
She seemed to imagine that the Commissar would immediately go on all
fours, but nothing of the kind happened, for he had once been before Mr.
Justice D—— for using seditious language in Hyde Park, and that learned
Judge’s witticisms still rankled in his mind. He did not grant the
passport.
But to return to Krasnoyarsk.
As for ourselves personally, if we were Parasites we could, they told
us, join the “working classes.” If we already belonged to the “working
classes,” we could get to work at once by joining the International
Battalion which was being formed in Krasnoyarsk out of Magyar and German
prisoners of war, or else by shovelling snow or carrying wood. Some of us
had been skilled mechanics, others had been railwaymen, one had been a
wireless operator, and one had been a telegraphist. The Bolsheviks were
amazed that these did not all fall at once into their proper places
under the Communist régime. The shackles of the capitalistic yoke had
been stricken from their limbs. Why were they hesitating? If, indeed,
the iron had entered into their soul and their minds were enslaved by
_bourgeois_ prejudices or by religion, then the best thing they could
do would be to wither away. The Government of the Russian workers was
certainly not going to maintain them in their accustomed idleness.
“But why not send us back to England?” we asked. “We are no good here.
Only two or three of us speak Russian.”
The reply was that, in order to fight or to shovel snow, one did not need
to know much of any language. The few words which were necessary could
easily be picked up. As for returning to England, it was impossible. The
Bolsheviks gave different reasons to explain why it was impossible. The
Red Governor of the town spoke of the British Government “shooting down
British workmen”—an atrocity of which, we said, we had never heard—and
the general Bolshevik view seemed to be that since open war was raging
in England, as it was raging everywhere else throughout the world, from
China to Peru, between the Capitalists and the Proletariat, we could not
be allowed to return home unless we gave satisfactory assurances that
we were going back to take the side of the Proletariat in that great
struggle. It would be an act of treachery towards the British working
classes, now on the very point of sweeping away an effete Parliamentary
system, to let loose on them at such a crisis in their fortunes paid
assassins like us, hirelings of capitalism. And the only assurance that
could be considered satisfactory would be our joining the Communist party.
It will be seen, by the way, that the Bolsheviks are very ably,
elaborately, and artistically misinformed about the state of things in
the outer world. The marvellous system, by means of which this is done, I
shall describe later.
The Red Governor to whom I have alluded above was a tall, spare Russian,
with a straggling beard and the thin face of a fanatic. He had been
a chemist in Minusinsk, was a man of some education, and evidently
believed every word he said. Captain Horrocks and I, after a somewhat
stormy interview with him, looked at each other with amazement, for we
realized that we were dealing with a state of things of which we had had
no previous conception. Up to that point in the history of the world,
when one nation fought against another, each was composed of an amalgam
of classes which held firmly together. Now the Bolsheviks maintained that
they were fighting, not only for one class in their own country, but also
for the same class in every other country. They do not admit, however,
that their action is unprecedented, for they say that the kings and
aristocrats of Europe fought in the same way for their class at the time
of the first French Revolution, and they maintain that if the working
men of different countries hold together as loyally and as long as the
kings did on that occasion, their ultimate success is certain. They even
had the audacity to maintain that England is even now helping on this
movement for the division of the world into two classes, and that if
Moscow takes foreign Communists to its bosom, Mayfair lavishes the same
tokens of affection on Russian imperialists.
Mixed with all this idealism, however, were sundry less lofty motives.
Several of the Bolshevik leaders said: “We must keep you as hostages. We
may want to exchange you for Russian Communists detained in England.” As
a matter of fact, our detention was, from the Bolshevik point of view,
a great mistake. If allowed to go free immediately after our capture we
should have left under a favourable impression, but we were kept till we
had seen what Bolshevism really is, and till we had all come to hate it.