RUSSIA
IN THE SHADOWS
H. G. WELLS
[Illustration:
STREET SCENERY IN PETERSBURG:
SITE OF A DEMOLISHED WOODEN HOUSE
_Frontispiece_.
]
RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS
BY
H. G. WELLS
AUTHOR OF “THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY,” “MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH,”
ETC., ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
NEW [Illustration] YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE 15
II DRIFT AND SALVAGE 41
III THE QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM 71
IV THE CREATIVE EFFORT IN RUSSIA 105
V THE PETERSBURG SOVIET: A LEGISLATIVE MASS MEETING 135
VI THE DREAMER IN THE KREMLIN 145
VII THE ENVOY 171
ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE
I STREET SCENERY IN PETERSBURG: SITE OF DEMOLISHED
WOODEN HOUSE _Frontispiece_
PAGE
II STREET SCENERY IN PETERSBURG 24
MR. WELLS DISCOVERS A STREET UNDER REPAIR 24
III A PETERSBURG STREET CAR EN ROUTE 33
MESSRS. LENIN AND WELLS IN CONVERSATION 33
IV GORKY IN THE GREAT DUMP OF ART AND VIRTUOSITY IN
PETERSBURG 56
V THE STATUE OF MARX OUTSIDE THE SMOLNY INSTITUTE
(HEADQUARTERS OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY) 73
VI THE BAKU CONFERENCE SWEARS UNDYING HOSTILITY TO
CAPITALISM AND BRITISH IMPERIALISM: ZENOVIEFF,
RADEK AND BELA KUN 92
VII THE BAKU CONFERENCE SWEARS UNDYING HOSTILITY TO
CAPITALISM AND BRITISH IMPERIALISM: THE BODY OF
THE HALL 93
VIII PROLETARIANS OF ASIA À LA BAKU 112
IX GUESTS AT THE HOME OF REST FOR WORKMEN ON THE
KAMENNI OSTROF 129
X THE PETERSBURG SOVIET IN SESSION: LENIN AT THE
ROSTRUM, ZENOVIEFF AND THE PRESIDENT, OFFICIALS
AND OFFICIAL VISITORS 148
XI LENIN, GORKY, ZORIN, ZENOVIEFF AND RADEK 165
RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS
I
PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE
In January 1914 I visited Petersburg and Moscow for a couple of weeks;
in September 1920 I was asked to repeat this visit by Mr. Kameney, of
the Russian Trade Delegation in London. I snatched at this suggestion,
and went to Russia at the end of September with my son, who speaks a
little Russian. We spent a fortnight and a day in Russia, passing most
of our time in Petersburg, where we went about freely by ourselves, and
were shown nearly everything we asked to see. We visited Moscow, and I
had a long conversation with Mr. Lenin, which I shall relate. In
Petersburg I did not stay at the Hotel International, to which foreign
visitors are usually sent, but with my old friend, Maxim Gorky. The
guide and interpreter assigned to assist us was a lady I had met in
Russia in 1914, the niece of a former Russian Ambassador to London. She
was educated at Newnham, she has been imprisoned five times by the
Bolshevist Government, she is not allowed to leave Petersburg because of
an attempt to cross the frontier to her children in Esthonia, and she
was, therefore, the last person likely to lend herself to any attempt to
hoodwink me. I mention this because on every hand at home and in Russia
I had been told that the most elaborate camouflage of realities would go
on, and that I should be kept in blinkers throughout my visit.
As a matter of fact, the harsh and terrible realities of the situation
in Russia cannot be camouflaged. In the case of special delegations,
perhaps, a certain distracting tumult of receptions, bands, and speeches
may be possible, and may be attempted. But it is hardly possible to
dress up two large cities for the benefit of two stray visitors,
wandering observantly often in different directions. Naturally, when one
demands to see a school or a prison one is not shown the worst. Any
country would in the circumstances show the best it had, and Soviet
Russia is no exception. One can allow for that.
Our dominant impression of things Russian is an impression of a vast
irreparable breakdown. The great monarchy that was here in 1914 and the
administrative, social, financial, and commercial systems connected with
it have, under the strains of six years of incessant war, fallen down
and smashed utterly. Never in all history has there been so great a
_débâcle_ before. The fact of the Revolution is, to our minds,
altogether dwarfed by the fact of this downfall. By its own inherent
rottenness and by the thrusts and strains of aggressive imperialism the
Russian part of the old civilised world that existed before 1914 fell,
and is now gone. The peasant, who was the base of the old pyramid,
remains upon the land, living very much as he has always lived.
Everything else is broken down, or is breaking down. Amid this vast
disorganisation an emergency Government, supported by a disciplined
party of perhaps 150,000 adherents—the Communist Party—has taken
control. It has—at the price of much shooting—suppressed brigandage,
established a sort of order and security in the exhausted towns, and set
up a crude rationing system.
It is, I would say at once, the only possible Government in Russia at
the present time. It is the only idea, it supplies the only solidarity,
left in Russia. But it is a secondary fact. The dominant fact for the
Western reader, the threatening and disconcerting fact, is that a social
and economic system very like our own and intimately connected with our
own has crashed.
Nowhere in all Russia is the fact of that crash so completely evident as
it is in Petersburg. Petersburg was the artificial creation of Peter the
Great; his bronze statue in the little garden near the Admiralty still
prances amid the ebbing life of the city. Its palaces are still and
empty, or strangely refurnished with the typewriters and tables and
plank partitions of a new Administration which is engaged chiefly in a
strenuous struggle against famine and the foreign invader. Its streets
were streets of busy shops. In 1914 I loafed agreeably in the Petersburg
streets—buying little articles and watching the abundant traffic. All
these shops have ceased. There are perhaps half a dozen shops still open
in Petersburg. There is a Government crockery shop where I bought a
plate or so as a souvenir, for seven or eight hundred roubles each, and
there are a few flower shops. It is a wonderful fact, I think, that in
this city, in which most of the shrinking population is already nearly
starving, and hardly any one possesses a second suit of clothes or more
than a single change of worn and patched linen, flowers can be and are
still bought and sold. For five thousand roubles, which is about six and
eightpence at the current rate of exchange, one can get a very pleasing
bunch of big chrysanthemums.
I do not know if the words “all the shops have ceased” convey any
picture to the Western reader of what a street looks like in Russia. It
is not like Bond Street or Piccadilly on a Sunday, with the blinds
neatly drawn down in a decorous sleep, and ready to wake up and begin
again on Monday. The shops have an utterly wretched and abandoned look;
paint is peeling off, windows are cracked, some are broken and boarded
up, some still display a few flyblown relics of stock in the window,
some have their windows covered with notices; the windows are growing
dim, the fixtures have gathered two years’ dust. They are dead shops.
They will never open again.
All the great bazaar-like markets are closed, too, in Petersburg now, in
the desperate struggle to keep a public control of necessities and
prevent the profiteer driving up the last vestiges of food to incredible
prices. And this cessation of shops makes walking about the streets seem
a silly sort of thing to do. Nobody “walks about” any more. One realises
that a modern city is really nothing but long alleys of shops and
restaurants and the like. Shut them up, and the meaning of a street has
disappeared. People hurry past—a thin traffic compared with my memories
of 1914. The electric street cars are still running and busy—until six
o’clock. They are the only means of locomotion for ordinary people
remaining in town—the last legacy of capitalist enterprise. They became
free while we were in Petersburg. Previously there had been a charge of
two or three roubles—the hundredth part of the price of an egg. Freeing
them made little difference in their extreme congestion during the
home-going hours. Every one scrambles on the tramcar. If there is no
room inside you cluster outside. In the busy hours festoons of people
hang outside by any handhold; people are frequently pushed off, and
accidents are frequent. We saw a crowd collected round a child cut in
half by a tramcar, and two people in the little circle in which we moved
in Petersburg had broken their legs in tramway accidents.
The roads along which these tramcars run are in a frightful condition.
They have not been repaired for three or four years; they are full of
holes like shell-holes, often two or three feet deep. Frost has eaten
out great cavities, drains have collapsed, and people have torn up the
wood pavement for fires. Only once did we see any attempt to repair the
streets in Petrograd. In a side street some mysterious agency had
collected a load of wood blocks and two barrels of tar. Most of our
longer journeys about the town were done in official motor-cars—left
over from the former times. A drive is an affair of tremendous swerves
and concussions. These surviving motor-cars are running now on kerosene.
They disengage clouds of pale blue smoke, and start up with a noise like
a machine-gun battle. Every wooden house was demolished for firing last
winter, and such masonry as there was in those houses remains in ruinous
gaps, between the houses of stone.
[Illustration:
STREET SCENERY IN PETERSBURG.
]
[Illustration:
MR. WELLS DISCOVERS A STREET UNDER REPAIR.
]
Every one is shabby; every one seems to be carrying bundles in both
Petersburg and Moscow. To walk into some side street in the twilight and
see nothing but ill-clad figures, all hurrying, all carrying loads,
gives one an impression as though the entire population was setting out
in flight. That impression is not altogether misleading. The Bolshevik
statistics I have seen are perfectly frank and honest in the matter. The
population of Petersburg has fallen from 1,200,000 to a little over
700,000, and it is still falling. Many of the people have returned to
peasant life in the country, many have gone abroad, but hardship has
taken an enormous toll of this city. The death-rate in Petersburg is
over 81 per 1,000; formerly it was high among European cities at 22. The
birth-rate of the underfed and profoundly depressed population is about
15. It was formerly about 30.
These bundles that every one carries are partly the rations of food that
are doled out by the Soviet organisation, partly they are the material
and results of illicit trade. The Russian population has always been a
trading and bargaining population. Even in 1914 there were but few shops
in Petersburg whose prices were really fixed prices. Tariffs were
abominated; in Moscow taking a droshky meant always a haggle, ten
kopecks at a time. Confronted with a shortage of nearly every commodity,
a shortage caused partly by the war strain,—for Russia has been at war
continuously now for six years—partly by the general collapse of social
organisation, and partly by the blockade, and with a currency in
complete disorder, the only possible way to save the towns from a chaos
of cornering, profiteering, starvation, and at last a mere savage fight
for the remnants of food and common necessities, was some sort of
collective control and rationing.
The Soviet Government rations on principle, but any Government in Russia
now would have to ration. If the war in the West had lasted up to the
present time London would be rationing too—food, clothing, and housing.
But in Russia this has to be done on a basis of uncontrollable peasant
production, with a population temperamentally indisciplined and
self-indulgent. The struggle is necessarily a bitter one. The detected
profiteer, the genuine profiteer who profiteers on any considerable
scale, gets short shrift; he is shot. Quite ordinary trading may be
punished severely. All trading is called “speculation,” and is now
illegal. But a queer street-corner trading in food and so forth is
winked at in Petersburg, and quite openly practised in Moscow, because
only by permitting this can the peasants be induced to bring in food.
There is also much underground trade between buyers and sellers who know
each other. Every one who can supplements his public rations in this
way. And every railway station at which one stops is an open market. We
would find a crowd of peasants at every stopping-place waiting to sell
milk, eggs, apples, bread, and so forth. The passengers clamber down and
accumulate bundles. An egg or an apple costs 300 roubles.
The peasants look well fed, and I doubt if they are very much worse off
than they were in 1914. Probably they are better off. They have more
land than they had, and they have got rid of their landlords. They will
not help in any attempt to overthrow the Soviet Government because they
are convinced that while it endures this state of things will continue.
This does not prevent their resisting whenever they can the attempts of
the Red Guards to collect food at regulation prices. Insufficient forces
of Red Guards may be attacked and massacred. Such incidents are
magnified in the London Press as peasant insurrections against the
Bolsheviks. They are nothing of the sort. It is just the peasants making
themselves comfortable under the existing _régime_.
But every class above the peasants—including the official class—is now
in a state of extreme privation. The credit and industrial system that
produced commodities has broken down, and so far the attempts to replace
it by some other form of production have been ineffective. So that
nowhere are there any new things. About the only things that seem to be
fairly well supplied are tea, cigarettes, and matches. Matches are more
abundant in Russia than they were in England in 1917, and the Soviet
State match is quite a good match. But such things as collars, ties,
shoelaces, sheets and blankets, spoons and forks, all the haberdashery
and crockery of life, are unattainable. There is no replacing a broken
cup or glass except by a sedulous search and illegal trading. From
Petersburg to Moscow we were given a sleeping car de luxe, but there
were no water-bottles, glasses, or, indeed, any loose fittings. They
have all gone. Most of the men one meets strike one at first as being
carelessly shaven, and at first we were inclined to regard that as a
sign of a general apathy, but we understood better how things were when
a friend mentioned to my son quite casually that he had been using one
safety razor blade for nearly a year.
Drugs and any medicines are equally unattainable. There is nothing to
take for a cold or a headache; no packing off to bed with a hot-water
bottle. Small ailments develop very easily therefore into serious
trouble. Nearly everybody we met struck us as being uncomfortable and a
little out of health. A buoyant, healthy person is very rare in this
atmosphere of discomforts and petty deficiencies.
If any one falls into a real illness the outlook is grim. My son paid a
visit to the big Obuchovskaya Hospital, and he tells me things were very
miserable there indeed. There was an appalling lack of every sort of
material, and half the beds were not in use through the sheer
impossibility of dealing with more patients if they came in.
Strengthening and stimulating food is out of the question unless the
patient’s family can by some miracle procure it outside and send it in.
Operations are performed only on one day in the week, Dr. Federoff told
me, when the necessary preparations can be made. On other days they are
impossible, and the patient must wait.
Hardly any one in Petersburg has much more than a change of raiment, and
in a great city in which there remains no means of communication but a
few overcrowded tramcars,[1] old, leaky, and ill-fitting boots are the
only footwear. At times one sees astonishing makeshifts by way of
costume. The master of a school to which we paid a surprise visit struck
me as unusually dapper. He was wearing a dinner suit with a blue serge
waistcoat. Several of the distinguished scientific and literary men I
met had no collars and wore neck-wraps. Gorky possesses only the one
suit of clothes he wears.
Footnote 1:
I saw one passenger steamboat on the Neva crowded with passengers.
Usually the river was quite deserted except for a rare Government tug
or a solitary boatman picking up drift timber.
At a gathering of literary people in Petersburg, Mr. Amphiteatroff, the
well-known writer, addressed a long and bitter speech to me. He suffered
from the usual delusion that I was blind and stupid and being
hoodwinked. He was for taking off the respectable-looking coats of all
the company present in order that I might see for myself the rags and
tatters and pitiful expedients beneath. It was a painful and, so far as
I was concerned, an unnecessary speech, but I quote it here to emphasise
this effect of general destitution. And this underclad town population
in this dismantled and ruinous city is, in spite of all the furtive
trading that goes on, appallingly underfed. With the best will in the
world the Soviet Government is unable to produce a sufficient ration to
sustain a healthy life. We went to a district kitchen and saw the normal
food distribution going on. The place seemed to us fairly clean and
fairly well run, but that does not compensate for a lack of material.
The lowest grade ration consisted of a basinful of thin skilly and about
the same quantity of stewed apple compote. People have bread cards and
wait in queues for bread, but for three days the Petersburg bakeries
stopped for lack of flour. The bread varies greatly in quality; some was
good coarse brown bread, and some I found damp, clay-like, and
uneatable.
[Illustration:
A PETERSBURG STREET CAR EN ROUTE.
]
[Illustration:
MESSRS. LENIN AND WELLS IN CONVERSATION.
]
I do not know how far these disconnected details will suffice to give
the Western reader an idea of what ordinary life in Petersburg is at the
present time. Moscow, they say, is more overcrowded and shorter of fuel
than Petersburg, but superficially it looked far less grim than
Petersburg. We saw these things in October, in a particularly fine and
warm October. We saw them in sunshine in a setting of ruddy and golden
foliage. But one day there came a chill, and the yellow leaves went
whirling before a drive of snowflakes. It was the first breath of the
coming winter. Every one shivered and looked out of the double
windows—already sealed up—and talked to us of the previous year. Then
the glow of October returned.
It was still glorious sunshine when we left Russia. But when I think of
that coming winter my heart sinks. The Soviet Government in the commune
of the north has made extraordinary efforts to prepare for the time of
need. There are piles of wood along the quays, along the middle of the
main streets, in the courtyards, and everywhere where wood can be piled.
Last year many people had to live in rooms below the freezing point; the
water-pipes froze up, the sanitary machinery ceased to work. The reader
must imagine the consequences. People huddled together in the ill-lit
rooms, and kept themselves alive with tea and talk. Presently some
Russian novelist will tell us all that this has meant to heart and mind
in Russia. This year it may not be quite so bad as that. The food
situation also, they say, is better, but this I very much doubt. The
railways are now in an extreme state of deterioration; the wood-stoked
engines are wearing out; the bolts start and the rails shift as the
trains rumble along at a maximum of twenty-five miles per hour. Even
were the railways more efficient, Wrangel has got hold of the southern
food supplies. Soon the cold rain will be falling upon these 700,000
souls still left in Petersburg, and then the snow. The long nights
extend and the daylight dwindles.
And this spectacle of misery and ebbing energy is, you will say, the
result of Bolshevist rule! I do not believe it is. I will deal with the
Bolshevist Government when I have painted the general scenery of our
problem. But let me say here that this desolate Russia is not a system
that has been attacked and destroyed by something vigorous and
malignant. It is an unsound system that has worked itself out and fallen
down. It was not communism which built up these great, impossible
cities, but capitalism. It was not communism that plunged this huge,
creaking, bankrupt empire into six years of exhausting war. It was
European imperialism. Nor is it communism that has pestered this
suffering and perhaps dying Russia with a series of subsidised raids,
invasions, and insurrections, and inflicted upon it an atrocious
blockade. The vindictive French creditor, the journalistic British oaf,
are far more responsible for these deathbed miseries than any communist.
But to these questions I will return after I have given a little more
description of Russia as we saw it during our visit. It is only when one
has some conception of the physical and mental realities of the Russian
collapse that we can see and estimate the Bolshevist Government in its
proper proportions.
II
DRIFT AND SALVAGE
Among the things I wanted most to see amidst this tremendous spectacle
of social collapse in Russia was the work of my old friend Maxim Gorky.
I had heard of this from members of the returning labour delegation, and
what they told me had whetted my desire for a closer view of what was
going on. Mr. Bertrand Russell’s account of Gorky’s health had also made
me anxious on his own account; but I am happy to say that upon that
score my news is good. Gorky seems as strong and well to me now as he
was when I knew him first in 1906. And as a personality he has grown
immensely. Mr. Russell wrote that Gorky is dying and that perhaps
culture in Russia is dying too. Mr. Russell was, I think, betrayed by
the artistic temptation of a dark and purple concluding passage. He
found Gorky in bed and afflicted by a fit of coughing, and his
imagination made the most of it.
Gorky’s position in Russia is a quite extraordinary and personal one. He
is no more of a communist than I am, and I have heard him argue with the
utmost freedom in his flat against the extremist positions with such men
as Bokaiev, recently the head of the extraordinary commission in
Petersburg, and Zalutsky, one of the rising leaders of the Communist
party. It was a very reassuring display of free speech, for Gorky did
not so much argue as denounce—and this in front of two deeply interested
English enquirers.
But he has gained the confidence and respect of most of the Bolshevik
leaders, and he has become by a kind of necessity the semi-official
salvage man under the new _régime_. He is possessed by a passionate
sense of the value of Western science and culture, and by the necessity
of preserving the intellectual continuity of Russian life through these
dark years of famine and war and social stress, with the general
intellectual life of the world. He has found a steady supporter in
Lenin. His work illuminates the situation to an extraordinary degree
because it collects together a number of significant factors and makes
the essentially catastrophic nature of the Russian situation plain.
The Russian smash at the end of 1917 was certainly the completest that
has ever happened to any modern social organisation. After the failure
of the Kerensky Government to make peace and of the British naval
authorities to relieve the military situation in the Baltic, the
shattered Russian armies, weapons in hand, broke up and rolled back upon
Russia, a flood of peasant soldiers making for home, without hope,
without supplies, without discipline. That time of _débâcle_ was a time
of complete social disorder. It was a social dissolution. In many parts
of Russia there was a peasant revolt. There was chateau-burning often
accompanied by quite horrible atrocities. It was an explosion of the
very worst side of human nature in despair, and for most of the
abominations committed the Bolsheviks are about as responsible as the
Government of Australia. People would be held up and robbed even to
their shirts in open daylight in the streets of Petersburg and Moscow,
no one interfering. Murdered bodies lay disregarded in the gutters
sometimes for a whole day, with passengers on the footwalk going to and
fro. Armed men, often professing to be Red Guards, entered houses and
looted and murdered. The early months of 1918 saw a violent struggle of
the new Bolshevik Government not only with counter-revolutions but with
rollers and brigands of every description. It was not until the summer
of 1918, and after thousands of looters and plunderers had been shot,
that life began to be ordinarily safe again in the streets of the
Russian great towns. For a time Russia was not a civilisation, but a
torrent of lawless violence, with a weak central Government of
inexperienced rulers, fighting not only against unintelligent foreign
intervention but against the completest internal disorder. It is from
such chaotic conditions that Russia still struggles to emerge.
Art, literature, science, all the refinements and elaboration of life,
all that we mean by “civilisation,” were involved in this torrential
catastrophe. For a time the stablest thing in Russia culture was the
theatre. There stood the theatres, and nobody wanted to loot them or
destroy them; the artists were accustomed to meet and work in them and
went on meeting and working; the tradition of official subsidies held
good. So quite amazingly the Russian dramatic and operatic life kept on
through the extremest storms of violence, and keeps on to this day. In
Petersburg we found there were more than forty shows going on every
night; in Moscow we found very much the same state of affairs. We heard
Shalyapin, greatest of actors and singers, in _The Barber of Seville_
and in _Chovanchina_; the admirable orchestra was variously attired, but
the conductor still held out valiantly in swallow tails and a white tie;
we saw a performance of _Sadko_, we saw Monachof in _The Tzarevitch
Alexei_ and as Iago in _Othello_ (with Madame Gorky—Madame Andreievna—as
Desdemona). When one faced the stage, it was as if nothing had changed
in Russia; but when the curtain fell and one turned to the audience one
realised the revolution. There were now no brilliant uniforms, no
evening dress in boxes and stalls. The audience was a uniform mass of
people, the same sort of people everywhere, attentive, good-humoured,
well-behaved and shabby. Like the London Stage Society, one’s place in
the house is determined by ballot. And for the most part there is no
paying to go to the theatre. For one performance the tickets go, let us
say, to the professional unions, for another to the Red Army and their
families, for another to the school children, and so on. A certain
selling of tickets goes on, but it is not in the present scheme of
things.
I had heard Shalyapin in London, but I had not met him personally there.
We made his acquaintance this time in Petersburg, we dined with him and
saw something of his very jolly household. There are two stepchildren
almost grown up, and two little daughters, who speak a nice, stiff,
correct English, and the youngest of whom dances delightfully. Shalyapin
is certainly one of the most wonderful things in Russia at the present
time. He is the Artist, defiant and magnificent. Off the stage he has
much the same vitality and abounding humour that made an encounter with
Beerbohm Tree so delightful an experience. He refuses absolutely to sing
except for pay—200,000 roubles a performance, they say, which is nearly
£15—and when the markets get too tight, he insists upon payment in flour
or eggs or the like. What he demands he gets, for Shalyapin on strike
would leave too dismal a hole altogether in the theatrical world of
Petersburg. So it is that he maintains what is perhaps the last fairly
comfortable home in Russia. And Madame Shalyapin we found so unbroken by
the revolution that she asked us what people were wearing in London. The
last fashion papers she had seen—thanks to the blockade—dated from
somewhen early in 1918.
But the position of the theatre among the arts is peculiar. For the rest
of the arts, for literature generally and for the scientific worker, the
catastrophe of 1917–18 was overwhelming. There remained no one to buy
books or pictures, and the scientific worker found himself with a salary
of roubles that dwindled rapidly to less than the five-hundredth part of
their original value. The new crude social organisation, fighting
robbery, murder, and the wildest disorder, had no place for them; it had
forgotten them. For the scientific man at first the Soviet Government
had as little regard as the first French revolution, which had “no need
for chemists.” These classes of worker, vitally important to every
civilised system, were reduced, therefore, to a state of the utmost
privation and misery. It was to their assistance and salvation that
Gorky’s first efforts were directed. Thanks very largely to him and to
the more creative intelligences in the Bolshevik Government, there has
now been organised a group of salvage establishments, of which the best
and most fully developed is the House of Science in Petersburg, in the
ancient palace of the Archduchess Marie Pavlova. Here we saw the
headquarters of a special rationing system which provides as well as it
can for the needs of four thousand scientific workers and their
dependents—in all perhaps for ten thousand people. At this centre they
not only draw their food rations, but they can get baths and barber,
tailoring, cobbling and the like conveniences. There is even a small
stock of boots and clothing. There are bedrooms, and a sort of hospital
accommodation for cases of weakness and ill-health.
It was to me one of the strangest of my Russian experiences to go to
this institution and to meet there, as careworn and unprosperous-looking
figures, some of the great survivors of the Russian scientific world.
Here were such men as Oldenburg the orientalist, Karpinsky the
geologist, Pavloff the Nobel prizeman, Radloff, Bielopolsky, and the
like, names of world-wide celebrity. They asked me a multitude of
questions about recent scientific progress in the world outside Russia,
and made me ashamed of my frightful ignorance of such matters. If I had
known that this would happen I would have taken some sort of report with
me. Our blockade has cut them off from all scientific literature outside
Russia. They are without new instruments, they are short of paper, the
work they do has to go on in unwarmed laboratories. It is amazing they
do any work at all. Yet they are getting work done; Pavloff is carrying
on research of astonishing scope and ingenuity upon the mentality of
animals; Manuchin claims to have worked out an effectual cure for
tuberculosis, even in advanced cases; and so on. I have brought back
abstracts of Manuchin’s work for translation and publication here, and
they are now being put into English. The scientific spirit is a
wonderful spirit. If Petersburg starves this winter, the House of
Science—unless we make some special effort on its behalf—will starve
too, but these scientific men said very little to me about the
possibility of sending them in supplies. The House of Literature and Art
talked a little of want and miseries, but not the scientific men. What
they were all keen about was the possibility of getting scientific
publications; they value knowledge more than bread. Upon that matter I
hope I may be of some help to them. I got them to form a committee to
make me out a list of all the books and publications of which they stood
in need, and I have brought this list back to the Secretary of the Royal
Society of London, which had already been stirring in this matter. Funds
will be needed, three or four thousand pounds perhaps (the address of
the Secretary of the Royal Society is Burlington House, W.), but the
assent of the Bolshevik Government and our own to this mental
provisioning of Russia has been secured, and in a little time I hope the
first parcel of books will be going through to these men, who have been
cut off for so long from the general mental life of the world.
If I had no other reason for satisfaction about this trip to Russia, I
should find quite enough in the hope and comfort our mere presence
evidently gave to many of these distinguished men in the House of
Science and in the House of Literature and Art. Upon many of them there
had evidently settled a kind of despair of ever seeing or hearing
anything of the outer world again. They had been living for three years,
very grey and long years indeed, in a world that seemed sinking down
steadily through one degree of privation after another into utter
darkness. Possibly they had seen something of one or two of the
political deputations that have visited Russia—I do not know; but
manifestly they had never expected to see again a free and independent
individual walk in, with an air of having come quite easily and
unofficially from London, and of its being quite possible not only to
come but to go again into the lost world of the West. It was like an
unexpected afternoon caller strolling into a cell in a jail.
All musical people in England know the work of Glazounov; he has
conducted concerts in London and is an honorary doctor both of Oxford
and Cambridge. I was very deeply touched by my meeting with him. He used
to be a very big florid man, but now he is pallid and very much fallen
away, so that his clothes hang loosely on him. He came and talked of his
friends Sir Hubert Parry and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. He told me
he still composed, but that his stock of music paper was almost
exhausted. “Then there will be no more.” I said there would be much
more, and that soon. He doubted it. He spoke of London and Oxford; I
could see that he was consumed by an almost intolerable longing for some
great city full of life, a city with abundance, with pleasant crowds, a
city that would give him still audiences in warm, brightly-lit places.
While I was there, I was a sort of living token to him that such things
could still be. He turned his back on the window which gave on the cold
grey Neva, deserted in the twilight, and the low lines of the fortress
prison of St. Peter and St. Paul. “In England there will be no
revolution—no? I had many friends in England—many good friends in
England....” I was loth to leave him, and he was very loth to let me go.
Seeing all these distinguished men living a sort of refugee life amidst
the impoverished ruins of the fallen imperialist system has made me
realise how helplessly dependent the man of exceptional gifts is upon a
securely organised civilisation. The ordinary man can turn from this to
that occupation; he can be a sailor or a worker in a factory or a digger
or what not. He is under a general necessity to work, but he has no
internal demon which compels him to do a particular thing and nothing
else, which compels him to be a particular thing or die. But a Shalyapin
must be Shalyapin or nothing, Pavloff is Pavloff and Glazounov is
Glazounov. So long as they can go on doing their particular thing, such
men will live and flourish. Shalyapin still acts and sings
magnificently—in absolute defiance of every Communist principle; Pavloff
still continues his marvellous researches—in an old coat and with his
study piled up with the potatoes and carrots he grows in his spare time;
Glazounov will compose until the paper runs out. But many of the others
are evidently stricken much harder. The mortality among the
intellectually distinguished men of Russia has been terribly high. Much,
no doubt, has been due to the general hardship of life, but in many
cases I believe that the sheer mortification of great gifts become
futile has been the determining cause. They could no more live in the
Russia of 1919 than they could have lived in a Kaffir kraal.
[Illustration:
GORKY IN THE GREAT DUMP OF ART AND VIRTUOSITY IN PETERSBURG
]
Science, art, and literature are hothouse plants demanding warmth and
respect and service. It is the paradox of science that it alters the
whole world and is produced by the genius of men who need protection and
help more than any other class of worker. The collapse of the Russian
imperial system has smashed up all the shelters in which such things
could exist. The crude Marxist philosophy which divides all men into
bourgeoisie and proletariat, which sees all social life as a stupidly
simple “class war,” had no knowledge of the conditions necessary for the
collective mental life. But it is to the credit of the Bolshevik
Government that it has now risen to the danger of a universal
intellectual destruction in Russia, and that, in spite of the blockade
and the unending struggle against the subsidised revolts and invasions
with which we and the French plague Russia, it is now permitting and
helping these salvage organisations. Parallel with the House of Science
is the House of Literature and Art. The writing of new books, except for
some poetry, and the painting of pictures have ceased in Russia. But the
bulk of the writers and artists have been found employment upon a
grandiose scheme for the publication of a sort of Russian encyclopædia
of the literature of the world. In this strange Russia of conflict,
cold, famine and pitiful privations there is actually going on now a
literary task that would be inconceivable in the rich England and the
rich America of to-day. In England and America the production of good
literature at popular prices has practically ceased now—“because of the
price of paper.” The mental food of the English and American masses
dwindles and deteriorates, and nobody in authority cares a rap. The
Bolshevik Government is at least a shade above that level. In starving
Russia hundreds of people are working upon translations, and the books
they translate are being set up and printed, work which may presently
give a new Russia such a knowledge of world thought as no other people
will possess. I have seen some of the books and the work going on.
“_May_” I write, with no certainty. Because, like everything else in
this ruined country, this creative work is essentially improvised and
fragmentary. How this world literature is to be distributed to the
Russian people I do not know. The bookshops are closed and bookselling,
like every other form of trading, is illegal. Probably the books will be
distributed to schools and other institutions.
In this matter of book distribution the Bolshevik authorities are
clearly at a loss. They are at a loss upon very many such matters. In
regard to the intellectual life of the community one discovers that
Marxist Communism is without plans and without ideas. Marxist Communism
has always been a theory of revolution, a theory not merely lacking in
creative and constructive ideas, but hostile to creative and
constructive ideas. Every Communist orator has been trained to contemn
“Utopianism,” that is to say, has been trained to contemn intelligent
planning. Not even a British business man of the older type is quite
such a believer in things righting themselves and in “muddling through”
as these Marxists. The Russian Communist Government now finds itself
face to face, among a multiplicity of other constructive problems, with
the problem of sustaining scientific life, of sustaining thought and
discussion, of promoting artistic creation. Marx the Prophet and his
Sacred Book supply it with no lead at all in the matter. Bolshevism,
having no schemes, must improvise therefore—clumsily, and is reduced to
these pathetic attempts to salvage the wreckage of the intellectual life
of the old order. And that life is very sick and unhappy and seems
likely to die on its hands.
It is not simply scientific and literary work and workers that Maxim
Gorky is trying to salvage in Russia. There is a third and still more
curious salvage organisation associated with him. This is the Expertise
Commission, which has its headquarters in the former British Embassy.
When a social order based on private property crashes, when private
property is with some abruptness and no qualification abolished, this
does not abolish and destroy the things which have hitherto constituted
private property. Houses and their gear remain standing, still being
occupied and used by the people who had them before—except when those
people have fled. When the Bolshevik authorities requisition a house or
take over a deserted palace, they find themselves faced by this problem
of the gear. Any one who knows human nature will understand that there
has been a certain amount of quiet annexation of desirable things by
inadvertent officials and, perhaps less inadvertently, by their wives.
But the general spirit of Bolshevism is quite honest, and it is set very
stoutly against looting and suchlike developments of individual
enterprise. There has evidently been comparatively little looting either
in Petersburg or Moscow since the days of the _débâcle_. Looting died
against the wall in Moscow in the spring of 1918. In the guest houses
and suchlike places we noted that everything was numbered and listed.
Occasionally we saw odd things astray, fine glass or crested silver upon
tables where it seemed out of place, but in many cases these were things
which had been sold for food or suchlike necessities on the part of the
original owners. The sailor courier who attended to our comfort to and
from Moscow was provided with a beautiful little silver teapot that must
once have brightened a charming drawing-room. But apparently it had
taken to a semi-public life in a quite legitimate way.
For greater security there has been a gathering together and a
cataloguing of everything that could claim to be a work of art by this
Expertise Commission. The palace that once sheltered the British Embassy
is now like some congested secondhand art shop in the Brompton Road. We
went through room after room piled with the beautiful lumber of the
former Russian social system. There are big rooms crammed with statuary;
never have I seen so many white marble Venuses and sylphs together, not
even in the Naples Museum. There are stacks of pictures of every sort,
passages choked with inlaid cabinets piled up to the ceiling; a room
full of cases of old lace, piles of magnificent furniture. This
accumulation has been counted and catalogued. And there it is. I could
not find out that any one had any idea of what was ultimately to be done
with all this lovely and elegant litter. The stuff does not seem to
belong in any way to the new world, if it is indeed a new world that the
Russian Communists are organising. They never anticipated that they
would have to deal with such things. Just as they never really thought
of what they would do with the shops and markets when they had abolished
shopping and marketing. Just as they had never thought out the problem
of converting a city of private palaces into a Communist
gathering-place. Marxist theory had led their minds up to the
“dictatorship of the class-conscious proletariat” and then intimated—we
discover now how vaguely—that there would be a new heaven and a new
earth. Had that happened it would indeed have been a revolution in human
affairs. But as we saw Russia there is still the old heaven and the old
earth, covered with the ruins, littered with the abandoned furnishings
and dislocated machinery of the former system, with the old peasant
tough and obstinate upon the soil—and Communism, ruling in the cities
quite pluckily and honestly, and yet, in so many matters, like a
conjurer who has left his pigeon and his rabbit behind him, and can
produce nothing whatever from the hat.
Ruin: that is the primary Russian fact at the present time. The
revolution, the Communist rule, which I will proceed to describe in my
next paper, is quite secondary to that. It is something that has
happened in the ruin and because of the ruin. It is of primary
importance that people in the West should realise that. If the Great War
had gone on for a year or so more, Germany and then the Western Powers
would probably have repeated, with local variations, the Russian crash.
The state of affairs we have seen in Russia is only the intensification
and completion of the state of affairs towards which Britain was
drifting in 1918. Here also there are shortages such as we had in
England, but they are relatively monstrous; here also is rationing, but
it is relatively feeble and inefficient; the profiteer in Russia is not
fined but shot, and for the English D.O.R.A. you have the Extraordinary
Commission. What were nuisances in England are magnified to disasters in
Russia. That is all the difference. For all I know, Western Europe may
be still drifting even now towards a parallel crash. I am not by any
means sure that we have turned the corner. War, self-indulgence, and
unproductive speculation may still be wasting more than the Western
world is producing; in which case our own crash—currency failure, a
universal shortage, social and political collapse and all the rest of
it—is merely a question of time. The shops of Regent Street will follow
the shops of the Nevsky Prospect, and Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Bennett
will have to do what they can to salvage the art treasures of Mayfair.
It falsifies the whole world situation, it sets people altogether astray
in their political actions, to assert that the frightful destitution of
Russia to-day is to any large extent the result merely of Communist
effort; that the wicked Communists have pulled down Russia to her
present plight, and that if you can overthrow the Communists every one
and everything in Russia will suddenly become happy again. Russia fell
into its present miseries through the world war and the moral and
intellectual insufficiency of it’s ruling and wealthy people. (As our
own British State—as presently even the American State—may fall.) They
had neither the brains nor the conscience to stop warfare, stop waste of
all sorts, and stop taking the best of everything and leaving every one
else dangerously unhappy, until it was too late. They ruled and wasted
and quarrelled, blind to the coming disaster up to the very moment of
its occurrence. And then, as I will describe in my next paper, the
Communist came in....
III
THE QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM
In the two preceding papers I have tried to give the reader my
impression of Russian life as I saw it in Petersburg and Moscow, as a
spectacle of collapse, as the collapse of a political, social, and
economic system, akin to our own but weaker and more rotten than our
own, which has crashed under the pressure of six years of war and
misgovernment. The main collapse occurred in 1917 when Tsarism,
brutishly incompetent, became manifestly impossible. It had wasted the
whole land, lost control of its army and the confidence of the entire
population. Its police system had degenerated into a _régime_ of
violence and brigandage. It fell inevitably.
And there was no alternative government. For generations the chief
energies of Tsarism had been directed to destroying any possibility of
an alternative government. It had subsisted on that one fact that, bad
as it was, there was nothing else to put in its place. The first Russian
Revolution, therefore, turned Russia into a debating society and a
political scramble. The liberal forces of the country, unaccustomed to
action or responsibility, set up a clamorous discussion whether Russia
was to be a constitutional monarchy, a liberal republic, a socialist
republic, or what not. Over the confusion gesticulated Kerensky in
attitudes of the finest liberalism. Through it loomed various ambiguous
adventurers, “strong men,” sham strong men, Russian monks and Russian
Bonapartes. What remained of social order collapsed. In the closing
months of 1917 murder and robbery were common street incidents in
Petersburg and Moscow, as common as an automobile accident in the
streets of London, and less heeded. On the Reval boat was an American
who had formerly directed the affairs of the American
[Illustration:
THE STATUE OF MARX OUTSIDE THE SMOLNY INSTITUTE.
(Headquarters of the Communist Party.)
]