MY LIFE IN MOSCOW
I do not propose to describe in detail my life in Moscow, as the reader
will probably be more interested in hearing what I saw there.
At first I lived in the railway carriage in which I had come, and I found
that other people were living there also. On these people I managed to
“sponge,” more or less successfully, but for some weeks I could not get
anything to eat or drink till 6 o’clock in the evening. What this means
I leave the reader to imagine. One can live without food for a long time
if one lives quietly in a warm room and drinks plenty of water, but I
walked a great deal about Moscow in cold weather and with the streets
knee-deep in snow and slush. Later on, when the snow melted, great pools
of water made some of the principal thoroughfares almost impassable. In
some places there were stepping-stones, or one could creep along close by
the sides of the houses where there was a broken margin of dry land about
an inch wide; and it was strange to see long queues of people waiting at
such places till they could negotiate these dangerous crossings slowly
and in single file. As my one pair of boots was worn out, I soon began to
suffer from “trench foot,” which I had never known when in the trenches.
My hair grew long, I ceased to shave, I could not even wash every day, I
was only able to clean my boots once during the course of a month; what
wonder, then, that when I made myself known to Mr. North he shook his
head very, very dubiously? He gave me money, however, and with this I was
able to buy some food. For food could be had, though at very high prices.
At several places near the Kremlin, women sold a sort of rough porridge
for one hundred roubles a cup—equivalent to £10 in the old currency—and
I used to stand in the street amid a crowd of famished derelicts
who looked almost as disreputable as myself, eating out of a wooden
porringer, with the aid of a wooden spoon this “grateful and comforting”
food. The porridge was kept in a large wooden bucket like what cattle
are fed out of; and, being carefully covered, it was always warm, though
there was very little nourishment in it.
Tea made out of hot water and dried carrot scrapings was sold in many
shops, and vegetable soup of a very poor quality could also be got.
Workmen and their families were better off than I was, for their tickets
entitled them to soup and black bread at the Soviet eating-houses which,
being without documents of any kind, I could not enter. Nor could I buy
bread in the Government bread stores, nor, in fact, anything at all, for
I had no documents, not even a permit to live in Moscow, and was in fact
an outlaw. Never in my life had I repeated with more fervour the petition
in the Lord’s Prayer wherein we ask for “our daily bread.” The damp black
bread which I managed occasionally to obtain was wholly insufficient to
stay the cravings of hunger.
This system of food control places unprecedented power in the hands
of the Government and makes all strangers visiting Russia absolutely
dependent on the Soviet. There are no hotels save governmental ones; and
private families cannot receive guests, as they have no food for them. I
cannot imagine how such an arrangement can ever work if intercourse is
resumed between Soviet Russia and the outer world. Ambassadors will be
dependent on the Bolshevik Government for food, unless they get all their
supplies from abroad, and foreign business-men, tourists, and newspaper
correspondents will be in the same position.
I talked to all sorts of people, but found everybody intensely fatigued,
suspicious, and unwilling to discuss Bolshevism, the only exceptions
being the paid Bolshevik officials, male and female, who number in Moscow
230,000 persons against 100,000 working-men. Those who were not officials
only spoke of the lack of food and fuel, and the innumerable difficulties
of life; and they were all cowed and dispirited. I attended the French
church and found that I was the only male in the congregation, the
others being a few frightened women. I spoke to the _curé_, a cultured
and scholarly French gentleman with exquisite manners, but he could not
have been more guarded in his answers if I had been a Commissar. He
certainly looked on me, I think, as a Bolshevik _agent provocateur_.
The Polish churches, not only in Moscow but all over Siberia, were
crowded with men as well as women; and I always felt better, physically
and spiritually, after visiting them. They were calm asylums for the sane
in a country which had gone mad. They were altars where one could seek
sanctuary from the poisoned shafts of ideas more deadly than the spears
of the feudal age, from Kropotkin’s fascinating theories of licence,
as well as from Lenin’s stern dogmas of oligarchic tyranny. Even their
severe Latin architecture and the plain, veritable cross of Rome on
the steeple were a relief after the twisted Oriental style, barbaric
colours, and distorted crosses of the Byzantine churches; while, on the
other hand, the warm glow of life which animated them was an equally
welcome contrast to the chill of death which pervaded the “Reformed”
chapels. They were mute but eloquent symbols of a greater and an older
International than Lenin’s, of an Institution which had witnessed the
fall of the Roman Empire, which had survived the dreadful menace of
Islâm, which had seen many movements madder even than Bolshevism rise and
rage for a season, and then disappear so completely that the man in the
street to-day does not know their very names.
I had visited many of those churches during the course of my journey, and
had found them open when the others were shut, had found the Catholic
priest at his post when all the other ministers of religion were fleeing
or had fled. The Red torrent had thundered down on them, the leaping
spray had hidden them from sight, and the raging waters had cut them off,
but when I came back they still stood like the rock on which they are
built. I thought with awe of that tremendous prophecy which I had seen on
the dome of St. Peter’s: “The Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.”
There was an indescribable comfort and reassurance in seeing exactly
the same service as is to be seen in Ireland, Tyrol, Westminster, the
Vatican, France, Valparaiso, the Islands of the Outer Hebrides, and
every part of the _orbis terrarum_. _Semper eadem._ One heard in all
these different places exactly the same Latin words leading up to that
stupendous sentence pronounced at the Last Supper, and followed by those
simple, soldierly words of the Roman Captain which are engraven to the
end of time on the memory of man. Yet in each place the Church was no
exotic, hothouse plant, but a national growth with its roots in the
hearts of the people. Even in Russia the congregations were made up not
only of Poles but of Lithuanians, Ukrainians, White Russians, French,
Germans, and Austrians. Meeting once in Siberia a gentle young priest
who had remained behind to share the fortunes of his flock, and knowing
that Poles do not like to speak Russian when they can help it (though
he turned out to be a Lithuanian), I addressed him in the best Latin I
could muster, and I shall never forget how his eyes lit up when he heard
the sound of that stately tongue. Did it remind him of how Nero failed
yesterday as Lenin will fail to-morrow? Nor can I ever forget the Masses
I have heard on dark, frosty mornings in isolated Catholic churches far
in the heart of Red Russia, and how astonishingly the calm and dignity
of the noble service contrasted with the mad roar of revolution outside.
The church was dark, save where the altar candles made the silvery hair
of the priest shine like a nimbus and lit up the altar, evoking a picture
of the same Sacrifice being offered in a dimly lit Roman catacomb in
commemoration of Sebastian the Soldier or of Agnes the Virgin Martyr,
while a tyranny as bad as Lenin’s howled itself hoarse outside. To me
the Catholic priests whom I met represented European culture, Christian
civilization; and great indeed was the contrast between their scholarly
discourse and the mad babble of the Bolsheviks into which I had again to
plunge.
One Bolshevik journalist to whom I had an introduction I found occupying
a big, cold, untidy room in a vast house which had once been divided up
into flats inhabited by business people, but which was now in a state
of decay. The journalist was ill in bed the first time I called, his
room in incredible disorder, and his wife out making speeches; but on
my second visit he got up, made me some tea, and talked volubly for
hours. He was an enthusiastic poet with entirely new ideas about poetry.
Another friend whom I made was a Bolshevik functionary of what is called
the political department, who dabbled in a multitude of things. I once
heard him lecture in a theatre on an opera which was about to be produced
before workmen who had never been to an opera before in their lives, his
object being to make these workmen appreciate the music and the acting.
He also lectured on literature, organized theatricals in factories and
military barracks, taught _muzhiks_ to write, wrote himself in the
newspapers, and painted the whole front of a Bolshevik bookshop with mad
daubs of every possible colour. This latter achievement he described
as Futurism, but it seemed to me an attempt to epitomize on a surface
twenty feet square all the wildest camouflage colour-schemes devised for
merchant steamers during the war. The sturdy, old-fashioned house on
which this outrage was perpetrated looked as outlandish as a cow with one
horn painted black and the other sky-blue, the tail green, and the body
in irregular patches of half a dozen different colours. I expressed no
surprise, for, since my entry into Bolshevik Russia, I had quite lost the
capacity for wonder.
The restless and chaotic activities of this enthusiast are typical.
All the intellectuals among the Russian Bolsheviks are in a state of
such indescribable ferment and agitation that it is sometimes difficult
to believe they are sane. They take nothing for granted. The wisdom
of the ages is nothing to them. Everything that is old repels them;
every fad and every novelty appeals to them. If it were not for their
lack of material they would be conducting the wildest experiments with
regard to dress, cookery, clocks, town-planning, music, furniture,
architecture, street traffic, and hundreds of other things. As it is,
they are trying to combine painting and music, they are teaching what
they call Marxian arithmetic, art, and metaphysics. They are so bursting
with revolutionary ideas on everything that no book ever printed would
be big enough to contain half the nonsense they told me. They seem to
imagine that in a few years they can lift up the entire population to
such an intellectual height that everybody will enjoy and appreciate
Chopin, Rodin, Shakespeare, Æschylus, and all the great artists of the
world. They seriously maintain that by three years’ desperately hard
work any man of average ability can reach the intellectual standard of
a finished University student. “In his ten years of college life,” they
say, “a student does not spend more than six months in actual study. Why
should not a workman make the same progress by crowding those six months
of actual study into three years at a Government University, where he
will be free from all care?” And they put their theory into practice by
filling the Universities with elderly men who merely impede the progress
of the younger and more talented students, just as they impede the
progress of dramatic art by filling the theatres with people who can
never attain that high standard of taste which is confined to the small
aristocracy of intellect.
All this is only part of the great camouflage and Propaganda of the
Reds, which is based on false principles and, on the whole, profoundly
insincere. They profess to think that in education the acquisition of
facts and the formation of taste and judgment is everything, and the
slow building up of character is nothing, a theory which is confuted by
all human experience. They told me of a simple Ural workman who learned
to read only two years ago and is now head of the Ministry of Mines;
also of Budenny, their famous cavalry leader, who was a corporal under
the old _régime_ and would be a corporal still were it not for the
Revolution. These two, I replied, are naturally able men who would rise
to the top under any liberal system of Government. Under the obsolete
and inefficient tyranny of the Tsar they would have little chance; under
a _bourgeois_ republic presided over by Miliukov or Lvov, they and men
like them from other political parties would have quite as good a chance.
The things most admired in Bolshevism are, indeed, borrowed without
acknowledgment from Tsarist times and from the Republic of Prince Lvov,
and, two years ago, the pre-Bolshevik republican Government broke down
all those barriers of class privilege for the destruction of which the
Reds take all the credit. Lenin has, in fact, stolen the thunder of the
Revolution, but this must not lead us to describe that particular thunder
as the voice of the Devil when it is really the voice of the great
Russian people. It was this mistake which ruined Kolchak and Denikin.
I have several times pointed out that all the Red propagandists work
extremely hard. I have attended Red dinners where some guests had not
time even to sit down or take off their overcoats or fur caps while
they wolfed their food from plates, but I cannot say that I admire this
feverish energy, especially in view of the ends to which it is being
directed. Despite the self-sacrifice and the idealism of the Bolsheviks,
those ends are thoroughly utilitarian. Even their literature, such as
it is, strikes me as wholly utilitarian. The great street for bookshops
was formerly the Kuznetsky Most, but all these shops are now closed
and guarded by soldiers, all books, without exception, being national
property. As there has been no time to sort out these books and place
such of them as the Soviet approves of in the many popular libraries
that have been opened, they litter the floors of these deserted shops in
a disorderly pile which sometimes rises to the height of a man; and the
circulation of books is now controlled as carefully as the circulation
of dangerous drugs. The Caliph who burned all the books in the great
library of Alexandria said: “If they approve of the Koran, they are
unnecessary and ought to be destroyed; if they oppose the Koran, they
ought also to be destroyed.” The Communists do not go quite so far as
that, but the universal application of their principles with regard
to literature would be almost as great a blow to civilization as was
the triumph of the Mohammedans in the territories of Byzantium. They
encourage the study of classical literature, but on all the distinctively
religious literature produced by Christianity they wage merciless war.
They have seized not only the great ecclesiastical libraries, but even
the humblest collections of religious books in country rectories and
schools, and, so long as the Bolsheviks rule in Russia, these books
will never be reprinted. They have no use for the Bible, Dante, Milton,
or Bunyan; and their hostility towards modern writers who treat social
problems from a Christian point of view is very marked. Practically the
only books which they print are Marxian or non-Christian books. So far
they have only had time to publish a small number of pamphlets treating
of the history of Russia, Germany, France, England, and Ireland from
the Socialist standpoint, but it is their fixed intention to deal as
soon as possible with all human history from this standpoint. The result
has, up to the present, been disappointing, for their brochures are
very inaccurate and one-sided, but if they remain in power long enough,
their literary output will certainly have the merit of originality. The
idea, for example, of writing the history of England entirely from the
Socialist working-man’s point of view is distinctly new, but the writer
will be terribly handicapped by the dullness of his subject. He will
have to confine himself to Jack Cade, the Chartists, and the modern
Labour movement, and to draw most of the material for the early part
of his work from very hostile sources. Of modern material he will have
plenty, but for the general reader it will be insufferably tedious, and
can never be fashioned into a work of art. It will have the aridity of
the driest Blue book on the remuneration of factory workers; it will
be filled with technical terms unknown to the general public and with
Socialist jargon; it will have to be anti-national, so that, for example,
the economic changes which took place here in the fourteenth century
must be considered in the light of similar European phenomena; it will
have to oppose, depreciate, or ignore all the pomp and circumstance of
war, kingship, ecclesiastical life, and feudalism. Such literature will
become the literature of specialists to the same extent as advanced
technical treatises on surgery, engineering, weaving, hydrodynamics,
or ichthyology, and “the man in the street”—if Socialism allows him to
exist—will take no interest in it. Before the Reformation there existed
a distinct Catholic tone in English literature; after the Reformation
there was an equally distinct anti-Catholic tone; and in modern times
there has been a sceptical tone. But at all these periods the social
system has been generally accepted. Bolshevism will, however, make an
entirely new departure, for it will be fanatically anti-Christian,
pro-Communist, anti-National, and materialist. It will tend to ignore
all history previous to October, 1917, when the Bolshevik Government was
established; hence its present craze for publishing all the forecasts of
a future Utopia that have been made from the time of Sir Thomas More to
the time of Mr. H. G. Wells. Communist literature at the present moment
is consequently a strange mixture of fierce propaganda, wild theory, and
heavy slabs of materialistic facts, though, indeed, these so-called facts
are falser and more misleading than either the Propaganda or the theories.
The only outlet for imagination lies in descriptions of the future, but
even these descriptions must make the future socialistic; and, like the
majority of those writers who have tried to lift the veil which conceals
the future, the Bolshevik prophets have failed lamentably. Practically
all human literature deals with the present and the past; when literature
tries to describe the future, it at once ceases to be human and ceases
to be literature; and all the pictures which the Bolsheviks have so far
given us of a future world constructed on the design of Lenin are so
depressing that nobody would like to read about such a world, much less
to live in it.
In literature, however, as in everything else, the Communists
are inconsistent, for nearly all the plays and operas which they
perform belong to what they would call the old-world era, and deal
sympathetically with princes, pilgrims, monks, soldiers, saints, nuns,
faithful retainers, and other classes which the Reds have sworn to sweep
out of existence. Sometimes, in Bolshevik opera-houses, while watching
the disguised Duke making love to the woodman’s daughter, I wondered
how the Communist audience could, if they were sincere, stand all this
reactionary propaganda. They say that they will, in course of time,
evolve a Communist drama of their own; but can they? Their theories are
so opposed to human nature that they will never be able to weave them
into drama or into any form of great literature. The elimination from
life of patriotism and the supernatural leaves a very shrivelled and
unsightly skeleton behind.
Before leaving the subject of Bolshevik literature I should like to
say that, in some respects, the clean sweep which the Bolsheviks have
made of books and documents seems to be a wholesome and necessary
clearance similar to that made by nature herself in expelling noxious
matter from the human system. A mass of sycophantic and useless books
had been published under the old _régime_ in Russia about Tsars and
Grand Dukes, while the accumulation of bureaucratic, military, and
“religious” propaganda was enough to stifle the energies of any race.
Some of us in this country can sympathize with the organizers of this
holocaust, when we contemplate our own goodly collection of interminable
lucubrations and insincere memoirs of tenth-rate politicians, preachers,
and administrators, not to speak of our endless volumes by “Persons of
Quality,” old Club gossips and hangers-on of the Court, the aristocracy
and the bureaucracy. But by far the greatest quantity of “literary”
rubbish has, of course, been produced by the people themselves, or
manufactured wholesale for them by writers and publishers who believe in
catering to the popular taste.
The Bolsheviks have not gone as far, in this work of destruction, as has
been represented. They have not, for instance, thrown Chekhov or any of
the other Russian classics into the bonfire; and, in fact, none of the
authors whom I saw waiting their turn at the incinerator brought a tear
to my eye. Nor had I much sympathy with most of the defunct newspapers,
despite the gigantic circulation which some of them had attained before
the Revolution. They emphasized the crimes and the trivialities of life
to such an extent that their continuance not only involved a prodigious
waste of good paper, but would have been a positive evil to the
community. All sensational newspapers of the “’orrible murder” type are
now gone, not only because the Reds want to conceal their own wholesale
massacres, but also because they are determined to give the public what
they consider edifying and instructive reading-matter.
To pass from the newspapers to the official documents of the old
_régime_, the accumulation of the latter in Petrograd and Moscow is so
great that it would take a Gibbon all his life to deal with it; and it is
on the whole of such little historical value that even the most reverent
archæologist cannot help seeing that there is something to be said,
after all, for the incendiary and the iconoclast. When one considers the
length of time during which the bureaucracy have ruled Russia, and the
voluminous reports which they have always been in the habit of writing,
and the large proportion of those reports which are perfectly useless,
one can realize the clog of printed paper which finally contributed
towards bringing the Governmental machine to a standstill. The papers
relating to decorations alone constitute a formidable collection, and not
a single one of them is of the slightest value to the nation.
Such a deluge of decorations rained down during the war (but not always
with the impartiality of that rain which falleth both on the just and
the unjust) that many officers had no room for any more Orders on the
breasts of their tunics, and would, had they worn all their decorations
at once, have presented simply a ludicrous appearance. It was a veritable
_reductio ad absurdum_ of a system, and the congestion in this direction,
typical by the way of the congestion in every other direction, was so
great as to indicate that the bursting-point had been reached. On one
of his visits to the Front the Tsar brought with him a bag containing
5,000 George’s crosses, and one of the recipients, who was not a
soldier, told me that he had got his for looking over the parapet of a
fire-trench! When, after spending a year among Kolchak’s over-decorated
staff officers, I suddenly found myself among Red officers without any
decorations at all, I felt that the revolutionary explosion had, after
all, something to recommend it.
Even the papers relating to the Imperial Family and the Foreign Office
are so numerous and of such little interest that most of them will
probably be destroyed. Mr. Florinsky, one of the old diplomatists who has
returned to Moscow, has been entrusted with the task of selecting such
of those papers as will serve to discredit the Romanovs and the foreign
royalties with whom they corresponded, but it is doubtful if anything
sensational will be discovered, for the Romanov letters simply disclose
in the writers mediocre minds occupied in great times by trivialities.
In 1905 a clever revolutionary published a volume containing the public
speeches of Nicholas the Second—only that and nothing more—but those
speeches were so unutterably vapid, that the book was at once suppressed
as a seditious publication. The letters of the Tsar and Tsarina will, if
published, convey a similar impression. I might remark, parenthetically,
that it would not be a bad idea for other Governments to make a
periodical bonfire of their _paperasses_ after a committee of experts had
summarized all the useful information which they contain, for if this
is not done the “future historian,” who is so often spoken of, will be
smothered in a superabundance of material.
Closely associated with the destruction of the independent newspaper
Press is the annihilation of all private advertising. The railway
stations and the public hoardings are no longer covered with the
mendacious posters of soap-makers and patent-medicine quacks, the
landscape is not disfigured by the blatant praise of foods which cause
dyspepsia and pills which cure it, and the newspapers contain not a
single advertisement.
In like manner the theatres are made to confine themselves to the
production of masterpieces of the past or artistic and promising work of
the present. I was surprised to see the streets of Omsk and Ekaterinburg
placarded with announcements regarding the production of works by
Molière, Æschylus, Racine, and Shakespeare; and one of the Bolshevik
officials in Moscow commissioned me to send him a number of Ben Jonson’s
plays which had not yet been produced in Russia. Shakespeare is popular,
and Shakespearean plays which have not been produced in England since the
time of Queen Elizabeth are now to be seen on the stage in Moscow. Nearly
all the beautiful Russian operas, excepting, of course, “A Life for the
Tsar,” are still produced by good companies and before crowded houses.
It is necessarily difficult to get the actors to speak frankly about
their present audiences, but I have been told by one of them that they
are dissatisfied, that they feel that their shaggy patrons do not always
understand or appreciate them as the old patrons did. Having seen both
the old playgoer and the new, I am convinced that this is true. Formerly
there was the nicest appreciation on the part of the public; at present
there is a noticeable lack of understanding. Some provincial delegates
with whom I sat during the progress of a delicate and artistic operetta
reminded me of cows looking at a railway train. The natural effect is a
general lowering of the artistic standard, save in plays of common life
or low life like those of Gorky and Gogol, when the audience is keenly
appreciative and the actors as good as ever they were.
All these sweeping changes are based on the Bolshevik theory that the
Russian public is a child which must be educated by a handful of talented
men; and I must admit that Lunacharsky, their Commissar of Fine Arts, is
a very cultured and artistic official of liberal and unerring taste. He
holds that if left to themselves, the public would tend towards circuses,
buffoonery, sloppy sentimentality, and bad farce; that their taste must
therefore be cultivated and directed in the right direction by men like
himself; and that a few years of this wise dictatorship will make them
prefer “Hamlet” to the “Girl who took the Wrong Turning.” Part of this
process of artistic education consists in the elimination of bad plays,
which are simply not allowed to appear.
Lunacharsky believes that he can by this procedure lift up the whole
Russian people in course of time to the artistic level of the small
select minority which guides dramatic taste in every country and has
always done so. But all he can do is to substitute one critical minority
for another, though I admit that he will greatly raise the artistic
standard of the masses, as there is at the present moment a positive
craze for dramatic excellence and the study of dramatic masterpieces all
over Russia, and even in the ranks of the Red Army. The dramatic and
musical performances given by the Russian soldiers are so much superior
to those generally given by our own troops, that one wonders sometimes
if, in this particular matter, the Bolsheviks are not right and we
wrong. Is there not something slightly unsound in our theory about
giving the public what it wants, a theory which places the interests
of literature, music, and the drama in the hands of speculators who
only want to make money? Is the modern music-hall an advance on the
Shakespearean theatre?
Undoubtedly the Bolsheviks are wrong, however, in making use of
literature and art, as they are doing, in order to teach Communism. If
they have swept away a frivolous Press they have replaced it by a Press
which is worse than frivolous. If they have prohibited the production
of stupid films in the cinemas, they have produced films preaching an
intense class hatred which will make Russia a centre of infection for
the next half-century. One film produced in Ekaterinburg glorified the
assassin of the Grand Duke Sergius, who was represented as weltering
in his blood, while the murderer, who was exhibited as a model for all
good boys to imitate, stood by with another bomb which he was preparing
to throw. If they have burned the innumerable and tiresome records of
the old bureaucracy, they are replacing those records very fast by the
wholesale manufacture of Socialist records which are far worse in every
way, and which will be likewise consigned to the flames by whatever
Government succeeds the Reds. If they have made a clean sweep of
Byzantine theology, they have replaced it by a Marxian literature which
will have an equally petrifying effect on the Russian mind.