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It has already been explained that the antagonism between Russia and the West is more than a conflict between principles of ownership and industrial morality. The word ‘Bolshevism’, divested of those flesh-creeping associations so gallantly propagated by the Tory imagination, represents not merely an economic system, but a fundamental way of thought inherent in the Russian species. To this way of thought has been added an abstract and all-embracing philosophy, which was consciously and sensibly elaborated by Lenin as an instrument of revolution and which bears the name of Dialectical Materialism.

The basic proposition of this creed is that everything perceptible to the senses is real and that everything real holds in itself the germ of organic change. Such a doctrine is in essence mystical, in that it opposes the physical or chemical explanations of change, and therefore of life, put forward by mechanistic thinkers. It thus contains a great and practical truth and is well adapted to its present function—that of a religion whose outward manifestations have already been shortly described. But behind it, and more important to the understanding of Bolshevism’s uneasy relations with the outer world, is that immemorial Russian sentiment of a cosmic national egoism which demands the regeneration of the mass rather than of the individual and produces introspection on a sacrificial scale. At the end of the last century, when Russian literature began to receive the fulsome appreciation of Western Europe, the implications of this sentiment were hardly realized. As a theme for Dostoievsky it was superb. As a theme for translation into practical politics it was not taken seriously, save in the sphere of Central Asia, where the fears of Anglo-Indian strategists were finally set at rest by the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. Our affinity with Russia was with Russian artists, not with the visionaries whom those artists portrayed. Now the visionaries have become men of affairs. Their kingdom is of this passing, empirical moment, and they would like to include us in it. To this desire we do not agree.

Meanwhile the aesthetic genius of the race, which once inspired us with admiration, still persists, and will flower again—though whether in the immediate or the distant future is hard to prophesy. The reader in search of observations on this genius may feel by now that to have been lured, as he has been, into a maze of political and economic considerations, is nothing less than an abuse of this confidence. If he feels thus, I must ask him to remember that modern Russian culture is still in its embryonic stage—if indeed it has yet been conceived at all; that the main interest it presents is rather as a field for prophecy than as one of completed achievement; that even the embryo is still obscured by the shell of a still mortifying past on which has fastened the inevitable mushroom-crop of contemporary plagiarisms; and that if the foreign observer is to discern any sign of original life, he must seek it primarily in a study of the individual educated Russian and of the evolution he is now undergoing. Of that evolution, of its attendant pains and mental voltage, I have attempted some slight account.

To the traveller whose first stay in a new country is limited to a month and a half, and whose view of it can therefore be only cursory, the most easily apprehensible clue to the cultural genius of its people is their native architecture. In the golden helmets and onions of the churches, in the towered Kremlins, baroque palaces, Empire streets, Revivalist museums, and ferrocrete tenements, the history and character of the Russian people stand revealed. I ask myself what future can come of so incongruous a past and present as this diverse architecture symbolizes. And I find answer in a permanent and impersonal factor, separable from time and politics, which, for architecture in particular, must play a decisive part in the eventual development of Bolshevist taste, and on which all prophecy in that respect must be based. This is the consistently unique tradition of colour and form displayed by all the visual arts in Russia from the eleventh century onward. Architecture, being the most functional of the arts, is essentially the art of the mass. And it is in architecture that this tradition must find life again or prove itself sterile and the culture of the Revolution sterile with it.

The Russian aesthetic is often called, by the glib classifiers of Western Europe, an Oriental one. Certainly it may have borrowed a motive here and there from the Moslems and Chinese. But its essential spirit is a purely Russian one. And such superficial resemblances as its architecture or painting may display to those of the East, derive from the fact that each has had the same aesthetic problems to overcome. These lie, as always, in the landscape. The Russian scene provides neither form, nor colour, nor shadows of rich texture. Apprehensible form, gay colour, and rich magnificence, must therefore be supplied by art. But the Russian landscape is not merely negative. Its illimitable spaces and skies, its limpid summer clouds, and its precise outline of detail against the winter snow, all determine the manner in which its deficiencies shall be filled by artifice. It holds a latent power which likes to speak in terms of the grandiose and monumental. No difficulty is too great, no scheme too vast, for this power to overcome. It plans cities on a scale commensurate with the huge rolling rivers by whose banks they stand. At the same time it employs the poetry of field and village and the peasant love of fantasy. Somehow, by some genius of the people, aesthetic order results: buildings are grouped as though on a perpetual back-cloth; paintings are composed; the domestic arts are sane. The lyrical note is absent; there is none of that intimate perfection which reaches to the hidden places of the mind. All is open, fully apparent on a glance, blatant even; there is no hidden measure, no economy of means; yet all is within bounds and betrays a love of well-being which is not dissimilar from that of our own prosaic isle.

For his means of architectural expression the Russian has always borrowed the grammar of some foreign tongue and made it the basis of a language entirely his own. The earliest was Byzantine, which he enlarged, as he has enlarged everything, heightening the churches out of all recognition and replacing the neat lead vaults and saucer-domes of the Greeks with helmets and onions. These in time he gilded, coloured, and patterned; he grouped them at different levels; he multiplied them into forests or inflated them singly to overwhelming dimensions. At length came the Tartar invasion. Round these churches grew walls and towers of Tartar pattern, to form the local Kremlins and fortified monasteries.

Then the Italians arrived, only to become more Russian than the Russians themselves. Venetian Gothic, classical pillarettes and arcades, machicolated balconies, elaborate rustications, and a wealth of faience, all came to swell the Russian harmony, brought by foreigners whose privileged position and adoption of Russian aims made them the counterpart of the specialists employed under the Five-Year Plan to-day. Released from the severe canons of their own countries, they threw themselves headlong into the Russian love of fantasy; they planned and they built with an emphatic eccentricity which is rendered none the less coherent by virtue of its very size. Far from being stifled by this foreign invasion the native motives, the gay colours and ubiquitous bulbosities, flowered anew like plants in a freshly manured garden. The eleventh century cathedral of St Sophia at Veliki Novgorod, built under the direct influence of the Greeks, has less of a specifically Russian character than the riotous and variegated churches of the sixteenth century, built after two centuries of Italian predominance, such as those of Yaroslavl or the Moscow suburbs.

With the reign of Peter the Great, whom Lenin acclaimed as a spiritual ancestor, a new and more systematic process of Westernization began. Churches and the dwellings of the nobility became baroque. Rastrelli, the architect of the Winter Palace and Tsarskoe-Selo, covered Russia with stupendous belfries, towering accretions of arches and pillars, but as intrinsically Russian as the monasteries in which they stand. At length followed the Empire style which the Russians, though still depending on Italians for their original designs, made particularly their own. The ruthless interminability of their official buildings grew till the eye cannot grasp them. A Government colour-wash was invented, a flat tawny yellow, against which pillars and ornament stand out in white. Towers persisted, great spikes such as that of the Leningrad Admiralty. At the same time a charming domestic architecture grew up, massive and low-storeyed, as though the domestic architects were still building with beams and tree-trunks for their pediments and pillars. The ornament is bold but never florid in the German way; the space is always so filled as to create either a pattern or an almost exaggeratedly individual piece of design; there is always meaning.

As the last century progressed the Russians, like ourselves, fell victims to the prevalent revivalism. The most grotesque and extraordinary structures resulted from the inspiration of so varied a past; the palaces of the Wittelsbachs or the inventions of Sir Gilbert Scott seem Palladian in their simplicity when compared with these neo-Slav town-halls and Kremlinesque museums. Yet the innate feeling of the Russian race for the monumental, its long practice in the ordering of fantasy, its general lack of aesthetic inhibitions and love of aesthetic plain-speaking, have invested even these buildings with a virtue unknown to their contemporaries in other countries, and one which, under the magic of snow, attains almost to charm. This, of course, was the ‘preliminary period of imperialism’. Finally, as the Boer War broke, a blast of art nouveau swept in from the West, to destroy the last vestiges of sanity and taste; though in Russia even this style assumed a form so freakish and preposterous as to rescue it from the smug suburbanism of its manifestations elsewhere. Follows an interval of ten years. When the curtain lifts there appear Lenin’s tomb and the graceless, but still monumental, concrete structures of the new industrial era.

In the provision of colour, the Russians have always relied for their effects on flat, cleanly outlined fields. The tints are emphatic, almost elementary; but the natural taste of the people, their skill in harmonizing and interweaving the various colour-fields into a balanced rhythm, together with the gigantic areas over which—in architecture at least—colour is employed, prevent the dominance of that shallow folkiness which so often strikes a false note in pictorial and photographic reproductions. In this province more than any, the Russians have retained their Byzantine inheritance, as the icons show; but here again they have added their own principle of frank appeal to the eye rather than the mind. How that principle, applied to architectural colour, survived into the nineteenth century, may be seen to-day in the streets of Leningrad, where the present authorities have not only preserved and renovated the old Government yellow (said to have been introduced by an Italian to remind him of the sun), but are also engaged in restoring the palaces of the nobility to their original gay state.

But colour in architecture must display something more than gaiety alone. Without richness of texture and material it becomes as tedious as an eternal pantomime. No people has understood this precept better than the Russians, and no country has ever been more naturally favoured with the means of acting on it. Gold leaf for their domes they have always been able to afford. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they lavished bronze and brass upon their interiors and exteriors with the profusion that, in other countries, attaches to stucco. But the glory of Russia, from the builder’s point of view, is her native quarries. The variety of her marbles and glistering labradors, her close-grained porphyries and granites, her stones of even finer texture—so fine that their appearance when polished is almost metallic—and her semi-precious varieties such as lapis and malachite, is inexhaustible, and even yet has scarcely been exploited. No shade, no texture that an architect can want, is lacking.

From conversations with various eminent architects in Moscow, I gathered that an official architectural policy was now in process of inception which will eventually withhold its approval from the drab functionalism of the present era, and allow free play once more to the native genius of the country. The outstanding example of this genius, as it can and will be translated into the language of Materialism, is the Lenin mausoleum by the architect Stchousev. It achieves its success, as I have already mentioned, not by any compromise with the past—for a more ruthless, more uncompromising monument has scarcely been erected since the Pyramids—but by the harmony of its colour with the old surroundings. Before visiting the chief architects of Moscow, I had inspected the plans submitted from all over the world for the new People’s Palace, which is to occupy the site of the Cathedral ‘of the late Redeemer’ recently demolished by explosion. This site is in the very heart of Moscow, and closely adjoins the Kremlin. Apart from the utter poverty of inventive ability displayed throughout the competition, I was concerned to notice that the designs were one and all of that gasometer or packing-case type which may be suitable to factories and even to tenements, but must inevitably have disfigured the centre of Moscow beyond redemption if erected on this site—as, indeed, the Tsik skyscraper on the other side of the river has succeeded in doing already. On my stating my apprehensions to the architects Stchousev and Grinberg, they both replied that, though the prizes would be allotted as promised, it had been decided to use none of the designs on account of those very reasons I had put forward; that the authorities were now casting about for ideas of a different character, being convinced that the ferrocrete style of the present was entirely unsuited to the dignity of a great capital or to the Russian scene; and that one of the chief considerations in the choice of a new design would be the use of colour and of the fine Ural stones, by which means alone could a specifically modern building—which the People’s Palace must and ought to be—avoid discord with its incomparable setting. There are those Russians, and plenty of them, who are sufficiently antiquated in their modes of thought to regard such discord as the very purpose of their artistic efforts. These victims of Materialist novelty fail to distinguish between ‘discord’ and ‘difference’. The first is mean. The second may be mean. But it can also imply a contrast between equals in artistic merit which provides the highest form of intellectual stimulus and contains in itself a ground of harmony between the opposing monuments. Let the new architecture be different by all means. But first let it solve the problem of differing like a man instead of like a naughty child. When, some years hence, the People’s Palace is at last erected, it will be possible to see how far Bolshevist taste has progressed towards this solution, and how far the aesthetic genius of the country has begun to recover from the shocks of the last fifteen years.