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The European visitor to Russia who values the inheritance of European humanism finds himself regarded as a baneful reactionary full of pontifical formulas which aim not only at the pursuit of ‘objective truth’, but at the immediate destruction of the Russian State. In compensation he will derive—unless already infected with prejudices of hate or enthusiasm—an exhilarating stimulus to rational thought from this attitude towards himself, a realization that his world’s horizon has been suddenly extended beyond all preconceivable expectations. He will discover, possibly against his will, a preponderance of what he has been taught to call obscurantism and tyranny which must necessarily outweigh the best of social purposes. Nevertheless he will be obliged to admit that so great an intellectual stimulus must itself contain the seed of intrinsic good. The question is how to explain this contradiction.

Let no one concern himself with this essay whose hope is for information about Russia of a detached, scientific kind—a mere observation of phenomena such as naturalists conduct in tide-forsaken pools. The Bolsheviks are men, not animals. I meet them as a man, not as a social zoologist. Since their every word is spoken in defence of a dogma, so then let mine be. This must be a personal account, a mobilization of personal feelings in defence of the European tradition; an attempt to keep in view a more scientific truth than that embraced by the records of the field-naturalist, and to see Russia, not as reactionaries and enthusiasts both see her, in ethical relation to the present, but in cultural relation to the future. The forces at work are older than the Revolution, and will long survive it. They are inherent in the country and people, though hitherto partially concealed beneath a Western veneer. Hence the shock of their emergence and the universal curiosity as to their future part in history.

I cannot sufficiently emphasize the fact that the opinions here expressed are entirely confined to those which formed of their own volition in my own mind and which, in fact, did not take conscious shape till I had returned to England and settled down to consider the evidence I had collected. During a large part of my time in Russia I enjoyed the hospitality of Sir Esmond Ovey, H.M. Ambassador to the Soviet Government, and of Lady Ovey; I spent much of my time with other members of the Embassy; and I naturally sought the company of various Englishmen resident in Moscow. Of the kindness they all showed me, and of the pains they were at to promote my journeys and inquiries, I can only make this bare acknowledgement. But I must affirm categorically that the colour of the interpretation which I put on such facts as I gathered is entirely my own. So indefinite had this interpretation remained till the very end of my stay in Russia, that if one had asked me, as the ship sailed out of Odessa, what colour it was, I could not have answered him. This question was in fact put both in Constantinople and London. I had no answer to make, and was considered in consequence either a dullard or an equivocator.

The assurance of my address is the assurance of the ignorant. If I claim a good enough eye and a sufficient experience of other countries to have enabled me to appreciate the visual arts of Russia, and to judge them by general standards, it is only to admit my disadvantage in seeking to paint their present environment. For my concern with laboratories, feats of engineering, and isolated social experiments, is so faint as to be negative; and it is chiefly these particular branches of Bolshevist activity which arouse the enthusiasm of foreign visitors. In six weeks one must choose one’s field; I chose to avoid conditioned reflexes, Ford lorries, and abortion clinics. Yet it needed no knowledge of engineering to feel the romance of ‘construction’ at Dnieperstroi—as I felt it before at Sukkur—nor the uplift of an Astor to pay credit to some hyperborean Demeter for the apple cheeks and fur-lined helmets of the children in the streets. If, sometimes, a note of rancour sounds, blame it on that immemorial Russian bureaucracy, which chose to regard me, rather in spite of itself, as an undesirable character. This arose from my irresponsibility in visiting Russia neither with an avowed purpose nor as a conducted tourist. Nearly all foreigners buy their tours beforehand, and are therefore obliged to keep to set routes. This is not to say, as so many people infer, that the visitor is only shown what the authorities want him to see. On the contrary, free movement within Russia to-day—except in the Turcoman republics, which are reserved for American millionaires—entails fewer formalities than before the Revolution. The advantage of the conducted tours is simply their remarkable cheapness; and since they are, very conveniently, ‘conducted’, the tourist is naturally treated to the show-pieces of the existing regime. But as these seemed to me, even by anticipation, both extremely uninteresting and fundamentally insignificant, I trusted to my own arrangements, and may here take the opportunity of thanking those who helped me make them. Travelling was consequently more difficult, but equally more entertaining. Should any echo of the laughter provoked by my journeys reach the ears of my Russian friends, they will be able to ignore, or at the best pity, such irreverence. Levity is the music that accompanies the European’s whoring after false gods, gods which, in fact—and all fact is Marxist—do not exist. The orthodox Marxist, like the orthodox Christian, need only give thanks that he is not as others, and leave them to stew in their own delusions. Doubt is unbecoming to him, and susceptibility to foreign opinion is tantamount to doubt.

The supreme moments of travel are born of beauty and strangeness in equal parts: the first panders to the senses, the second to the mind; and it is the rarity of this coincidence which makes the rarity of these moments. Such a moment was mine, when, at the age of three, I ventured on to a beach in Anglesey, and found a purple scabious; such again, when I stood on the Jelep La and surveyed the peaks of Tibet; and such once more, as I walked up the side of the River Moskva late in the afternoon of my second day in Russia. The Red Capital in winter is a silent place. Like black ghouls on the soundless snow the Muscovites went their way, hatted in fur, lamb, leather and velvet, each with a great collar turned up against the wind that sweeps down the river from the east. With bent heads they hurried past, impervious to collision with one another, or myself, as though desensitized by a decade of mass-living. Farther on, at the corner by the bridge, stood a line of hackney sledges, whose owners, the rearguard of capitalism, sat huddled in their portentous blue coats. Other sledges of robuster build trailed by, bearing piles of hay and boxes. When they came to the slope by the bridge, they all began to go sideways, while their horses scrabbled at the ice.

This, at last, was Red Russia; this horde of sable ghosts the Bolshevists, the cynosure of an agitated world. It was more than Russia, it was the capital of the Union, the very pulse of proletarian dictatorship, the mission-house of Dialectical Materialism. I looked across the river. Before me stood the inmost sanctuary of all: the Kremlin.

A curious irony has dowered the creed of utilitarianism with this edifice as the symbol of outward power. While collective man sits within, the walls deny him and the domes laugh aloud. Fantastic one has always known it to be from photographs. But the reality embodies fantasy on an unearthly scale—a mile and a half of weathered, rose-coloured brick in the form of a triangle that rises uphill from its base along the river. These airy walls, which in places attain a height of forty feet, are hedged with deep crenellations, cloven and coped in white stone after the Venetian fashion. Their impalpable tint and texture might suggest rather the protection of some fabled kitchen-garden than the exigencies of medieval assault. But from their mellow escarpments bursts a succession of nineteen towers, arbitrarily placed, and exhibiting such an accumulation of architectural improbability as might have resulted had the Brobdingnagians, during a game of chess, suddenly built a castle for Gulliver with the pieces. As my eye moved westward, seven of these unbelievable structures marked the half-mile prospective, itself slightly askew, of the base-wall. At either end the angle-towers were taller than the rest, each a cylinder finished with a machicolated balcony and surmounted by an octagonal cone, a kind of dormered cracker-hat tapering skywards to a bronze pennant. Between these two marched five squatter towers—steep, rectangular cones of dark green tiles, broken by a middle storey of the same rosy brick, but varying in height and breadth. These five towers, though they vary in particular dimensions, reflect a pattern introduced by the Tartars. Thus the historian may distinguish a Sino-Byzantine fusion accomplished under the aegis of Italian architects. Be that as it may—my attention was elsewhere. For now, within the walls, rose a white hill, as it were a long table covered with a cloth of snow, lifting up to the winter sky the residences of those vanished potentates, Tsar and God: to the west the two palaces, nineteenth century Russo-Venetian, cream-coloured against the presage of snow in the sky; the little Italian palace of the fifteenth century, whose grey stone façade of diamond rustications conceals the tiny apartments of the early Tsars; and then the Cathedrals: that of the Annunciation with nine onion-domes; that of the Dormition, where the coronations took place, with five helm-shaped domes; and that of the Archangel Michael, whose central bulb stands high above its four smaller companions; nineteen domes in all, each finished with a cross, most of them thinly gilt; and then, higher than all, the massive belfry, crowned with a flat onion; yet still overtopped by the ultimate cupola of the tower of Ivan Veliki, colossal in solitude, the climax of this Caesaropapist fantasia. I looked down to the river below me; I looked up to the sky; I looked to the right and I looked to the left: horizontally and vertically, towers and domes, spires, cones, onions, crenellations, filled the whole view. It might have been the invention of Dante, arrived in a Russian heaven.

And then as the lights came out and the snowflakes, long imminent, began to wander down in front of them, the scene became alive. As I reached the turn to the bridge, a company of soldiers came marching up the opposite street; the Red Army! visible agent of proletarian power and hardly less fantastic to my eyes than its fortress over the river. In their grey serge dressing-gowns swinging right down to the feet, and their grey serge helmets with pointed Tartar crowns, they looked like so many goblins on an infernal errand. Tramp! tramp! swung the grey serge skirts; but not a footfall sounded. From the shoulders of each goblin slanted a pair of skis, taller than the man himself, and ready to whisk him down upon some country churchyard to prod the dead. As they wheeled round to cross the bridge, they broke into a ringing chorus, taking those earnest, melancholy parts which are associated with all Russian singing. The theme of the words was doubtless Revolutionary, and, if so, not ill-suited to the effect achieved—as though the troops of ancient Russia were sallying out to a Holy War. It was quite dark now; the snow falling fast. Behind the chanting goblins the Kremlin rose aglow with electricity, like some ghostly back-cloth to the hurrying city, tower upon tower, dome upon dome, piling up from the rose-red ramparts and the snowy eminence within them, to the last gigantic onion of Ivan Veliki, 450 feet above the black river.

I followed the soldiers, and, climbing a steep road parallel with the east wall of the Kremlin, reached the Red Square. Half-way across the expanse of floodlit snow a queue had formed, ant-like in the distance, to see Lenin. The tomb was open.

I took my place next to a young Turcoman. His pale, aquiline features, properly moulded and furnished with bones, were those of an individual, and seemed companionable, despite the outlandish fleece that crowned them, among these casual-bred Slavs. But for a group of peasants clad in leather and shod with birch-bark, they presented the usual characterless appearance of all urban populations—the mass-man about to pay his Russian homage to his new and Russian Christ.

A halt preceded our entry while they swept out the snow left by the previous pilgrims. Then, two by two, the Turcoman with me, we entered the bronze wicket in the low balustrade. Two sentries, with fixed bayonets and sheepskin ruffs, stood on either side of the door. The vestibule was blank, but for the Soviet emblem—hammer and sickle on a globe supported by sheaves of wheat—in silver relief on the grey stone. Turning to the left, a flight of stairs and a subterranean corridor led us down to the vault.

In the midst of this tall, dim interior, sheeted with sombre, close-grained stones, the mummy lay on a tall pedestal sheltered by an inverted cradle of plate-glass, and brightly lit. Below, in pairs at either end, stood four sentries. We lengthened into single file. Mounting a flight of steps, I took my view and, in virtue of the atmosphere, paid my homage. Round the walls, I noticed, ran a frieze of vitreous scarlet lightning.

Lenin must have been a very small man. He rests on a bed of dun-coloured draperies, which engulf his legs with the tasteful negligence of a modiste’s window. His upper part wears a khaki jacket buttoned at the neck. The finely modelled hands and features are of waxen texture, like the petals of a magnolia flower. The beard and moustache turn from straw-colour to brown, a fact which caused Bernard Shaw more surprise (so he told me) than anything else in his self-patented Russian Elysium. One might have said: A nice little man, fond of his grandchildren, and given to pruning his trees. I wondered whether a countenance so placid and benign was not really made of wax. For rumour insists that the sewers of the Kremlin recently overflowed into the shrine, to the detriment of its keepsake. But when I got outside, I had not walked a hundred yards before I met an old man with features, beard, and expression exactly similar to those I had just examined. So that there need be nothing inherently false about the present appearance of the relic.

The Red Square was so called long before the Revolution, since the Russian words for ‘red’ and ‘beautiful’ are the same. Still the snow falls, each flake softly sparkling in the electric haze. At the north end of the great white oblong rises the blood-coloured bulk of the Historical Museum, a building in Ye Olde Russian style, but now transformed into something fairy-like by the snow filigree on its twin steeples and twisting rooflets. Along the Kremlin side runs the same crenellated rose-red wall, interrupted by three towers. That near the Museum, which carries a slender, cold green spire, was blown up by Napoleon, but rebuilt according to the old design after his departure. At the other end of the square, to the south, stands the famous Spassky tower, a castle of brick surmounted by Gothic pinnacles and finials of white stone, which remind one of Wren’s Tom Tower, and were actually built by an Englishman, Christopher Holloway, in 1625. This bears a rich octagonal steeple, decorated with a gilt clock-face. From the topmost apex shines the emblem of the Tsars, a golden eagle, whose glinting double heads act as a signpost to the stranger lost in the ‘China Town’ opposite.

These two towers, with one other on the west side, are the chief entrances to the Kremlin. Between them the wall is broken by a blind tower of the rectangular double-cone type, above which appears a flat dome of green copper, in the austere Greek style of the later Catherine period. From this dome floats a plain red flag, emblem no longer of the rowdy May Day farce in other capitals, but invested with the dignity of its architectural surroundings. Beneath the wall runs a series of low tribunes in grey-white granite. These are interrupted, immediately below the tower, by Lenin’s tomb, which is backed by a screen of small black fir-trees.

The tomb is squat and powerful, instepped like a Ziggurat, and polished like a public-house. It is built of red Ukrainian granite and black and grey Ukrainian labrador, which contains flecks of iridescent blue like those on a butterfly’s wing. The lantern is surmounted by a monolith of red Karelian porphyry, 26¼ feet in length and weighing 59 tons. The colour of the granite is not our anaemic pink, but a deep rhubarb-red, slightly tinged with ochre. This colour strikes a mean between the scarlet flag and the pink walls, and fits the monument harmoniously upon its ancient stage.

The architect of the mausoleum is Stchousev. His original design, which stood for five years, was of wood. The present, though similar in character, is stronger and more ruthless. It is constructed—or gives the illusion of being constructed—of superb blocks of stone, whose gigantic size is reminiscent of the Inca walls. The form is gained partly by the use of the three colours, black, grey, and red, as an instrument of proportion, and partly by the irregular succession of steps on which these colours are employed. But these steps, though irregular, are far from haphazard. Their ratios, both of height and width, are calculated with the utmost nicety, so as to increase the effect of power and strength. The base of the monument is slightly above the level of the Square, and is enclosed within a low parapet, whose front corners are rounded, and whose rear corners are finished with two small pavilions. This parapet, these pavilions, as well as the long rows of tribunes which run parallel with the Kremlin wall, are built of a greyish white granite, only semi-polished, and having a very close and hard texture. Within the parapet on either side of the entrance have been planted small fir-trees, which, it must be hoped, will not be allowed to grow too high.

Last of all, at the far end where the ground begins to slope down to the river, rises the famous church of Basil Blajenny—Basil the Blessed. Lying slightly below the general level of the square, yet with no other buildings behind it, it closes the panorama like some phantom ship ice-bound against the skyline. Or in circus mood one might compare it with a giant’s coconut-shy, whose drab nuts have been replaced by sea-urchins, leeks, pineapples, and peeled pomegranates at different levels—multi-coloured fruits, spiral, spiked and fluted, that tempt Lenin’s ghost to warm itself on cold nights by potting snowballs at them. There are always a few nocturnal drunks about the Red Square. Perhaps some staggering mystic, or a frozen cabman, or a posse of GPU raiders, passing by in the small hours, have already seen that all-familiar figure clambering wraithlike up its mausoleum for one more shot at the embodied past. I can hardly be sure that I myself, after a certain party at the Metropole, did not discern one or two extra-human missiles hurtling through the air towards that green pineapple with the red scales ... But the less of this the better. When I emerged from inspecting Lenin’s more solid remains on this particular afternoon it was barely tea-time. Suddenly the Spassky clock rang out the hour on the last of the Moscow bells, whose deep melodious chimes never failed, so long as I stayed in the town, to give me a little start of melancholy and pleasure. And as the first clang echoed over the snow and along the red walls, a black smoke of crows shot up into the sky, cawing and croaking their contempt for that motionless anachronism, the Tsar’s eagle.

The vision was over. I had exchanged the experience of a moment for a memory that will support me till I die. I shall never see Moscow again as I saw it on that afternoon.

But beside the Moscow of dreams waited a Moscow not less unique—that of men. I left the square by the side of the Historical Museum, where the Iberian gateway used to stand, and, crossing the Opera Square, came to the Hotel Metropole. Here I was to deliver three precious lemons for the use of Albert Coates, who was suffering from a carbuncle. I was also to meet a young English communist named Morgan.

I expected a hatchet-faced consumptive. I perceived a Nordic giant. Morgan was once a chauffeur, but having seen light in a Russian film, had made his way to the land of promise and creative outlet. As that land had seemed to him from a distance, so it had continued to seem, despite loneliness, language difficulty, and food shortage during the early months. I admired his courage in having overcome such obstacles. He now worked with a band of students drawn from thirty-seven nationalities, dividing his time between Materialistic philosophy and the Moscow film studios, and receiving a salary on which he lives. I had brought him some parcels, which, being ignorant of their contents, I had persuaded the customs officials at Negoreloje not to open. He seemed to assume, therefore, that I, too, had found light. Our conversation was, consequently, at cross-purposes. It started with my asking the waiter for some vodka.

M.: We don’t want any of that dope here.

R.B.: Sorry, but I can’t live without alcohol.

M.: Oh, well, I suppose you’ll grow up some time.

R.B.: I suppose so. But I’m beginning to doubt if I shall ever grow up into a communist. (Morgan looked surprised.) Anyhow, I’m not interested in politics. What I want to know is, not whether the Five-Year Plan is going to succeed, or how many million peasants will know the alphabet in ten years’ time, but whether anything really important, any advance in human thought or happiness, is going to come of so much misery as the Russians have gone through. I feel it will; but I can’t see how it can, when you substitute a banal ideology for the free exercise of the mind. Soviet culture, for example—what and where is it?

M.: You’re full up with the old ideas; you don’t understand. Our art must be a collective art, and we’ve got to produce an intelligentsia that will think and create collectively. It was different during the revolutionary period, when everyone was inspired. The construction period, which we’re settling down to, is harder to express in art.

R.B.: You mean there isn’t the same epic feeling of excitement?

M.: That’s right. The struggle goes on though, just the same.

R.B. (petulantly): I wish to God you’d tell me what you mean by this struggle you all talk about. Struggle with what? I shouldn’t have thought there was anyone left in Russia to struggle with by now.

M.: Don’t you understand that everything’s a struggle. If I put this glass of water on this table, the glass and the table are at war—their actual contact is a struggle. It’s the same in social evolution. The workers can only build socialism by struggling, by continuing the class war right through.

R.B.: So that when you’ve done away with classes, all you do is to create new ones and make an aristocracy out of a few million factory workers, who rule the country by oppressing, i.e. struggling with, the remaining majority. How anything creative, or even interesting, can come from this obsession with class, I fail to see. It’s worse than England.

M.: There’s not much you do see. Now look at Beethoven. Of course we admit he was a genius. But you can see how the class-struggle of the time comes out in his symphonies. Or Wagner. When he had been exiled for revolutionary opinions, he wrote the Ring. Then he became a good bourgeois again, and the result was Parsifal.

R.B. (soothingly): Parsifal is dreadful, I admit. I suppose if I translate what you’re trying to tell me into ordinary language, all it means is that genius is the product of environment. There’s nothing very new in that. And may I ask whether you think Newton could ever have thought out the law of gravity in the environment of modern Russia?

M.: Of course he could have. Our laboratories here are better equipped than any in Europe.

R.B.: I’m talking about thought, not experiment—something that goes on in one person at a time. If you take all the great periods of human invention, scientific or otherwise, you’ll find that people were free to think as they wished. There was an atmosphere of disinterested inquiry. The nineteenth century in England, for example—it produced Marx’s Capital among other things, and he says as much in the preface.^[1] Or the Renascence ...

M. (incredulously): The Renascence!! Coo! there you are. The Renascence was simply a phase in the class-struggle, the beginning of the capitalist age, when the merchants and the bourgeoisie began to rise to power.

R.B. (firmly): My dear Morgan, you remind me of an evangelical preacher, who’s right before God, when everyone else is wrong. I don’t mind being wrong. But I haven’t come all the way to Russia to argue with people like St Athanasius. It’s too boring. I admire your enthusiasm, and I wish to understand what gives rise to it. It doesn’t help me in the least to be told that everything that ever happened was a manifestation of the class-struggle. Do you think there were revolutions among the lung-fish? I dare say the Revolution was an excellent thing for Russia. I wouldn’t put the clock back for a moment. But what I want to know is whether it holds the seed of hope for the rest of the world beneath this desiccated husk of class ideology.

M.: We’re absolutely different. You can’t be expected to have the right outlook. You’re ...

R.B.: I’m of a different class, you mean?

M.: That’s it. Your voice—it sounds affected to me.

R.B.: Perhaps it is. But I don’t see that that’s any reason why we should start a class war over this table, or why the GPU should send old professors to the Urals for writing about Byzantine icons.

M.: They belong to the wrong class—they’re our enemies. The intellectuals have let us down too often. We can’t take any more risks, when the war may come at any moment.

R.B.: There you go again. What war?

M.: It’s happened once. What about the Intervention?

R.B.: D’you think the whole of England is peopled with Churchills?

M.: I don’t know about that, but war’s coming all right. Why, it’s beginning already in Manchuria. What’s more, I tell you seriously that in two or three years’ time I hope to be inviting my comrades from here to stay with me in Buckingham Palace.

R.B.: That’s a very bourgeois ambition. (Inconsequently) Do you get on with Jews?

M.: I’m pretty used to them after living in the East End. I like them. Still, they’re not quite the same as yourself. Let’s go up and see Sylvia Chen.

R.B.: Why, is she a Jewess?

M.: No, she’s a daughter of Eugene Chen and a French negress. Her brother’s a commander in the Red Army, and she’s a dancer.

We went upstairs to Miss Chen’s apartment. Though her shelves groaned with the early fathers of Materialism, she was temporarily engrossed with the difficulty of obtaining new dance records, since Jazz is proscribed by the Russian customs as ‘ideologically incorrect’. Even Morgan, now released from argument, admitted the hardship of this deprivation. They put on an old record, and Miss Chen hopped about, a pretty creature against the antiquated plush of her surroundings.

‘What are you going to do in Russia?’ she asked me.

I said I hoped of course to go to Leningrad, and also to Novgorod to see the old churches.

‘Churches?’ she answered. ‘Whatever interests you about that kind of dead stuff?’

I felt I could hardly explain.

[1] ‘The social statistics of Germany and the rest of Continental Western Europe are, in comparison with those of England, wretchedly compiled ... We should be appalled at the state of things at home, if, as in England, our governments and parliaments appointed periodically commissions of inquiry into economic conditions; if these commissions were armed with the same plenary powers to get at the truth; if it was possible to find for this purpose men as competent, as free from partisanship and respect of persons, as are the English factory-inspectors, her medical reporters on public health, her commissioners of inquiry into the exploitation of women and children, into housing and food ... In England the progress of social disintegration is palpable. When it has reached a certain point, it must react on the Continent ... For this reason, as well as others, I have given so large a space in this volume to the history, the details, and the results of English factory legislation. One nation can and should learn from others.’—Capital, Preface to the first edition, 1867.