former palace of Potemkin, the favourite of Catherine the Second. Here
the Imperial Duma met under the Tsarist _régime_, and I visited it in
1914 and saw a languid session in progress. I went then with Mr. Maurice
Baring and one of the Benckendorffs to the strangers’ gallery, which ran
round three sides of the hall. There was accommodation for perhaps a
thousand people in the hall, and most of it was empty. The president
with his bell sat above a rostrum, and behind him was a row of women
reporters. I do not now remember what business was in hand on that
occasion; it was certainly not very exciting business. Baring, I
remember, pointed out the large proportion of priests elected to the
third Duma; their beards and cassocks made a very distinctive feature of
that scattered gathering.
On this second visit we were no longer stranger onlookers, but active
participants in the meeting; we came into the body of the hall behind
the president’s bench, where on a sort of stage the members of the
Government, official visitors, and so forth find accommodation. The
presidential bench, the rostrum, and the reporters remained, but instead
of an atmosphere of weary parliamentarianism, we found ourselves in the
crowding, the noise, and the peculiar thrill of a mass meeting. There
were, I should think, some two hundred people or more packed upon the
semicircular benches round about us on the platform behind the
president, comrades in naval uniforms and in middle-class and
working-class costume, numerous intelligent-looking women, one or two
Asiatics and a few unclassifiable visitors, and the body of the hall
beyond the presidential bench was densely packed with people who filled
not only the seats but the gangways and the spaces under the galleries.
There may have been two or three thousand people down there, men and
women. They were all members of the Petersburg Soviet, which is really a
sort of conjoint meeting of its constituent soviets. The visitors’
galleries above were equally full.
Above the rostrum, with his back to us, sat Zenovieff, his right-hand
man Zorin, and the president. The subject under discussion was the
proposed peace with Poland. The meeting was smarting with the sense of
defeat and disposed to resent the Polish terms. Soon after we came in
Zenovieff made a long and, so far as I could judge, a very able speech,
preparing the minds of this great gathering for a Russian surrender. The
Polish demands are outrageous, but for the present Russia must submit.
He was followed by an oldish man who made a bitter attack upon the
irreligion of the people and government of Russia; Russia was suffering
for her sins, and until she repented and returned to religion she would
continue to suffer one disaster after another. His opinions were not
those of the meeting, but he was allowed to have his say without
interruption. The decision to make peace with Poland was then taken by a
show of hands. Then came my little turn. The meeting was told that I had
come from England to see the Bolshevik _régime_; I was praised
profusely; I was also exhorted to treat that _régime_ fairly and not to
emulate those other recent visitors (these were Mrs. Snowden and Guest
and Bertrand Russell) who had enjoyed the hospitality of the republic
and then gone away to say unfavourable things of it. This exhortation
left me cold; I had come to Russia to judge the Bolshevik Government and
not to praise it. I had then to take possession of the rostrum and
address this big crowd of people. This rostrum I knew had proved an
unfortunate place for one or two previous visitors, who had found it
hard to explain away afterwards the speeches their translators had given
the world through the medium of the wireless reports. Happily, I had had
some inkling of what was coming. To avoid any misunderstanding I had
written out a short speech in English, and I had had this translated
carefully into Russian. I began by saying clearly that I was neither
Marxist nor Communist, but a Collectivist, and that it was not to a
social revolution in the West that Russians should look for peace and
help in their troubles, but to the liberal opinion of the moderate mass
of Western people. I declared that the people of the Western States were
determined to give Russia peace, so that she might develop upon her own
lines. Their own line of development might be very different from that
of Russia. When I had done I handed a translation of my speech to my
interpreter, Zorin, which not only eased his task but did away with any
possibility of a subsequent misunderstanding. My speech was reported in
the _Pravda_ quite fully and fairly.
Then followed a motion by Zorin that Zenovieff should have leave to
visit Berlin and attend the conference of the Independent Socialists
there. Zorin is a witty and humorous speaker, and he got his audience
into an excellent frame of mind. His motion was carried by a show of
hands, and then came a report and a discussion upon the production of
vegetables in the Petersburg district. It was a practical question upon
which feeling ran high. Here speakers arose in the body of the hall,
discharging brief utterances for a minute or so and subsiding again.
There were shouts and interruptions. The debate was much more like a big
labour mass meeting in the Queen’s Hall than anything that a Western
European would recognise as a legislature.
This business disposed of, a still more extraordinary thing happened. We
who sat behind the rostrum poured down into the already very crowded
body of the hall and got such seats as we could find, and a white sheet
was lowered behind the president’s seat. At the same time a band
appeared in the gallery to the left. A five-part cinematograph film was
then run, showing the Baku Conference to which I have already alluded.
The pictures were viewed with interest but without any violent applause.
And at the end the band played the _Internationale_, and the audience—I
beg its pardon!—the Petersburg Soviet dispersed singing that popular
chant. It was in fact a mass meeting incapable of any real legislative
activities; capable at the utmost of endorsing or not endorsing the
Government in control of the platform. Compared with the British
Parliament it has about as much organisation, structure, and working
efficiency as a big bagful of miscellaneous wheels might have beside an
old-fashioned and inaccurate but still going clock.
VI
THE DREAMER IN THE KREMLIN
My chief purpose in going from Petersburg to Moscow was to see and talk
to Lenin. I was very curious to see him, and I was disposed to be
hostile to him. I encountered a personality entirely different from
anything I had expected to meet.
Lenin is not a writer; his published work does not express him. The
shrill little pamphlets and papers issued from Moscow in his name, full
of misconceptions of the labour psychology of the West and obstinately
defensive of the impossible proposition that it is the prophesied
Marxist social revolution which has happened in Russia, display hardly
anything of the real Lenin mentality as I encountered it. Occasionally
there are gleams of an inspired shrewdness, but for the rest these
publications do no more than rehearse the set ideas and phrases of
doctrinaire Marxism. Perhaps that is necessary. That may be the only
language Communism understands; a break into a new dialect would be
disturbing and demoralising. Left Communism is the backbone of Russia
to-day; unhappily it is a backbone without flexible joints, a backbone
that can be bent only with the utmost difficulty and which must be bent
by means of flattery and deference.
Moscow under the bright October sunshine, amidst the fluttering yellow
leaves, impressed us as being altogether more lax and animated than
Petersburg. There is much more movement of people, more trading, and a
comparative plenty of droshkys. Markets are open. There is not the same
general ruination of streets and houses. There are, it is true, many
traces of the desperate street fighting of early 1918. One of the domes
of that absurd cathedral of St. Basil just outside the Kremlin gate was
smashed by a shell and still awaits repair. The tramcars we found were
not carrying passengers; they were being used for the transport of
supplies of food and fuel. In these matters Petersburg claims to be
better prepared than Moscow.
[Illustration:
THE PETERSBURG SOVIET IN SESSION.
Lenin at the rostrum; below him are the women stenographers;
immediately behind him is Zenovieff and the President.
Behind these again are officials and ministerial persons, official
visitors and the like.
]
The ten thousand crosses of Moscow still glitter in the afternoon light.
On one conspicuous pinnacle of the Kremlin the imperial eagles spread
their wings; the Bolshevik Government has been too busy or too
indifferent to pull them down. The churches are open, the kissing of
ikons is a flourishing industry, and beggars still woo casual charity at
the doors. The celebrated miraculous shrine of the Iberian Madonna
outside the Redeemer Gate was particularly busy. There were many peasant
women, unable to get into the little chapel, kissing the stones outside.
Just opposite to it, on a plaster panel on a house front, is that now
celebrated inscription put up by one of the early revolutionary
administrations in Moscow: “Religion is the Opium of the People.” The
effect this inscription produces is greatly reduced by the fact that in
Russia the people cannot read.
About that inscription I had a slight but amusing argument with Mr.
Vanderlip, the American financier, who was lodged in the same guest
house as ourselves. He wanted to have it effaced. I was for retaining it
as being historically interesting, and because I think that religious
toleration should extend to atheists. But Mr. Vanderlip felt too
strongly to see the point of that.
The Moscow Guest House, which we shared with Mr. Vanderlip and an
adventurous English artist who had somehow got through to Moscow to
execute busts of Lenin and Trotsky, was a big, richly-furnished house
upon the Sofiskaya Naberezhnaya (No. 17), directly facing the great wall
of the Kremlin and all the clustering domes and pinnacles of that
imperial inner city. We felt much less free and more secluded here than
in Petersburg. There were sentinels at the gates to protect us from
casual visitors, whereas in Petersburg all sorts of unauthorised persons
could and did stray in to talk to me. Mr. Vanderlip had been staying
here, I gathered, for some weeks, and proposed to stay some weeks more.
He was without valet, secretary, or interpreter. He did not discuss his
business with me beyond telling me rather carefully once or twice that
it was strictly financial and commercial and in no sense political. I
was told that he had brought credentials from Senator Harding to Lenin,
but I am temperamentally incurious and I made no attempt whatever to
verify this statement or to pry into Mr. Vanderlip’s affairs. I did not
even ask how it could be possible to conduct business or financial
operations in a Communist State with anyone but the Government, nor how
it was possible to deal with a Government upon strictly nonpolitical
lines. These were, I admitted, mysteries beyond my understanding. But we
ate, smoked, drank our coffee and conversed together in an atmosphere of
profound discretion. By not mentioning Mr. Vanderlip’s “mission,” we
made it a portentous, omnipresent fact.
The arrangements leading up to my meeting with Lenin were tedious and
irritating, but at last I found myself under way for the Kremlin in the
company of Mr. Rothstein, formerly a figure in London Communist circles,
and an American comrade with a large camera who was also, I gathered, an
official of the Russian Foreign Office.
The Kremlin as I remembered it in 1914 was a very open place, open much
as Windsor Castle is, with a thin trickle of pilgrims and tourists in
groups and couples flowing through it. But now it is closed up and
difficult of access. There was a great pother with passes and permits
before we could get through even the outer gates. And we filtered and
inspected through five or six rooms of clerks and sentinels before we
got into the presence. This may be necessary for the personal security
of Lenin, but it puts him out of reach of Russia, and, what perhaps is
more serious, if there is to be an effectual dictatorship, it puts
Russia out of his reach. If things must filter up to him, they must also
filter down, and they may undergo very considerable changes in the
process.
We got to Lenin at last and found him, a little figure at a great desk
in a well-lit room that looked out upon palatial spaces. I thought his
desk was rather in a litter. I sat down on a chair at a corner of the
desk, and the little man—his feet scarcely touch the ground as he sits
on the edge of his chair—twisted round to talk to me, putting his arms
round and over a pile of papers. He spoke excellent English, but it was,
I thought, rather characteristic of the present condition of Russian
affairs that Mr. Rothstein chaperoned the conversation, occasionally
offering footnotes and other assistance. Meanwhile the American got to
work with his camera, and unobtrusively but persistently exposed plates.
The talk, however, was too interesting for that to be an annoyance. One
forgot about that clicking and shifting about quite soon.
I had come expecting to struggle with a doctrinaire Marxist. I found
nothing of the sort. I had been told that Lenin lectured people; he
certainly did not do so on this occasion. Much has been made of his
laugh in the descriptions, a laugh which is said to be pleasing at first
and afterwards to become cynical. This laugh was not in evidence. His
forehead reminded me of someone else—I could not remember who it was,
until the other evening I saw Mr. Arthur Balfour sitting and talking
under a shaded light. It is exactly the same domed, slightly one-sided
cranium. Lenin has a pleasant, quick-changing, brownish face, with a
lively smile and a habit (due perhaps to some defect in focussing) of
screwing up one eye as he pauses in his talk; he is not very like the
photographs you see of him because he is one of those people whose
change of expression is more important than their features; he
gesticulated a little with his hands over the heaped papers as he
talked, and he talked quickly, very keen on his subject, without any
posing or pretences or reservations, as a good type of scientific man
will talk.
Our talk was threaded throughout and held together by two—what shall I
call them?—_motifs_. One was from me to him: “What do you think you are
making of Russia? What is the state you are trying to create?” The other
was from him to me: ‘Why does not the social revolution begin in
England? Why do you not work for the social revolution? Why are you not
destroying Capitalism and establishing the Communist State?” These
_motifs_ interwove, reacted on each other, illuminated each other. The
second brought back the first: “But what are you making of the social
revolution? Are you making a success of it?” And from that we got back
to two again with: “To make it a success the Western world must join in.
Why doesn’t it?”
In the days before 1918 all the Marxist world thought of the social
revolution as an end. The workers of the world were to unite, overthrow
Capitalism, and be happy ever afterwards. But in 1918 the Communists, to
their own surprise, found themselves in control of Russia and challenged
to produce their millennium. They have a colourable excuse for a delay
in the production of a new and better social order in their continuation
of war conditions, in the blockade and so forth, nevertheless it is
clear that they begin to realise the tremendous unpreparedness which the
Marxist methods of thought involve. A hundred points—I have already put
a finger upon one or two of them—they do not know what to do. But the
commonplace Communist simply loses his temper if you venture to doubt
whether everything is being done in precisely the best and most
intelligent way under the new _régime_. He is like a tetchy housewife
who wants you to recognise that everything is in perfect order in the
middle of an eviction. He is like one of those now forgotten
suffragettes who used to promise us an earthly paradise as soon as we
escaped from the tyranny of “man-made laws.” Lenin, on the other hand,
whose frankness must at times leave his disciples breathless, has
recently stripped off the last pretence that the Russian revolution is
anything more than the inauguration of an age of limitless experiment.
“Those who are engaged in the formidable task of overcoming capitalism,”
he has recently written, “must be prepared to try method after method
until they find the one which answers their purpose best.”
We opened our talk with a discussion of the future of the great towns
under Communism. I wanted to see how far Lenin contemplated the dying
out of the towns in Russia. The desolation of Petersburg had brought
home to me a point I had never realised before, that the whole form and
arrangement of a town is determined by shopping and marketing, and that
the abolition of these things renders nine-tenths of the buildings in an
ordinary town directly or indirectly unmeaning and useless. “The towns
will get very much smaller,” he admitted. “They will be different. Yes,
quite different.” That, I suggested, implied a tremendous task. It meant
the scrapping of the existing towns and their replacement. The churches
and great buildings of Petersburg would become presently like those of
Novgorod the Great or like the temples of Paestum. Most of the town
would dissolve away. He agreed quite cheerfully. I think it warmed his
heart to find someone who understood a necessary consequence of
collectivism that many even of his own people fail to grasp. Russia has
to be rebuilt fundamentally, has to become a new thing....
And industry has to be reconstructed—as fundamentally?
Did I realise what was already in hand with Russia? The electrification
of Russia?
For Lenin, who like a good orthodox Marxist denounces all “Utopians,”
has succumbed at last to a Utopia, the Utopia of the electricians. He is
throwing all his weight into a scheme for the development of great power
stations in Russia to serve whole provinces with light, with transport,
and industrial power. Two experimental districts he said had already
been electrified. Can one imagine a more courageous project in a vast
flat land of forests and illiterate peasants, with no water power, with
no technical skill available, and with trade and industry at the last
gasp? Projects for such an electrification are in process of development
in Holland and they have been discussed in England, and in those
densely-populated and industrially highly-developed centres one can
imagine them as successful, economical, and altogether beneficial. But
their application to Russia is an altogether greater strain upon the
constructive imagination. I cannot see anything of the sort happening in
this dark crystal of Russia, but this little man at the Kremlin can; he
sees the decaying railways replaced by a new electric transport, sees
new roadways spreading throughout the land, sees a new and happier
Communist industrialism arising again. While I talked to him he almost
persuaded me to share his vision.
“And you will go on to these things with the peasants rooted in your
soil?”
But not only are the towns to be rebuilt; every agricultural landmark is
to go.
“Even now,” said Lenin, “all the agricultural production of Russia is
not peasant production. We have, in places, large scale agriculture. The
Government is already running big estates with workers instead of
peasants, where conditions are favourable. That can spread. It can be
extended first to one province, then another. The peasants in the other
provinces, selfish and illiterate, will not know what is happening until
their turn comes....”
It may be difficult to defeat the Russian peasant _en masse_; but in
detail there is no difficulty at all. At the mention of the peasant
Lenin’s head came nearer to mine; his manner became confidential. As if
after all the peasant _might_ overhear.
It is not only the material organisation of society you have to build, I
argued, it is the mentality of a whole people. The Russian people are by
habit and tradition traders and individualists; their very souls must be
remoulded if this new world is to be achieved. Lenin asked me what I had
seen of the educational work afoot. I praised some of the things I had
seen. He nodded and smiled with pleasure. He has an unshaken confidence
in his work.
“But these are only sketches and beginnings,” I said.
“Come back and see what we have done in Russia in ten years’ time,” he
answered.
In him I realised that Communism could after all, in spite of Marx, be
enormously creative. After the tiresome class-war fanatics I had been
encountering among the Communists, men of formulæ as sterile as flints,
after numerous experiences of the trained and empty conceit of the
common Marxist devotee, this amazing little man, with his frank
admission of the immensity and complication of the project of Communism
and his simple concentration upon its realisation, was very refreshing.
He at least has a vision of a world changed over and planned and built
afresh.
He wanted more of my Russian impressions. I told him that I thought that
in many directions, and more particularly in the Petersburg Commune,
Communism was pressing too hard and too fast, and destroying before it
was ready to rebuild. They had broken down trading before they were
ready to ration; the co-operative organisation had been smashed up
instead of being utilised, and so on. That brought us to our essential
difference, the difference of the Collectivist and Marxist, the question
whether the social revolution is, in its extremity, necessary, whether
it is necessary to overthrow one social and economic system completely
before the new one can begin. I believe that through a vast sustained
educational campaign the existing Capitalist system could be _civilised_
into a Collectivist world system; Lenin on the other hand tied himself
years ago to the Marxist dogmas of the inevitable class war, the
downfall of Capitalist order as a prelude to reconstruction, the
proletarian dictatorship, and so forth. He had to argue, therefore, that
modern Capitalism is incurably predatory, wasteful, and unteachable, and
that until it is destroyed it will continue to exploit the human
heritage stupidly and aimlessly, that it will fight against and prevent
any administration of national resources for the general good, and that
it will inevitably make wars.
I had, I will confess, a very uphill argument. He suddenly produced
Chiozza Money’s new book, _The Triumph of Nationalisation_, which he had
evidently been reading very carefully. “But you see directly you begin
to have a good working collectivist organisation of any public interest,
the Capitalists smash it up again. They smashed your national shipyards;
they won’t let you work your coal economically.” He tapped the book. “It
is all here.”
And against my argument that wars sprang from nationalist imperialism
and not from a Capitalist organisation of society he suddenly brought:
“But what do you think of this new Republican Imperialism that comes to
us from America?”
Here Mr. Rothstein intervened in Russian with an objection that Lenin
swept aside.
And regardless of Mr. Rothstein’s plea for diplomatic reserve, Lenin
proceeded to explain the projects with which one American at least was
seeking to dazzle the imagination of Moscow. There was to be economic
assistance for Russia and recognition of the Bolshevik Government. There
was to be a defensive alliance against Japanese aggression in Siberia.
There was to be an American naval station on the coast of Asia, and
leases for long terms of sixty or fifty years of the natural resources
of Khamchatka and possibly of other large regions of Russian Asia. Well,
did I think that made for peace? Was it anything more than the beginning
of a new world scramble? How would the British Imperialists like this
sort of thing?
[Illustration:
LENIN.
Behind him stands Gorky: to the right of Gorky (_i.e._ on his left)
are Zorin (_hat_) and Zenovieff. Behind with cigarette is Radek.
]
But some industrial power had to come in and help Russia, I said. She
cannot reconstruct now without such help....
Our multifarious argumentation ended indecisively. We parted warmly, and
I and my companion were filtered out of the Kremlin through one barrier
after another in much the same fashion as we had been filtered in.
“He is wonderful,” said Mr. Rothstein. “But it was an indiscretion——”