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(1)

I have given the above conversation as one specimen out of many. I had come to a new world: Morgan was to me as the kangaroo to Captain Cook or as the Erewhonians to the Edwardians. Yet since he was neither beast nor fiction, I could not, and cannot, treat him and his like with the polite detachment of a zoologist.^[2] This is the normal attitude of the visiting foreigner, than which, if the Russians only realized it, nothing is more insulting to them. Nevertheless, beneath the insane babble of Marxian clichés, I was conscious of forces whose reality was not to be denied, and whose significance aroused my avid curiosity. This curiosity, I knew, would go unrequited unless I could see beyond the fanatics and jargon that obscure every view in modern Russia.

The first condition of understanding for the stranger is to realize that the Revolution and all that followed it were the outcome of processes which began with Russian history and will end with it. The Byzantine Orthodox Church has always been distinguished from the Catholic in that its ideal is rather the attainment of heaven on earth by means of contemplation than the pursuit of a satisfactory after-life. From the domination of ideas which this Church exercised from the tenth century on, no Renascence ever delivered Russia. Nor were the serfs, as in other countries, liberated from their material slavery by an economic demand for fluid labour. Thus the Russian has always conceived of progress as a mass-advance towards an immediate millennium rather than as a succession of steps taken by gifted individuals towards objective truth. While no country has produced more theorists on the theme of human betterment, their concern has always been with the prompt delivery rather than with the quality of the perfection supplied. Only by this means could the mass of humanity, whose mystic elevation has always been the keynote of Russian speculation, be adequately embraced. The individual, wedded to objective thought for its own selfish sake, was ignored as a permanent factor in the social scheme, for the obvious reason that the Russians have no conception of the individual in this sense—a fact which emerges plainly enough from those travesties of humanity which form the individual heroes of Russian novels.

In the last century, the rise of an intellectual class gave mouth and power to this Russo-Messianic concept of collective uplift. At the same time there arrived from the West the new industrial idea of a purely physical universe ruled by a God who was nothing more than a chemist-engineer. Such an idea, reacting on the pervasive mysticism of Orthodoxy and the fantastic sects that had sprouted from so fertile a soil, produced a philosophic vacuum, a kind of mystic nothingness, which was elaborated into a system by Bakunin (1814-76) under the name of Nihilism. Then began the classic era of sacrificial plotters, whose dramatic assassinations attracted the attention of the outside world. It was complacently imagined by their liberal sympathizers in other countries that the murderers, if slightly misguided in their methods, were inspired by the desire to free their country from a brutal autocracy. Even to-day this idea is ingeniously fostered in the minds of foreign tourists by the transformation of the fortress of Peter and Paul, where the chief rebels were confined, into a museum for the display of Tsarist atrocity. The hatred of the anarchists for the Monarchy was doubtless genuine and disinterested. But if anyone wishes to disabuse himself of the illusion that they wished to substitute for it a regime of Anglo-Saxon liberty, let him read the appendix to René Fülöp-Miller’s Mind and Face of Bolshevism, which contains quotations from The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov, written by Dostoievsky in 1871 and 1879. Even these prophetic utterances are superfluous. For did not Lenin say that freedom was a bourgeois prejudice?

The European may stigmatize as merely destructive the Russian theorist’s obsession with a joyless, unwilled mass-nirvana, and as impracticable his conception of the human mass as the one and only agent of human advance, obedient to the impulses of its Narcissistic mysticism. He may even be permitted a just indignation when these ideas threaten the structure of his own laboriously evolved tradition. But it serves no end to curse the Russians for thinking as they do, or to depreciate their ideal of enabling the mass to exchange its bestial sloth for an inspired self-immolation on the altar of industrial productivity. It is not our ideal. We aim at an increasing distribution of material benefits within a framework that preserves the prerogatives of the individual. But let us understand that Bolshevism, whether it prove economically feasible or not, derives directly and genuinely from the Russian view of the universe, which regards the passion of the mass-man for the sake of the mass-man as the highest form of human expression.

Meanwhile Nihilism and its like offered incentive to individual self-sacrifice, but no programme for co-ordinated action. This deficiency was to be filled in part by Karl Marx, who propounded a new philosophy of historical evolution, and in part by Lenin, who, with the usual Russian impatience to be in at the Second Coming, extracted from that philosophy a social doctrine capable of immediate application, and, since evolution was concerned, conceived himself to be the proper agent for speeding up that cumbrous process.

Karl Marx arrived in London in 1849, and there devoted himself to research among the voluminous materials that had already been collected anent the conditions of the English working classes. In his lighter moments he entertained a wholesome respect for class distinctions and established authority: ‘he attended at the Society of Arts a soirée graced by the presence of royalty ... he liked his wife to sign herself “Jenny, née Baronne de Westphalen” ... finally, he accepted the office of constable of the vestry of St Pancras, taking the customary oath, and donning the regulation uniform on gala occasions.’^[3] He retained his enthusiasm for Germany, ‘sang the praises of German music and literature’, and regarded Germany’s part in the war of 1870 as purely defensive.

His contribution to thought was his conception of society as something fluid, in a state of perpetual change and becoming, and his adumbration of a law governing this process. It is claimed that, as Darwin to biology, so he stands in relation to sociology. The claim is somewhat exaggerated, for whereas Darwin could base his deductions on the whole of the world’s history, Marx was necessarily confined to that comparatively narrow field contained in the written records of a few thousand years. Starting with the premise that all ‘value’ is the outcome of labour, his law of evolution naturally developed a purely economic complexion: all societies are based on the exploitation of labour in some form or another, and since the exploiters cannot be expected to relinquish their privileged position of their own accord, it is only by explosions of violence that the changes rendered necessary by changing methods of economic production are brought about; these explosions are the outcome of a permanent, though generally latent, struggle—the class war; as for politics, morals, religion, art, and the rest, these are but the ideological expression of that struggle. In Marx’s opinion, the moment was at last approaching when labour should free itself from the last of a succession of exploiting classes and assume the whole fruits of its own toil for itself. Thus his theory of social evolution dissolves, or is dissolved by those who would put it to practical use, in the mist of an imminent millennium. One is left in doubt as to whether, once the workers cease to be exploited, the Marxian law will continue to operate or not.

In putting forward his theory of the evolution of society according to economic laws, Marx added something to the general technique of historical inquiry. But in seeking to found, upon the basis of those laws, an all-embracing philosophy, he displayed a lack of scientific method which must be ascribed to the Jew’s inability to apprehend the reality of emotions and ideals of which he himself has no personal experience.

It were redundant to indicate which particular points in the Marxian philosophy brought grist to the revolutionary mill. But it cannot be sufficiently stressed how easily these theories might have disappeared into the limbo enjoyed by most of their kind, but for their transformation into a militant creed of action at the hands of Lenin. For good or evil, Lenin was one of the most remarkable characters in history, not only by virtue of his influence on the fate of millions, but for his individual pertinacity and consistency in working towards an apparently impossible goal. In the Marxian theory he saw a practical instrument and he shaped it to that end. To read his works after those of Marx is like turning to the Athanasian Creed from the Sermon on the Mount. He found in Marx the raw material for both a politico-economic programme and a philosophy to uphold it. When the time came, the weapons were ready forged, and he brought them into play.

(2)

Into the exact nature of the political organism that to-day exists as the result of Lenin’s activities, I do not propose to inquire; abler heads than mine have run themselves against this brick wall, and will continue to do so. But I wish to record a very definite impression on my part of the nervous insecurity and strain that prevails among all educated and semi-educated people in Russia, members of the Communist Party included. The incidents that contributed to form this impression were cumulative in their effect, and in any case too numerous to recount. Indeed, its origin was atmospheric as much as circumstantial. But if it was a correct impression, its importance is vital to the sifting of the ashes whence the phoenix of collective culture must eventually arise. The stranger must inquire what produces it.

In describing the system under which they live, the Russians themselves invariably make use of two terms, one political, the other economic. These are ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ and ‘State capitalism’.

The ‘proletariat’ is a name for that hypothetical mass with whose aims Lenin, as a good Russian, necessarily identified his own. But the word, when used in the Marxian sense, denotes a fluid supply of labour, without anchorage or possessions, at the beck and call of economic, i.e. capitalistic, demand. Unfortunately, this particular kind of mass scarcely existed in Russia at the time of the Revolution. Thus the Bolsheviks, having established a government which has alienated the sympathies of the intellectual class by its tyranny and an economic system which, if judged by their own material standards, was, and is, a total failure from the point of view of the peasant, lack the chief support postulated by their creed, the very lynch-pin of the whole theoretical structure. Until this support is created—that is to say, until at least a bare majority of the Russian population has been recruited into the ranks of the true proletarian nucleus already centred in the large towns—the present rulers of Russia must continue in their present state of nervous insecurity, particularly when they consider the volume of existing discontent, passive though it be. Hence the frantic efforts that have been, and are being, made to create a fluid rural proletariat by impressing peasants into the collective farms—by, in fact, the artificial stimulation of that very process which the whole of Capital was meant to damn for ever and ever.

Says Marx, after lauding the independence of the English peasant before our great enclosures took place: ‘What the capitalist system demanded was, on the other hand, a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, the transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means of labour into capital.’ Says Lenin, in his article on Marx written for a Russian encyclopaedia: ‘If, finally, we wish to understand the attitude of Marxian socialism towards the smaller peasantry ... we must turn to a declaration by Engels expressing Marx’s views: “When we are in possession of the powers of the State, we shall not even dream of forcibly expropriating the poorer peasants .... Our task as regards the smallholders will first of all consist in transforming their individual production and individual ownership into co-operative production and co-operative ownership, not forcibly, but by way of example, and by offering social aid for this purpose.” ’^[4] Well might Marx cause an earthquake in the Highgate cemetery and Lenin burst his mausoleum to fragments, could they have witnessed the treatment of the Russian peasant carried out in their names during the last five years.

So bitter and so widespread has been the resentment aroused by this treatment that Stalin, temporarily at least, has had a stop put to it. It is the result, not of socialism, but of State capitalism, as the Russians admit. Marx was at pains to point out that capitalists always tend to absorb one another. ‘Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital ... grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation.’ Is this true of Russia, where the number of capitalists has been diminished to one? If so, what will be the result?

Either the peasants, incensed beyond all reason, will resist all attempts to proletarianize them; in which case they will be permanently at odds with the communist aristocracy of the towns, and the class war will go on, thus vindicating Marx’s theory of evolution. Or they will surrender themselves to a joyless impersonal exploitation by the State, redeemed by elementary education and broadcast culture; and Marx’s theory will either die of classless inanition or receive its most terrific vindication in a subsequent revolt on the part of the expropriated against the one grand expropriator—the State. Both alternatives hold possibilities well calculated to disturb the present rulers. They have staked everything on the Five-Year Plan. This, if it succeeds, should create a purely industrial proletariat of sufficient size to support them and recruited without the ill-feeling produced by compulsory measures. Meanwhile the tension, as of a man fighting for his life, pervades the whole country. It may not conduce to the pursuit of objective truth or the creation of great art, but it results in a great activity and exercise of the mind.

(3)

It was recognized from the beginning by Lenin and his coadjutors that allegiance to their politico-economic system must depend, in the long run, on a general acceptance of its concomitant philosophy by those capable of even the most rudimentary mental activity. In attempting to secure this allegiance they were at once face to face with the weakest link in their carefully forged chain for the bondage of the individual—with, in fact, a link so weak as to constitute a gap. To remedy this deficiency they have exercised an ingenuity which deserves the success it is receiving. But the very contrivances to which they are obliged to resort, reveal more clearly than anything else the totally unscientific character of the philosophy to which they are committed.

The exponents of Dialectical Materialism, as the creed enunciated by Lenin is called, regard the universe as composed solely of phenomena whose reality can be subjected to the empirical test of their own senses. Religion is their bane. It diverts man’s attention and effort from the society in which he lives; its priesthood is invariably the agent of political and social stagnation. This view is rational enough, and, though one may take occasional exception to it, not difficult to acquiesce in or at last to understand. But the Materialists are also the victims of a frenzied and irrational hate for those ancient beliefs and institutions which symbolize, possibly in its crudest form, the search of mankind for a central Reality and, consequently, the prime obstacle to the spread of the New Gospel. This hate, amounting almost to dementia, has prevented them from conducting any detached inquiry into the reason why religion exists and always has existed. Ostrich-like they have failed to recognize that religion fulfils some fundamental human need.

After the Revolution, religion in Russia fell, or was thrust, into very general desuetude. No sooner did this happen than the needs which, however superficially or improperly, it had hitherto satisfied, made themselves apparent in an atmosphere of licence, restlessness, and disillusionment. Village life had lost its keystone; the peasant his theatre; among the educated or semi-educated classes was felt an equal lack of that faith or code without which life cannot be regulated. In addition, the new rulers were not slow to discover that they, too, had lost something, and that this was hardly the moment to dispense with the traditional ally of all government. ‘Religion,’ they had thundered, ‘is the opium of the people.’ The practical value of this maxim now became fully apparent to them. Since all pre-existing religions were proscribed by the new philosophy, there was only one course open to them in their need for a popular soporific. This was to erect the philosophy itself into a religion. And this they have done. They have preserved the jealousy of the God of Israel while dispensing with the God himself, and the external ceremony of the Orthodox Church while dispensing with the Church. In place of the single God enthroned in heaven, they have substituted the Mass enthroned on earth; in place of the Church, a hierarchy no less intolerant—YOUTH. It is a different kind of opium; its dreams are less reposeful. But it works.

The Italian Professor Achille Loria closes his monograph on Karl Marx with words which might almost be supposed, by one ignorant of their context, to emanate from a newly discovered papyrus of St John the Divine:

For the day is coming. And in that day, when remorseless time shall have destroyed the statues of the saints and of the warriors, renascent humanity will raise in honour of the author of this work of destruction, upon the shores of his native stream, a huge mausoleum representing the proletarian breaking his chains and entering upon an era of conscious and glorious freedom. Thither will come the regenerated peoples bearing garlands of remembrance and of gratitude to lay upon the shrine of the great thinker, who, amid sufferings, humiliations, and numberless privations, fought unceasingly for the ransom of mankind. And the mothers, as they show to their children the suffering and suggestive figure, will say, their voices trembling with emotion and joy: See from what darkness our light has come forth; see how many tears have watered the seeds of our joy; look, and pay reverence to him who struggled, who suffered, who died for the Supreme Redemption.

True, the Rhine still waits its promised monument. But I could not help thinking, as I walked about Moscow on 22 January, what a graceful and at the same time inexpensive gesture the British Government might make by unearthing the bones of Marx and his Jenny in Highgate^[5] and presenting them to Russia. Lenin, after all, is only second best. Still, he makes a very decent pilgrimage, and the patriot type of saint is certainly the more fashionable at the moment.

Lenin died on 21 January. For some inscrutable Russian reason his death is mourned, or was this year, on 22 January. The Red Good Friday proved the occasion for elaborate manifestations of dolour, such as mark the same season in Rome. To all shops and offices of any pretension, red banners, bearing the hammer and sickle in gold, and bound in black, had been distributed, and now hung motionless in the cold fog with which nature was participating in the national grief. The grandiose front of the Bolshoy Theatre, the Opera, was draped on either side with an immense arras of the same character; while across the portico the name Lenin was blazoned in scarlet light, like a gigantic IHS. In addition to this Latin ostentation, something of the English Sabbath had crept in. The sale of alcohol was forbidden, lest the dignity of the occasion should be marred by the usual inebriate holiday-makers. Even food was difficult to obtain. At the same time hotels and restaurants were crowded with congresses and delegations assembled to observe the sacred day. In the Red Square, a queue had formed such as one sees in London when a dead king lies in state, twisting and turning over the great expanse of snow, like one of those wire puzzles that have neither end nor beginning. From morning till night it shuffled convulsively along, a foot at a time. There might have been ten or a hundred thousand people; I could find no means of computing. But it struck me that none of them would have been there, to stand for an hour in a temperature of several degrees below zero, unless actuated by genuine emotion and a personal conviction of the solemnity of the occasion.

The instances of resemblance between the outward manifestations of the Materialist faith and those of the older religions could be multiplied indefinitely; they astonish the visitor at every turn. In factories and clubs, the icon corner has been replaced by the Lenin or the Marx corner: hideous busts of pseudo-bronze stand on pyramidical pedestals draped in red, bowered in red, and backed with red. In the separate rooms, less expensive coloured prints replace the erstwhile less expensive icons, forerunners of a new and monotonous hagiography depicting Stalin, Kalinin, Krupskaya, and Budenny. In the large towns, every third shop window teems with these frightful representations, of all sizes to suit all purses, and exhibiting a lack of artistry sickening to behold. On being told the sum formerly derived by the Pechersky Lavra in Kiev from the sale of holy pictures, I was anxious to learn what profit accrued to the present government from the same source. The answer to my inquiry was, that far from there being any profit, the State actually incurred a considerable loss in promoting the distribution of its blessed effigies.

In addition to dead saints, there are the living Early Fathers, the Jeromes, Clements, Origens, and Athanasiuses, who thunder out their daily commentaries on the central creed and its application to the daily emergency with the prolific inconsequence induced by modern printing facilities. In Kremlin, commissariat, club, factory, institute, and school, these Early Fathers reside and multiply, seeking heresies and definitions with the appetite of Byzantine Christologists. Fortunately for their happiness, there is no end to either, since their dogma is based on the most uncertain of all sciences and the details of its proper practice are as elusive as quicksilver.

These Christian similes may sound far-fetched; but though individual definitions of what does and does not constitute a religion may differ, they do in fact convey better than any other the mental atmosphere of Bolshevist Russia. It is as easy for us—for me—to laugh at the ideological hair-splitting and Salvation Army jargon that have grown up round the Materialist creed as it was for Gibbon to ridicule the Monophysites and the Monothelites. Yet the purpose of these ideological and Christological controversies is the same, and an eminently comprehensible one: namely, to expand the provisions of a central creed so as to cover every possible contingency by a formula that shall be intelligible to the illiterate or the semi-literate mass. Where the parallel may possibly lose its force is in the nature of the spiritual force or faith behind the two religions.

The faith that inspired the earlier Russian revolutionaries was, as I have tried to explain, a conviction that the redemption of humanity must and could be attained through the mental and material advance of humanity in the mass. This was Lenin’s faith. It may incorporate a kind of devil-worship. But judged by the measure of his devotion to his faith, Lenin was a great and noble man. I could not help asking myself, when in Russia, whether, now, this same faith was not giving place to external boastfulness and megalomania, a kind of hollow, inverted Fascism. One hears too much about the enthusiasm of YOUTH, in Russia as everywhere else. The very phrase is suspicious; it cloaks an emptiness; great movements cannot draw their force from supporters in a state of petrified immaturity. Russian YOUTH may feel itself predestined to dominate the globe. Drunk with titanic visions, it may hurl itself down mines and into factories. For the moment, the Five-Year Plan provides a psychological safety-valve to this bursting intoxication, this class-chauvinism. But where is the original faith? What will sustain the young shock-brigaders and komsomols of to-day twenty years hence, if the reward should not prove equal to their hope?

To these questions, to the question whether Materialism is destined to endure for centuries as a vital force, or to crumble away like a nerveless tooth, I can put no answer. Meanwhile, it seeks to reinforce its dominion with every device of jealous obscurantism and personal oppression known to the medieval Church or the Spanish Inquisition. The faith may survive the longer for such conditions, the social structure gain in strength. But art and culture must either die, as they died with Julian the Apostate, or assume a form as yet unknown, as they assumed in the Gothic cathedrals. So far, only darkness is descending, while the new light has not begun to shine. But the Dark Ages lasted four centuries. Must Russia wait as long, plunged in her scientific night?

At a certain stage of their development [wrote Marx^[6]] the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing production relationships, or, what is but a legal expression for the same thing, with the property relationships within which they have hitherto moved ... A period of social revolution then begins. With the change in the economic foundation, the whole gigantic superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations, we must always distinguish between the material changes in the economic conditions of production ... and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic, in short, ideological forms, in which human beings become conscious of this conflict and fight it out to an issue.

The italics are mine. They enshrine the kernel of Bolshevist truth: thought, creative power, can have but one beginning and one end, one incentive and one purpose—the furtherance of the class-struggle.

Education thus becomes a question of instilling into children (from the ages of six to sixty) the belief that the continuance of this struggle is the proper aim of all human beings and the particular aim of all good Russians. As far as general principles are concerned, a specious amorality is inculcated by the most elementary copybooks. Spy on your neighbour and cherish the machine! is the motto of Russian childhood. In the towns, the principal churches are occupied by a litter of posters and photographs which remind one of a dismantled coffee-stall. Closer examination reveals a pictorial exposure of the iniquities and class bias of all religions—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Christianity, the Sects, Judaism, Mohammedanism, and Buddhism. The Calvinistic fury of Materialism can tolerate no rivals. Crowds of children trail round behind their teachers, as we see them at the Burlington House exhibitions, imbibing knowledge of the hard and fast line between the new Right and the new Wrong as laid down in these Anti-God Museums. The same line is apparent in the Press and in public entertainments. At the Press it becomes no Englishman to throw stones; I can only blush in guilty silence. But on the Moscow wireless, during the English programme, I heard one thing that might have shocked even Mr Maxton. The speaker was describing the industrial activity of Sverdlovsk, a town in the Urals once known as Ekaterinbourg. In their spare time, he said, smiling children and workers might be seen going in and out of the house of Ipatiev—now a museum—‘where the family of Romanov met the fate it justly deserved’. The man’s voice, I thought, faltered as he spoke his silly text. And well it might. If this is how the Bolsheviks conduct their propaganda abroad, the world is safe from revolution for a long time. I should like to go to Sverdlovsk and see the children smiling in the death-cellar of those other children. The sight would bear noble witness to the power of the new faith, and also to that cowardly, hypocritical pretence of infallibility, mark of all religions, which must needs brazen out the most repulsive accidents.

The atmospheric oppression of a land where the only truths are the class war and the machine, and where all culture must be subservient to those ends, is alleviated by the novelty—one might even say eccentricity—that results. The air is mixed with laughing-gas. But it is a stifling air—how stifling I only realized on reaching Kiev, which preserves in some indefinable way its old university tradition of the humanities and allows one to breathe normally again. Not that I was unhappy in Russia. I can truthfully say that in no foreign country have I ever enjoyed myself so positively, been so sheltered from boredom, or felt such regret at departure. But this was partly due, I must confess, to the pleasant feeling of pugnacity that woke in my bosom. The system is intended for the world—that is clear from the start. Try your damned religion on me, I felt, and you’ll get as good as you give! And so they did, now and then. Yet I could not but respect persons so deeply engaged in a definite purpose and so homogeneously subscribing, with heart or lip, to a definite belief. Such fixity was hardly to be despised by a member of that nation whose chosen patriots are Noel Coward and Winston Churchill. It was rather to be envied.

My first real consciousness of the Great Untruth was brought to the surface by a Beethoven concert conducted by Oscar Fried in the Moscow Conservatorium. They were playing the Pastoral Symphony. It was not a bad performance, though the instruments lacked tone. When it was at an end, I looked up and remembered where I was. And then, suddenly, it came to me that here—not in capitalism, nor in Christianity, but here on the concert platform in these tattered scores—was the enemy that Materialism can never conquer and that must ultimately and inevitably conquer Materialism. It seemed to me that to allow such a performance to take place in public was simply an act of quixotic folly on the part of the authorities. In theory, no doubt, the Pastoral Symphony provides exemplary illustration of the class war in rural Austria. In practice ... I turned my attention to the audience and read, or thought I read, my own thoughts in their faces. Only a group of shock-brigaders, young hierarchs in tall boots, looked sullen, as indeed it was their duty to do. They would have explained to me, had I reproached them for their attendance, that music, above all arts, conduces to the socialization of emotion. This means, in ordinary language, that it moves a lot of people at once. But if I had asked them how it is that certain compositions wield this invaluable power in a greater degree than others, or whether the emotion produced by them is not the outcome of a highly incorrect revelation of abstract beauty, I do not know what they would have replied. The functions of art are one thing. Its creation and effect are another. Either art must be proscribed in its entirety, as St Clement of Alexandria recommended; or, if its effect is considered beneficial to the general mass, then the individual must be allowed free play with abstractions in order to create it. The learned doctors of Materialism argue that a class war for the redemption of humanity should be abstraction enough for any artist. This may be so. A spontaneous culture may spring from the soil of mass-betterment. But I could see no signs of it. When I asked for any, they could only answer with Christ: ‘A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it.’ This was disappointing. Still, I persisted in my search.

At Morgan’s instance, I went to see the two most recent sound-films made in the Russian studios. Russian films of the revolutionary or epic period have aroused great hopes. These, depicting the present period of construction, proved by contrast somewhat disappointing.

The first was called Sniper. It opened with a regiment of British troops in kilts made of duster-cloth being cheered off to the front to the strains of ‘Tipperrarr-ee’, which tune, I afterwards learnt, they had been taught to sing by Morgan. A confusing succession of incidents on various fronts followed, during which No-man’s-land was suddenly transformed into a maize-field, in order that harvesting women, whom the German Army was gallantly assisting in their labours, might be shot down by the Allied guns. Finally, the scene changed to the new Russia, in which all the workers but one of a certain factory devoted their leisure hours to rifle-practice. This one, a feckless youth, maundered about with a tennis racquet; until one day the capitalist invasion began, and the tennis racquet proved of little service in defending either its owner’s person or his fatherland. I was reminded of those ridiculous British productions sponsored by the Empire Marketing Board to promote imperial fellowship. And I must say, in all justice, that even the Moscow Press was loud in its denunciations of such crudity.

The other film, on the other hand, had been acclaimed as a national triumph, and has presumably obtained popularity abroad, since I afterwards found it showing in Constantinople and it has since been seen in London. The photography was generally good and in parts excellent. Its title may be rendered as The Way into Life.

The theme was the redemption of those homeless children that have grown up like animals and have infested Russia since the great famine. They are shown at first as thieves and thugs. Then, while sleeping in a cellar, they are rounded up and transported to a deserted church in the country which they turn into a workshop. Their gradual transformation into useful members of society is effected by a kind of scoutmaster who seeks to inculcate into them the public school sense of honour, and is materially assisted in this admirable work by the hero of the film, a worthy Tartar boy named Mustafa. But evil influences persist. While the scoutmaster is away, a disaffected section of the boys, despite the opposition of those led by Mustafa, breaks all the machines. The scoutmaster, on return, cannot conceal his pain, but instead of reproaches he produces a toy train from a brown-paper parcel. This he sets going on toy rails; and, inspired by its example, they start to build a real railway. Meanwhile the disaffected section has discovered a log-hut in the woods where prostitutes congregate and vodka circulates freely. To this horrible resort they lure Mustafa and his disciples, now clad in smart lounge suits. But when the orgy is at its height, the latter, at a sign from their leader, draw revolvers, shoot up a number of strange but repulsive men, and bind the evil women, who are now in a state of blubbering dishevelment. By now the line is finished. The night before the opening Mustafa goes down it on a trolley, singing a Tartar song as the dawn breaks, the birds begin to chirp, and the bull-frogs to croak. But an enemy lies in wait; the trolley is upset and Mustafa stabbed to death. After some delay the ceremonial first train, manned by the now fully reclaimed boys, starts its opening journey without him. Then they find his body, and placing it reverently on the front of the engine, steam into the terminus of a small town, where rejoicing at once gives way to grief. In real life, I am glad to say, Mustafa is still with us. Moscow now realizes that he is human after all, and that he is more broad-minded in his pleasures than the film would have us believe.

There were moments in this film of real emotional solemnity, such as that of the Tartar song at dawn. But for me these were entirely overshadowed by the didactic unreality of the whole story, and by the catechism in Right and Wrong which the audience was obliged to answer in order to keep abreast of the plot. It was the atmosphere of Eric, or Little by Little and The Fairchild Family over again, with the same fascination of the contemporary social document. I would have given half my time in Russia to have read into the hearts of my fellow-spectators, and to have discovered whether this crude antithesis of Materialist values had inspired them with real emotional piety, or had rendered their entertainment, as it had mine, just a little tedious.

It would be possible to continue indefinitely the list of experiences which went to prove how utterly impossible, and, from the Materialist point of view, undesirable, it is that any form of disinterested, non-political, or non-economic culture should ever flourish on the soil of modern Russia. But there came to my notice one final instance which revealed, more plainly and more grotesquely than anything else, the mendacious and futile obscurantism to which the new religion finds it necessary to resort in its own self-defence. There hangs in Moscow one of the finest and most representative collections of modern French pictures that has ever been assembled. Over the entrances of each room are printed notices, which are designed to assist the appreciation of less sophisticated visitors. In appending a selection from these notices, I withhold comment that would be impertinent to the intelligence of the English reader and offensive to my Russian friends:

MONET: Age of transition from capitalism to imperialism. Taste of the industrial bourgeoisie.

CÉZANNE: Age of the preliminary period of imperialism. Taste of the industrial bourgeoisie.

PISSARRO and SISELEY: Age of the preliminary period of imperialism. Taste of the industrial bourgeoisie.

GAUGUIN: Taste of the rentier.

CROSS and SIGNAC: Taste of the lower and middle bourgeoisie under the influence of the lower industrial bourgeoisie.

VAN GOGH: Taste of the small bourgeoisie.

MATISSE: Age of distorted imperialism. Taste of the rentier.

(4)

While the doctrine of Materialism ascribes all artistic creation to the genius of the mass and epoch rather than to that of the individual, it must perforce admit that the concrete fruits of such creation do owe their shape to some effort on the part of the individual, even though his proper function is only to interpret and organize the taste and emotions of the mass and epoch; and that the successful fulfilment of this function, impersonal though it be, requires of the individual a degree of concentration and thought which distinguishes him from the common herd and thus postulates the existence of an intelligentsia. ‘We workers,’ say the good partymen, ‘will create our own intelligentsia.’ So they may do—though how, neither they nor I can explain. But whatever its origins, this intelligentsia will constitute a different class from that of the ‘workers and peasants’, and as such a suspect class. All disinterested thought, such as we regard as the first condition of cultural development, is rendered impossible in Russia by the jealousy of the prevailing religion. But even those of the intelligentsia who sincerely subscribe to that religion—‘one must believe in it, or one cannot live here’, said the son of a former landowner, now an engineer, to me—even they are subject to a system of bewildering impediments which makes the foreign observer wonder how their task can be adequately performed and whether anything truly inventive can ever result from their efforts. I would emphasize the fact that I am writing here, not of the disgruntled dispossessed, but of those who are honestly desirous of working for and with the new system, but whose vocations necessarily place them in the intellectual class.

Sixty years ago one of Dostoievsky’s characters spoke as follows concerning the social system adumbrated by another:

One thing in his book is good, the idea of espionage. In his idea every member of the society spies on the others, and is bound to inform against them when necessary. All are slaves and equal in their slavery ... First of all, the level of education, science, and innate natural talent falls. A high intellectual level is possible only to superior talents; but we have no need of superior talents. Superior talents have always seized power for themselves and led to despotism. Men of talent cannot help becoming despots, they have always done more harm than good; therefore they are driven out or put to death.^[7]

This prophecy is somewhat exaggerated, since Materialism has great need of superior talents and its exponents admit the fact. But it contains much that the visitor to Russia can recognize.

Those less fortunate observers, who are obliged to commit themselves entirely to the excellent facilities offered by the Russian tourist agency, remain completely oblivious to that unique state of affairs which most clearly distinguishes the lives of Russian humanity from those led by humanity in any other part of the globe. This state of affairs consists in the universal, all-pervasive practice of espionage and suspicion conducted among all grades of the Materialist society. I heard it said that one in every fourteen persons in the whole of Russia is in some way or other an agent of the secret police. Whether this is true, I do not know. But my own short experience revealed to me that even the boldest flights of fiction conceived by the late Mr Edgar Wallace had visualized nothing to compare with the reality of those excitements which the Russian people are daily privileged to enjoy. Now that I am back in England, no report circulated by the die-hard Press seems too preposterous to believe, even though, in nine cases out of ten, I do not believe it. At times, during my visit, I began to doubt my own sanity; but never for long; some conversation with those who had actually experienced the ordeals of Russian citizenship or residence always intervened to restore it. Plotters, saboteurs, informers, kulaks, assassins, counter-revolutionaries, and the ever-renascent bourgeoisie, native or foreign, lurk behind every window, playing their assigned rôles with the ineradicable malignancy of the Vauriens in Elmer Rice’s Purilia. Against these vile creatures, the Communist Paragonians, members of that unspotted élite, the party proper,^[8] are engaged in ceaseless warfare. It is a kind of film-land, where all the types are prearranged and Goodness shines with perpetual brightness in its everlasting victory over Sin. Even prostitutes, being forbidden a trade-union, cannot flourish.

The secret police are known as the GPU. This is pronounced Gaypayooh—but only by foreigners. By Russians the term is never uttered. They may sometimes talk in whispers of the ‘three-letter men’. But generally they prefer not to mention them at all. It became one of my favourite amusements to enunciate the fatal syllables in public places, in order to watch the tremor of surprise and apprehension elicited from everyone within hearing. On one occasion, it happened that my companion and I had inadvertently settled ourselves in a railway compartment reserved for the State couriers. The first of them to arrive naturally expostulated, and on seeing that we did not understand, pointed to the red tabs on his collar. ‘Oh!’ I said, comprehending, ‘you’re a GPU man, are you?’ At which even he, who was, started as though I had stuck a pin into his behind. He proved afterwards a Crichton of courtesy and assistance, even getting out of his bed at three in the morning to see us comfortably off the train.

But there is another and repulsive side to the picture. It must be remembered that the majority of those who enjoy the real power in Russia to-day are men who spent their early lives hunted from pillar to post by the Tsarist Okhrana; they were imprisoned; they were sent to Siberia; and the old spirit of suspicion and revanche still lives in them. Lenin and Trotsky were different. They too may have harboured these feelings. But their constructive energy outweighed them. To-day Russia is ruled by men of meaner mould, men whose twisted outlook infects the whole Soviet Union with a spirit of malice and suspicion. The whole air is poisoned by this evil. Every man lives in fear of his neighbour. Even the school-children are admonished, in the books from which they learn to read, to train themselves as spies in their own villages. I do not exaggerate. I talked with persons who had been recently summoned to cross-examination by the GPU and with persons who had recently been the victims of their midnight raids. I learned from first-hand of their cold chamber. I found that distinguished scholars whom I had wished to meet had ‘disappeared’. I experienced personally their postal inquisition. Yet such information was acquired purely by chance in the most casual fashion. I was far too interested in the permanent Russia as it was and ever shall be, and was enjoying myself far too much there, to go nosing about in search of evil. Finally, after the Foreign Office had begged me to extend my stay, some unknown authority thought it better not to extend my visa. But then, I thought, in a country that celebrates its October Revolution in November, one should not be surprised that the Foreign Office cannot grant its own visas.

It is none of my purpose or business to censure the government of Russia and the priesthood of Materialism for maintaining a body of agents and police such as have always been found necessary to uphold the government and religion of that country. It may reasonably be assumed, from the historical evidence, that the Russian people and those who comprise the rest of the Union can only be governed by a despotism based on espionage, and that some such body must always be inherent in the Russian State. I am simply concerned to note the mental effect of such a system, whose rigour has been steadily increasing during the last five years, and whose brunt is borne mainly by the intellectual class, not necessarily on account of subversive activity, but simply because it is the intellectual class. It is they who are pilloried as the public enemies in theatrical trials; it is they whose every word and action is circumscribed by terror of the ‘ideologically incorrect’, whose avocations are supervised by semi-literate youths chosen from the party ranks, whose numbers are continually depleted to swell the Ural camps, and whose families suffer from cruel uncertainty. Such measures may be necessary; there may be enemies lurking in their midst; considering the difficulties under which they work, I should be surprised if there were not; these things again are not for me to affirm. But what I will affirm, and what I would beg the reader to share with me, is my contempt for those foreign intellectuals, and particularly those English ones, who, while finding in Russia the exemplar of social and economic planning, the climax of constructive politics, the paradise of YOUTH—in short, the model towards which all truly progressive persons must look for world redemption—are so intoxicated with admiration that they can spare no word of sympathy for their fellow-intellectuals, the men in Russia likest to themselves, for whom there is no place or hope under the system they so ardently covet. That this system would immediately, on attaining power, annihilate these miserable hypocrites, these hypnotees of every windblown theory, these bastards by uplift out of comfortable income, is the one satisfaction I could derive from its introduction into England. These Fabian ghosts, these liberal politicians, socialist editors and female peace-promoters, are the very people who anathematize without cease the tyranny of Hitler and his treatment of the German intellectual. But in Russia, where they are building not only socialism but Fordson tractors, the treatment of the intellectual does not matter: what counts freedom of thought or scholarship or individual creation beside the regeneration of the Great Unwashed? Very little, I dare say. And as little as these things count in that new world, just so little in this old one count those men whose inheritance they are and who renounce them for a mess of Bolshevist pottage. Let us rather have amongst us the red revolutionary who tries to seduce the troops and goes to prison for it, than these Russophil enthusiasts who acclaim the downfall of their own kind as the ultimate triumph of civilization.

Despite its cruelty, it is possible to argue that the old intellectual has deserved his fate, on account of his procrastination of soul and his slowness to ally himself with the new movement when it rose to power. But it is not only the old intellectual that falls under the ban of prevalent suspicion. The new—the inventors, planners, engineers, specialists, editors, architects, film-producers, and their like, all the prophets of the modern age—suffer from the same intolerable lack of freedom. In 1930 the campaign waged against them by the GPU reached such a pitch of fury that the authorities began to count the cost. Rykov produced figures to show how the Five-Year Plan was being hampered by this insensate policy. Until at last Stalin, who is a realist when the truth penetrates to him, called off the terror. The GPU, it was felt, was getting too big for its boots, with the result that administrative measures were taken to diminish its power. At the same time the salaries of the specialists were increased. These measures, it is evident, have since been reversed, and the terror re-started, in order to throw the blame for the failure of industrial projects on to specialists and foreigners. In any case the evil has been done, and it will take more than temporary half-measures and periods of leniency to undo it. Maurice Hindus asks: ‘Can Russia make man as inventive, as creative, as constructive as a capitalist regime which lays at the feet of a Ford, a Rosenwald, a Woolworth, a Rockefeller, all the rewards that this earth can afford? This is the crux of the Communist challenge to Capitalism.’^[9] In my opinion, this is not the crux; the national enthusiasm for the work in hand seemed, among nearly all those I met—even among such minor actors in the drama as archaeologists and museum curators—to provide its own reward. Where the crux lies now (Hindus wrote at the beginning of 1929) and where the whole system is threatened with breakdown, is in the terror of responsibility which has resulted from the preposterous campaign against the intellectual of the last five years. One of the foreign specialists in the country assured me that no sooner did he leave his office on one of those frequent trips to which his business called him, than his whole department absolutely ceased to function owing to the positive physical fear that now accompanies the taking of any decision whatsoever. Certainly, he said, there were other difficulties in the way of the Five-Year Plan; these difficulties, however, could be overcome. But in this doctrinal and actual proscription of the intellectual class he saw an insuperable obstacle to the Plan’s success. And he prophesied that unless the psychological effects of the last three years were removed—unless, in fact, the class war should cease—the immense factories now in construction would either have to be placed under the management of foreigners or bankrupt the State by their total failure.

In concluding this very incomplete account of the psychological atmosphere in which the Russian intellectual moves and attempts to have his being, I would mention two last factors whose significance is by no means negligible and which serve, in some degree, to counter-balance the disabilities enumerated above. These are Russian nationalism and the paradox involved in the Russian worship of the machine.

The Allied intervention in Russia after the war was over was the most futile, most stupidly conducted, and most subsequently harmful adventure that modern history can show. The Materialist philosophy had postulated at least a brand of internationalism, even if that brand meant only loyalty to international socialism. Owing to the intervention and the attitude that the greater part of the foreign Press has inherited from it, there has resulted in Russia a mental isolation from the rest of the world which was at first merely negative, but which is now crystallizing into a positive national egotism of the most pronounced kind. Owing to the general impossibility of travel, of corresponding with foreigners, or of obtaining foreign books, both the educated and the semi-educated Russian honestly believe that in themselves alone is concentrated all the really progressive thought of the whole world; in which belief they are confirmed by the agreement of the foreign enthusiasts. This state of affairs, though it hardly conduces to a profitable use of the world’s intellectual resources, sustains the Russian intellectual in his present difficulties by placing him, at least in his own estimate, in the van of human affairs. His vanity, moreover, is flattered by the enormous curiosity which his country continues to arouse. It is not unpleasant to be regarded either as a bogy or as a saviour, but never as a nonentity, by virtue of one’s very nationality. In addition, this mental chauvinism is reinforced by continual war scares. The reader may find it hard to believe, but I can assure him that I emerged into the streets of Moscow one morning to discover the hitherto sober trams adorned with posters calling on the wise citizen to buy his gas-mask before it was too late. Malicious rumour said that the army stocks having been found to be defective, it was now sought to unload these essential household requisites on the civil population at seven roubles apiece. Be this as it may, no Russian seemed to think the admonition absurd. ‘What about the Intervention?’ came the inevitable retort. But the real explanation is, that deep down in the hearts of the population endures an older patriotism than that inculcated by Materialism—a patriotism which must always be associated with ‘Holy Russia’. I was told of a certain evening at the opera about a year before, when it happened that the principal singer had ended his part, the climax of the piece, with the words: ‘God shall save Russia’. Whereupon the audience rose to its feet in the stress of its collective emotion and cheered away its feelings till the roof shook. It was not the voice of the old Christians that cheered, but the voice of Russia, of the Russia that has stood and shall stand till the world’s end.

The paradox involved in the prevailing adoration of the machine lies in the fact that this cult should find its most devoted adherents in the most unmechanical country in the world. In the early days of this century, when Russian literature and Russian ballet swept over Western Europe, an idea grew up that the average Russian lived in a romantic Slav twilight, a cherry orchard of his own incapacity, where everything was excused by wringing of hands and a reference to temperament. Whether this ever was so, I doubt; it certainly is no longer. Russian incompetence of to-day is something cosmic, almost brutal, scorning excuse and seeking none. Should circumstances happen to obtrude it on the foreigner, and he happens to remark on it, this is considered an exhibition of bad form on both sides. During one week in the Ukraine, my companion and I experienced no less than five railway mishaps, in one of which—though fortunately it happened to the train in front—nineteen people were killed and over forty injured. Our eyebrows rose; finally, when the memory of this tragic accident had evaporated, we broke into uncontrollable laughter, and teased our guide till the poor man almost lost his faith in Progress. Was this the country of the Five-Year Plan, we asked, rejoicing in our ribald scepticism. But our inquiry lacked generosity. For those five mishaps explained precisely why Russia is the country of the Five-Year Plan.

On another occasion, when there was no boat waiting at the end of the journey, I discussed the question more calmly with an intelligent young Jew, who fully understood my detestation for the machine cult. He replied that to appreciate its meaning, I must realize what the Russians had gone through during the period of Civil War, the Intervention, and the great famine. When the first party of foreign tourists reached Leningrad in 1926, forty cars were needed to transport them to Tsarskoe-Selo. Forty pre-war cars were collected, and twenty-five more to act as a reserve. Even so, that party failed to arrive at Tsarskoe-Selo, which is about twenty miles away. He said that when, some time later, the first new cars that had been seen since the Revolution arrived from America, crowds followed them in the streets in order to touch them, as though a Cardinal were in progress with his ring outstretched. He himself had been among them. And though he smiled at the memory, he still treasured the rapture he had experienced on seeing the first Russian-made lorry actually in movement. Then he went on to speak of his father, a poor nep-man, who had been taken away and never seen again after the reversal of the New Economic Policy. What a restricted life he had led, immersed in his family and his little business. Now here was his son, my friend, partaking in great events, mover in a great world force—though only a tourist guide. He was happy; I have never known anyone more content. Yet this youth, who had placed a sacramental finger on the first Ford car, was as impatient and active as myself in climbing about rickety scaffoldings in the biting cold to study the fourteenth century frescoes of the Novgorod churches.

Those who see fit, like I did and still do, to loose their gibes at the Russian cult of the machine, should recall England of the ’forties and ’fifties. Let them read Macaulay’s panegyric on his country’s factories and railroads, couched in the language of an artist before the Parthenon; and having read, let them envy rather than despise a country that can still enjoy, in the twentieth century, that blend of assurance, novelty, and excitement which produced our own greatness in the nineteenth. We have had time to profit by the mistakes of our native materialists, our Victorian rationalists and economists. So perhaps will the Russians also profit when the time comes. Meanwhile the air is fresh and stimulating. The intelligentsia of Russia, both the survivors of the old and the children of the new ages, are victims of every disadvantage that dogmatism and jealousy can invent. But they escape, notwithstanding, the one supreme disadvantage that can afflict an intelligentsia—that of lethargy and complacence.

Last, and most precious of possessions, they have still their own country. They have escaped the desperate fate of the émigrés. I met one lady in Moscow, the avowed survivor of an old Russian family, who had recently married a foreigner, and, having obtained his nationality, was able to leave Russia and visit her friends of the old days in Paris and Riga. This lady has suffered much from the Bolsheviks—particularly during the last two or three years. But she assured me that after experience of the mental Bourbonism by which her old friends sustain their lingering hopes of a restoration, she was glad to think she still lived amid the fears and discomforts of Red Moscow. Because she was still a patriot, they ended by regarding her as a traitor. It is this patriotism which, above all else, makes the lives of educated men and women in Russia to-day still worth living.

[2] The original publication of this phrase in the Architectural Review has enriched the Russian vocabulary. On 8 April 1933, Pravda appeared with the headline: ‘Diehards’ Zoological Hatred of the Soviet Government’.

[3] A. Loria, Karl Marx (London, 1920), p. 48.

[4] Lenin, Collected Works, Authorized English Edition, vol. xviii, p. 42.

[5] They share God’s acre with those of Thomas Hood the poet, and Lillywhite the cricketer. Coleridge is round the corner in a coke-house. I am indebted for this information to Mr John Betjeman, the father of necropolitan research.

[6] A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago, 1904).

[7] From The Possessed, quoted by René Fülöp-Miller in The Mind and Face of Bolshevism.

[8] This body numbers only about two millions.

[9] Humanity Uprooted, p. 82.