I Went To Russia by Liam O’Flaherty

To

Harold Stroud

Chapter I. The Soviet Ship

On the evening of April 23rd, 1930, I set out for Moscow on a Soviet ship, in order to collect material for a book on Bolshevism. It pains me to admit it, but it is the truth. I set out to join the great horde of scoundrels, duffers and liars who have been flooding the book markets of the world for the past ten years with books about the Bolsheviks. I had already travelled in an honest fashion to various parts of the world, for the sole purpose of breathing, walking, lying, sitting, eating, drinking, loving; never for the purpose of squinting at strange buildings or at odd people, or to scavenge information for newspapers and learned societies about customs that are different from our own. Indeed, I might have died honourably without having become such a scavenger had not poverty and the peculiar nature of my profession forced me to become one.

Nowadays, owing to the growth of democracy and the machine, the profession of literature has ceased to be an art. It is an industry. Literary men, if they must eat by their work, are forced to watch the market and pander to the tastes of the public, just like any other class of manufacturers. Just as clothiers make green cloth, or blue cloth, or red cloth in accordance with the change of fashion, so must novelists write about sex or adventure or the Yellow Peril or psycho-analysis. At the moment, two kinds of books are in fashion, autobiographies and books about the Bolsheviks.

I refrained from writing an autobiography as long as I could. At last I was forced by hunger to do so. Immediately afterwards I realised that I had to scavenge among the Bolsheviks or starve a little later. So I set out for Moscow with black anger in my heart against the whole of human society, which has become so corrupt and democratic and indifferent to art.

Thank Heaven! Bolshevism means no more to me than Lord Beaverbrook’s Empire Crusade or the Roman Catholic Religion. I loathe all political beliefs. I brand as a perverted scoundrel any man with an itch for changing the world and the habits of mankind. For the purpose of my work, the British Empire is no whit better than the Republic of Liberia. I am more interested in the well-being of horse-racing than I am in the abolition of slums, or the universal cure of prostitution. I consider that a good game of Rugby football is more important than all the speeches ever made by Mr. Lloyd George. It is my business to observe human beings and to dig beneath the labels, under which they hide their beauty or their infamy. For that reason, I am more qualified to write this book than most people. I write it honestly, for the sole purpose of making some money; neither to convert the British proletariat to Communism, nor to incite old parsons, butlers and maiden aunts into a war for the preservation of their virtue against the oncoming Soviet hordes.

I had no difficulty in getting a visa for my passport. Against such a callous writer as myself, their embassies and consulates were helpless. If they refused a visa I could write a book in any case without ever going to Russia. Many have done so and the fact that their books have had no great success is rather a proof of the lack of talent of the authors than an indictment of the method. So the Bolshevik envoys, considering that courtesy was their best policy, covered a page of my passport with words and figures that were Hebrew to me and told me I could visit the Soviet Union for a period of one month, taking with me a maximum luggage of three suits of clothes, six pairs of socks, four shirts, two pairs of pyjamas, six collars, two towels, three pairs of shoes, soap, a packet of Gillette razor blades with razor, and a marine compass for finding my way in the streets of the more Asiatic cities of the Soviet Union. Being still in a state of violent anger while I applied and waited for my visa I was unable to observe properly those with whom I came in contact, but I have a vague memory that most of them were Jews of the polite kind.

Indeed I conducted myself with such arrogance that I was given a berth on a ship that was taking no passengers for that trip; for instead of going direct to Leningrad, she was stopping at Norway for cargo.

‘The ordinary trip is five days,’ said the clerk at the Soviet shipping agency. ’This trip will take twelve days. Surely you prefer to wait for another ship or go by train?’

‘I must go at once and by ship’, I cried, striking the fellow’s counter with such force that he understood at once I was a dangerous man.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘It can be arranged.’

So he telephoned to the ship a few hours before it sailed and I set out for the docks almost at once. When I arrived, they were already preparing to put to sea. Nobody expected me and no preparations whatever had been made for my accommodation. I make a point of this, because it is the common belief that the Bolsheviks make special provision for writers, showing them everything that is good and preventing them from seeing whatever is bad in the Communist Commonwealth. I, on the contrary, caught the ruffians in the very act of leading their abnormal lives.

At first sight, I could see nothing abnormal about them. I must admit there was a lot of litter on the decks that might have been used for wrapping up corpses and some fellows were hauling ropes that might have once been used for hanging innocent people, and from the dress of the seamen one might easily deduce that they were pirates on an American film ship. But the chief officer, who met me at the entrance to the companion way on the lower deck, was a most charming North Russian, with the large, pale, smiling face of the pure Slav. I gave him my papers and asked him could I have a drink at once.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘I go tell steward. Follow please.’

He brought me into the officers’ mess, which was the first room on the left. Then he bowed politely and left me in order to fetch the steward. The room was brand new, fitted out very creditably. There was nothing unnecessary. Every inch of space was compactly organised. There was no hint of luxury. At once it reminded me of the mess room in a monastery. I also noticed that everything possible bore the Soviet Arms in red. That increased the monastic impression, for people with religions love to carve their symbols, not only on their furniture but even on their underwear.

The chief officer returned and beckoned to me a trifle furtively. His furtiveness cheered me, since there was a question of having a drink. It reminded me of my own country. In Ireland there is always something secret about drinking which makes it an adventure. Recognised topers in country villages, where the slightest and most secret sins are common knowledge, have a habit of leaning over the bar counter and whispering their order into the ear of the barmaid, who assumes the proper air of taking part in a conspiracy. Even at dinners in private houses, the host secretly invites his guests into the kitchen or the cubby-hole, with many a ‘hush’ and a finger to the lip, for fear ‘she’ might see him uncork the jar of old whisky. I mistook the mate’s furtiveness for this admirable Irish attitude towards the beautiful ritual of drinking. But as I followed him out into the corridor, he whispered:

‘In my cabin better. There nobody see you.’

There was no joy in his voice. I could detect, on the contrary, a horrid fear, which made me feel sorry I had set foot on the ship. Here, I understood at once, drinking was regarded as a crime and drinkers were criminals. Yo ho ! And a bottle of mineral waters.

‘Hell!’ I thought. ‘What sort of a ship is this?’

In his cabin, which was opposite the mess room, the mate was the essence of courtesy. But he was so kind that he made me feel uncomfortable. There is an art in kindness. There is a certain limit, which, overstepped, turns kindness into cruelty. This man was so affable, so enthusiastic and so obviously cheered by my arrival and my company that I understood he had very little in his own life or in his own nature to give him happiness. His pale, blue eyes, surrounded by a flabby, white face and his mouth, that was not beautiful, repelled me, because they inspired pity. He looked unhappy and at the same time greedy of happiness. He was obviously in surroundings that were uncongenial and yet he had not the courage to leave them. He was like those priests and monks that one encounters in religious societies, fellows who donned the cassock of celibacy on the impulse of a moment, or through some gross necessity, and have not the strength of character to leave, but go on being priests and monks and at the same time sinners beneath the unseemly folds of their smocks. Yet, just as those unwilling monks are more human than the genuine fanatics and are, in general, good fellows, so was this mate charming. I pitied him and liked him and despised him. I could see at once that he disapproved of Bolshevism and wished to show me that he dis-approved of it and wished to curry favour with me, because he thought I was a ‘bourgeois’ and an enemy of Bolshevism.

When the steward had brought a bottle of brandy and we had filled our glasses, I said:

‘Here’s to Soviet Russia.’

‘Here’s to fair women and fair weather,’ said the mate.

We drank.

‘Are you not a Bolshevik?’ I said.

He shrugged his shoulders and muttered something about being a working-man. Then he skinned an orange which he offered to me. He offered chocolates and cigarettes. In fact he offered me his whole cabin and if his wife were present, I feel sure that he would have offered her also, such was his eagerness to oblige and to immolate himself in a fanaticism of generosity.

‘Life is hard,’ he said. ‘I am now chief mate. I was once a captain. I once had wife with me on ship. Now I see wife, two days, maybe six days one month. Before, good house Archangel. Now, one room Leningrad. I have forty-four years. One time I make business, what you call ship chandler. Very good. I go Black Sea also. Very good. Oh! Very nice. Greece also with wife. Other women maybe. This ship ... I think maybe this ship different. Communist personnel. Maybe politics no good for sailor men. I think sailor men all the same all the world. They like women, drink, good weather. You think too?’

‘Sir,’ I said. ‘I never give voice to my thoughts.’

He looked at me suspiciously and changed his attitude. He became more serious and dignified. Then I liked him better. But I could see that he was of no use to me. After all, my business was to write a book about Bolsheviks, not about people with slave minds whom the Bolsheviks could not mould to their fanatical purpose of imposing the idea of proletarian equality on the whole of mankind. He noticed that I did not think much of him and ceased to drink. Presently he went out and returned with the steward. The steward brought me to my cabin, fetching also the remainder of my brandy. When he had installed me, he turned to leave, but I recalled him.

‘Sir,’ he cried in German, with the same force and the same servility that a corporal would use on being addressed by his company officer.

At the same time he bowed from the waist, with his heels together, so low and with such a straight back, that his body was perfectly horizontal from neck to rump. In appearance he was a Jew. His face was that of a serf. I was convinced by the look of him that he had often been whipped. He offended me.

‘Drink’ I said to this ruffian.

He looked behind him furtively, bowed several times and cried:

‘Danke. Danke sehr. Danke’

I filled him a tumbler with brandy. ‘Prosit!’ he cried and tossed it off at incredible speed. I straightway filled him another tumbler. He protested feebly, but having taken the fellow’s measure and wishing to amuse myself by making him drunk, I seized him by the poll and practically forced the contents of the tumbler down his throat. He writhed and shook his head like a dog that has been doused. His long nose became very red and daubs of colour stood out on his sallow face. The alcohol had gone to his head, changing his fawning servility, as is invariably the case, into a false arrogance. He treated himself to a chair, seized an orange, skinned it, began to eat it and lit a cigarette, talking excitedly in German. I understood nothing of what he said, for German is a language I have never felt impelled to acquire. But language, whereas it may be necessary for the exchange of ideas, commodities and services, is rarely of use for the study of human character. For this, conduct, voice and gestures are much more enlightening.

A traveller, when studying the manners and character of a strange people, should begin with their servants. Hotel porters, waiters, chambermaids, policemen, cab-drivers and petty officials of all sorts are much more likely to give a correct estimate of the people’s culture and civilisation than any amount of reading, or intercourse with chance acquaintances, or official convoys through museums, theatres and public displays. Servants always develop a dual personality, their individual character, which is used in their intercourse with their wives, their friends and their families, and their social character, which is forced upon them by their duties. It is this social character which is of interest to the traveller. When the servants of a community are corrupt, indolent, inefficient, unstable and without polite dignity, it is inevitable that the community at large is guilty of these vices to a major degree. On the other hand, when such servants are in all manner pleasing to the traveller, it is inevitable that the community which employs them has reached a high degree of civilisation and culture. To my mind, the English are nearest to perfection in this respect, although they are far from perfect in other respects. If I were to judge by the steward, the Russians wallowed at the opposite extreme. But such judgment would be ridiculous. He was proof of nothing, except of the vanity of human idealism. For he remained a slave, in spite of thirteen years of proletarian equality. The Bolsheviks had willed him to be a free man, as free in spirit as the great Lenin. Yet he remained a slave. They had given him the Marxian theory of value, the sickle and hammer of the Soviets, a Red army and navy to protect him, the title of Comrade, the Five Year Plan, all their schemes for the liquidation of everything from God to drunkenness, yet he remained a slave. He even grovelled before a citizen of the bourgeois British Empire.

‘Yes!’ I thought. ‘One cannot turn a slave into a free man by an edict. The free man is born not made.’

I suddenly shouted at him:

‘For God’s sake, leave my sight. You offend me.’

He did not understand what I said. He gibbered something and ran out of my cabin. In a short while he returned with a companion, a tall fellow who wore the uniform of an officer. The newcomer astonished me, for he was not only powdered but painted slightly. He belonged to a type that is never seen on one of our merchant ships, a sort of heavy and effeminate dandy, with the languorous expression of a film actor who plays amorous parts. His hair was false and he wore patent leather shoes and he spoke French.

‘I am the fifth mate,’ said this worthy, who had obviously read the novels of Turgenev and wished to become a European gentleman. ‘You require something, which the steward was unable to decipher.’

‘No more’ said I, ‘than I am able to decipher the reason for your exalted rank. Surely three mates are enough for a ship of three thousand tons. But I am glad to see that a Bolshevik ship carries more officers than a British ship. Making everybody an officer is one way of establishing social equality. Have a drink.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I will taste your drink without swallowing it. It is not my custom to drink on board ship. Please understand also that I am an apprentice officer.’

‘It doesn’t matter a damn what you are, my boy,’ I answered. ‘The great thing in this world is to be a Man. Understand that and you are all right with me.’

But the painted lad, with the patent leather shoes and the wig, did not feel inclined to become a man, even though he was nearly twice my size. He had the same bee in his bonnet as the mate. He was afraid of something. After a few tiresome remarks he left my cabin. So did the steward, after he had fetched me another bottle of brandy. I was drinking rather freely through sheer boredom and irritation. I got to my feet and seized my bottle.

‘Armed with this bottle,’ I cried, TU make a tour of the ship, in the hope of finding somewhere a free man who is willing to drink or to talk with me, somebody who is neither a grovelling slave nor oppressed by a vague fear of something I cannot understand. I am beginning to get afraid of this ship.’

I sallied forth into the corridor. We were going down the river, but I felt sure that we were already in the open sea under heavy weather, by the way the walls of the corridor and the deck seemed to sway and threaten me. Undoubtedly the brandy was not to be trifled with. I reached the mess room, entered and tottered to a seat, in a way that was not at all impressive. Four or five officers were already sitting there.

‘Have a drink,’ I cried.

One of them pointed to a samovar that lay on the centre of the table.

‘We have already got a drink’ he said laughingly. ‘There is tea.’

‘Have some brandy instead,’ I cried. ‘Tea is for women.’

‘So?’ he said, still laughing. ‘On your ships it is the custom for crew to drink at sea? Yes? With us, no. Crew drink. Then maybe ship sinks and passenger is drowned. You drink. We sail ship. Very good. Good luck.’

I could just barely see his laughing, boyish face, but I could hear that he was a good fellow and a man. And I was properly put to shame. So I rose and bowed and said:

‘Thanks comrade. Good night.’

Taking my bottle, I returned to my cabin. There I pitched it out through the porthole, sobered with an effort and said to myself:

‘I am like the Greek who fouled the toga of the Roman envoy, or like a jester in a holy place. This is my first contact with the greatest force in modern history, the Russian Revolution, and I come to it with vine leaves in my hair. It is easy to jest about these people, just as easy as it is to jest about Christ, or make fun of a child’s intellect. But it is obvious that these Bolshevik seafarers are apostles of Communism just as sincerely as Christ’s fishermen were apostles of Christianity. I must approach them with respect.’

Then I went on deck and walked about the ship and listened and I felt a mysterious influence crowding in upon me. It was not real, but the crystallisation of my thoughts, all I knew about this Revolution, all it had meant to me in my hot youth, when revolt is imperative and romantic, together with all it meant to the later development of my intellect, when reason, settling down to manhood, thinks calmly on a re-arrangement of man’s relation to the universe and to all that is still unknown of the universe.

I saw the ship riding in the darkness, with the red flag of Communism fluttering at her stern, not as a trader, going from shore to shore with goods, but as a courier, bringing this wild message of social salvation from the East to all the toiling masses of the world, as Christ’s apostles brought salvation to the slaves of Rome’s great Empire. Now I saw this ship in the abstract, as a real fragment of that terrifying phenomenon which has engrossed the mind of humanity for the past twelve years. It was all round me. I had stepped into it, almost as a fly is caught in a spider’s web, or as a foolish swimmer is gathered in a current of the sea, engulfed and carried headlong among the violent rumours of the deep.

The individuals I had met had also been engulfed and were carried along. That is why they looked like slaves, judging them from a European standpoint, whose criterion is the individual and not the mass. In this immense force, of which the ship was a unit, there were no individuals, just drops in an ocean, grains of sand in a desert, cogs in a machine. The crew was a Soviet. The ship was a machine. I felt humble, smaller infinitely than this force which surrounded me, just as infinitely as I felt superior to the individual Bolsheviks I had met. It was the mass of the Bolshevik machine that was terrifying in its power, encroaching on Europe like an outrageous colossus, rude, barbarous, yet beautiful, like a great mountain in the morning light.

As I watched and listened, the idea both attracted and repelled me. I love power whether in the individual or in the state. Rome, Britain, Genghiz Khan, Napoleon or Shakespeare, they are all equally beautiful. But I like to hold apart from a power greater than myself.

And then, standing alone there in the night, I said to myself:

‘I loathe the multitude, except as a spectacle to be watched, an ant-hill on the march, a horde of tribesmen moving across plains, a city’s mob in riot; all watched from a mound, or an upper window, or in the pages of a history book. I can only love this Revolution from afar, as a spectacle to be watched. I am an individual of Western Europe. I am proud of my individuality and proud of my intellect. For the first time, I realise that these people are come to overthrow us and are inventing specious philosophies in order that we may lay down our arms and allow ourselves to be overthrown without a struggle. Now they are looting our brains, looting our workshops for our inventions, looting our libraries and our universities and our museums for the revelations of our intellect. To-morrow they shall come with fire and sword to annihilate our power, when their barbaric strength has been harnessed to our knowledge and become unconquerable. I feel that Europe is doomed. Yet I will to remain with it and be destroyed rather than ally myself with this alien power, which has an alien, myriad-headed God, a clinging monster, belching smoke, made of steel, brutal, without the refined, singing beauty that can alone satisfy my soul/

I started. Somebody called out on the bridge in a strange language, a deep voice, full of power, menacing.

I almost fled to my cabin.

Chapter II. I Make Friends With The Crew

I Awoke late. Through the porthole I could hear the lashing of the sea against the ship’s sides. While I dressed I had to sway with the movement of the deck. That was good. I love the sea. My mind grew calm. The sea drove out the fears and melancholy speculations of the previous night. The revolution was no longer a monster, with a sickle in one hand and a hammer in the other, come to smash our statues and burn our libraries, and rip our pictures from their frames, and raze our cities and organise us all as human cogs in a machine of monastic regularity. Ho! The ancient sea! The same old sea that carried Agamemnon, Raleigh and myself, with the same utter indifference, an undying testimony to the unchangeability of nature and to man’s powerlessness to destroy the earth’s beauty. Ho! Ho! All fanaticism dies and does not even leave a stench on the salt sea's surface. There she rolls the same as ever.

I strolled towards the mess room in search of food and to continue my investigation of Bolshevik life. The room was empty. Through an open slide I could see a pretty wench washing dishes in the galley. Also a jolly cook or two, smoking cigarettes. I winked at the girl. She giggled and closed the slide. In a moment it opened again a little, and two wenches tried to get a look at me, the first one and her mate. Yes. Not only the sea is unchangeable but the women also, those blessed beings whose bodily comeliness makes them proof against the brooding fanaticism of man, the maker of gods.

A third woman came into the mess room with food for me. She was the mess room attendant, a peasant woman called Dunya. She was of the type that Tchehov loved to paint in such a melancholy fashion; but whether the type had been relieved of its melancholy by the death of Tchehov or by the Bolshevik Revolution or had never been melancholy, I swear I have rarely seen a woman worker of her class look more happy or good humoured. There was nothing of the servant in her. Neither was there anything of the arrogance of the freed servant. I hate servants, whether they are lords waiting on a king, or blowsy old harridans from the slums waiting on tiny city clerks. The whole race of those, who say ‘sir’ and ‘madam’ and ‘master’ and ‘mistress’ with awe in their voices and a crouch in their backs, is loathsome to me. Even those who shiver in servile ecstasy when they speak of the Prince, or of the Flag, or of the latest public hero.

Dunya was not good to look at. She had the high cheekbones of the Slav. Her face was pale and worn with toil. She was over forty and she had borne children. She had obviously worked from childhood. And she was a peasant, a child of the earth. She had lost the freshness of youth, that supple roundness which is the birthright of all things born of the earth, be they foals, or saplings, budding flowers, or girls at the period of their mating. And just as ageing trees become furrowed, scarred, rough to the touch, cumbersome in their swaying, poor in leafy ornaments, so had this woman become rough and devoid of comely beauty. Her beauty had sunk into her bones, to feed their shrivelling form. But she had dignity, as the old oak has dignity. Her smiling kindness was like the gesture of an old tree that sends out shoots from its stem. They die without bearing fruit, but they are a tribute to eternal beauty.

Dunya was the first real Russian peasant I had ever seen, although I had read a great deal about the Russian peasant and had almost come to believe that he was something essentially different from the rest of earth’s children. She convinced me that there was no difference between her and peasants of other countries. But there was a vast difference between her and the other Bolshevik citizens I had met on the ship. She did not have the ambition to better herself socially, to change her kerchief for a silly hat; to make all men and women equal, because she felt inferior to bourgeois women who had good perfume and rich clothes. Such, I believe, is the basis of Levelling; envy. She was content to be herself. That is why she was beautiful. What she had received from the earth sufficed her.

Perhaps, if I could speak to her freely in her own language, she would have horrified me by talking about the liquidation of the peasant or some such drivel. But I greatly doubt it. She looked too happy to really want to change anything, or to worry herself with insane lusts for the reformation of mankind. Yet I saw a difference between her and our own peasants which made me see the real basis of Bolshevik power. The woman’s brow bore no trace of the fear that is constant in the faces of our peasants. Fear of God, fear of the lord, fear of the government, fear of the earth? She had somehow become free and she was aware of the fact. She feared neither me nor anybody else. She felt herself my equal and she felt herself the equal of the whole world. I could feel that, by the way she gave me food and moved about and bantered with the other girls while she served me.

And then I watched the other two girls and saw that I did not like them so well. They were city born, from Leningrad. They were young and pretty, but I could see greed and restless ambition in their eyes. Their goal was not constancy to the earth, but the beauty parlours of London and Paris brought to the Soviet cities as the spoils of victorious Communism. They smiled and giggled and were friendly, but for them I was not a human being, but a type of the enemy Their men were going to conquer. There was a hardness in their faces which I did not like. They were slaves of the new god, already become cogs in the Bolshevist machine.

As I left the mess room, the thought struck me that Dunya and the scores of millions of her brothers and sisters, the peasants of Russia, would also soon cease to be children of the earth. Into every village would come the red ensign with its sickle and hammer instead of the cross, making every soul convert to this great crusade for making all humanity free to better its social position, bringing ambition and envy and organisation, turning the whole mass of Soviet citizens into a machine for the liquidation of everything that is opposed to Communism. So were the peasants of England organised and destroyed, in the effort to make British all that was not British, in the effort to make even the pagan Zulu wear the dog-collar of British civilisation.

I went about among the crew, watching them at their work. They too were jolly lads. In some faces I saw the restless ambition of the pretty girls, a brooding envy. But in most faces I saw Dunya’s genial kindliness and sense of freedom. I was amazed to find that they were Conscious of their freedom, for I myself have worked on ships and I know how our seamen are conscious of their enslaved condition, how they bow down before a passenger. I saw them talk to their officers in a friendly fashion, as equals. Although there was no sign of inefficiency or of idleness, there was no harshness of command. Each person worked the ship as his own property, as the complement of his own being. Yet, instead of being pleased at this, I felt worried. I did not feel happy or comfortable, simply because I felt alien, or because I felt that they were not really free, that they were even less free than our enslaved seamen, that some mysterious power stood over them.

Suddenly I came upon the doctor, who introduced himself. We sat on a hatch and lit cigarettes.

‘Well!’ he said. ‘You like our ship? How do you like?’

‘Amazingly interesting,’ I said.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I am glad. You are a writer, yes? The mate says you write books.’

‘Yes. I am a writer.’

‘Splendid. I also. I am very interested in all literature and art. It is for that, principally, we make revolution, to give everybody love of beauty. Good. I hope we shall be friends. Yes?’

‘I hope so indeed.’

I immediately liked him. His face was extremely intelligent. He had fine clear eyes and he looked one straight in the face, boldly. His lower lip was heavy and his jaw was good. His nose was short and stubby. He was obviously not of proletarian origin; probably a Jew, but of a type that was not at all Semitic. As he talked, I gathered that he had no sense of humour, that he was ambitious, strong-willed, interested in his own work as a scientist and in all the world as a greedy explorer. His voice was deep, but resonant and pleasant to hear.

‘I want to talk to you a great deal,’ he said, ‘in order to improve my English.’

I bowed, amazed at the simplicity with which he admitted that he intended making use of me. So typically Russian, even though it was probably Jewish! So have these Russians come among us for the past hundred years, as simple children, amusing us by their childish frankness and at the same time, gradually assimilating everything they could steal from us.

‘My position on this ship,’ he said, ‘is perhaps different from that of a doctor on your ships. Of course, I treat crew for sickness and even perform operations. I am proud because I cut off a finger in Hamburg very well. But I am also organiser and teacher.’

‘Really? What do you teach?’

Then he made use of a phrase that I was destined to hear perpetually in Soviet Russia. Striking his right palm into his left , he cried:

‘The situation is such.’

I learned later that as soon as a Soviet citizen begins his remarks with that phrase, he is not speaking but reciting something from ‘one of the Fathers’, be he Marx or Lenin or one of the lesser ones, like Engels, Bucharin, Radek, Rosa Luzem-bourg (not a father, of course, but a Holy Woman) Jean Juarez and others. In this instance, the doctor explained to me that it was his social duty to impart to the crew such knowledge about general culture as he possessed and which they did not possess. In this way, by the mutual co-operation of all citizens, all ignorance would be liquidated. Just as he meant to exploit me for my English, he was being exploited for his knowledge of the materia medica.

‘In your country,’ he said, ‘it is different? Yes?’

‘Not quite,’ I said, ‘except that different types engage in the work of liquidating ignorance and lack of culture. Among us, certainly, doctors on board trading vessels do not engage in the liquidation of ignorance. They mostly engage in the consumption of liquid. Maiden ladies assume the work of liquidating ignorance, by the establishment of village clubs, sewing circles, societies for the preservation of the virtue of the young person, societies for the supply of medical knowledge to slum women and such things.’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘But such organisations are bourgeois. They are meant to keep the working class enslaved.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Of course. I also retain my contact with shore. I write scenarios for film. Now I write scenario dealing with the Five Year Plan. You have heard of Five Year Plan? It is for industrialisation of Soviet Union. Now all films must deal with Five Year Plan. This ship is also Five Year Plan. We all give thirty-five per cent of our wages to the Five Year Plan. Also you will find crisis of alimentation in Soviet Union. All food is exported in order to buy machines for Plan. Cigarettes also. In three years it shall be complete, because we decide already to finish Five Year Plan in four years.’

‘Marvellous,’ I said. ‘Are all the crew eager for this, for giving their wages and for liquidating their ignorance and for industrialisation?’

‘Oh! Yes,’ he said lightly. ‘Already great work had been done. This motor ship is one of five made by workers of Leningrad. Also fifteen are laid down at Leningrad. In five years we shall have big fleet. And so on in all industries. But I am fear that capitalists make war before then. They do not wish Soviet Union to get strong.’

‘I should think not,’ I said.

He talked on and simply carried me off the hatch by his enthusiasm, so that I wanted to jump up at once and liquidate something, or at least make a ship or a Five Year Plan. He awed me by the number of Liquidating Societies to which he belonged. He awed me still more by the revelation that over one hundred and thirty million people were organised under the domination of men like himself, going somewhere. What a weapon! One hundred and thirty million simple and ignorant people organised under the control of a couple of million people with a Religious Idea. Never before had the world known such a phenomenon. I tried to explain that to him, but he gently waved aside my ideas.

‘Mister!’ he said. ‘The situation is such. We are planning not for such a thing, to make great world power, but for proletarian revolution in all the world. We wish abolish bourgeois class. Then all world is free. All men and women equal. All men and women have culture and beauty and knowledge. No more hunger. No more anarchy. So? You understand?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I understand.’

Why argue with him? It is both foolish and immoral to argue with a man who has a religion. Neither would it pay me at this stage of my journey to begin arguments. Indeed, I agreed with his programme, not because it was going to make the world free, but because it had power behind it and in it. But for myself? I would not submit to such a world power. My ancestors never submitted to the English, who are more akin to me than the Russians. Sitting on the hatch beside the enthusiastic doctor, I felt like saying:

‘I’d rather disembowel myself like a Jap than be a cog in your machine, ordered about by some duffer I despise.’

While we talked, several members of the crew joined us. They treated the doctor absolutely as an equal. They looked at me with the curiosity of peasants into whose village a stranger has come to rest for an hour. Using the doctor as an interpreter, they asked me questions about conditions on our ships. They laughed when my answers were translated. They could not understand how our sailors could submit to such inhuman treatment.

Most of them were boys who had never seen the sea until a few months before. They were all healthy. They looked well fed and happy. In a few hours they had washed down the ship, working very hard. Now they were having a ‘smoko’. Some of the engine room crew were there also and I was impressed by the change machinery had made in their condition. The old coal-using stokehold was gone, that earthly hell I knew of old. Now there was oil. The engine room crew was just as happy and as healthy as the deck crew. I envied them all their brotherly happiness, their confidence, their hope for the future, the eagerness in their faces. Yet I did not belong. When they heard I had been a sailor, they asked me to work on their ship. The captain would get me a job. Perhaps I could teach them something. Soon they were joking with me and making indecent remarks about my person, delighted at discovering that I was not really a bourgeois but a comrade. And just as I felt a sense of solidarity with Dunya, so did I feel at one with them. They were of the same earth as myself. They had no religion no more than I had. They had no bee in their bonnet. They rejoiced in the same healthy things as myself, women, drink, fighting, eating, work. But over them also I felt the ruling power. What?

It is a terrible thing to be old, for the old are unable to submerge their intellects in the delusions of youth.

Suddenly the gong for lunch sounded and we all dived for our food. The doctor and myself entered the mess room together. Still feeling alien, even hostile, I looked with suspicion and embarassment at the ten officers who were already seated at the table. They took no notice of me. They were busy with their food, attacking it without ceremony, in a manner I had forgotten, but which I once knew among the lumberjacks of Canada. Each helped himself from a great dish that lay in the centre of the table. Nobody passed food. Each leaned over his neighbour. They all talked and laughed as they ate. Among them were engineers, mates, electricians, wireless operators, all bronzed, powerfully built, healthy. No two faces belonged to a single type. Some were Jews. Others were Slavs. There was a Cossack and a Lithuanian and a Tatar from Tiflis. But they all had a common vitality, a common exuberance, a common lack of the morbid introspection which comes from a development of individual character. They were a mass, even though there were only ten of them and it was obvious that they loved being a mass, being together, being brothers. Even at table, they gave me the impression of a great avalanche prowling down, irresistibly, upon Europe, sweeping before them all the decadent rubble into which our civilisation and power has subsided. Woe to us!

‘My God!’ I thought. ‘Just think what we can oppose to these men; an army of butlers, parsons, refined bank clerks and a generation that is only interested in jazz, tennis, chocolate and senseless fornication. Undoubtedly we are doomed.’

The doctor said something to them in answer to their questions. It seemed that he said I was not a bad fellow, for they all began to smile at me and they accepted me into their brotherhood. I felt at one with them. Then I thought:

‘My boy! You have been a slave without a country all your life, because you have been born with the spirit of a free man and you have been forced to live with slaves. Admit it. You have felt all your life that the earth you trod did not belong to you, neither in Ireland nor in England nor anywhere else. What are you even as an artist? A despised and tolerated outcast, forced to beg for food from dullards that are not fit to lick your feet. Here is your chance to ally yourself with people who are your equals. They want to make the whole of humanity feel that the earth belongs to them; at least those with free spirits like yourself. You are rough and hearty like these fellows. Why cling to Christ-ridden Europe, whose blood has been sapped. To hell with Europe. To hell with the British Empire. To hell with Ireland. To hell with the Pope. Become a Bolshevik.

Then the captain entered the room. At last I saw a sign and portent of the power inherent in the Bolshevik idea.

Chapter III. The Bolshevik Skipper

‘That is the captain,’ whispered the first mate, who sat beside me.

I saw an extremely tall man take off a shabby overcoat and hang it on one of the pegs behind the door. Then, with a hollow cough, he slowly turned about and scanned the table. Rarely in my life have I seen such an impressive countenance, head and body. His hair was shorn to the bone of his skull, so that it was impossible to determine its colour. But he had not shaved for a week or more, so that his jaws and upper lip were covered with a grey stubble. His face was like that of a monk, sombre, brooding, as of one who looks out from a holy place on a wicked world. He had a powerful jaw and an equally strong mouth, as is generally the case with fanatics of more than ten years’ standing. The continual tension caused by the presence in their minds of a fixed idea forces the muscles of their jaws and lips to develop. His eyes were also those of a fanatic. For it was obvious that they were by nature gentle and almost feminine, whereas concentration on ideas of desperate violence had succeeded in giving them an outward appearance of ferocity. They looked fiercely. Then they blinked and became gentle, ruminating. Then again they quivered and became fierce. He had a beautiful forehead, high, broad, capable of holding great knowledge behind its wall. His nose was ugly, short and stubby.

From this head, his body dropped away to a great length, almost supine but with the suggestion of loose strength given by a sleeping panther. It would be dangerous to rouse him. His hands were so big and his arms were so long.

He wore a shabby grey Tolstoyan blouse and an equally shabby pair of trousers. Contrasting his shabby clothing with the pride in his countenance, I could not help feeling that he dressed shabbily through vanity; that same monkish trait which makes ‘the fanatics of poverty’ go abroad in sackcloth and ashes, in tattered rags, or in simple white gowns; as if to say to the whole of wicked humanity:

‘Behold us. We are so holy, so pure and so godly that we need no fine raiment to make our beauty manifest.’

I expected him to speak to me, since I was his passenger and a guest in his mess room; but he sat down unobtrusively on my left in the seat vacated by the chief engineer. Without knowing it, I had occupied the captain’s seat at the head of the table. He neither spoke nor looked at me. Nobody else took any notice of him. Neither did he notice anybody else. He helped himself from the dish in the centre of the table. The conversation went on. Now those that were left in the room were bantering a new arrival.

At first I thought the new arrival was a good looking boy, rather effeminate, even more effeminate than the painted apprentice I had seen the previous evening. Then the chief mate leaned over and whispered:

‘You see who come now. The third mate. She is a woman.’

Now I examined the new arrival in astonishment. It was obviously a woman and except for the fact that she wore trousers and pilot jacket buttoned to the throat, she did not look very different from the manly women one sees about London. But her face was different from the faces of our lonely ones. Although her features were delicate and pretty, her face showed great force of character, together with that harshness always acquired by a woman in a position of authority over men. Her manners were like those of the men; at least she attempted to be like them. But as I watched her, I noticed that she toyed with her food a little pettishly and seemed a trifle irritated by the lack of refinement. She had not the free and natural gusto of the males. But she was doing her best to be manly. The first mate obviously disapproved of her, for he kept winking at me and raising his eyebrows sarcastically. The others made fun of her without mercy. I was astonished to see the ease with which they treated her. There was no question of sexual desire at the root of their bantering. It was as if she were a young sister who had insisted on joining an excursion which was really for men only. Even the sombre captain joined in the bantering.

Presently he said to me:

‘You have never seen a woman serving as mate before?’

He spoke slowly, but in perfect English. His voice was almost as refined as that of a woman. Indeed, it seems that all Russian voices have a feminine quality. They have none of that masculine gruffness which the voices of our men possess. Is it because the Russians lack our northern virility? ‘Of course,’ quoth our slender-waisted young exquisites, in voices of the highest soprano.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I have never seen women officers before on ships. We have none.’

‘I know,’ he said with a smile. ‘It is the result of our revolution. There are already two in our merchant service. I don‘t know whether it will be a success, having women as officers. I don‘t know why any woman would want to take on this bloody job. Still, if they want to do it, they are perfectly free. She is a good officer, but a bit strict. A little too strict, perhaps.’

‘She would be,’ ‘I said, in order to prove that she is not feminine. That is the worst of women working in charge of men.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But our position is very difficult. We have to try and organise a vast country, millions and millions of people, to give them machines and ships and education and all the products of modern civilisation. And we have hardly anybody to do it with. We want engineers, we want doctors, we want teachers, we want officers for ships, we want practically every damn thing you can think of. So everybody has to work twice as hard as he or she should do. So this woman is a mate.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘the great thing is that you are working.’

‘I am glad you see even that,’ said he. ‘You are a writer. As a general rule, writers who come to Russia, unless they are members of our Party, see only the desolation left by the Revolution and the Civil War. They see none of the feverish work we do. The great Wells saw only a Caucasian dance to please him. For the rest, he could see only squalor and oriental dreamers in the Soviet Union.’

He pushed away his plate, began to roll a cigarette and grinned at me.

‘It’s very funny,’ he said. ‘Comrade Lenin brought Wells down to the Caucasus to see the Conference of Eastern Peoples in 1920. Wells saw only a dance that was given as entertainment for the delegates. He did not see the Conference. He said it was a dream of the dreamers in the Kremlin. Now that dream is beginning to bear fruit, in India, in China, in Afghanistan. Wells did not foresee that. Lenin did. Tell me. What do you think of Revolution in England?’

‘From within or from without?’

‘How do you mean?’ he said.

He looked at me closely, as he placed the stem of his cigarette holder between his ascetic yet strangely sensual lips. I had a curious feeling that he was like a satyr, or a Jesuit, or some astute animal. An Oriental? Playing with me? No, no. It was just insane pride. He was the embodiment of some insane idea. That was why he was so strong. Otherwise I was stronger.

‘I cannot imagine a social revolution from within taking place in England,’ I replied. ‘The English know perfectly well they would lose their Empire and become an over-populated island, a third-rate nation, condemned to a vassal decadence like the Egyptians under Rome. But a revolution from without. . . . That is possible. Communism by conquest is possible, even in England. Already, as you say, the Lion and Unicorn of England is confronted with the Bolshevik Sickle and Hammer in India and elsewhere in the East.’

He looked at me still more closely and his eyes almost closed.

‘So you think that the Russian Revolution is a movement of Russian nationalist expansion.’

‘Not exactly.’

He went on looking at me closely and I began to feel uncomfortable. Again I had the feeling that I was an alien on this ship, being watched by the ship’s captain, who was probing me in order to find out whether I was a spy, an agent of the enemy, Europe, or just a harmless traveller come to see the wonders of the Soviet lands. I again felt that no matter how much I wanted to become a Bolshevik, no matter how much I admired their ideas, their youth, their virility, I must remain outside; or even if brought in, baptised in their faith, grafted on their society, I must still remain suspect and in reality an alien, because a different religion and culture had become part of my being.

Now I saw the captain as a great Inquisitor, guarding the ship and I clearly understood that he and his ship and his crew were all members of a band of scouts, sent out into Europe to examine the strong posts of the enemy.

He moved away without salutation. I was left alone in the room with the first mate. It was a relief to be left alone with a shallow and harmless fellow like the first mate. The mate began to speak at once.

‘How do you like third mate?’ he said, with a grin.

‘She’s not very pretty,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Nobody likes her much, except Chief Wireless. I no like women on ships. Once they give fat Jewish girl as apprentice. She member of Party. They say I must take her. I say no. Give me my wife. They say no wife, take fat Jewish girl. She learn Marine Law. So, so. She member of Party. Pull strings. Perhaps love important bureaucrat. All right. She come aboard. All the time she wants love with everybody. I no like. She come in my cabin. I was captain. She says does captain want tea. I say no. She says captain let her sit and talk. I say no. She cries and say she sad and throw herself on my bed, I say go away. Yes. All right. Very good. I want maybe but I know perhaps later I pay. She have poor dress. She want maybe to make love and then I have to buy dress. If not she go to big bureaucrat and say I love her and give nothing. So. Very bad. Now I go sleep. This ship sad., Very lonely.’

I went out on deck, in a state of high nervous tension. I felt that this ship was driving me mad, or else that I was unable to endure close contact with this mighty force, this Bolshevism. I could not feel at ease. Either I was watched by the captain, or by one of his crew. It was a delusion perhaps, a waking nightmare; but I felt it. And I felt a criminal for being hostile to this beautiful and healthy force.

As I expected, as soon as I got on deck, the doctor approached me and took charge.

‘Come and see my hospital,’ he said.

I submitted. I had not enough energy to resist. He showed me his hospital, which was perfectly equipped, with an operating room and a room for accouchement. He ranted about the Soviet hygienic laws. He talked about his work in liquidating medical ignorance among the crew. And all the time I could only see the captain’s sombre eyes and the mate’s lascivious grin and the ship prowling about among European cities, collecting information for the red hordes that were massing and singing their battle songs on the steppes. Woe to Europe! He brought me to the quarters of the crew and showed me how they ate and slept and played musical instruments and read books and fired shots from the rifles that hung in their mess room and meditated before the image of the great Lenin, like any pious Buddhists or Moslems or early Christians.

‘You will notice,’ he cried in triumph, ‘that their quarters are as good as the quarters of the officers. They eat exactly the same food. They are armed in accordance with the law for the militarisation of the proletariat, to protect this ship, which is the property of the proletariat, against counter revolution among the officers and against the spies of the bourgeoisie. They are reading books on Marxism and the Materialistic Conception of History, to prepare them for the great struggles of industrialisation of the Soviet Union, the liquidation of illiteracy and the overthrow of world capitalism. They are the real vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat.’

He showed me the great room in the men’s quarters where the meetings of the ship’s Soviet were held.

‘Here,’, he cried proudly, ‘I shall bring you to show you how all come here and make plans to better ship rule, save oil, save work, organise closer co-operation, all for one thing. Victory of world proletariat.’

And after two hours he left me exhausted on the after-hatch, while he went to dress an ulcer on Dunya’s hand. With folded arms and head fallen forward, I tried to rouse myself and master the situation. I tried to tell myself that I had set out on this journey, not only for the trifling purpose of writing a book and earning some money, but also, with the more important idea of finding a new purpose in life, something to which I could attach myself, a community as vital and as worthy of great poetry as Elizabethan England. Why did I remain hostile?

Before I could reason with myself I was again approached, this time by a tiny individual, who had the face of a Jew and wore the jersey of a seaman in the French navy, an affair with narrow blue and white stripes horizontally, on the cotton fabric. He bowed and smiled. I looked at him sombrely, thinking:

‘I have had enough of these blighters for one day. What’s this chap going to show me? By the look of him he is one of the engine room staff. He‘ll take me down below and show me the superiority of Soviet engine rooms.’

‘Salut!’ he said. I am told you speak French. I am French.’

‘Indeed!’ I said.

He sat down beside me, lit a cigarette and began to talk without further invitation. Now I was subjected to a different type of Bolshevik, an assimilation from abroad. This fellow was undoubtedly European, a Parisian Jew, with all the pertness of the gamin, intelligent, quick, alert, subtle, amusing, cunning in conversation, a rascal. Talking rapidly, he asked me to forgive him for being so badly dressed, but as one-third of everybody’s wages was abducted for the Five Year Plan and people were paid in roubles which they were not allowed to export or change into foreign currency, and as there were no clothes to be bought in Russia, it was impossible for people to be properly dressed. In the Soviet Union I would find a great deal that was good and a great deal that was bad. It was true that the condition of the working class, particularly on this ship, was good as regards working hours, labour laws and food, but it was bad in other respects. There was so much envy, so much jealousy, so much spying and intrigue and tittle-tattle, that life was sordid. Then this hatred of joy, of music, of love, of the dance, of drinking. What do people want? To turn the world into a Scotch Sunday? For himself, he had been the object of misfortune, being now an oiler, although he was by right a wireless operator.

‘Have you read the book of Panistrati?’

‘No. I never heard of him.’

Almost numb with exhaustion, I listened to the insinuating conversation of the little Jew, and enjoyed it as one always enjoys the speech of these clever little tricksters, conversation that was half serious, half humorous, interspersed with bawdy jokes and anecdotes from Parisian life, the life of the street, of the brothel, of the cabaret. He spoke like a counter-revolutionary, yet I knew he was not one. Neither was he an agent sent to sound me, but just one of these born gossips, who love to curry favour with the multitude by giving voice to whatever is likely to please, or to be interesting. Such people invent conspiracies, plots and events of the most startling import, for the sole purpose of attaching importance to themselves. They love to be the victims of injustice in order to inspire pity, for as a general rule, they are tiny of stature and have not the sense of dignity which attaches itself by nature to men of normal size. The type is common in Dublin, so it was not strange to me. How often have I been buttonholed in the street by dismissed civil servants, bankrupt business men and decayed people of all description, hauled into a tavern and then told in an awed whisper:

‘Give me your word of honour. A state secret you know. Do you know what happened at the United Services Club last night?’

The little wretch leaned close to rne and said in a secret tone:

‘I am surprised that you never heard of Panistrati. His book made a sensation in France and England. They forbade it in Russia. It angered them very much, for this Panistrati was received by them as a great writer, treated with great honour for a whole year in the Soviet Union, where he went about agitating and behaving as an enthusiastic Communist. Then suddenly he left and wrote a book, denouncing Bolshevism. So it is said, for I have not read the book. But the case of my father was prominent in the book. I am sorry you have not read it.’

Then he added in a melancholy fashion:

‘My father was manager of the Europa Hotel at Leningrad. He had also an apartment which was coveted by Communist officials. In order to get the apartment, because apartments are difficult to get, they rigged up false accusations against him. They succeeded. All our family were punished with my father. I had to walk the streets for six months. Then the captain got me this job. It is better than hunger. The captain is a good man. He also protects me against those who grumble against the presence of Josef, that is my name, the son of the intriguer. And Panistrati gave a whole chapter to my father’s case. Oh! I am sorry you have not read it.’

It was obvious that he preferred the publicity his father got by being incorporated in the ‘book of Panistrati’ and the consequent ‘fame’ of the whole family, to the apartment and the position as manager of the Europa.

‘I was a wireless operator. Now I am an oiler. In the same way they try to tell us that Trotsky is writing for the counter-revolutionary papers. But I have been abroad and I know this is untrue. Trotsky is still a revolutionary. So am I. In spite of injustice I remain true to my class. I have fought in the Red Navy. I would again fight in the Red Navy. But my friend, it is difficult to put up with the envy and intrigue that is everywhere. On this ship, there are low scoundrels, envious wretches, greedy ruffians, wolves in the clothing of sheep.’

Suddenly he told a bawdy story, jumped up, said he desired love, did an obscene dance and darted off to his fo‘c’sle.

I burst out laughing.

‘Ah!’ I said to myself. ‘I am delighted to find they are after all human and not yet cogs in a machine, without soul, or sin, or vice. There is hope for humanity, as long as the new rulers of the earth, the conquerors of Europe, remain fickle and treacherous to one another, greedy of possessions, subject to the changing emotions which are the germs of beauty. Out of passion, whether good or evil, comes all joy of life. Man, even under Communism, when all the liquidation societies have exhausted themselves, will still remain a man, a crude brute, full of evil, but likeable.’

Yes, much more likeable than these damned monks in their shabby Tolstoyan blouses. For who wants virtue or temperance or godliness for a bed mate?

After dinner I again talked to the captain. He now told me about his life. He, like little Josef, the Parisian Jew, had also suffered. But whereas the sufferings of Josef, the Jew, were a trifle unreal and a trifle pleasing to merry Josef, the sufferings of the captain were terrible and they had left black scars on the soul of the captain, who was eaten with an implacable hatred of his enemies the bourgeoisie. I have never met anything so cold and so terrible as the hatred of the captain for the bourgeoisie. He whom everybody on board praised and loved for his gentle kindness, was a wild beast when he thought or spoke of the bourgeoisie, that intangible monster with a million heads. So does the Christian monk hate that other intangible monster, the devil. So did the early Christians hate those monsters, the Pagans.

Born of parents who were serfs, he became a revolutionary before he could read or write. He took part in the revolution of 1905, was imprisoned, escaped from Riga and went abroad, to travel around the world as a sailor and general labourer at all manner of work. ‘I was then a member of the Social Revolutionary Party,’ he said, ‘and afterwards a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. Now, of course, I understand that it is only within the ranks of the Communist Party the world revolution can be organised.’ He apologised for himself when he spoke of his past political affiliations. It was just as if an early Christian admitted having once been a Pharisee. He told me of revolutionary activities in America and Australia, how he had been put in jail and tortured in those countries, how he was also jailed and tortured in England; and then how he returned to Russia in order to continue the great work of liberating the toiling masses of the world.

Of the world? I began to doubt if he were still an international communist as he continued to talk. His hatred of foreign capitalists (for it was foreign capitalism especially that had persecuted him) had thrown him back on the broad bosom of mother Russia.

‘Look,’ he cried, cat the English workers. They all want to dress like their masters. They all want to wear the same trousers as the Prince of Wales and to wear the same tie as the Duke of York. They are slaves. We Russians are different. All our great men have always tried to dress as simple peasants. This is the blouse that Leo Tolstoy wore. The great Lenin never bothered about his clothes. In the old days our students were all rebels and they dressed like workmen. The spirit of freedom is born in the Russian. And when people tell me that life under Tsarism was a tyranny I tell them that the life of the worker and peasant under Tsarism was not so bad as the life of the European proletariat under capitalism. If a worker starved in our cities he went to the villages and got fed. The great Russian country lay ready to receive him. They boast of their inventions and of their science and of their civilisation and their culture and their art. But we can show them all these things in equal or even in greater proportion. No longer must Russia allow herself to be called the barbarian at the gates of Europe.’

As he spoke he almost lashed himself into a state of frenzy, so that I could hear the ghoulish characters of Dostoievsky thrusting themselves forward from between his teeth, the Karamosovs, the Idiots, the Devils and the strange creatures from the House of the Dead, wild and wonderful geniuses, ashamed of their barbaric ancestors, clawing greedily at all the beautiful philosophies of Europe, to use as tools for paring off their savage humps and warts.

Lo! The very newest and most potent philosophy was this dictatorship of the proletariat, for the use of which the insurrected Russian people had slain their Little Father and the whole horde of their nobility.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The Romanovs were dirty Germans, come to plunder Russia. They were not Russians. Peter the Great. There was a Russian. If he were alive now, I am certain he would be a sympathiser with our Party. I am certain he would understand we are continuing his work. We preserve all his work-tools in a little chapel at Leningrad.’

Then, with glittering eyes, he told me about Morosov, a Russian intellectual who had been imprisoned by the Tsar and had stayed fifty years in prison, being released by the outbreak of the revolution. When this man had crawled, astounded and unbelieving, into the light of day, a free man, it was discovered that he had planned an enormous book in jail. In spite of the shortage of paper this book was being published, volume after volume. And the book went to prove that neither Rome nor Egypt, nor Babylon ever existed. Nothing ever existed but Byzantium. And Byzatium is the mother of Holy Russia.

The captain believed in the lurid insanity of this prisoner, whose intellect had burst clear of the earth’s moorings during fifty years’ confinement. Not only did he believe, but he scattered these volumes among his crew and he told me proudly that they also believed. They were stirred into enthusiasm by the assurance that; nothing ever existed but Byzantium, the mother of Holy Russia. Therefore Russia is the source of civilisation and no Russian ever again need feel an inferiority complex when confronted with the civilisation and culture of Europe.

Mad, mad! But it is only the mad who conquer worlds. This was the madness of Christ and of Mahomed, the madness of Alexander who deified himself, the madness of Napoleon who believed in the guiding star of his destiny. Conquest is to the mad and defeat is for us, who linger by the stagnant pools of reason.

Suddenly he rose up before me, unwinding his long body until he reached his full height. Smiling on me, as gently as the Christly Prince in The Idiot might smile, he said in a pathetic voice:

‘I have two parrots in my home at Leningrad. The comrades ask me why I develop bourgeois habits, by buying such toys as parrots. I tell them that parrots live for hundreds of years. My parrots are now young. Perhaps they will see Communism. I will never see Communism. But as long as I live I will make war on the bloody bourgeois. My children are growing up. They too will carry on the war against the bloody bourgeois. Now I go to the meeting of our Soviet.’

At that moment, the doctor entered the room to say the captain was wanted at the meeting of the Soviet.

‘You come also,’ he said to me.

I followed them. The night was dark on deck. The sea loomed up, hurriedly rushing past the sides of the floundering ship, in a mysterious fashion.

We moved aft. Presently a light gleamed from an open doorway and I heard heated voices arguing. It was the meeting of the Soviet. I felt a thrill. At once it occurred to me that this perfectly legitimate meeting of the Soviet reminded the captain of the old days, when he held exciting and illegal meetings in cellars and in caves, with scouts and all the awe-inspiring paraphernalia of conspiracy. Then as now he was plotting war against the bourgeoisie. Then he was powerless to act, except in a crude and violent fashion. Now he was master of a powerful unit of warfare, a whole ship’s crew and a ship, sailing the open seas, with his flag strung proudly at his mast. How delighted he must be with himself, I thought.

I entered the room with them and sat on a form near the door. Then indeed I too felt awed. I do not know why, but even now, months later, I can recall the terrific spiritual and emotional reaction to that sight, all those seamen gathered together under the portrait of Lenin, arguing about the governance of their ship. The doctor tried to interpret what they were saying, but I paid no attention to him. One after the other they got up and shouted and perorated and shook their fists at one another, with the same force and enthusiasm one finds among the characters of an Elizabethan drama; the same violence of gesture, the same crazy sincerity, the same extravagance of emotion. The meeting summed up and contained all that I had seen on board the ship, all that I felt of mystery and of power in Bolshevism. I tried to ridicule it, to tell myself that they were playing at being a Soviet, at running the ship in common. But the atmosphere swept aside reason and ridicule. It was over-powering, like the sudden awe that overcomes a man in a lonely cave at night and forces him to run flying before spooks.

Only with the difference, that I wanted to jump up and cry out I was a Bolshevik. I trembled on my form and did not rise.

Presently I crept out into the night and leaned over the ship’s side, listening to the rolling sea. I could still hear their voices raised in argument, the words Soviet, Socialist, Industry, Bourgeois, Proletariat rushing out at me. But above all the savage energy in the voices, the triumphant outburst of force; while the ship sailed and the gloom of night about the meeting place made sinister their strange conference.

Somewhere on the ship a man was playing a Balalaika, a wailing tune that rose and fell like the steppe. That is where they come from.

Chapter IV. Jews And Vikings

On the following afternoon we sighted the coast of Norway. I was leaning over the side with the doctor.

‘What sort of cargo do we take in Norway?’ I asked him.

‘Zinc,’ he said. ‘Metal for Five Year Plan.’

‘Where do we get it? Where are we going?’

‘Odda. Small town in Fiord. I been twice already in Norway. I like country. My ancestors were Scandinavian. Some Scandinavian, some Jewish, some Tatar. Great deal Tatar, great deal Scandinavian, a little Jewish. Born in North Russia. I am biologically an internationalist.’

‘That is very interesting,’ I said, looking at him closely.

‘It is interesting scientifically,’ he said with excitement. ‘And for this reason specially. Great mixtures of blood, such as in my life machine, cause great social disturbance. Then progress comes. In Soviet Union we have more than one hundred different races. I myself do not know the names of them all. We shall mix them together as compounds are mixed in a scientific laboratory. Then we shall build great civilisation with this mixture. We shall teach this mixture a common proletarian culture, what you call world culture. Then human race, at one jump, go forward five cultural miles. If from dawn of history, so called, until now equal one cultural mile, then from outbreak proletarian revolution until realisation of socialism equal five cultural miles.’

I looked at him still more closely. His forehead was furrowed with thought. His eyes blazed. It was something more than his belief in Communism that excited him.

‘How long do you think that will take?’ I said quietly. ‘To realise socialism.’

‘I know not,’ he said. ‘Perhaps one hundred years. Perhaps two hundred years. That is not important. It is the struggle, the new moulding of a world type that is interesting, destroying old prejudices and building new, great, wonderful world culture.’

‘So to speak,’ I said, ‘you hope to evolve Nietzsche’s Superman through the medium of the proletarian revolution.’

‘No, no,’ he said angrily, just as I had expected. ‘Nietzsche was a savage, a sick savage. Great genius but. . . .’

‘He did not understand Marx/ I said gently.

‘No,’ said the doctor eagerly. ‘He did not.’

He excused himself and ran off to attend to one of the crew.

‘Ha!’ I thought. ‘He says he is a Tatar and a Norseman and a Jew, but I think he is all Jew, from Tartary and Scandinavia and North Russia. Truly an internationalist, for the Jew has no country. No matter where he suckled at the earth’s breast he remains a Jew. The earth seems to shun him and to deny him characteristics that; she grants to other types of men and animals. He cannot change his form or his habits no matter whether he wills to be born on the Himalayas or the pampas of the Argentine. Everywhere he is pursued by the curse of his heredity. And all the time he tries to fly from it, to deny his origin, to be assimilated by his environment. But all races cast him forth and eschew him. And in rage he invents religions that are based on human brotherhood, on the negation of race and of caste and tries to force their acceptance on all humanity, so that at last he may disappear from the face of the earth as a Jew and come to life as a brother of all men, a blood equal of Mongols and Slavs and Teutons and Franks and Latins. But shall he ever succeed? Shall this crusade for the abolition of classes result in the abolition of the Jew?’

While I thought, leaning over the side, the doctor returned and said:

‘See that yacht? Good sport, with yacht. I once go to Stockholm from Leningrad in yacht. I am a member of Workers’ Yachting Club in Leningrad. Formerly it was belonging to the Tsar. Yes?’

He walked on and I continued to think:

‘Certainly there is nothing artificial in his passion for yachting, as there is in the passion of Jews in capitalistic countries for adopting the sports and habits that are essentially Gentile. Seeing a Jew riding a horse in Rotten Row is a pathetic sight. One can read in his face that he is aware of the contempt and hostility of the watching Gentiles. Even when one of them is extremely rich and powerful, he knows that even the meanest and poorest Gentile still sneers at him as a “dirty Jew.” What an amazing phenomenon! Even I myself, who admire Jews for their intelligence, their generosity, their kindness, cannot help feeling that they are inferior. What is it?’

Suddenly I hoped that the Russian Revolution would at last liberate the Jews. And then, as if he had read my thoughts, the chief mate approached at that moment and said:

‘Tell me. You notice Jews on ship?’

‘Yes. I have noticed them.’

‘In your country no Jews on ships?’

‘Only as stewards.’

‘Here lots of them. How many you count already?’

‘Three.’

‘I count seven,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I find more. Now in Russia I think everybody become Jew. I get afraid. I think, maybe, I wake up in morning and find myself Jew. Ach! What good Jew on ship? In storm what good Jew? No understand sea. Not man like you and me. All wrong. This ship all wrong. No profit. Too much crew. No work enough. All for propaganda. If this ship owned by private company then everything different. Private company has to make profit, so they find good crew and make everybody work.’

He sighed and added:

‘On this ship captain good sailor. Second mate good sailor. Bo’sun good. Chief engineer also good. The others no good. I go small sleep.’

He was stupid. He had not the quick intelligence of the doctor, nor the world consciousness, nor the will to achieve things beyond his immediate environment. He was a common fellow; decent, kind, efficient at his work, but common. Yet if I were asked to choose between saving him and the doctor from death I should choose to save him. His blood and his nature were more akin to mine than the doctor’s. Even though he was stupid, he might breed genius. The doctor, I felt, could never breed anything but inquisitive, analytic brats, without the earth’s rich, violent exuberance. I found that strange.

Yet how illogical! The mate disliked seeing Jews working as seamen; but only for the reason that they were good for buying and selling. Instead of being glad that they were giving up their nefarious habits, of trading for profit, and taking to difficult, badly paid, uncomfortable work like sea-faring, he would prefer that they stuck to their trading and left the dirty, unprofitable work to him and his kind. Of course, he implied that the Jews took to the sea for ulterior motives, to use the ship as a medium of propaganda, instead of using it for the purpose for which man had invented it.

And as the mate was a typical Russian, of the old nationalistic type, obviously one of many millions of similar Russians, I became afraid that the Jews would not succeed in ‘liquidating’ themselves by means of Communism; no more than they succeeded in ‘liquidating’ themselves by means of Christianity. But in any case, the question is not of great importance, at least when compared with other more vital questions arising out of the giant Proletarian Revolution.

Norway ahoy! It is an astounding country. If one looks at it on the map, one is amazed at how it ‘manages to stick together. It seems to be all rivers, like a soft road after sudden, heavy rain. Nobody would ever suspect people of living there. One shudders at the very thought of living there. Yet, in reality, it is as fresh and green, almost, as Ireland. Although it was still April, I saw signs of full blown spring on either side of the ship, green fields, woods, pretty houses, cattle, human beings fully equipped in modern fashion. The doctor told me that part of Norway was farther south than Moscow. I was startled.

‘Really,’ I said. ‘I wish I had stayed at home. I detest cold.’

‘Yes?’ he said. ‘I like cold. I make expedition on ice-breaker Krassin to North Pole to save Italian explorers. Very good. Very much learn. Very soon, Soviet Union stretch to North Pole. Very interesting Soviet movement among Esquimos and such other illiterate people. Very interesting when there is autonomous Soviet Republic of North Polar Regions.’

Devil take it! The doctor was beginning to make me feel inferior. I began to grow jealous of his enthusiasm, his sanity, his interest: in the world, his assurance that the Revolution would inevitably succeed, spread out and cover the earth.

‘No,’ I thought. ‘It’s no good fighting against this urge to become a Bolshevik, by sub-consciously accusing the Revolution of being inspired by Jews or by sub-consciously persuading myself that it is going to develop into a movement of Russian nationalist expansion. What power it has! Its grandeur and the immense possibilities of its future spring to my mind, as soon as I bring it to bear on any question.’

Yet I kept on fighting against it, trying to keep it outside myself and to watch it with cynical detachment. Or perhaps it was because we were in sight of Norway that I was trying to feel more detached. While the ship was at sea, I was completely surrounded by a Bolshevik world. There was nothing to contrast with it, nothing to denote that a bourgeois world existed, except the abnormal sounds distributed by the Broadcasting Company. It was like being in a church, where even atheists are affected by the grandeur of the priest, who wears shining garments, murmurs strange words and swings a thurible, from which perfumes of an exciting nature issue to drug the senses into a belief that God really exists. The same priest, dressed in a similar manner in a public street, swinging the same incense, but surrounded by traffic and the indifferent crowd of a city, is merely an object of ridicule for young children, who point at him and say: ‘Look at the funny man, daddy.’ No religion, whether it is Bolshevism or Christianity, is really impressive when confronted with the gross realities of life.

That evening, after supper, I had a further conversation with the captain. In keeping with my mood, I found that he also was less impressive. We discussed literature, history, politics. He amazed me as much by all he knew as by his incapacity for thought, when confronted with abstract ideas and with the necessity for judging what he had read in the light of his own intellect. He did not question anything which had been written by his own prophets, Marx, Lenin and such people. He denied everything which they denied and refused to find virtue in anything that was opposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat; except, perhaps, things that were essentially favourable to his position as a Russian, such as Morosov’s insane dream of a Byzantine world Empire. I also felt that he talked in order to impress, in order to air all he knew in the hearing of a foreign writer. And he then went to bed with a book by Edgar Wallace.

I awoke next morning to find myself confronted by the whole beauty of Norway. Through the open port-hole I saw a mountain rising like a wall, covered with trees, snow and dazzling sunlight. The ship rode at anchor. The air was still and warm. The mountain seemed to be within arm’s reach. Yet the pine trees on its side seemed the size of geranium plants. It was overwhelmingly beautiful. I crawled on tip-toe to the porthole and stuck out my head, making no sound; either afraid of breaking the spell of the mountain’s beauty by sound, or through fear that it was unreal, a ghost that would fly from sound. But it stayed and, becoming assured of its reality, I cried out and looked joyously from side to side, at the mountain’s snowy summit, blazing in the sun, at the blue lagoon that wound away to the left , at little Odda to the right, within its mountain walls. Oh! How gorgeous it looked! What a birthplace for Vikings!

Half-naked, I ran on deck and sought the highest point on the ship to gloat on the scene. Vikings! Sun, snow, mountains, deep gorges, water-falls, winding bays to bear the savage plunderers in their boats to distant lands. I felt a stirring of my blood and even in my bones the marrow quivered in ecstasy. Pride in that glorious race. What did Marx know of that beautiful insanity, the romance of the beautiful earth and of great peoples, who spring up in strange places and act their piece upon the world’s battle stage and then die or wither into insignificance? How can they ‘liquidate’ this beautiful insanity, with their milky gospels of human brotherhood, the abnegation of race? Here is what Christ could not understand. Neither shall any Jew ever understand it and man shall go on being subject to this beautiful insanity, until the earth is a dry crater like the moon.

So I thought, looking at the sunlit snow and at the mountains that flung down proud shadows from their swelling sides on to the shimmering waters.

It seemed that all the crew was equally moved by the beauty of the Norwegian earth and sea. The officers drank one another’s health in a merry fashion. It was while going from one room to another, drinking healths, that I met the Chief Engineer, a most interesting man from my point of view.

He looked like a horseman and I was not surprised when he told me that he was a Cossack. He was short of stature, with a thick neck, short nose and long arms. His hands were large but his feet were extremely small. His mouth and his eyes looked cruel. His face was sallow and with a skin that looked unhealthy at first sight, but was really a horseman’s skin. It is odd how hereditary horsemen revert to that type all over the world, so that there is hardly any difference of body between a Cossack from the Don, an Argentine Gaucho and those western Irish horsemen that come riding easily from the mountains on a fair day.

He was a powerful drinker, and drank rapidly for the obvious purpose of getting drunk as soon as possible. It was the first time I had spoken to him and I was amazed at the indifference with which he let me see what his political opinions were.

‘This ship is no good/ he said, speaking in a mixture of English and French. ‘Vous savez, very many of crew hired to make propaganda. All ship hired to make propaganda. No good. No drink. No banquets. Settlement, comrades, the situation is so. All the time watching. Vous savez, such a thing is impossible, to live like a monk, all live like monks. II y a des types, vous savez, but not all. It’s mieux, so you say, besser, let men take money how they can get it, fight for it. Ach! It is impossible to explain.’

He struck his chest and cried with great violence:

‘I have forgotten my languages. All life has been turned like this, bottom top, top bottom.’

‘Are you not a Communist?’ I said.

‘No,’ he cried with an oath. ‘I’m a Cossack. I fought against them. But I am Russian. I no want to be emigrant. I stay. Build up Russia. C’est mon pays. Here they hate me. Why? I get more money than captain. On other ships, captains no Communists, banquets all time in port.’

‘So you are a Cossack,’ I said, filling his glass.

‘When I a little boy,’ he said, ‘my father take me out to herd of horses and say take one. He wild. I catch him, tame him. My people have hands like that. Strong iron. Comprenez? These Jews. But I have a son in Moscow. I must stay, work for him. I hate this life. I want Cossack country. Wild horses. Great fields. Drinking with strong men.’

He picked up a novel by a Soviet writer and said:

‘Brusski by Panferov. No good. That my country. I know. He know nothing. They tell him write so. He write so.’

At that moment the doctor knocked and entered. Immediately, the Chief Engineer went out.

‘Beware of him,’ said the doctor. ‘The situation is such. This man is drunkard. Such types are no good for our Union. They are exotic types, of interest only to foreigners. It is our proletarian duty to liquidate such types. We shall do this by education. Yes? This afternoon we go on shore, observe Norwegian country. Here, there are very fine factories and such works to observe.’

He went out. I struck my table and said:

‘God! What a collection of odd human beings! This doctor always hovering about, with his system for the liquidation of evil, so free from the ordinary human impulses that he wants to observe factories in Norway instead of observing water-falls, mountains and snow; and the engineer, who is a Cossack, dreaming of wild horses, while he wipes the clammy engine-oil from his hands. Is it the genius of the Russian race always to struggle against the flood of human passion, to lacerate itself by self-denial and to waste half its energies cutting out from its being impulses that have led other races to great achievements? And when Russians give those impulses free rein, they regard them with horror and a consciousness of sin, so that they lead to barren excess, as in drunkenness, lust and intellectual despair. But hold! Is not the doctor a Jew? And have the Jews, by a strange freak of fortune, taken charge of the hysterical Russian genius, as this doctor is watching the engineer, by means of the dictatorship of the proletariat? Excellent joke, if it is so. Shall the hated Jew, by means of his extraordinary philosophical system, his new God (offered to man after man had rejected the former philosophical system of Christianity, also offered by the Jews, as useless for the purposes of the machine age), cure the wild Russian of his anarchy and make him a fit person to rule the earth?’

Such reflections amused me intensely. Certainly the Chief Engineer was a braggart and somewhat of a ruffian. He needed some sort of dictatorship, as was proved a few days later when he went drunk into his engine room, tried to tamper with the machines and had to be ejected by the second engineer, a Jew. At the same time, I found it amusing that the despised race of Jews, whose thighs have become alien to a horse’s flanks, should have tamed and made servant the wild horsemen of the steppes, by means of a few pleasing phrases.

Wandering about the ship, I found that our Norwegian pilot had got terribly drunk. I met him in the mess room, where he was attempting to get on good terms with Dunya. He asked me for a drink, which I refused him. He was a wretched old man from whom I wanted to learn nothing, since he was not a Bolshevik.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Ha! Ha! You no Russian man?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m an Irishman.’

‘Ha! Ha!’ he said. ‘I know New York ten years. Irishman. Tammany Hall. Very good.’

Then he winked and said:

‘Why do they come for cargo of zinc? To put roofs on houses? No sir. To make war. Russian man getting ready for war. Yes, sir. Goddam. All fools. All countries fools. Make war. Russian man sells food and clothes to buy bullets. He is hungry and he has no shoes on his feet, because he wants bullets to make war. Damn fool.’

He tottered away, singing. Again I reflected that even though this withered Norseman was drunk and strangely pacifist for a descendant of Vikings, he seemed to be more sane than the Russians. Ho! Ho! It was one way of looking at the Five Year Plan. But was it good to sneer at the Russian lust for war and conquest?

The drunken pilot met me on the deck a little later and said, pointing to a large and ugly factory that lay on a peninsula in the harbour:

‘There is the factory. Goddam! They have ruined that place with their bloody factory. Before it was beautiful. Also, look this side.’ He pointed to the town, where another large factory towered over the houses, sending flashes of fire and clouds of fiery smoke into the air. ‘Carbide they make there in that other one. Dirty bloody Belgian and French capitalists. The smoke cannot rise out of the valley. It will bring disease. Dirty bloody factories. Never mind. To-morrow it will all go. The world will be again beautiful.’

The doctor came up and drew me aside and said in an excited fashion:

‘Very strong Communist Party in Odda. Perhaps we make good propaganda here.’

He pointed to the factories and said:

‘Very good. Very beautiful. Factories very good for Communism. The machines, it is effected so, that they create proletariat. Very good. Then great dynamic energy becomes. Wonderful. Yes?’

‘It is strange,’ I thought, ‘that the Norsemen once had a new idea which sent them out to ravage the earth; some dynamic force that drove them to conquest. Now they are pacifist and the Russians have that spirit in turn.’

When we went ashore during the afternoon, I was convinced that the Norsemen had lost whatever dynamic force they ever possessed. Nothing could be more dull than the town, or more bovine than its inhabitants. The houses were neat, well-built, exquisitely clean. There were signs of prosperity everywhere. All the appliances of modern civilisation were in evidence, electricity, telephones, motor cars. In the shops I saw all the latest products of American industry. The people were healthy and of fine physique. They were excessively polite in manner, calm, orderly, industrious. Yet they repelled me. I saw not a sign of the Viking spirit in their faces; nothing but placidity and stagnation. It seemed that they were robots, manufactured on the latest model of pacifism, hygiene and efficiency. In the cafés I found strong, silent, young men drinking large tumblers of hygienic milk, while gramophones, manipulated by hygienic young women, played sentimental jazz tunes of American origin. When I asked for beer I was given a poisonous concoction. When I asked for food the result was still worse. Rarely have I been offered less appetising garbage, cooked and served in a truly barbarous fashion.

The Russians looked odd beside the Norwegians. And although the Norwegians had a melancholy effect on me, because they had lost the fierce grandeur of their ancestors, I still felt akin to them and hostile towards the hairy Russians who were not of my blood. These latter looked unkempt, lean, inquisitive, out of place, a horde of prowlers. In their company I felt the snobbish shame one feels in the company of a disreputable person. What was it to me that the ancient Norsemen were probably as disreputable as these Russians when they began their career of plunder? Neither did it interest me that the Russian expansion had for its stated objective the creation of a great world civilisation.

A machine civilisation such as the Russians sought lay before me in the town and it was abhorrent to my senses. Why should I want to destroy the calm beauty of English villages in order to create a senseless ugliness such as this? Why should I want to destroy French culture, where the delicacies of the table and of the boudoir are considered of greater importance than this speechless worship of tinned food, canned music, standarised morality?

Out upon the Russians and their ambitions.

They made no secret of their contempt for the Norwegians. I was indignant at the greedy way they looked at the factories, the motor cars and the shops that contained the products of European and American machine-labour, as if to say: ‘All this shall be ours by conquest or by subtlety.’

They obviously regarded themselves, not as friendly traders but as scouts, seeking information for conquering armies that were to follow them. Their laughter, their exuberance, their energy did not hide their uncouthness and their lack of individual beauty. They were a herd, with a mass consciousness of a religious idea that was to send them careering, tails up, bellowing, into the rich towns of Europe, to pillage ancient store rooms that are full to bursting point with rich treasure.

Sadly I stole away from them and wandered up into the mountains. I had not far to go. No sooner had I left the outskirts of the town than the mammoth sides of the mountains hid from sight the factories and the ships. They drowned the strident noises of the machines. All signs of machine life disappeared. The earth regained its mystic power and its atmosphere of unchangeability. There was utter silence. There was snow and smooth rocks that had been trodden by the feet of ancient, hide-wearing men, toothy savages whose gods were sounds and the flashing rage of nature, seas in triumph, cloud bursts, avalanches of snow, icebergs in movement, the terror of mountain shadows.

The earth’s power drugged my intellect, so that I laughed at the foolish social philosophies of the Bolsheviks and saw that they were but the superstitions of savages to glorify the lust of conquest. It was the same lust that had driven the Norse pirates over the sea.

Here brutal nature, by her sinister silence, brought vividly to my mind the realisation that human life is governed by the same ruthless competition and brazen anarchy which governs the growth of nature. Plant wars with plant, insect with insect, animal with animal. The elements destroy life with the same power that generates and feeds life. All is in continual movement, ever-changing, blindly moving, being born, flowering, dying, from a miraculous beginning to an un-explainable end, beautiful only in movement, incomprehensible in purpose.

So are man’s ambitious movements incomprehensible and without purpose when examined by reason. Each successive culture crumbles into ruin and desolation spreads over the sites of his proud cities. His gods are forgotten. His works of art become dust. His philosophies and religions become a gibberish, unintelligible to his descendants. His music becomes the moaning of the rough winds. Hordes of ants march over battlefields, where his armies, with their banners, passed to victory.

I saw the Bolshevik god as a wooden dummy like the rest, of no nobler quality than the fetishes which the Chinese and the Egyptians and the Assyrians and the Greeks and the Aztecs and the Romans carried into the strong places of their enemies. Born in the hungry bellies of the Bolshevik masses, he would die when those bellies were full to repletion, just as Odin and Thor died when the Norse conquerors were glutted with loot. Loot! Loot! Man appeared no whit more divine than the foraging ants, which gnaw their way across continents, leaving desolation in their trail.

But I grew lonely as I reasoned thus, sitting on an old stone by a mountain torrent. For he who detaches himself from the herd of his human brothers and regards their movements as insanity is more insane than they. It is good at times to retire unto the heights and look down with sorrow on the futility of man’s activity. But it is folly to stay on the heights. The scoffer and the sceptic are sour and useless citizens, esteemed only by decadents and invalids. For they who effect a harmony between their reason and their actions lose the power to create beauty. All things appear equally futile when examined by reason. But the young and vigorous wisely sneer at reason.

On the mountain it became manifest to me that the realisation of the Bolshevik idea was impossible, that it was impossible to organise all mankind in one society where all should be equal, free from care, famine, disease, vice, personal ambition, war. It appeared as childish as the attempt to realise the ideal of Christianity. But it also became manifest to me that all the beauty which man has created in his career had been the outcome of attempts to achieve similar impossible ideals. And although Christianity has been a failure, although its ideal of peace and brotherly love has brought war and hatred and although it has ended in hypocrisy, disillusion and decadence, no man but an unthinking boor will refuse to admit that magnificent achievements have resulted from the attempt to realise it.

In the same manner the Bolshevik god may scatter lavish beauties in the path of his conquest.

Chapter V. A Discourse On Various Subjects

The first evening that we were in port, the crew behaved in a human fashion. They prowled about the town looking for drink and women. But the Norwegian women were unappetising. The solitary local harlot did not trouble to offer herself to the Bolsheviks, possibly because she knew they had little money to purchase her wares and because she had a professional hatred of Bolshevism. It has always struck me as curious that stock-brokers, clergymen and harlots, the most naked tribes of parasites within our social organism, are the most bitter enemies of Bolshevism and the most ardent supporters of Christian morality.

The supply of drink was less than the supply of women. There was local prohibition at Odda. The wretched natives were subjected to that form of puritanism which has made certain regions of the United States of America the laughing stock of the civilised world. The result of this puritanism was that numbers of the citizens of Odda got most foully drunk every evening on methylated spirits and other dangerous liquors. There were hordes of touts going about, trying to sell these poisons to the poor. As in the United States, the rich could drink as formerly in the security of their homes. It was only the poor who were poisoned.

But the healthy stomachs of the Bolsheviks turned from these poisons, just as their healthy lusts failed to be roused by the Norwegian women. They all came aboard the ship cursing Norway and blaming capitalism for the lack of recreation in Odda.

This helped the captain in his fanatical ambition to make the ship’s stay in port a means of ‘liquidating’ the Norwegian bourgeoisie. I doubt if his men would have consented to go on excursions of observation and propaganda so readily had the town offered facilities for sensual pleasures, or even if they had the money to purchase such pleasures as existed. Indeed, the rage of these people against bourgeois pleasures was largely the result of envy and not a desire to restore man to his aboriginal innocence. They used to tell me how they longed to turn a machine-gun on the crowds issuing from and entering the Savoy Hotel in London. Why? Simply because they themselves could not enter.

So they went like schoolboys in charge of a master on the following day to inspect an electrical plant in the vicinity. The doctor invited me to accompany them but I refused. In common with most civilised people I hate being taken on a tour of inspection with a crowd. But the Russians love such things. They fear solitude. They love being in a mass.

That Sunday I found life on board the ship exceedingly interesting. I met a Norwegian customs officer walking along the deck and we began to talk. He had been a sailor and spoke English very well indeed. He was of fine physique, intelligent above the ordinary, of kindly disposition, a sturdy, trustworthy fellow. We became intimate almost at once, after the manner of men who are accustomed to wander about the world. I was rather astonished when he told me that he was a member of the Norwegian Communist Party. I expressed my astonishment and he asked me the reason.

‘It is hard to explain,’ I said. ‘I suppose it is the difference between you and the Russian Communists aboard this ship that I find odd. I doubt if any of us Western Europeans take Communism really seriously as a religion. Among us a man is either a Conservative, or a Liberal, or a Social Democrat, or a Communist. He is not either a Christian or a Communist.’

He did not understand me and said so in his slow, polite, Norwegian manner.

‘Well!’ I said. ‘My opinion is that Communism is a religion rather than a political belief. It is even a particular form of religious belief as Jesuitism is a particular form of Christianity. A Jesuit may even be a Social Democrat. I have met such people. But Jesuitical Social Democrats would run Social Democratic States on the same autocratic principle as they run their own Society and such governments as they have controlled. They have a particular philosophy of life, bound in dogma, which they insist on imposing on human beings. They will impose that philosophy, irrespective of what outward mask it wears. So with the Bolsheviks. They are a very limited oligarchy, with a philosophy of life that appeals in its entirety only to very few people. The masses controlled by them have very little to do with . . . Yes. I quite understand I am not making myself very plain. But to put it quite baldly, I believe the Russian Bolsheviks are fanatics, with a dogma they want to impose on the world. You don’t look like a fanatic. You rather look like a Liberal, a Social Democrat.’

Straightway, the man became furious.

‘I a Social Democrat!’ he cried. ‘I hate them, the Social traitors.’

Then he began to mouth about topical quarrels among the various parties that espouse the cause of the proletariat. Nothing is so dreary as these quarrels. They rival in intensity and bitterness the quarrels among the early followers of Jesus Christ. In common with nearly all European Communists and Socialists, he had no comprehension of his objective, being almost solely concerned with proving that all factions except his own were wrong in their tactics and their beliefs. His Communism was something similar to a hobby that occupied his spare time and the fact that he may have been willing to go to jail for it was no proof that it was more than a hobby. Among us, irascible characters are quite willing to go to jail in defence of their theories about the cuckoo’s egg. I grant that there are Communists and Socialists among us who are inspired by the ambition to achieve fame or political success within our societies; but there are hardly any who have the ambition definitely to overthrow capitalism and ruthlessly organise Socialism on its ruins.

‘You are a Communist,’ I said, ‘simply because you believe the Social Democrats are wrong and not because you want to create a Communist system of society in Norway.’

He gaped at me and said:

‘Communism must replace capitalism or else Europe will revert to barbarism.’

‘That is possible,’ I said. ‘But I feel that you don’t really believe communism is going to replace capitalism in Norway.’

‘It is difficult to say,’ he answered. ‘It is hard to move the Norwegian people. Conditions are too good for the workers. When conditions are better in Soviet Russia than in Norway, then perhaps there will be a revolution here.’

‘Then your idea of a Norwegian revolution is not of a dynamic force, a spiritual renaissance, but a cold, mercenary exchange by calculating mobs of one system of economy for another; just as a man changes a barren cow for a fertile heifer.’

‘You are a bourgeois intellectual’ he said. ‘It is easy to argue but there are only two classes and between them there is . . .’

‘War to the extermination of one,’ I said. ‘I know all that, just as I know about the Immaculate Conception and the Infallibility of the Pope and other honoured dogmas. But tell me honestly. Do you really believe you are a Communist like these Russians?’

‘I am a Norwegian Communist,’ he said after some thought. ‘The Russians are big children. They make many mistakes. On this ship things are not done well.’

‘Ah!’ I said. ‘You admit a difference, if only a difference in degree of civilisation. But the truth is that you are not a Communist but a Social Reformer. You want to improve Norwegian life not to uproot it. The Russians on the contrary are trying to create a new order of society and to give a new philosophy of life to the world. You are as remote as the poles, you and the Russians. Your attitude towards them is a purely selfish one. I am not talking of you personally but of European Communists in general. You are content to watch the Russians expending their energies, fighting, starving, struggling against great odds? to make a revolution in the organisation of human society, knowing that you will gain immensely if they succeed and yet lose little of your present status if they fail. You are a Communist because you are more intelligent and ambitious than the other workers and you want to be a favourite of the Russians in their hour of triumph. Instead of attempting revolution yourself you wait for the Russians to do the job for you. I am amazed at the folly of the Russians in expecting any help from you; unless, indeed, they are subtle enough to regard their foreign Communist organisations as espionage groups and as means of demoralising European economy while their own economy is being organised. But I have an idea that when the Russians are strong enough they are going to get tired of maintaining you. They are going to treat you in the same way as they’ll treat the Social Democrats and the bourgeoisie and the proletariat too; by planting a Russian empire on your backs.’

‘You are a reactionary,’ he cried. ‘You are a bloody fool.’

‘More than likely,’I said, walking away from him.

A little later he approached me once more, wishing to continue the discussion, but I insisted on believing that he was a Social Democrat. So he finally sighed and agreed with me.

‘However,’ he said, ‘if you come to the entertainment given this evening by our local party to the Russian comrades you will see that we are really Communists in Norway.’

After I had finished lunch, the chief officer approached me and said:

‘Foreign engineers having lunch on ship. They say, please bring Irish writer to take coffee and liqueur with us.’

‘With pleasure,’ I said.

He was already drunk and looked rather unpleasant. I went with him to the dining room. There was a large company of foreigners there. They had finished lunch and were nearly all rather the worse for drink. They were engineers, customs officials and managers of factories, with their wives and sisters. At first they regarded me with suspicion. It is the customary attitude of middle class people towards strangers. They are never sure of themselves and therefore they are afraid of strangers. They are afraid of mixing with people beneath themselves in social standing. They are shy of mixing with people who are their social superiors. They are afraid that the former may borrow money from them or put them to shame. The latter might also put them to shame by superior manners and education.

I found it odd that their gluttony and drunkenness aroused in me feelings that were almost puritanical. Intelligent people alone can afford excess of the appetites. Stupid people become bestial when beyond the control of the strict rules of conduct that give them a veneer of culture. I could not help comparing their coarse delight in the pleasures of the table with the simple abstemiousness of the Russians. They ate and drank immoderately. Their conversation was idiotic. Their manners were barbarous. I had the unpleasant feeling that they were typical of our bourgeoisie, typically European, even though some of them were American. They made me sad. In their company I felt myself becoming a fanatical Bolshevik. I remembered, as I sat with them, how gross all our bourgeois life is, that wretched middle class life which is without grace or vitality or exuberance, where everybody says the same stupid things, plays the same stupid games, wears the same stupid clothes, makes love according to the same stupid formulas, has the same stupid ideas and reads the same stupid books.

Why is it so? It is not money or position that makes them stupid and gross and objectionable. The ‘oppressed masses’ are equally coarse, gross and stupid. They have the same ideals. They are really of the same class. They move in a mass, act in a mass, think in a mass. It seems that this is so because our civilisation has reached its climax. It is degenerating. Its force is spent. There are no fresh hordes within it to be trained, no fresh human resources to be exploited.

The Russian mate was the most gross and objectionable person there. He had detached himself from the Bolshevik herd and was trying to curry favour with the foreign herd by being more drunken and more gluttonous. Yet he had a vitality that the others lacked. His barbaric laughter and the brutal candour with which he admired the women compelled attention. He still possessed some of the earth’s electric force. The others had none.

They went into the lounge to dance. I danced with the sister of a Swedish engineer. She was pretty, quite sober and gently refined in manner. But she was lifeless. There was no energy in her body. She was irrevocably virginal. If she were the mother of ten children she would still remain a virgin. Life born in her womb would be half dead at birth and go through life supine, without vitality. She was obviously incapable of love and fiercely desirous of it, instinctively knowing that she was incapable of it. How different she was from Dunya and from the stewardesses and from the third mate Tatyana! In their eyes I could see the brooding consciousness that their bodies were the vehicles of procreation, the nesting places of human life, the generators of beautiful beings. They were aware of their electric energy and shrank from male contact, as from a flame that would surely ignite their passions. But the Swedish girl clung to me, lax, as a perished cat drapes its body about a fire, shuddering.

I shuddered at the thought that perhaps all European women were becoming like this Swedish girl, at least all the educated European women, the best types. Woe to Europe! When the women of a community fail to inspire lust in their men the community is doomed. When wine, gluttony and perverse practice are necessary to fan the flames of concupiscence, death is near.

While the dance was in progress the doctor looked into the room.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘We go ashore to Communist house.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This is very boring.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘The situation is such. No longer is real amusement possible for the bourgeoisie and for this reason. Real amusement comes first from the consciousness that creative work has been done. Perhaps it is peasant who sows crops or man build house or artist make picture. But bourgeois believe nothing. So he create nothing for outside of himself. He work just so, that he may get drunk and fornicate. He has no social wish. Now we shall perform social act, so to speak, to spread proletarian revolution. Much better.’

Four boat loads of us went ashore to perform our social act. As our boat left the ship’s side I saw the chief engineer rowing furiously around the ship in a little boat, singing a Cossack song, utterly uninterested in the performance of social acts, dreaming of untamed horses. I also saw the captain standing on his bridge, sombre like a Sphinx, watching his disciples go forth to perform their social act. The chief mate, a sinner, was leaning over the ship’s side with the wife of a Swedish engineer, a drunken woman whom he desired.

We were received at the pier by a deputation from the Communist Party of Odda and conveyed to their headquarters. They had prepared a feast for us, coffee and cakes. It was a typical socialist gathering. There were old men with red ties and awkward bodies, old women who had always been ugly and young people who were insipid and identical. There was an orchestra in an ante room and we were forced to listen to its howling for a considerable time. Then revolutionary songs were sung. I got terribly bored. When they sang the Internationale in Russian and Norwegian simultaneously, I chimed in with ‘The Boys of the Fifth North Lanes.’ Nobody noticed the sacrilege. They resembled two tribes of Salvation Army people having a powwow. In the dining room, twenty-seven speeches were delivered. Afterwards the room was cleared and we had a dance. That was still more desolate. There was an entire absence of spontaneous gaiety. I was glad when the meeting broke up with further singing and ten final speeches.

When we got aboard the ship, two young sailors came into my cabin for a drink. They drank very rapidly, becoming intoxicated almost immediately. Then they began to tell me about the difficulties of life in Russia, the shortage of clothes, the shortage of food, the danger of breaking the laws in order to procure food and clothing. One of them asked me to give him two English pounds in exchange for roubles on our arrival in Leningrad. I agreed, thinking it was a very ordinary transaction. But he pointed out to me, mostly by gestures and the continual mention of the G.P.U., that it was extremely dangerous for him. He just wanted the English money in order to buy a suit of clothes in London. I could not see the harm in that. But he encircled his throat with his hand and then pointed to the ceiling, suggesting that he would be killed if the G.P.U. found out. So he begged me on his knees to keep his secret. He gave me his address. I tore it up when he had left my cabin.

The day before we left Norway, the captain of a little Norwegian mail-boat that lay alongside came aboard to inspect our ship. Afterwards he invited the doctor and myself to come aboard his ship for a glass of good beer from Bergen. We did so. His beer was excellent. It was odd to see the difference between his ship and ours. His saloon was furnished like the drawing room of an old family hotel. There were rugs and clocks and anti-macassars and antlers and all manner of unnecessary ornaments. He himself was a kindly old father of a family, restrained in speech, shy of expressing a decided opinion, mild in his attitude towards life, a man who fitted beautifully into his groove, was happy, did his duty well and wished for no change.

How different he was from the doctor! While I talked to the captain, the doctor fidgeted about, refused to drink his beer, scowled and continually tried to turn the conversation into controversial channels. More than ever he looked like a man who had no time to waste, a man interested in amusement solely as an experience, a greedy, ambitious fellow driven on by an insatiable passion. Suddenly he jumped to his feet and cried:

‘I very much like inspect your ship, captain.’

The captain bowed and said it would give him great pleasure.

‘But please excuse my little old ship’ he said. ‘She is very old and out of date like myself. Of course, I love her. I have been married to her for a long time. But I am not blind to her faults.’

‘So?’ said the doctor gloomily. ‘We regard ship simply as social tool. Not in such a way as human being. Old machines with us are scrapped.’

‘Alas!’ said the captain. ‘It’s becoming like that all over the world. But some of us. . .’

His voice ended in a mumble as we went along an alley-way. He showed us the quarters for the first and second class passengers and then suggested leading us back into the saloon for another glass of beer. But the doctor insisted on seeing the crew’s quarters. It was obvious that the old skipper was not very enthusiastic, but he led the way down into the bowels of the little ship, into an evil-smelling hole where one could hardly breathe. There, in a tiny room, a number of sombre men were huddled together, living in a state of sordidness that shocked me and made the captain blush.

I hated seeing those fine Norwegian seamen put to shame by being inspected like wild animals or criminals. One poor fellow was washing his feet in a filthy bucket. The expression on his face was humiliating.

As the captain led us back to the saloon, he said:

‘You see, on this little ship there is no room for. . .

‘Yes?’ cried the doctor gruffly. ‘I understand. On capitalist ship there is room only for profit-making cargo and for first class passengers. For workers there is only such a place, a hole near ship’s bottom, with bilge, where situation is very much against laws of Soviet hygiene. It is terrible. Goodbye. Thank you very much.’

On our way back to the ship he kept smiling.

‘The situation is such,’ he said. ‘Such an old fool has no social life. He loves ship but he does not love his brothers the crew.’

‘That is only natural,’ I said. ‘If he loses the ship he cannot get another very probably. But he can get a different crew very probably every day in the week.’

‘But that is inhuman,’ he said.

I was going to argue with him when I suddenly remembered that it was both useless and immoral to argue with a man who has a religion. And yet one cannot help smiling at the inconsistency of Marxian logic. For if a man’s attitude towards life is governed by his economic position in life, surely it would have been immoral for the captain to care more for the crew than for the ship. And if there is no god all things are equally just and permissible, the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalist as well as the revolutionary activities of the proletariat, the slaughter of revolutionaries by the police as well as the slaughter of the bourgeoisie by the red terror.

The captain was very angry at the speed with which his ship was loaded. As a matter of fact the capitalists of Odda managed to get him out of port on the eve of the first of May. Wondering why he was not in a hurry to get to Leningrad with his cargo as soon as possible, in order to help finish the Five Year Plan in four years, I questioned him on the matter. He smiled and said:

‘Very good fun May day. Rival processions of Communists and Social Democrats. I would like very much to see it.’

But we had our own demonstration at sea. The stewardesses painted revolutionary slogans on banners and these were hung up.

‘What sort of celebration are we going to have?’ I asked the chief mate.

‘You see,’ he said. ‘Jews march up and down ship with red flags.’

I saw no Jews marching on the waters with banners. But we had a special meal for all the crew in the dining room. The Jews made speeches, giving thanks for the successful propaganda made in Norway, for the cargo that had been secured for the fulfilment of the Five Year Plan in four years and praying for the speedy deliverance of the worker from the bondage of capitalism.

And then we sailed out of the European Egypt into the Promised Land of Russia.

Chapter VI. I Reach The Promised Land

As we approached Leningrad I began to Feel nervous. Although I had by now become exceedingly friendly with the crew (except with the female third mate, who remained aloof, possibly in order to make an impression on me), the feeling of discomfort I experienced on joining the ship increased almost to a state of fear. There were positively no grounds for it but it persisted in spite of all my efforts to become a Bolshevik.

I thought the captain became more sinister as we approached Russia. The air of intrigue increased. Josef, the gossip, began to frequent my company on deck, whispering more mischievous tittle tattle. He told me among other things that the chief mate had been lampooned in the ship’s wall paper for having got drunk and conducted himself in a lecherous and counter-revolutionary manner with the foreign engineers at Odda. I heard of quarrels between the chief engineer and the captain. I heard of dissatisfaction among the crew about food. Even the doctor, that revolutionary of spotless integrity, was accused.

‘Oh! Yes!’ said Josef. ‘On this ship he is a proletarian and he mixes with the crew on an equal footing. But if he meets the common members of the crew in the streets of Leningrad, he passes by without salutation. Just a casual nod as to a servant.’

And then, in order to turn his mischievous conversation into a joke, he said to me:

‘I see you are learning the Russian alphabet. How many letters are there?’

‘Twenty-eight, I think. But I’m not sure.’

‘Never mind’ said he. ‘Only seven are necessary.’

‘Why? How do you mean?’

‘I and A for the automatic telephone. C and P for the Communist Party. G, P and U for the rest of us.’

Then he skipped off singing.

It was the dynamic power of Russia that the ship began to feel. Just as the ship’s power disintegrated on approaching Norway, so it now disintegrated on approaching Russia. Before, it was sapped by something lifeless, which it could not infuse with its own vitality. Now it was swallowed by a turbulent force, into which it rushed whirling. That was the force that terrified me and which caused all the murmurs of discontent aboard the ship.

The weather being fine, the men had target practice every day on deck. Shore rations were distributed. They prepared for going on shore exactly like soldiers going into camp.

I was looking over the side as we passed a small island off the Baltic coast. The captain approached me and said:

‘Come on the bridge with me. I want to show you something on that island.’

I went on the bridge and examined the island through his glasses. I could see nothing but a forest that came down almost to the water’s edge. I told him so.

‘Ha!’ he cried in a sinister tone. ‘You can see nothing. It’s well concealed, their bloody plot. But I tell you, although you see only trees and a deserted place, this island is another Heligoland, bought by the bourgeoisie to make war on Soviet Russia. It was bought by the English from this bloody little republic that was once part of the Russian Empire and is now paid by the English to act as a buffer state against the advance of the Soviet Union. The bloody swine are building an aerodrome on it. They are preparing to jump on us from that place, to murder our women and children and destroy our machines with their bombs. Ha!’

He struck the rail a violent blow and cried:

‘But we’ll drive the bastards back, as our forefathers drove back Napoleon and the combined forces of Imperialist Europe. The Soviet Union is indestructible. We shall fight them to the last peasant and to the last hut and to the last crust of black bread.’

I could see no hangars. I saw no activity whatsoever on the island. If there were any Englishmen there, they must have been lying asleep in the forest or having a game of billiards somewhere in a cave. But perhaps the captain was right and that there were Englishmen hiding in the trees. On the other hand, it is equally possible that the captain’s imagination was running away with him. His subconscious desire to conquer Europe may have prompted him to believe that the English were aware of this desire and wished to forestall it.

Be that as it may, the island, with its suggestion of secret plots, and wars, hangars, and Englishmen hiding in trees, increased my terror of Russia.

That afternoon my terror became still more intense. On entering the saloon for afternoon tea, I was startled to hear the Leningrad Broadcasting Station. A choir of revolutionary maidens and youths was singing revolutionary songs in Leningrad. Those officers who were listening clapped their hands in unison with the beat of the chorus. Their eyes glittered with excitement and they struck the table violently as the air halted suddenly on a high note, in the strange wild manner of Russian songs. Like all Russian songs, the air was melancholy, but ecstatic and triumphant.

I was exalted by the singing. I could see people wandering over vast plains, searching. I heard the wind singing in the long faded grasses of the steppes. It was a voice weary of wandering, melancholy with suffering, but triumphant in sight of its goal. It was the voice of the children of Russia coming out of the land of bondage, out of servitude, out of savagery, out of subjection to the brutal vastness of their country. It was the voice of a people who had found a prophet and listened to his exhortation and rose up in a mass, united, enthused by his genius. What a tumult! What a host of marching men and women! Famine thins them by millions but they march, pressed on by great hordes in their rear. Their blood is dark like their earth. Their passions are fierce. They are simple like children and savage like the wolves in their forests. Their dancing is barbaric. Their singing is a wild chant, full of the earth’s richness, but terrible to our ears, like the crying of animals in a forest afar off. It is an avalanche, this downpour of countless millions, pouring down on Europe, singing, dancing, wailing, lean with hunger.

The choir ceased. There was a pause during which I remained entranced. Then a man began to speak.

‘Young Communists . . . the industrialisation . . . the socialisation . . . Soviet Union . . . capitalism . . . foreign . . . Lenin . . . your role . . . our revolution . . . our party . . . victory. . . ,.’

Although I could only understand an occasional word, his meaning was plain as if he had spoken in English. It was a pattern speech, exactly like the speeches I had heard on board the ship. It was a war cry urging on these youths to the conquest of the world. What power machinery has given to the apostles of this new religion! For to the unlettered multitudes of Russia, this wireless speech, carried on the empty air, must appear a greater miracle than the rumour of water being changed into wine by a former prophet. Always repeating the same message as from a new Koran:

‘The machine is God and Lenin is his prophet. All power to the proletariat. There are two classes, the working class and the capitalist class. Down with the bourgeoisie. Liquidate illiteracy.’

A host of slogans that are handed down from the prophet Lenin, as the rather foolish sentences of the Koran were handed down from the prophet Mahomed to urge on the Moslems. Phew! The Russian bear is no longer to be mocked, nor must jokes be cracked about his shaggy beard and the lice that were always with him, poor wretch, before he discovered this new god.

The captain sat beside me at tea and talked proudly of the power of wireless.

‘It is only when I return from abroad to the Soviet Union,’ he said, ‘that I realise what wonderful use can be made of wireless. In England and in other bourgeois countries, wireless is used principally to broadcast useless entertainment. In our Union it is used entirely for propaganda, to consolidate existing revolutionary victories and to spread the revolution. I am proud that wireless is a Russian invention. A naval officer invented it, but the Tsar’s government was too stupid to use it, so Marconi got the patent. But that does not matter. Now wireless is doing greater work in Russia than in rest of the world. It is showing our youth the way to travel. We have cleared the foundations. We have destroyed Tsarism. They shall build socialism.’

‘And capitalist Europe? It’s not yet in ruins.’ ‘It shall be brought to ruins. On its ruins perhaps the Soviet Union will engage in the final war, against the Iron Heel of America.’

When I came on deck in the morning we were abreast of Kronstadt. It was my first view of Russian territory and it was not impressive. It was more like an ambitious ruin than the naval headquarters of a great country. The docks were there, the buildings, the monuments; but life seemed to be extinct. Looking at it, I felt ashamed of myself for believing that Russia harboured within its being the dynamic force to conquer the world.

Kronstadt looked like a fresh corpse, which still retains the form of human beauty, but is rapidly becoming a mass of corruption. All the great buildings were still intact, shining in the morning light, all the great offices of Tsarist imperial power. But they were desolate and unkempt. The great docks that were capable of holding scores and scores of ships lay empty. The quays were deserted. All was as silent and forbidding as a great city whose inhabitants have been suddenly cut down by a plague. The destruction of war had not been there, to cheer the mind with an impression of fierce conflict. There was nothing to cheer the mind; just a sad memory that a great empire had passed that way, had used this port as its mouth and then disappeared. A wretched flotilla of Soviet destroyers only increased the impression of miserable desolation. There was a cruiser at anchor as we passed. The men were at exercise on her decks. Our men cheered. The naval men waved their caps. It was revolutionary but sadly lacking in dignity.

We lay for a little while waiting for a pilot. My eyes became attuned to the strangeness of the scene. Then it did not look so desolate. At least I began to understand the desolation. It was not, perhaps, a sign of Russian weakness, but of a change in Russian policy. By looking back over Russian history an interesting theory sprang into my mind with the vividness of a drama. It was that the whole of Russian history, from the beginning of the Tsarist period to the present day and on into the future, is a direct continuation of the will to conquer the world. When the Romanoffs took charge of the savage Russian hordes, it was but natural that their eyes turned towards their native Europe. By the defeat of Sweden, they were enabled to build their headquarters at the mouth of the Neva, a city completely European, where their people were enabled to assimilate European culture, take part in the affairs of Europe and begin to plunder its intelligence. Thither they brought all its philosophies, its literature, its art, its mechancial inventions. They built a fleet and quartered it here at Kronstadt. Then came the Great War, when all the great European nations struggled for hegemony. Down swept the Russian hordes into Germany and Austria and Poland. They were driven back, slaughtered by the million. The Tsars were overthrown. But the Russian colossus reorganised itself and crept away towards the East, away from these doorways into Europe which the European Tsars had built. The wise Lenin, armed with all the newest ideas of European statecraft, retired on Moscow with his people and began a new policy of Russian expansion, towards the East.

Woe to Europe! The ruins of Kronstadt are no guarantee that the Russian bear has mortally wounded himself in his revolutionary debauch. Rather has he become more dangerous, now that he has realised the sea is not his proper element, but that he must sprawl over land to hug his enemies.

The pilot came aboard. We began to prepare for going ashore. Now an interesting question confronted me. Were the stewardesses and the steward human or would they refuse a tip? I first consulted the doctor.

‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘whether tipping is permitted in Soviet Union?’

‘No,’ he said fiercely. ‘It is forbidden. It is considered crime against personal dignity for union member to take tips.’

‘Splendid,’ I said. ‘Travelling must be cheap in the Soviet Union.’

I began with the steward, when I was paying my drink bill. Although I gave him quite a small tip, the wretch threw his arms around my neck and kissed me with great violence on both cheeks. Shuddering with disgust, I pushed him away, but he burst into tears and went on talking for at least ten minutes.

‘Most immoral,’ I thought as I went to look for Dunya.

I tried her with a larger tip, thinking that its size would terrify her, either making her feel it was a bribe or a compromise with her virtue. She accepted it with a cold smile and pocketed the money dexterously, like one who was born to it.

‘Exceedingly immoral,’ I thought, as I sought the other stewardesses.

I had already begun to repent of my experiment as I thrust a pound note, in as brazen a manner as possible, into the face of one of the younger stewardesses. She smiled delightfully, took it between the tips of her fingers and slipped it into the pocket of her apron.

‘Not only immoral but exceedingly expensive,’ I thought, as I rushed to my cabin in order to avoid demoralising my purse and the third stewardess.

However, the traveller in Russia, if he is precious about his entertainments, will find considerable delight in this game of tipping untippable Bolsheviks. It is like making a teetotaller drunk.

The pleasure I found in it at that time vanished as soon as I examined my wallet. It was in a wretched state. Making the crew drunk on board the ship and in Norway had been more expensive than I could afford. I was arriving in Russia practically without resources. I remembered the two peasants in the opening paragraph of Gogol’s Dead Souls. Looking at the wheel of Tchicikoff’s carriage, they wondered how far it would carry him and they were inclined to believe it would not carry him very far. So now I wondered would my funds carry me to Moscow and even if they did, I wondered how on earth I was going to get back.

As I packed my kit for going ashore, I became inspired with the admirable determination never again to leave my own country. Then we docked. The customs officers came aboard and I became excited and terrified once more. I decided to leave the major portion of my luggage on the ship and travel solely with a small suitcase. So I quickly got through the formalities of inspection. Indeed they were exceedingly polite.

Yet there were armed men everywhere on the ship, immediately after our arrival. Although they were gentle and polite fellows, who joked with the crew as with brothers, they gave me the impression that I had entered by the gate of an armed camp and was being examined by the sergeant of the guard. I had the curious feeling that I had arrived under escort, that I was part of the loot brought by the ship from Europe.

Then I went ashore with the doctor.

Chapter VII. The Corpse Of Tsarism

The deserted and ruined appearance of Kronstadt should have prepared me for the greater horror of Leningrad. But in the interval between passing Kronstadt and arriving at Leningrad, the old Irish proverb about far off cows having lpng horns caused a delusion as to the prosperity of the latter city to take possession of me. In the distance it appeared to be as real a city as Liverpool, a great, low-lying mass of smoking chimneys, great docks, shipyards, teeming with life. But as I came nearer this illusion of prosperity vanished. The docks, shipyards and great stretches of shore, covered with enormous piles of timber for export, showed no great signs of human activity. Hardly a hammer resounded. The stray men I saw seemed more concerned with keeping themselves warm by slogging their armpits than by working. Was it their meal hour or their rest hour or were they holding a general meeting of their Soviet or were they just contemplating the Materialistic Conception of History? I cannot answer the question.

But I can offer an alternative explanation of their inactivity. The weather was so cold and bleak that sensitive people like the Russians found it difficult or even impossible to work. Indeed my first view of the main Russian shore explained to me, in a great measure, the cause of Russian melancholy and of those queer outbursts of apparently senseless activity which have characterised Russian history. It looked so large and unkempt, so infested with the most desolate humours of nature, that wretched man, condemned to labour under such conditions, must perforce resort to the delightful extravagances of insanity. Taken as a whole, from horizon to horizon, the scene was not devoid of beauty. It had the grandeur of immensity. But immensity has a curious and nihilistic effect on the human mind. Gazing at it, feeling it about, the human mind resorts to dreaming. It becomes inspired with mystical ideas and ambitions philosophies, about the universe and its own relation to the universe. But what can man DO with immensity? As soon as he tries to move it or to fashion it according to any of the designs which man’s restless energy contrives to satisfy his genius, he is made aware of his helplessness, confronted with such an enormous mass of material. So he shrugs himself, forgets to wash and becomes melancholy. Then he becomes mischievous and finds pleasure in destruction, in order to revenge himself on immensity.

This immensity is also, in my opinion, responsible for the Russian worship of the mass; the mass being the human counterpart of the immensity of nature. The Russian likes to work in a mass and to think in a mass. In pursuance of these likes, he has invented mass action and mass consciousness.

As we travelled up the river, I noticed a number of ships, mostly foreign, moored to the quays. Here there was the same inactivity, the same state of lethargy, due apparently to the reigning conviction that the gross humours of the weather and the immensity of the surrounding earth made labour of a trivial kind impossible. Why unload a ship to bring matter into Russia when there was already such an incredible amount of matter in Russia? Why load a ship with Russian matter for export when there was so much matter in Russia as to make it quite impossible ever to get rid of it? It was obvious (to the contemplating Russians on the quays) that it was necessary to organise masses of human beings, as enormous as the masses of matter to be moved, before the least particle of matter could be touched. Otherwise the theory of mass action would be sinned against. The whole power of all the available human masses must be properly organised and marshalled for mass action before a single individual took off his sheepskin.

While waiting for this mass action of organised millions, the populations waiting aboard the Russian ships as crews and the populations waiting on the quays as potential dock labourers were exceedingly merry, firm in the conviction that some day the combined masses would burst into activity and move all the matter in Russia to hell or to Europe. Massed on their decks and on their quays, they gave us a mass welcome. They waved kerchiefs, sheepskins and such pieces of metal as they found handy. They uttered cries which I took to be revolutionary slogans. It was very impressive and revolutionary.

The pier to which our ship was moored was deserted. I was a trifle piqued at not finding a mass of dockers, with hooks at belt, ready to board us. Neither were there any cranes with tremendous teeth, ready to drag the masses of zinc for the Five Year Plan from the bellies of our ship. In fact, I saw nothing on the pier but a solitary soldier. On inspection, this soldier proved more interesting than the greatest possible mass.

He was standing on the very edge of the pier, looking very melancholy, owing to his being cut off by the exigencies of military routine from the mass of his comrades. Although I examined him for fully twenty minutes, the wretch never moved a muscle during the whole of that period. His weapon lay within his folded arms, just as if it were a baby some shyster truff had given him to hold and then decamped, leaving the fellow with something of which he did not know how to dispose without getting into trouble. By the gloomy aspect of his countenance and the forlorn state of his dress, it was certainly obvious that the possession of his weapon did not inspire him with any sense of military pride. He wore a stocking cap, which had ear flaps and a chin strap and a pinnacle and the Soviet arms on the forehead. His greatcoat was at least six sizes too large for him. An enemy could easily bind him securely with the unnecessary ends of the sleeves, which reached at least a foot beyond the tips of his outstretched fingers. The skirts of the coat touched the ground, giving the impression that he had built a tent about himself, with his head sticking through the roof, like a periscope.

The fact that he had pitched his tent on the edge of the pier, on the verge of enormous Russia and that he was looking into the sea gloomily, convinced me that if his greatcoat were a balloon instead of being a tent and the wind favourable, he would float off at once, fondling his weapon, to the conquest of Europe, without waiting for the mass of his comrades. For he DID look tired of enormous Russia.

As I watched, I pondered on the possible military use of this individual. I could find none. His overcoat made movement practically impossible. The sheer stupidity depicted in his countenance made it impossible for me to believe that he knew how to use his weapon should he be attacked. Indeed, had somebody tried to persuade me that the man was a comic monument, wrought in the new grotesque style of Soviet sculpture, as a satire on Standing armies, he would have had no difficulty in persuading me.

Carrying my suitcase and my typewriter and accompanied by the doctor, I landed on the pier and set out for the city on foot. The doctor had invited me to meet his family before going to an hotel.

The docks were enormous. There were hardly any human beings about, but we had to make wide detours in order to avoid long trains that lay everywhere, ready to shift masses of matter sometime, somewhere. God only knows when or where. Wandering over this enormous and empty place, over ground that was as uneven and battered as the battlefields of France during the world war, a horrible melancholy took possession of me, such melancholy as I have not experienced since I read Dostoievsky’s House of The Dead. But the doctor’s enthusiasm was proof against any form of melancholy. He waved the parcels in which he carried his shore rations and cried:

‘Very big. Powerful. Gigantic.’

‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘But what are you going to do about it?’

‘How?’

‘It’s certainly gigantic but nobody seems to be working.’

‘Yes?’ he said.

He halted for a few moments, looked about him, shook his head, frowned and then smiled in his usual ecstatic manner, when contemplating the progress of the Soviet Union, with special emphasis on the Five Year Plan.

‘At present,’ he said, ‘the situation is such. The activity is underground. At the end of Five Year Plan it shall be overground. Let us go.’

A little farther on we halted to take a rest. The doctor enlarged on his idea of underground and overground activity in relation to the docks.

‘In bourgeois countries,’ he said, ‘the situation is such. Very much dock activity contributes nothing to positive social results. Indeed very much negative social results. For example, potatoes are brought to England from France and then same potatoes are brought to Argentine from England and then to Cape Town and back again to Marseilles where the French put them in their soup. Here there is no such activity with potatoes or other commodities. There is only such movement of commodities as is socially necessary. Potatoes are moved to nearest stomachs. So for present, instead of making socially unnecessary movements of socially necessary commodities, we concentrate on Five Year Plan and afterwards we export large masses of commodities by means of this dock.’

‘But tell me,’ I said, ‘as a special favour, what IS the Five Year Plan?’

‘For building up industries of Soviet Union.’

I thought of suggesting that while the dockers were waiting to move the masses of commodities to be produced by the Five Year Plan they might amuse themselves by repairing the docks, but I refrained on realising that the suggestion might be indelicate.

Having undergone another customs’ examination at the dock gates, we debouched into the city. Then indeed I fell into a fever of excitement. Everybody has read accounts of the Paris mobs that thronged the streets after the French Revolution, with red bonnets and without trousers (or at least poorly trousered), but it is impossible to realise the redness of these mobs without seeing a similar mob in Russia in the full flush of red bonnetry and untrouseredness. When I saw the revolutionary hordes of men, women and children moving excitedly back and forth in the streets that lay beyond the waste place surrounding the dock gates, I very nearly went into an ecstasy.

And the dramatic instincts of the Russian people had provided a striking contrast to the excited mob in order to intensify their revolutionary excitedness. For a great number of sleeping cab horses and sleeping cab drivers lay between me and the mob, relics of the old, pre-revolutionary regime, somnolent, decadent, in opposition to the fervent enthusiasm of the beings of the new era.

For the first few moments I did not notice the cabmen. I wanted to embrace the red-capped women and thank them for their courtesy, since they had stuck to the outer show of revolution for thirteen years after the outbreak of revolution, presumably for my benefit. Then, when the first stage of my ecstasy passed, I took notice of the cabmen.

Astonishing! They were the famous Ish.. v.. xz .. ki (utterly impossible to spell) that figure in books written by foreigners about Russia. Their cabs resembled slightly the chair carriage of the eighteenth century. They were incredibly dirty and old. The harness was of crude design, the most amazing part of it being a huge yoke that towered above the horse’s head. The horses were equally disreputable, shaggy nags, not far from death. The drivers were more odd than anything the most imaginative child could dream of seeing in the zoological gardens, which Uncle James said he had seen in Bangkok. Both the horses and the drivers were in that state which is neither sleep nor wake, but a kind of idle trance from which a sudden shout or a flea bite might send them flying at furious speed, lashing, prancing, neighing, cursing.

‘Hurrah!’ I cried to the doctor. ‘This is marvellous. This is a scene which an American film producer might buy lock, stock and barrel as a studio. I refuse to move from here except in one of those cabs.’

But the man was impossible.

‘Please understand,’ he said. ‘The situation is such. These cabs are relics of Tsarism. It is our proletarian duty to liquidate them. We shall use instead taxis of a modern plan. These drivers are all counter-revolutionaries. They are drunkards and immoral. They charge very great prices. It is impossible for any friend of Soviet Russia to encourage them by being carried to any destination in such a manner. Instead, we shall go in a tramway, which is a scientific method of movement, commonly used by the proletariat.’

Thereupon he urged me forward and I followed him, half dazed, gaping. In spite of the crowds, there was an atmosphere of utter misery all round. The houses, the streets, the stray vehicles that passed, the human beings, all had the same air of poverty, hunger and desolation. I looked around and smelt, fancying that there must be decaying corpses in the streets. I listened, fancying that I must surely hear the wailing of ghosts.

Death! Death! Death! Or a state midway between life and death, as when a maimed animal waits with sad eyes for delivery from his torture.

What silence! Nobody smiled. Nobody laughed or cried out or made a joyous gesture. Each face wore a pinched expression, caused by fear, hunger and nervous exhaustion. It was exciting, yet it rent the heart and caused a desire for instant flight. Now I understood why the melancholy soldier stood enveloped in his greatcoat, as within a tent, on the verge of Russia, ready to fly into Europe. Now I understood why these Russian hordes were massing for the conquest of Europe. In order to escape the desolation of their own country. Under the strain of life in that city I felt that I should go mad, contemplating the corpse of something that had once been beautiful.

‘You like it?’ said the doctor in an enthusiastic though rather nervous voice.

‘I think it is the most wonderful sight I have ever seen,’ I answered with Jesuitical candour.

Our tramcar arrived. We dashed into the road from the pavement with the intention of getting aboard. Unfortunately, the greater part of a multitude dashed into the roadway at the same time. I found myself wedged among a crowd of people that smelt. They all tried to board the car at the same time, shouting what were very probably curses. Some got on board by plunging prone on to the platform, whence they were dragged by their friends or pushed by their rivals into the body of the vehicle. But the main body remained hanging on to the doorway, when the car, full to bursting point, continued its journey. Utterly exhausted, with my overcoat about my neck, I returned to the pavement. Again I suggested to the doctor that we should take a cab. But he remained adamant.

Another car came along. This time the doctor and myself got away smartly and reached the door of the tram well up with the leaders. Then, going all out, we managed to get on board, just as the conductor was pushing off the less lucky ones. The car moved on. I sighed with relief and prepared to stay where I was until I recovered breath. But no such respite was allowed me. A violent female citizen, wearing a red bonnet and a uniform that resembled that of a London policewoman, demanded our fares with small ceremony. I had no Russian money. The doctor had to perform acrobatic tricks with his body in order to get at his pocket, tricks similar to those performed by actors who pass doubled up through a barrel or stick a head, an arm and a leg through a hoop. While he was doing so, he received several upper cuts and hooks to the ribs from others who were performing similar tricks.

‘This is what he calls scientific travel,’ I thought maliciously.

Then I myself received a straight left to the jaw and as I turned around to retaliate, an enormous woman fell prone upon me, so that I was nearly smothered and had to give up all idea of defending myself. While I lay thus the tram came to a halt. Another mob attacked it, for the purpose of getting some scientific travel on it.

‘Move up,’ cried the doctor.

Had I any breath I would have told him what I thought of scientific travel, the Five Year Plan and the whole of his blasted country. But I was overwhelmed by the immensity of Russian womanhood which lay heavily on me and I could not speak.

Everything is organised in Russia except common sense. The rule on Soviet tram cars is that passengers must enter at the conductor’s end and emerge at the driver’s end. In theory that saves time. In practice it wastes time, together with subjecting the passengers to excruciating tortures under present conditions. The trams being overcrowded, the passages are blocked and many-passengers are forced to travel miles beyond their destination, owing to their being unable to descend. So to speak, it is generally necessary for a passenger, once he gets aboard, to begin to descend, by hacking his way through the press of human beings in the vehicle.

The doctor and myself began to hack our way. Those directly in front of us, being in the vehicle and not wishing to descend for some time, were unwilling to budge. Indeed, they could not move if they tried. Yet we had to move, as a multitude pressed us from behind.

‘Preastiti,’ cried the doctor.

He might as well have asked for a pint of bitter for all the chance he had of getting room to pass. Half the passengers were yelling praestiti and the other half were yelling to the shouters to stop yelling.

Nevertheless we made progress until we reached the centre of the car. There we were pushed into a side current. I was by that time so exhausted that I would have signed on for three years in the French Foreign Legion on condition that I be removed at once from the hellish place. But the doctor had lost not an atom of his revolutionary enthusiasm.

‘The situation is such,’ he began.

Losing my temper at last, I interrupted him and yelled:

‘Yes. The situation is such and a bloody awful situation it is.’

‘It is a crisis of transport,’ he yelled, either not understanding what I had said owing to the general tumult, or else indifferent to what I had said. ‘This crisis faces all the great cities of the Union. In Leningrad it is very severe especially. Now Leningrad great industrial city. Many more factories than before revolution. At dinner time and knock-off great pressure on transport.’

‘Why not organise the crowds?’ I yelled.

‘No understand crowd organisation,’ he shouted. ‘What means it?’

‘Why not make the people take their turns and not overcrowd the trams?’

‘Not enough trams,’ he yelled.

‘Make more,’ I shouted in fury.

‘No time,’ he cried.

‘Utter rot,’ I screamed. ‘Time is wasted here by the mile.’

‘No materials,’ he screamed in reply.

‘Then you had better go bankrupt,’ I whispered, as my voice had broken.

He also was exhausted, so we remained silent until the end of our tram journey. In some un-explainable manner we managed to get off, only two stations farther .than we wished. I crawled over to the pavement and almost shed tears with exhaustion and irritation. A Rugby player feels just like that when he has gone down to a forward rush and then crawls out of the loose scrum with his body squashed, as if it had been over-run by a herd of cattle.

‘Where are we now?’ I gasped

‘This street,’ he said, ‘was formerly called the Nevsky Prospeckt.’

‘Astonishing!’ I cried, as I looked up and down the magnificent thoroughfare. ‘It is hardly recognisable from the Overcoat.’

‘What overcoat?’

‘Gogol’s.’

‘Oh! You mean XcVzPL’

He mentioned the name of the story in Russian.

‘Yes. It looked so magnificent in literature. In reality I must tell you that it looks drab and devoid of romance.’

‘But now,’ he said, ‘you must understand it is changed. It is October Street.’

I said no more. But as I looked I thought it would have been more kind to change its name into December Street, that dead month smelling of the tomb. In its prime it must have been magnificent. Even yet, in its degradation, the domed churches, that are scattered here and there along its length, thrill the imagination. Wide, with gorgeous shops that were stocked with all the luxuries of the world, it was a fitting parade ground for all the grandeur of Tsarism, that most sensual and voluptuous of aristocracies.

Although the thoroughfare of the Nevsky was visible for a mile, I could not see a single motor car. A child could play with safety in the very middle of the street. A blind man could feel his way across without a stick. What desolation! It was painful for me to remember that this great street acted as a centre for my imagination, when forming a picture of the life portrayed in Russian literature, as environment for the splendid personages of Tolstoy, as contrast for the starved idiots of Dostoievsky. And now it was merely an empty roadway, full of holes, flanked by pavements that were rotting away and lined with houses that looked like tenements of the worst quality.

‘This street,’ said the doctor, ‘is now uninteresting. More interesting from the social point of view are the new workers’ quarters where the new socialist life is being built. Formerly this street was interesting, because of the bourgeois parasites who enjoyed themselves here, by satisfying the lusts of their bodies. Now there is no bourgeoisie. This street is dead. Formerly in workers’ quarters there was only despair and darkness. Now there is great life and positive social activities. The situation is such as I say.’

Then he added:

‘It is like a clock. The pendulum swings.’

‘Quite true,’ I said. ‘Rome is now inhabited by Italians. Alexandria is rather like a dunghill. Carthage is extinct. Explorers dig for the great Aztec cities.’

‘Please explain,’ he said uncomfortably.

‘I mean,’ I said, ‘that Gibbon spoke truly when he said that all things that have in them a beginning have in them the elements of decay.’

‘Who is Gibbon?’

‘A famous English historian.’

‘He is a bourgeois,’ said the doctor curtly. ‘Here it is not decay but growth.’

‘It looks to me,’ I said, ‘more like the growth of an ulcer as far as this street is concerned.’

‘You no understand,’ he said. ‘The situation is such. In New York when they wish build skyscraper, not only they knock down old house, but they dig very deep for foundation of new very tall house. So here, it was not only necessary knock down Tsar, but also sweep away all sign of Tsar life. Then build Socialism.’

‘Then you admit Leningrad is going to decay.’

‘No. It shall become not as formerly pleasure city like Paris, but great industrial city, like Manchester.’

‘I doubt it. You cannot put life into a corpse. This city is the corpse of Tsarism. Even as a museum it would not be of sufficient world interest to maintain. After all Tsarism was not a civilisation. It was merely a temporary experiment in government by an awakening national consciousness.’

‘Yes?’ said the doctor. ‘Foreigners observe our Union in such a manner. You look for one minute and then you judge. Perhaps it would be better to see all city first and then judge.’

‘Ridiculous,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t take a year to examine a horse’s mouth. I am not an economist or a sociologist or a politician. It is no use showing me the city in detail and giving me figures and facts. I could see nothing and learn nothing. I know merely by intuition. I feel essences. I do not see surfaces. I comprehend the whole, in my own manner, for my own purpose, without knowing the composition of the various parts. Your ship, Kronstadt, the Soviet navy at exercise, the docks, this street, as well as the history of Russia from the time this city was built on land conquered from the Swedes, through the Japanese war, which meant Russia’s failure to expand through the Pacific, through the Great War, which meant Russia’s failure to expand along the Baltic coast into Europe, on to the Revolution, when Russia retired on Moscow in order to weave a new plan of expansion, all tell me that this city of Leningrad is doomed. So why should I look at the houses in order to convince myself of the truth of a conviction with which I left home. It would even be dangerous for me to do so. I might prove myself to be wrong. Dreadful thought, because I am never wrong. Russia’s road is not this way. It has merely been an observation post, a . . .’

‘You are mad,’ said the doctor. ‘Or, perhaps you are joking. Yes?’

‘Not exactly,’ I said. ’I was just giving you an example of what a scoundrel could write, if he set out to make a book called, let us say, Lies About Russia’

‘Of course,’ said the doctor. ‘That is a joke.’

‘I hope an excellent one,’ I replied.

We arrived at the doctor’s house. It was a large building divided into flats. Formerly it had been elegant but it had fallen into disrepair and also, I fear, into disrepute. Its former elegance was still manifest but it had begun to resemble a finely-built man of quality who has taken to drink and forgets to shave, or to take a bath or to keep his clothes in order. Like the rest of Leningrad, the house was also a relic of Tsarism. It once had inhabitants, vague people whose existence I could barely imagine as I climbed the gorgeous staircase. They had gone away, to the grave, to the cabarets and brothels of Western Europe. Strange beings had taken their place. And these new things were not really inhabitants of the house. They were merely billeted therein; a rather savage and undisciplined soldiery who did not keep their billets clean. Those that I met on the stairs were ragged, haggard and melancholy.

When we reached our floor, we entered by a magnificent doorway into a large room where there was nothing whatsoever. It was a beautiful room and it seemed to look at us with contempt and anger. Empty rooms always give one that impression of contempt and hostility. We passed through it into another room which was also empty, except for some piles of rubbish. This astonished me, as I had heard there was a housing crisis in Leningrad. But apparently these rooms had formerly been used as drawing and reception rooms. Nobody now wanted such rooms. They were left empty as unsuitable for the needs of the masses.

We then entered a corridor which was very long and dark. We entered the doctor’s room. That room was also of considerable beauty, furnished in a manner that gave an impression of elegance, but of a certain kind. The furniture must have been extremely expensive at one time, but it now looked out of place, since the room was used as a bedroom. It was heavy and rather like the musty, ornate stuff found in French antique shops.

I looked out through the window on to a courtyard that was surrounded by great barracks of tenement houses. On this flagged space there were children at play. A lane opened off the court at one end. And opposite the mouth of the lane there was an arch cut into the wall of the tenements. People kept crossing the courtyard, back and forth from the lane to the arch, appearing and disappearing. Other people emerged from the sides, through dark doors and moved towards the lane or towards the arch, appearing and disappearing; or coming from the lane or the arch, they entered by the dark doors, moving at angles to the route of the others, who were moving straight across, disappearing and appearing. It was exactly like a scene in a macabre Russian film, where the people, photographed from a height, look like ants and move in a curious manner, brooding, their arms hidden in their sleeves or held rigid by their sides, performing mass movements that are apparently without purpose. In life it was even more impressive and terrifying than on the screen.

It reminded me also of the delightfully romantic places inhabited by the desolate characters in Dostoievsky’s work. And I was delighted that Dostoievsky worked from reality and had not distorted life as his enemies have claimed. For this court and all I had seen of Russia since my arrival was exactly as Dostoievsky had depicted it in his magnificent writings, all the slovenliness, the insanity, the poverty, the melancholy, the wild passions that goaded people, forcing them to rise up and escape from the tortures of incomprehensible immensity by the performance of some wild feat.

But it is always so. When a writer of supreme genius imprisons, within the confines of his art, the body and soul of his people, shabby intellects accuse him of having distorted reality. Of course, there existed also the artificial civilisation depicted by the polite and clever Tchehov and by Turgenev. It lived in this heavy room and looked down into this courtyard on Dostoievsky’s brooding maniacs. But it held aloof. It did not belong. It deplored life and begged for death. The brooding maniacs granted its wish and destroyed it. It has gone, wringing its delicate hands and uttering gentle platitudes in a sad voice about culture. But Dostoievsky’s people remain. To do what? What wild feat of genius shall their future disclose, could they but issue from that flagged dungeon where they march to and fro?

I was held by that gloomy courtyard as by a magnet. Intellectually, it was the most exciting thing I had seen for a long time. And my fixed idea about the conquest of Europe by the Russians was fed by this gloomy place until it assumed the intensity of accomplished fact. It seemed that they were already massing for that descent on Europe, as they marched back and forth, in and out, gloomy, with downcast heads, shabby, in need of loot, massing for that conquest of the world which Dostoievsky foretold in The Idiot.

The war of the idiots?

A policeman strolled into the courtyard, stood, watched, swung his baton and walked out again.

The doctor was a trifle irritated when I told him that I loved the court and that I was excited by its sordid romance.

‘We shall change all that,’ he said. ‘New workers’ houses are being built. But now we shall go. My wife is not at home. Later we shall come back, when we get room for you at hotel.’

As we were leaving, his sister-in-law came in. She blushed deeply on being introduced. She was a young Jewess, not pretty, but with great charm. Although she spoke English very well, she bolted through shyness after saying a few words.

‘My wife belongs to a bourgeois family,’ said the doctor as we went downstairs.

Chapter VIII. The Doctor’s Wife

I Got a room at the Europa Hotel off the Nevsky. Then I returned to the doctor’s house. On the way he said to me:

‘The situation is such. In Soviet Union, sexual relations have been re-organised on rational system, so to speak. My wife and I live together on this basis. While we find mutual existence, so to say, socially useful to both of us, we are married. Afterwards, either for one or other personal wish, we become separate citizens. I meet her in train one day. We both like. Next day we marry. She is such a type, fond of marriage. Already she marry five times. How long we marry I know not. So life is.’

Later he said:

‘I hope you like her. Relations are so. Continual acquaintance with one woman excites desire for other women. Already I begin to think there are, perhaps, in Soviet Union, women more socially useful to me than my wife.’

I don’t quite understand you,’ I said. ‘But at least I beg of you to understand that I am a traveller and travellers are notoriously interested in temporary amusement, hardly ever in the liquidation of anybody else’s matrimonial liabilities by the assumption of heavy responsibilities of their own.’

‘Comrade,’ said the doctor, ‘you make use of a word which no longer exists in the Soviet Union, so to speak, matrimonial.’

‘It’s pleasant to hear that,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think all men all over the world, bourgeois as well as proletarian, are delight because such word would not exist. But here it is reality, except among such unliquidated slave classes, such as uncollectivised peasants, unsocialised Esquimos, nomadic Gypsies and people of old regime. Among young generation and liquidated members of old social formations there is only biological attractions or such personal formations, which lead in bourgeois societies to homosex and female sex, what you call Lesbian.’

‘Brilliant,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Please understand that situation is such.’

‘But it’s nothing new,’ I said. ‘It’s merely a rather odd and Germanic re-statement of a situation which already existed before the Revolution among the more enlightened of Western Europeans.’

It shall be so,‘ he said irrelevantly.

When we got back to the apartment, we found the doctor’s wife, his sister-in-law, his brother-in-law, his father, his mother, four cousins and various other personal and social relations, together with three members of the ship’s crew, making in all twenty souls, judging them from the point of view of the old regime, or twenty citizens, according to the canons of the new regime.

The doctor’s father was the most interesting of these citizens. I was received by him in his own room, which he inhabited with his wife according to the old custom. He was a venerable and distinguished looking man of sixty, a Jew of the educated class. He asked me at once for the exact date of the outbreak of the World Proletarian Revolution. Being unable to give him the exact date for such a doubtful event, I parried by saying that the World Proletarian Revolution was undoubtedly relative, in its outbreak, to the development of the Soviet Union. When the economic position of the latter reached a point higher than the highest point in the graph of the economic position of the world proletariat, a world revolution would immediately break out. The old man was Satisfied with my reply and showed me his books. He had an interesting collection, but they showed me that he erred gravely in the direction of social fanaticism. He had a craze for books that exposed the barbarism of the Tsarist regime.

I was impressed by the pre-revolutionary binding and illustration. While the binding could not be compared with better class French work, nor the illustrations with that of English craftsmen, nor the printing with either (it would be difficult to produce excellent work with the cumbersome Russian lettering) they had reached a high degree of skill. It was pleasant also to handle old books and feel the atmosphere of luxury, peace and culture they exuded, after the desolating experience of having spent several hours in Leningrad. Unlike other relics of past civilisations, old books do not inspire one with melancholy thoughts, for the reason that they improve with age. Since they are detached from life, even while the life they depict is still potent, so they retain their vitality after that life has passed away.

The old man hardly ever stirred out. He had only a vague idea of current events. Yet he was extremely interested in politics, but only theoretically. In practice, the Revolution had meant nothing to him; certainly not in respect of the new matrimonial relationships. It was pleasant to see the quiet, old fashioned way he treated his wife. A perfectly bourgeois couple.

The doctor’s wife was of quite a different type. She was a beautiful woman, of exquisite refinement. She united the best qualities of Jewish women with that generosity of nature which is the most pleasant characteristic of Russian women. Subtle in movement, in speech and in gesture, she astonished me by the degree of feminine culture she possessed. Her sister was very different, more serious, if anything more nervous, less exciting as a woman, but more lovable for her gentleness and for the virginal modesty of her manners and appearance. She conversed with me for an hour, acting as interpreter for her sister, with an elegance that was captivating.

I enjoyed their bantering, happy in the consciousness that such types still existed within the Soviet Union. For they betrayed positively no interest in world affairs, being solely concerned with their own personal experiences and those of their intimates. Indeed, they were strangely reminiscent of the eighteenth century, so remote did they seem from the violent and fanatical passions of the Russian Revolution. Yet it was exhausting to talk to them. I kept feeling a desire to seize them and carry them out of Russia. For it was painfully obvious that they were unhappy, bored, overwrought by the drabness and intensity of existence, by the lack of refinement, of gaiety, of relaxation. The strange beings of the courtyard below terrified them. They were merely tolerated, almost in hiding.

That was the impression they gave me, while they laughed and joked about their lives, even claiming that life in Leningrad was exciting. It was merely the gaiety of hysteria.

Their brother was even more pathetic. As he was too nervous to stay in a room with a crowd of people, I was brought to see him in his own room at the back of the kitchen. He was a student. Pale, haggard, extremely intellectual, he was so shy that he could barely talk in my presence. He could not keep still. His eyes moved continually in all directions, but they could never meet mine. At first I thought he suffered merely from the effects of terror. Afterwards, I learned with horror that he suffered from hunger. When his shyness wore off a little and he spoke to me, he astonished me by his wide knowledge of philosophy, of history, by his acquaintance with world politics, by his love of literature and by the acute intelligence which he brought to bear on everything he discussed. Yet his intelligence and erudition only increased the discomfort I felt in his company. He was like a colt that has been ruined by too much racing in his second year. He was hectic, with the unhealthy precocity of the consumptive or the cripple. His sombre eyes and his starved face were accusing. I felt that I myself was in some way responsible for his hunger and for the terror from which he had suffered.

There was no trace of fanaticism in his nature. He was neither for nor against communism. He seemed too exhausted to have any active convictions about social life. Alas! Such refined types are destroyed by the violence of Revolution.

Later we had a meal. I examined the rest of the company as we were seated at table. There was a wild and magnificent film actress, who had just recovered from a nervous breakdown and seemed on the point of having another one. There was an engineer, who, alone of all the company, looked well-fed and happy and indifferent to such grave issues as the world revolution and the liquidation of human frailties. He was a type of the new Russian aristocracy, a member of the skilled profession of engineering. He was a self-satisfied man, interested in his toilet, his food and his dancing girls. He was uninteresting. There was a director of a film company, a seaman from the ship and others of vague character and profession.

Although the quality of the food was not excellent, owing to the ‘crisis of alimentation,’ the company left nothing to be desired from the point of view of my peculiar needs at the moment. Practically everybody spoke a little of either French or English, so that I could follow the trend of the conversation without difficulty. It was as exciting as a boxing match, the same sort of nervous tension and the fear that the entertainment might too suddenly come to an end; or that something dreadful might happen; for example, a fear that everybody, including myself, might have a nervous breakdown.

Indeed, I could not help thinking that each person, excepting the engineer, simulated gaiety, as the only safeguard against the nervous breakdown which would assuredly result from a calm realisation of his or her position in life. It was for that reason that they got together in a mass, afraid of being alone. That was why they laughed and talked incessantly, to avoid the danger of thought.

‘These people,’ I thought, ‘cannot hold out much longer. Unless they attack Europe shortly and plunder its store of food and gaiety they will all assuredly collapse.’

‘It’s terrible now’ one woman said to me. ‘I was for four hours in the shops to-day trying to buy a few potatoes. I was utterly exhausted. Finally I had to return without any potatoes. It has become really bad during the last few months. You should have come last year or the year before. Then there was plenty to eat. When is the Revolution going to come in Europe?’

‘The Revolution will come in Europe,’ I said politely, ‘when people eat better in Leningrad than in any village of France.’

‘I see,’ she said dubiously.

We sat down to table at five. We arose at ten. These five hours had passed without leaving any definite impression on my appetite or on my mind. Such is Russia. It is a land where everything has been scientifically organised except time; possibly for the reason that its philosophy of life has been harnessed to the wheels of modern science and Einstein has recently discovered that time does not exist. Our old proverb that ‘time is precious’ makes one unreasonably irritated by the scientific Russian attitude. And they had promised to take me to the cinema.

We finally set forth at half-past ten. There were six of us when we started. The conversation continued in the street with great violence. Some of our party left us. We were joined by others. An argument began as to which cinema was the best to visit. The doctor’s wife suddenly became furious about something and stood stock still on the pavement for twenty minutes. At half-past eleven, a young man with more wit than the rest suggested that we should enter a public house, have some beer and decide definitely on some cinema.

By this time I had reached such a state of coma that I was speechless, half paralysed, frozen with cold, weak with hunger, stupefied by the barrage of talk, severely bruised, being dragged hither and thither by my companions and buffetted by the crowds in the street. I had grazed my shin against a perambulator which had been driven against me, at full speed, by a fierce woman. I had been rammed in the small of the back by six men who were trying to bring a ladder across the pavement. A troop of young Communist Pioneers, either going to, or returning from an expedition of social importance, had carried me fifty yards or so within their ranks. A young woman of our party had seized me violently by the arm, halted me and whispered with great intensity into my left ear: ‘Do you believe in physical or in spiritual unions? I tell you spiritual unions are purely counter-revolutionary. Every man and woman should have spiritual union only with society. Whereas physical unions are the manifestations. . .

My lower lip hung as if it had been stretched with violence, sewn to my chin for an hour and then let loose. And therefore it was only natural that I pricked up my ears and offered up a prayer of thanksgiving when I heard the young man mention beer. There was a pub nearby. We entered. But alas! When I found myself within the place and sat down in half darkness at a little table and looked around at a large room, where a ghostly company sat in silence, I realised that even the tavern did not offer any escape from the gloom of Leningrad. It was like a tomb. Not a shout, not a laugh. All the drinkers were thin, hungry, wretched, sober. My lip hung still lower and I offered no resistance to the wretch who kept whispering in my left ear: ‘Under our new proletarian society, sexual union shall take the form of spontaneous action generated by a combination of things, such as an accumulation in the male . . .’

The inevitable happened. When the waiter arrived to take our order, a thin and melancholy woman of our party got to her feet and made a statement.

‘Comrades,’ she cried, striking the table. ‘The situation is such. We are in the midst of a revolutionary crisis. It is therefore counter-revolutionary to waste time consuming alcohol in a den of the Tsarist regime. We must leave here at once. I am a member of the society for the liquidation of drunkenness.’

I was too weak to protest by throwing a chair at the woman’s head. So I laughed hysterically. And my laughter produced the odd effect of making me feel at home with the company. I reached the same level of idiocy as they and I went forth babbling about the liquidation of alcohol in every way except by drinking it.

‘Comrades,’ I said, when we got into the street. ‘The best protest against alcohol is the consumption of food. The French have stabilised their capitalist system since the war by eating more than they drink. Let us help to stabilise the Proletarian Revolution by eating more than we talk. To my hotel then. Let us celebrate my arrival in the Soviet Union by eating. It is a bourgeois habit, I admit, but the human race has been addicted to food for so long that I conceive it dangerous to give up the habit at once, at least before the successful conclusion of the Five Year Plan.’

I spoke at some length, using all the reserves of my strength to convince them that it was necessary to eat. I even went so far as to say that, if they all got nervous breakdowns at once, they would be acting in a counter-revolutionary manner, by taxing the resources of the hospitals and causing a crisis in the treatment of the most prevalent disease within the territories of the Soviet Union. They agreed with me and we went to my hotel.

It was now midnight and the streets were crowded with people who were just emerging for a stroll after their evening meal of conversation. Although there was very little traffic on the Nevsky, the noise of conversation made a din as great as the German barrage that preceded the great offensive of 1918. So great was this noise that a loud speaker, installed by the government for the propagation of the Soviet Gospel outside a public building, was inaudible. But the doctor assured me that this loud speaker did good work during the day, when it had merely to contend with the noise of motor traffic.

We entered the hotel. It was a fashionable place before the Revolution. It is now a mournful building. It gives the impression of being a Rowton House masquerading as the Berkeley, with uniformed police patrolling the building lest the pauper staff might rob (or rape) the visitors. Instead of receiving the guests with respect and hospitality, the members of the staff regard strangers with suspicion that is akin to hatred. These proletarians regard the hotel itself with grave dislike. I felt they would cheerfully set fire to it, from the way they roamed about, scowling, doing their chores as carelessly as possible, without hurry or industry.

The dining room was enormous, with a lofty roof, decorated in an extravagant and vulgar fashion. At the far end there was a platform, whereon an orchestra was preparing to begin its nightly adventures. The centre of the floor was bared for dancing. The guests were odd. Some were foreigners. There were even ladies in evening dress and three of the men wore dinner jackets. But the majority of the guests were Russian, incredibly shabby, some bearded and with Tolstoyan blouses, others clean shaven and in European dress. Some of the women wore a pattern dress, green jumpers, black skirts, red bonnets. Other women wore what they could find in the shops, without attempting the uniformity of costume encouraged by the government.

What gloom! The gloom of Leningrad was here also. I felt that everybody was afraid to be merry. Everybody realised that the corpse of Tsarism was present at this macabre feast. They realised that they were in a museum. The ghosts of the anciens were there in the room, those roysterers who had eaten and drunk and were then carried upstairs to sleep or love.

One also felt that there were police about.

It took our company thirty minutes to order some food. During that time the orchestra began to play. It was charming to hear pre-war tunes again, especially ‘Alexander’s Rag-time Band’ and ‘The Turkey Trot.’ People danced. How melancholy!

After an hour the waiter came to take our order. That is the normal time to wait for a Russian Soviet waiter. Whether through sheer cursedness, or through a desire to maintain his proletarian dignity, the Bolshevik waiter rarely comes under the hour.

While awaiting the waiter, I was entertained by a party of bloused Russians who were getting drunk at a table nearby. They were drinking Rhein Wein which cost a fabulous sum at that hotel. They consumed it like beer, tossing off their glasses at a draught without tasting the wine. Bottle after bottle was consumed. Rapidly they became indefinite in their gestures, raised their voices, laughed foolishly, looked about them lecherously. Suddenly one of them sprawled across the board, upsetting a bottle. The pale German wine flowed in a full stream from the bottle’s neck, as a gesture of contempt, on to the drunkard’s outstretched beard. The sot put out his tongue to lap the spilt wine. Then he closed his eyes, letting his tongue hang upon his dripping beard. He snored. His companions watched him, laughing and waving their arms in an idiotic way.

A group of waiters (who might, perhaps, have been serving the customers were it not for this entertainment) held a conference, which lasted ten minutes. Then the largest of them approached the sleeping sot and laid him back against his chair, high up, in the way that railway porters dispose heavy luggage on trucks. Then he tilted the chair slightly backwards and dragged it nonchalantly across the floor, to a door at the right of the orchestra. Another waiter held open this door in a bored fashion, until the first, looking equally bored, passed out with the sot.

Noticing that I watched this scene with interest, the doctor pointed out that, unhappily, such things still existed in the Soviet Union, but drunkenness was rarer there, taken on the whole, than in bourgeois countries.

‘My dear fellow,’ I said, ‘instead of deploring the scene, you should understand that I value very highly this experience. It excites my imagination which was merely irritated by things you find creditable. I have no idea of believing that your Revolution is a failure because one or more Russians get drunk in an hotel. In England I imagine one hundred thousand people get drunk every night and are carried to bed. In Ireland, since the population is one-tenth that of England, ten thousand people are carried to bed, or fall into ditches, since they are more rustic than the English. But in this case, I was interested in the variation of the method of getting drunk and in the splendid efficiency of the method of expulsion. The latter shows a high degree of civilisation, the former a state of barbarism which is disgusting. One almost feels that the sot was a teetotaller for the greater part of his life, and has begun to drink without having previously received the proper tuition. Comrade, you would do more for the Revolution and for the abolition of drunkenness, by teaching your people to drink like the French, than by your stupid liquidation societies. Wine is beautiful. So has alcohol its munificent uses. Drunkenness is. . . . Look! There goes another victim of the society for the liquidation of drunkenness.’

Five of them were wheeled out, one by one and deposited in some mysterious place outside the door.

We were served with an omelette at two o’clock, two hours after we entered the hotel. By that time I was so exhausted that I was unable to eat. Almost immediately afterwards the company broke up. I went to my room. It was very cold and there were hardly any bedclothes. After I had lain awake for an hour shivering, I got up, dressed, put on my overcoat and my gloves, wrapped the solitary blanket around me and lay down again.

It was impossible to sleep. But it was pleasant lying awake, owing to the activity of my mind. I was surprised to find two separate modes of thought working simultaneously, but in opposite directions. One mode was antagonistic to Russia and to Bolshevism. It wished to take me home at once. It was surly, selfish, cynical, that of a man old before his time. It made much of things that I had despised until then. It was cowardly, envious, hypocritical. The other mode of thought, to my amazement, suggested that I should quit Europe forever, wander into the eastern interior of Russia, become an adventurer in the Soviet Army, conquer large tracts of territory for them, espouse the religion of Bolshevism with enthusiasm and rejuvenate myself, by forgetting all of my life that had gone before. This mode of thought was thrilling. The very idea of obeying it made me feel ten years younger. It even transfused its energy to my body, so that I felt I was lying on the bed in a Soviet military greatcoat instead of my own civilian overcoat. But even at that moment, I was careful to remind myself that my new military adventurer’s overcoat was vastly different from the one worn by the soldier on the brink of the pier.

The second mode of thought easily conquered the first and assumed complete possession of my consciousness. I went to sleep, whispering to myself, like a second Napoleon:

‘To Moscow.’

Chapter IX. She Could Not Convert Me

But morning has no moon or ghostly shadows to fan the dreams of unreality. Even the wildest love is chastened when the body awakes, either made normal by refreshing sleep, or exhausted by nightmares. When I awoke, reality struck me with unpleasant force and I longed for home.

I had eighty roubles in my pocket. With that I had to pay my hotel bill and my fare to Moscow. For I must get to Moscow since I had left London in order to go to Moscow. If I returned without having gone to Moscow, the whole purpose of my journey would have been wasted. It would be just as if Napoleon had turned back from Borodino. Even though his having gone on to Moscow possibly lost him his empire, it is unquestionable that his career was rounded off from an artisitc point of view by his having reached Moscow. To Moscow, then, I must go.

I cursed myself. For I should be forced to besiege my Russian publishers for my royalties in order to maintain myself in that city and to get my fare home. Should I be successful in recovering from them what they owed me, I had no doubt but that my success would entail the performance of something unpleasant to my nature; I would have to allow myself to be led around by guides, examine buildings, factories, museums, children being cured scientifically of kleptomania, peasants being collectivised and a multitude of other social activities that do not interest me. Indeed, I may state here that these activities are counter to my nature, namely, those activities which are concerned with the eradication of human vice and social anarchy. For if I am a writer, forced to live by my work, I must realise that man’s viciousness has provided the material for all of the world’s great literature, from the Iliad to Macbeth and The Brothers Karamazov.

Then I suddenly remembered that my purpose in coming to Russia was to write Lies About Russia. At once I grew cheerful. For the more I suffered, the more courage I should have to write lies about it. So I jumped out of bed, took off my overcoat and gloves, slapped myself violently, danced a jig and shouted for a waiter in order to restore my circulation. There was a bell and I rang that, in the hope that somebody might come to give me some breakfast.

Curiously enough a waiter did come. After I had tried every language I knew without success, I seized my shoes, sat down to table and made the movements, with my shoes, of a man using a knife and fork with skill and expedition. He watched me in terror for a while without understanding that I wanted bacon and eggs, or eggs without bacon, or even bacon without eggs. Then I pretended to drink tea out of my right shoe without any more success. I took a match, dipped it into an ash-tray and pretended to spoon sugar into the interior of my right shoe. Then I stirred cheerfully. He began to laugh. In despair, I seized a book, put a corner of it in my mouth and pretended to chew a few pages. The fellow could see no relation between a man chewing the corner of a book and a man wanting to eat bread. Instead he opened his mouth wide and roared with laughter. Then I rushed at him with a chair and drove him off. He fled along the corridor.

I dropped the chair and decided to follow him and bring him back, because I realised that I must eat or starve. I thought of taking him to his kitchen where I could point out to him that I wanted food, by touching the food, or even by devouring it in his presence. But when I rushed out he was just disappearing around a corner, going at a great pace. I followed at the same rate, only to find myself wandering through a maze of narrow passages. And at last I was brought to a halt when suddenly confronted by a policeman with drawn revolver who stood guard outside a door (evidently occupied by a person of Soviet rank). I retreated at once, pretending to have lost my way and saluting in an obsequious manner. After a while I managed to get back to my own room, almost famished with cold and hunger.

I thought a hot bath would pull me around. I again set forth looking for a bathroom. I met a woman and halted her. I tried the words ‘bath’ and ‘bain’ but she did not understand. Then I began to scrub my body, blowing on to my palms and uttering those exclamations of satisfaction used by a weary and dirty man, enjoying a hot bath. But she merely giggled and called her mate to watch the funny foreigner. I retired in disgust to my room.

Again I put on my overcoat and gloves. I went downstairs hoping to get something to eat in the dining room. There I waited for twenty minutes until a waiter came. As I was the only person in the room, I did not trouble to shout at him on his appearance, feeling certain that he was going to come and take my order. But he walked straight past me without looking at me, just like a Dostoievskian character about to commit suicide. When he had gone ten yards or so, I called out:

‘Hey! Where the devil are you going?’

He halted, turned around slowly, looked at me in a mournful fashion, shrugged his shoulders and continued his journey. I went out to look for the manager. In the hall, an individual who spoke French told me that the manager was too busy to see anybody.

‘Well!’ I said, ‘Who are you? Have you any authority in the hotel?’

‘I also,’ he said, ‘am connected with the hotel in an official capacity. You wish to say something.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You have an organisation in London to entice tourists into the Soviet Union. I am one of those tourists. It’s not fair to bring them here and then treat them in a scandalous fashion. I am one of the ordinary ones, of no account whatsoever. But as this is an equalitarian country, the tourists of no account should be treated as well as if they were capitalists coming to invest money, or engineers, or members of bourgeois parliaments whom you want to impress, or delegates from foreign Communist Parties, with whose importance you want to impress your own people. I am here just as a miserable human being and I beg of you to give me some food in the name of suffering humanity. If you want to exterminate us wretched Europeans, do it in a manly way at the point of the gun or even with poison gas. I am quite willing to be poisoned provided you give me the poison in an otherwise eatable omelette or mutton chop.’

‘Why?’ he said. ‘There is plenty of food here if you pay for it.’

I have been sitting in that dining room for half an hour. . . .’

‘No meals are served in the dining room before eleven o’clock,’ he said curtly. ‘Go to your room and ring for the waiter.’

‘But I did ring and he could not understand me. I also shouted but he. . . .’

‘You must not shout,’ said the man. It is contrary to the rules governing Russian hotels.’

‘Go to the devil,’ I said.

‘Thank you’ he said calmly. ‘The devil does not exist, so I do not fear him.’

‘The devil he doesn’t,’ I replied. ‘Your damned hotel is run by him.’

He shrugged his shoulders and walked away. I went out into the street. I wandered about for half an hour desolately.

Then I suddenly came across an eating house and entered. There was plenty of food there, but just as I was preparing to gorge myself, I remembered that the doctor was sending his sister-in-law to the hotel at eleven o’clock, to show me places of interest. I devoured some sturgeon and black bread hurriedly and ran back. It was then half-past eleven.

She was very melancholy. I forced myself into a cheerful mood, lest her melancholy might drive me to suicide. But it was impossible to console her.

It is very difficult,’ she said, ‘to be happy. Life is sad.’

‘One seems to have read that,’ I said, ‘in the works of Tolstoy, Tchehov, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, Leskov, Gorki, Gogol and a host of others. But I was given to understand that melancholy as a philosophy of life had been destroyed by the Proletarian Revolution. I have been told repeatedly that one of the great achievements of the Revolution was the introduction into Russia of the American philosophy of Pep.’

‘What is Pep?’ she said mournfully.

‘Canned optimism.’

‘What is canned?’

It is an American word which means artificial to a European.’

I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Please explain to me, because I wish to be happy and to learn this new philosophy.’

‘Impossible,’ I said. I also know that life is sad. But I thought Communism had destroyed sadness in the soul, in the Russian soul.’

‘That is untrue,’ she said sadly. ‘They pretend they are different. But they are the same. And you also are sad? How can that be when you live in wonderful places like London and Paris where everything is beautiful and people eat what they wish and wear beautiful clothes and life is gay.’

‘You think so?’ I said. ‘Well! That is the root of happiness, to think that it is only one’s environment that is sad. In the distance life is always gay. At this moment I am convinced that people are enjoying themselves in almost every place in the world except in this. Let us pretend we are not ourselves and that we are not here.’

‘How?’ she said seriously.

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘There are many ways. We could get drunk or fall in love or get put into jail for shouting “long live the Tsar” or by scores of other methods. The sadness of life is caused by monotony, which is, in itself, caused by an absence of excitement. Let’s get excited.’

‘You are very funny,’ she said. It is obvious that you are happy and that you are happy because you are a foreigner. In Russia it is impossible to be happy.’

‘One of your writers wrote a long poem in celebration of that statement,’ I said. I quite agree with him in so far as this wretched town is concerned.’

‘Well!’ she said with a sigh, ‘Life must continue. Sascha said we must either observe the Winter Palace or Tsarskoe Selo to-day. Which do you prefer?’

‘Which is the nearest?’

‘The Winter Palace.’

‘Do we have to take a tramcar to get there?’

‘No. It is near.’

‘Cheers. Let’s go there.’

We set forth. On the way I asked her the principal cause of her sadness.

I am lonely’ she said. ‘Last winter I had a lover. Now he has left me.’

‘That’s too bad.’

‘Yes/ she said dolefully. It is bad. For a fully developed female it is bad to be without a lover.’

‘Damn it,’ I said. ‘Could I help you in any way?’

She blushed and remained silent. We reached the end of the Nevsky and debouched on to the large square in front of the Winter Palace. The square was empty except for the wooden platform which had been erected for the May Day celebrations. She began to explain to me that this square had been used in Tsarist times for military parades and that the great buildings surrounding it were used formerly for housing government departments. I took no interest in what she said, because her voice was depressing and I pitied her lack of a lover. In some military school nearby, machine-guns were being fired continually. That was the only sound to disturb the gloomy peace of the dead city. I wondered why the platform had not been removed since it was now the eighth of May. Were they leaving it there for the October celebrations?

‘That’s the Winter Palace’ she moaned.

‘That shabby red building opposite?’

‘Yes,’ she sighed. It was not shabby but it needs repairs. We had better observe it from the inside. The exterior, as you remark, looks desolate.’

It does look desolate,’ I groaned.

‘Yes,’ she moaned. ‘All life is desolate.’

It is,’ I whined. I wish there were a coffee stall near here, or a chemist that sold strychnine.’

We entered that portion of the Palace which was being inspected on that day by the proletariat of Leningrad. There were several groups of proletarians with their guides. I paid full price. My friend, being a student, paid half price. The proletarians went in at wholesale prices. An old woman conducted us from a very dirty waiting room, through a maze of corridors, into the living quarters of Nicholas II. It resembled a disreputable Madame Tussaud’s. The old woman told the tale in a melancholy voice, very rapidly. I understood nothing of what the old woman said, neither did I understand what my melancholy interpreter translated. And I wanted to know nothing. It was incredibly dull and gloomy, entirely in keeping with Leningrad. And it seemed so vulgar, these people inspecting the bed where Nicholas II died, where his officers-in-waiting lived, where his wife slept.

The proletarians were pleasant people. They looked shy and respectful and they obviously would prefer to spend their holiday looking at a football match.

‘Let’s go,’ I said to my friend.

‘Yes,’ she said dolefully. ‘You will be more interested by the Museum of Revolution.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t we think of that at first?’

We went through corridors and up and down winding stairways into rooms that were filled with stuffed horrors, portraying the suffering of revolutionaries under the Tsarist regime. Room after room was laid out elaborately to show the life of Siberian prison camps, of Russian jails and of the road from the jails to the Siberian prison camps. It was awe-inspiring, but it left an impression of despair on the mind, instead of producing a feeling that misery had passed, giving place to liberty and happiness.

As I walked gloomily from room to room, I could not help coming to the conclusion that people who have spent their lives in prison or conspiring and flying from the law, become infatuated with the idea of self-torture. So, even when they have won their war and are in the enjoyment of the fruits of victory, they still wish to think and talk of the bad old times; and they offer their miseries to others as a gift. I have often heard revolutionaries tell with delight the tortures they have suffered. They are like old women who boast of their diseases.

But is it not dangerous to treat the proletarians of Leningrad to this macabre entertainment? They should get music, dancing and feasting to cheer them on through the monstrous labours they have to perform, as the result of their revolutionary victories.

But no. The old campaigners, like the disgruntled people who look upon themselves as heroes of the late Great War, hate to think that the younger generation should forget those who freed them. It is a form of sadism, this parade of suffering; a miserable and disgusting form of selfishness. Out upon it! I hate mummies, tombs, martyrs. Have we not had enough of Christ’s suffering and of those of his early followers, without beginning a new religion exactly on the same diet of suffering and martyrdom? Washed in the blood of the lamb merely gives way to a washing in the blood of the proletariat.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said to my companion. ‘This is desolate.’

‘Yes,’ she moaned. ‘All life is desolate.’

‘Oh! Damn that for a tune,’ I cried. ‘Life is NOT desolate. Let us find a field somewhere, so that we may lie on grass, or a river with running water, or a mare with foal at foot, or even a merry child playing in the gutter. I want to see something green, fresh, young, happy, something that is unconscious of its duty to society, something that lives for the sake of the joy that is inherent in the act of living, for the sole purpose of expressing its existence in the manner most suited to its nature.’

I do not understand you,’ she moaned.

‘No?’ I said. ‘Well. . . . Come to my hotel.’

Next morning she came again to be my guide, accompanied by another Jewish girl. The newcomer was older, more sophisticated and more revolutionary. She had information beyond the wildest ambitions of most European young women of her age and an acute intelligence which was almost humiliating. So that, after an hour she began to bore me by the fixity of her convictions and the narrow compass into which proletarian culture, so-called, had forced her mind.

And she was not very pretty.

We went to see the Church of Saint Isaac, since it was near my hotel and I had a horror of the scientific means of transport in Leningrad. The church gave me no great satisfaction. I cannot understand the mentality of people who find pleasure in seeing things for the first time; or just seeing a beautiful thing for half an hour and then going away, never to return. Nothing is more detestable than the mentality of people who go to see things for the sake of being able to say afterwards that they have seen them. A thing shows its real beauty when one becomes intimate with it, when one has paid it loving visits, courted its beauty assiduously, so to speak, for a long time. These sudden visits and departures and the aftermath of boasting gossip are like furtive and vulgar rapes.

Churches, especially, can only be appreciated when one knows their history and when one is alone. Their effect depends upon the mystic silence which reigns within them. But this church was like a museum, exactly like the Winter Palace. Crowds were there, climbing to its roof, in order to look upon the city.

We climbed to the roof and saw the city. Right beneath us was the Hotel D’Angleterre.

‘That is where Essenin committed suicide,’ said the elder Jewess.

I quite understand his point of view,’ I answered.

‘Why?’ she said aggressively.

‘Well!’ I said. I hate the thought of death. But poets love the light and there is nothing here but gloom.’

‘How?’

‘Leningrad is a tomb.’

‘Nonsense/ she said, when I had explained more of what I meant. ‘There is great life in Leningrad, a great industrial life and a great cultural life. But you refuse to see it. Your nerves are bad, so you can only receive unpleasant impressions. You miss the outward appearance of bourgeois life, so you are unhappy. You have to permit yourself to be born again before you can understand or appreciate Russia.’

I thought of doing that last night, being born again. But this morning I preferred to get back home. Indeed, you fail to convince me that there is a great and full life in Russia, for the facial expressions here are rather similar to those produced by despair in Western Europe.’

‘But we are happy,’ she cried. I am happy.’

‘Are you happy?’ I said to the doctor’s sister-in-law.

‘No.’

‘There you are,’ I said to the elder Jewess.

‘Oh! But she would be unhappy anywhere,’ said the latter. ‘She is constitutionally incapable of social optimism. Her life centres around her own personality. In order to be happy in the new society, we must live not for ourselves but for others, for the mass.’

‘That is the gospel of the Salvation Army.’

‘What is the Salvation Army?’

‘A bourgeois Christian Evangelical Society.’

She spat and cried:

‘Work. Social work. That is the key to happiness. To build up human society on a new basis. There is immense work to be done. So there is no time to think of unhappiness. To educate the ignorant, to organise industry, to defend the proletarian revolution, to make scientific discoveries in every direction, there is immense work to be done and every citizen has unlimited means of working. What does personal comfort matter at such a time? You should be ashamed of yourself. You are fully grown. You are intelligent and yet you are a greater fool than an illiterate peasant. Look. See those workers mending the street? They are better than you.’

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Do you mean those chaps down there around a hole in the ground?’

‘Yes.’

‘But they are not working. They are merely talking.’

‘They have been working. They are now resting/

‘When were they working? Before the outbreak of the Great War?’

It is easy to mock/ she said. ‘Why don’t you go and fill in that hole yourself and give an example, if the comrades are tired or lazy?’

‘Why should I fill in that hole? I’m not a professional navvy.’

‘Every citizen works at that point of the front where he finds himself.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘You are a bourgeois.’

‘Oh! Let’s go and eat. We are run down. I can see myself fainting in a few minutes.’

The word food deprived her, temporarily, of her reason.

‘Food, food, food,’ she screamed into my ear. ‘You bourgeois people can think of nothing but food. You should realise that millions of proletarians in Russia are hungry because of your blockade.’

‘Oh! Let them die of hunger,’ I cried in rage.

Really, she would have turned the mildest of Manchester Liberals into a man-eating Fascist. I never met, previously, an individual so capable of inspiring hostility towards her creed in everybody with whom she came in contact.

I have had enough of this city,’ I said to myself, as we walked in silence back to my hotel.

So I bought a ticket to Moscow immediately on entering, at the Intourist Bureau. Then I again suggested a meal to the doctor’s sister-in-law and to the fanatic. Neither offered any opposition. Indeed the fanatic’s hatred of food proved to be entirely intellectual, as she proved herself to be an excellent trencher-woman. I myself became a little more reasonable with the help of a bottle of Crimean wine. Then I looked more charitably at the fanatic and saw that she was just as pathetic as the doctor’s sister-in-law.

She was plain.

I bid good-bye to the doctor’s family, but was unable to find the doctor himself, that wonderful man who had given me such an insight into cthe situation.’ The sister-in-law accompanied me to the station.

As we were on our way in a cab, my irritability was chastened by the loneliness one always feels on quitting a strange city, probably never to return. And I realised how kind everybody had been to me, and how I would have been entranced by the wonderful life of the city had I not decided on my arrival that it was a melancholy tomb, in which I could not possibly find anything but death. But arrival at the railway station cured me of this mood and plunged me once more into the mood of violent irritation necessary for writing Lies About Russia.

Night had fallen. The station was practically in darkness, its gloom having merely to contend with an occasional lamp. As we had to wait for an hour, I suggested to my friend that we should go into the station restaurant and have a bottle of beer.

‘Yes,’ she said dolefully.

We entered and sat down at a table. The room was very large but it was crowded. It strongly reminded me of a railway station in London during the war, when there were soldiers everywhere with their kits, some lying on the floor or on benches, asleep, others eating, others drinking, some going to the front, others returning, dirty and almost in rags, strangely accoutred. Here the effect was the same, except that there were more civilians than soldiers. They squatted on the floor and they carried their kit in bundles, or strapped to their backs. Officers and private soldiers and sailors ate together, cheek by jowl with bearded peasants, who wore bast shoes and sheepskins.

Where were they all going? Where had they come from? I felt that I wanted to stay for a year in that restaurant and watch these people coming and going, in order to learn the secret of the wild thoughts their presence inspired in me. For in that room, for the first time I had seen a real sign of that mighty movement of a people which I had until then merely imagined.

Ho! Ho! My comfortable bourgeois friends, you were beginning to chuckle when you found that Leningrad was merely a stinking tomb inhabited by feckless idiots. But mark you well, a dead Leningrad is more dangerous to you than a live Leningrad. The closing of that marshy mouth of Mother Russia has but opened wider her other fanged maws that open upon China and upon India and upon Poland and Bessarabia and Persia, mouths that shall belch upon Europe not flabby Slavs, effete with melancholy, but fierce, lean Cossacks and Tatars with hawk’s eyes and savage Siberians whose veins hold rivers of dark blood.

Whither go these hordes if not towards the south, to mass among the unknown valleys of the Caucasus and upon the plains of Samarkand, greater than the hosts of Ghengiz Khan, that king of one hundred thousand camels?

The diseased condition of Leningrad cannot cheer the good bourgeois of Western Europe, for history proves that all conquests have been predatory, inspired by the desire to acquire loot and not by an altruistic desire to force upon less civilised people a superior civilisation as a gift. Gloomy and debauched Leningrad shall serve to hasten the conquest rather than stay it. For they shall come not with gospel according to Karl Marx open on their bosom, crying: ‘Lo! All ye who are enslaved and hungry and oppressed, enter ye into the paradise which is Russia.’ They shall come with fire and sword, lousy, hungry, thirsty, rampant, to take by plunder what is lacking in their territories. So, woe to Europe. Greater woe when Leningrad is in ruins than when the Tsar and his merry courtiers jigged their dance of death therein.

I lit a cigarette. Almost at once a policeman came up and began to shout at me, waving his arms. I looked at him in amazement, not understanding one word of what he said. My friend got very excited and began to talk in Russian also. I looked at her, utterly dumbfounded. Her face wore an expression of terror that amazed me.

‘What on earth is the matter?’ I cried.

She gasped and managed to mutter, pointing at my cigarette:

It is not permitted to . . . to . . . to smoke here.’

‘Oh!’ I said.

I crushed the cigarette under my foot. The policeman still went on talking.

‘My dear fellow,’ I said, ‘you’re making a fool of yourself.’

‘Hush!’ cried my friend in terror, clutching my arm. ‘Don’t speak to him. It is always better to keep silent.’

I gaped at her. At last the policeman went away, after having examined my passport. My friend was trembling.

‘But what’s the matter?’ I said. I don’t understand. Why couldn’t he tell me politely that smoking was not allowed? And why were you afraid?’

Poor girl! She was an utter wreck.

‘Unpleasant conquerors these fellows are going to be.’ I thought. I pity the good ladies of Kensington.’

‘Come,’ said my friend, ‘let us leave here.’

We went out and began to look for my train. Although we had half an hour to do so, we found it with very little to spare. It was impossible to get information and my friend was in such a state of nervousness that I had to lead her instead of her leading me. When we found the train, it was still difficult to find my carriage. Those to whom I showed my ticket merely stared at it stupidly and told me to go on farther. In this way I went to the end of the train. The doorkeeper of the last carriage, a worthy with drooping moustaches and a small lanthorn, being unable to send me farther, as the train ended with him, had to examine my ticket more seriously. He turned it upside down and back to front, scratching his head and chewing the ends of his moustaches. Then he shrugged his shoulders and told me to enter his carriage.

I bid goodbye to my friend. She burst into tears, so I gave her my typewriter, just as one gives a toy to a child. She stopped crying. I went aboard. It was what corresponds to a third class carriage in France, whereas I had booked a berth in a pullman. The occupants of the carriage looked very exciting, people similar to those I had seen in the restaurant. I should have loved to spend the night with them but I wanted to sleep. So I came out again.

Now I began to shout, cursing the Soviet Union lock, stock and barrel. Immediately, as if by magic, several personages approached me, examined my ticket, took charge of my luggage and helped me into the next carriage, which proved to be the pullman. Having installed myself I descended once more to the platform. We had still a few minutes.

To my surprise, I found the doctor’s wife on the platform with her sister. She was dazzingly beautiful in a black fur coat and a hat of which a fashionable Frenchwoman would have been proud. Her face was wreathed in smiles. Her eyes danced with excitement. Her movements were full of energy. I was amazed and enraptured.

Beside her, my melancholy friend drooped, with hanging lip, trembling slightly, a little person with her long black hair swept straight back from her white forehead, weary of living.

Chapter X. The Keepers Of The Satchel

I Walked up and down the corridor several times after the train had left the station. I observed that nearly all the passengers carried portfolios.

‘Ha!’ I thought. ‘Who are these people? A Government commission of some sort returning to Moscow?’

They were all young Russian men, except a few foreigners whom I noticed and two young women, very richly dressed, apparently film actresses.

I grew curious about the portfolios. At last I managed to get into conversation with a young fellow who was lounging before the door of my compartment apparently trying to pick up the actresses who occupied the compartment next door. When the actresses closed their door, preparing to go to sleep, this young man banged the window with his fist and said the Russian equivalent of ‘damn’. Then he winked at me. He was a tall fellow, well built, seemingly devoid of melancholy and fanaticism.

‘Are you English?’ he said.

‘Irish,’ I replied.

‘Shake hands,’ he said. I love the Irish. I was ten years in the United States. I had numbers of Irish friends there. Yours is a very revolutionary race.’

‘On the contrary,’ I said. ‘The Irish are the most reactionary people in Europe, except, perhaps, the Spaniards and the Albanians.’

‘But how?’ he said. ‘They were the first people to revolt against the war. They have fought bravely against British Imperialism.’

It all depends,’ I said, ‘on what you mean by the word revolutionary’.

‘You are interesting,’ he said. I propose to sit in your compartment and discuss these questions with you.’

‘With pleasure,’ I said. ‘And I want to ask you why everybody carries a portfolio.’

Another gentleman (or rather comrade) was in the compartment. He occupied the lower bunk.

‘My name is Shatov,’ said the first. ‘This is Kotpov.’

‘My name is O’Flaherty,’ I said.

‘Are you an engineer or a journalist?’ said Mr. Kotpov.

I am a novelist,’ I answered.

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Please tell me what is the reaction of English intellectuals to the Indian situation.’

I am afraid,’ I said, ‘that I have not taken the trouble to find out.’

‘Too bad,’ said Mr. Kotpov, ‘because the Indian situation interests us very much in Russia.’

Mr. Kotpov was a slight and very exquisite young man with a little, trimmed moustache. He smelt of perfume and his hands were beautifully manicured. He spoke English correctly, though with a French accent.

It is extraordinary,’ said Mr. Shatov, ‘but he says that the Irish are not a revolutionary race. Please explain that to us.’

‘Ah! The Irish,’ said Mr. Kotpov, ‘have an interesting folk literature and of course Mr. Shaw. There are also in that country very interesting stone buildings of great antiquity. I have read of them in a German publication of some importance. But please tell me what is the attitude of Irish intellectuals towards our treatment of national minorities. You must understand that in our Union we have developed local languages and have, indeed, organised languages among minorities which had previously dialects.’

‘Shut up Alyosha,’ said Mr. Shatov. I want to know what he means by saying the Irish are not revolutionary. I hate the English. Don’t you hate the English?’

‘That is ridiculous,’ said Mr. Kotpov. It is utterly impossible to hate such a large human aggregation as the English. Also it is uncivilised. The English are a great race. You will agree with me Mr. Flaxy?’

‘Taken as a whole,’ I said, ‘it is probable that the English are the most remarkable people the world has yet seen.’

‘Damn lie,’ said Mr. Shatov. It is a shame to hear an Irishman say that. You are Anglicised.’

‘You are a ridiculous fellow Sascha,’ said Mr. Kotpov. It is firmly established among intellectuals all over the world that the achievements of the English in culture are unequalled by the achievements of any other race. Also in the matter of commerce, industry and government they have led the world for several hundreds of years. And even in such things as sport they have continued the policy of the Greeks. And even by their creation of that remarkable human being “the gentleman,” they are outstanding.’

‘But British Imperialism,’ said Mr. Shatov, ‘is the most cruel tyranny the world has ever seen. Shut up Alyosha. I want to ask him what he means by the word revolutionary and whether he supports British Imperialism.’

‘Judging the question purely from an intellectual point of view,’ said Mr. Kotpov, ‘we must admit that the English were acting in accordance with the morality of the time when they began their career of plunder and the oppression of other races. But. . . .’

‘Let him speak,’ said Mr. Shatov. ‘What do you mean by revolutionary?’

‘Well!’ I said. I consider that a race is revolutionary when its social activities tend to increase man’s power over the forces of nature and to widen his comprehension of the universe. Examined from this point of view it will be seen that the English are extremely revolutionary, at least until quite recently. As Mr. Kotpov has stated, they led the world for a long time in culture, as well as in commerce, industry, and the science of government.’

‘But that is not revolutionary,’ said Mr, Shatov. ‘That is another word, progressive.’

‘But as far as you are concerned,’ I replied, ‘since, I presume, you are a Russian Bolshevik, the word progressive is contained in the word revolutionary. The Russian Revolution, in the mind of every Russian Bolshevik, means not only the overthrow of one government and the establishment of another, but the progressive evolution of human society from an inferior state of civilisation to a superior state of civilisation.’

‘That is so,’ said Mr. Kotpov.

‘A political revolution may be reactionary as well as progressive.’

‘That is so,’ said Mr. Kotpov.

‘But for the purpose of our discussion we are not concerned with merely political revolutions but with the development of the human race. And under the heading of revolutions I would place the discovery of the steam engine as of equal importance with the overthrow of monarchy in favour of republicanism.’

‘You are getting mixed up,’ said Mr. Kotpov. ‘You are getting away from the point. Are you prepared to defend British Imperialism or do you condemn it? That is the point.’

I want to get this point cleared up first,’ I said. ‘From my point of view a race living under an autocracy may be as revolutionary as one living under a constitution as democratic and libertarian as the present Russian constitution.’

‘That is entirely ridiculous,’ said Mr. Shatov.

‘Not if you remember my definition of the word revolutionary.’

‘You are playing with words,’ said Mr. Shatov.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Kotpov. ‘Although I have an unprejudiced mind when dealing with intellectual ideas, I must say that in this instance I must differ with you. The existence of autocracy is always a bar to progress.’

‘Shut up Alyosha,’ said Shatov.

‘Allow me to continue,’ I said. ‘Ah forms of government are, in themselves, equally useful as far as progress, in our sense, is concerned. The form of government of a community depends entirely on the community’s state of development and forms of government in a single community almost invariably change in accordance with the community’s development. Indeed, all the forms of government that we know, from Communism to autocracy, existed at one time or other during the last twenty thousand years. It is also quite possible that the same forms of government, monarchy, Communism, republicanism, will exist twenty thousand years hence. But the total of man’s knowledge is, materially, greater now than it was twenty thousand years ago and twenty thousand years from now it shall be still greater. That is what is of importance.’

‘But classes,’ cried Shatov, ‘and the exploitation. . . .’

‘Hold on a moment,’ I said. I shall ask you a question about classes and about portfolios later. Let us finish with the question of British Imperialism. We find that in all periods of recorded history a community with more energy, cunning and intelligence than its neighbour set up a hegemony in the course of its development and expansion. Some, like the Romans, established an empire by conquest. Others, like the Greeks, built up an Empire by commercial exploitation. But in all cases, the Imperial communities built up great civilisations and cultures. Indeed, imperialism and culture and civilisation have been until now inseparable and almost synonymous. Even the Italian republics of the Renaissance period were little commercial empires who paid Crusaders to make trade routes to the East. In fine, when you accuse the British Empire of being cruel and tyrannical, it is just the same as accusing an oak tree of being a cruel tyrant, because the destruction of neighbouring smaller plants is necessary to its growth. One might say that the exploitation and oppression of India’s millions was necessary for the production of Darwin, Newton and Shelley, by providing that luxury and leisure and pride of being which are the background to the flowering of genius. Nor should I, as an Irishman, deplore the conquest of Ireland if that conquest helped to inspire the proud genius of Shakespeare.’

‘What amazing logic!’ said Mr. Shatov. ‘You are a reactionary. You believe, then, in the justice of capitalism, in the exploitation of one class by another, as well as the oppression of one country by another?’

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Tell me the meaning of the portfolios which I see in this carriage.’

‘Oh! This,’ said Mr. Kotpov, touching his portfolio. In Russia it is usual for officials, clerks, journalists and such middle class people. . .

‘Shut up Alyosha,’ said Shatov. ‘There is no middle class. . . .’

‘But it is simply to explain to this foreigner,’cried Kotpov, ‘that. . . .’

I see,’ I cried. ‘Then you two are officials?’

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Kotpov. ‘We are what you call civil servants.’

‘Then already in the Soviet Union,’ I cried, ‘classes have come into existence.’

‘How do you mean?’ cried the now furious Shatov.

‘Well! There are two classes on this train. I looked into the lower class carriage and it was rather dreadful, whereas this first class carriage is very comfortable. You fellows with portfolios travel in one. The class without portfolios travels in the other.’

They began to speak at the same time, Messrs. Shatov and Kotpov, explaining that all could travel in the first class carriage if they wanted to do so.

‘But the point is,’ I said, ‘that they don’t do so, either because they can’t afford to do so, or because they would not feel at home, being used to certain conditions. In that manner I see that the possession of portfolios gives a certain class of Soviet citizens privileges and ambitions not enjoyed by the mass. That is the beginning of a . .

But Shatov jumped to his feet and began to become offensive. He was calmed by Kotpov and induced to leave the compartment. Kotpov himself was none too friendly. We went to bed hardly on speaking terms. That did not worry me, for I had made a wonderful discovery, of a new class hitherto unknown (or at least uncatalogued) in human society, the Bearers of Portfolios.

I admit that portfolios are carried in Western Europe, especially in France, by different classes of human beings, who do not become socially distinct by the act of carrying portfolios. But here in Russia, it seemed that the carriage of portfolios definitely meant that the bearer was a government official of some sort of other, a member of the superior class.

As I lay on my bed, I meditated with morose satisfaction on the ingenuity of man, who is such a bitter enemy of equality that he is prepared to descend to the lowest depths and to the most base forms of cunning in order to establish class distinctions. So that here in Russia, where the greatest experiment in social equality ever made by man is in full force, the more intelligent of the citizens have chosen the portfolio as the heraldic sign of nobility. The possession of money would but bring the possessor under the suspicion of the secret police. The possession of a title of nobility would mean imprisonment, death or dishonour. Eminence in literature, science, art, or politics necessitates the cultivation of an exaggerated humility, in order to escape the jealousy of the mass, which is the custodian of the theory of equality. But even an equalitarian mass must have some form of government and government is always administered by a body of officials. So this body of officials, the civil service, chose an innocent-looking black satchel as the emblem of its aristocratic state.

Then I realised that this satchel was strange and ridiculous merely because it was new. As a coat of arms it was no more ridiculous than a pair of lions rampant, or an eagle with outstretched wings, or a sword held by a mailed fist, or any of the other heraldic emblems of nobility. ‘Lord of the Satchel.’ In what way was that title more ridiculous than many titles current among us, for instance ‘the keeper of the match-box?’

Indeed I was pleased by the existence of this new Communist aristocracy and by the degree of information and culture manifested by the aristocrats I had met. For I hate vacuum and monotony. A country where everybody is equal means that everybody is forced to be as barbarous and un-mannered as the most brutal. Whereas there is always hope for a group of human beings who set a standard of superiority for themselves.

I also, as I lay in bed thinking, began to understand the structure of the new Russia, that society which I felt convinced was destined to conquer Europe and the world. I already knew of the position occupied in that country by the Communist Party and its feeder organisations, the Young Communists and the infant Pioneers. These organisations, so to speak, would be the Church of the new society, the Keepers of the Word, a Hierarchy entrusted with the definition of social morality and that spiritual ambition, which in former and less enlightened societies was given the name of religion. But the real power would lie with the Bearers of Portfolios, those worldly officials who pull the strings of government, the Keepers of the National Ledgers and Tasters of the National Luxuries. At one moment or another they might be subsidiary to the soldiers, the Keepers of the Sword, but inevitably soldiers get weary of war and disintegrate, whereas officials never get tired of their ledgers or portfolios.

Russia, then, would definitely set a new fashion in government, not the vulgar conception of the Western European bourgeoisie of a country run by untrousered Bolsheviks, bearded, lousy and paidophagic; but an extraordinary human society run by civil servants, under the aegis of the Portfolio, that contraption which, among us, is associated at times with bohemianism, when used by artists to carry their drawing sheets.

The only danger I foresaw, as I lay in bed thinking, was that the Bearers of Portfolios might allow themselves to be governed too long by the Keepers of the Word or of the Sword, as happened in Turkey, during the height of the Sublime Porte’s empire. I mean that in Turkey the Civil Service was looked upon as an inferior profession, which was fit only for Greeks and other Christians. But Russia’s ancient respect for officialdom did not point towards a similar error on the part of the Bolsheviks.

‘That is all to the good,’ I thought as I fell asleep. I have a high regard for the honesty and efficiency of Civil Servants. Now I feel more secure and resigned to the destruction of Europe. For, mark you, when they conquer London, these Bearers of Portfolios won’t omit to take note of the titles of my books in the British Museum. Civil Servants catalogue everything.’

When I awoke, the first thing I thought of was the fact that I had only eight roubles in my pocket. I looked at Mr. Kotpov. He was already washed and shaved and busy powdering his face. He seemed to have lost all memory of the unpleasantness of the previous night.

‘Desolate country/ he said, pointing towards the window.

I looked out. It was certainly desolate, my first view of the Russian countryside, bleak, dreary, monotonous, flat, savage, marshy.

It is strange how alien the earth looks a long distance from one’s native country. It does not smell. One feels hostile to it, jealous of acknowledging its beauty.

We were approaching the outskirts of Moscow. Instead of thatched villages, we were passing rather ornate wooden houses. They looked weather-beaten.

‘Are these buildings post-revolutionary?’ I asked my companion.

He yawned. He was rather bored in the morning. He had become a typical Civil Servant, rather dull and tired.

‘No,’ he said. ‘They are pre-war. Now they are mostly used by city workers who live in the country to get away from the noise.’

‘So there is noise in Moscow,’ I said. ‘That’s rather cheerful.’

‘How?’

‘There was no noise in Leningrad.’

‘Ah! Of course,’ said Mr. Kotpov. ‘A foreigner would find Leningrad rather passe and provincial. Indeed, I’m afraid it has no future. It is like Odessa and other towns important under the old regime. Out of date, of no special value for our new requirements. The tendency in a highly organised and efficient modern industrial state is for the important cities to spring up about the centres of industrial raw material. For that reason, Baku, Stalingrad and Rostov are growing at terrific speed, while Leningrad is moribund, or merely active because of the presence therein of a highly conscious proletariat, a legacy from the old regime. Our mineral wealth and the chief areas of our agricultural wealth are in the south. So Russia turns towards the south.’

‘Ha!’ I cried. I thought so. Through India, Persia, Bessarabia.’

‘Eh?’ he said.

‘What of Moscow?’ I countered.

Mr. Kotpov smiled.

‘Moscow is the centre of government,’ he said. It has immense traditional interest for our peasants. It is worth preserving for that reason although it will cost a great deal to regularise it, to turn it, for instance, into a pattern city like Buenos Ayres.’

‘You mean to say that the government definitely stays in Moscow in order to show the peasants that there is no difference between the Bolshevik government and the traditional Russian governments of the Tsars, the Little Fathers?’

‘No, no,’ said Mr. Kotpov, as he began to pare his nails. It is something quite sociological that I had in mind.’

He yawned and said a little later:

‘The week-end habit is growing among us as in England. Everybody tries to have a cottage in the country. You’ll find hardly any peasant life in the neighbourhood of Moscow. The city is stretching. But unfortunately there is a great lack of tennis and golf clubs in the country. We are too centralised at present. One has to go into the city for all one’s amusements. It is tragic’

‘Yes,’ I thought. ‘His type is already perfectly standardised. He says “everybody tries to have a cottage in the country” with the same air that an English middle class person would say that “everybody is out of town in August.” There is no hope for the proletariat. Plus ga change, plus c’est la mime chose.’

Just for fun I asked Mr. Kotpov what he thought of the possibility of a world revolution. He seemed to have lost all interest overnight in the Indian question and in the attitude of Irish intellectuals towards the Russian treatment of national minorities.

‘Yes,’ he said, with a sigh of boredom. ‘The world crisis is becoming more acute abroad. However, our internal situation is so interesting at present, what with the Five Year Plan, especially the collectivisation of the peasants, that one has little time to speculate idly about foreign affairs.’

Woe to the proletariat of Battersea and Alexandrplatz. I tried Mr. Kotpov on every conceivable subject, in the hope of getting some slight message of encouragement to bring back to my friends in Battersea and Ringsend, but I might as well have tried a Civil Servant in Whitehall for all the signs of revolutionary fervour I discovered in Mr. Kotpov. On the other hand, his manners were perfect, his information considerable and his general culture infinitely superior to that of his English replicas, who set off for London every morning from Coulsdon and other places, with copies of the Times.

‘Moscow!’ cried Mr. Kotpov suddenly, jumping to his feet and seizing his portfolio.

‘Good God!’ I cried. ‘That’s terrible.’

‘Pardon me?’ said Mr. Kotpov.

I mean to say that I have not prepared my mind to receive the proper impression of arrival in Moscow.’

‘Hm!’ said Mr. Kotpov, looking at me in a disdainful fashion.

I could see that he had by now come to the conclusion that I was a disreputable character, one whose acquaintance it was not desirable to cultivate. I felt that he disapproved of my dress, my manners, my language and my general attitude towards life; that he was convinced I had not been to a proper school and that my relatives were under a cloud. Indeed, when he bowed coldly and took his portfolio and his suitcase out into the corridor among his friends and equals, I felt that I was arriving in Moscow as a proletarian and that I had no hope of being received in portfolio drawingrooms.

‘There you are, you fool,’ I said to myself. ‘You have come all this way for nothing. For you have arrived in Moscow without seeing that wonderful effect of golden domes in sunlight which all writers rave about on approaching this wonderful city. You besotted fellow, your eyes can only see the ruins of locomotives and goods waggons, three bearded peasants sitting on a ruined truck, two goats trying to eat a tin canister and a rich growth of grass between railway tracks. Nobody will ever believe that this is Moscow. A golden dome! My kingdom for a golden dome.’

But I’m blowed if I could see anything more than I have related. It was less impressive than arriving at Mullingar or Wolverhampton.

Chapter XI. I Promise To Make War

In Leningrad I had been advised that the Grand Hotel at Moscow was the best place for me to stay, so I set forth from the station to look for it. There were a number of cabs, but the doctor had terrified me to such an extent that I was loath to celebrate my arrival in Moscow by the counter-revolutionary conduct of riding in one. In any case, I was shrewdly aware that I had only eight roubles and it might cost that and more to go as far as the hotel in a cab. So I boarded the first tram I saw and told the conductor where I wanted to go. He put me down in a large square some distance away.

‘Grand Hotel?’ I asked him.

He shrugged his shoulders and the tram moved off. I walked over to the pavement, put down my suitcase, sighed and looked about me.

‘Certainly,’ I thought, ‘this city looks exciting. If Leningrad looked like a tomb, this looks like a bee-hive in a state of violent excitement. What crowds! What extraordinary buildings! What bizarre costumes! The very air is odd and charged with a form of neurasthenia which makes one forget everything, except the necessity to do something violent! Bo! Bo! How happy one could be here if one had a million roubles in one’s pocket and one knew the language. But I have only eight roubles and I don’t know the language. I have no friends. I don’t know why I’m here. What am I to do?’

After some thought, I remembered that I had letters of introduction to various people, English and Russian, but a curious form of shyness which I have never been able to conquer prevents me from presenting a letter of introduction in order to make an acquaintance, especially under the peculiar circumstances in which I found myself. On the other hand, no writer suffers from feelings of delicacy about his publishers. I decided to throw myself on the protection of my publishers, after first getting rid of my suitcase, which bothered me.

‘That is the cause of my melancholy,’ I thought, ‘this suitcase. The possession of baggage is always responsible for the irritation felt by travellers. I shall get a room and leave my baggage there. I might even get a meal.’

By continual questioning I reached the Grand Hotel. At the desk, an official looked at me and said in perfect English:

‘You want a room? Have you booked? I’m afraid, sir, it’s utterly impossible. Every room in Moscow is taken at this moment. You should have made arrangements beforehand at this time of the year.’

‘Well! Could I at least find a corner in your cloak room for my kit?’

‘With pleasure,’ he said.

Having got rid of my suitcase and my overcoat I sallied forth to look for my publishers. I was so glad to get rid of my suitcase that I forgot to ask the official for the address of my publishers and I was gone a long way before I realised that I did not know the address. By that time I could not find my way back to the hotel. I was completely lost.

‘Never mind,’ I thought. ‘This is fun. Let’s see whether I can find the place without knowing the language.’

I asked twenty-seven citizens without success. Then I wandered into a bookshop, where I found behind a counter a young man who spoke English. But it was difficult to get him to give me the information I desired. He asked me my nationality and then began to question me about the political situation in Ireland, about Irish revolutionaries whom he had met in Moscow and about the attitude of the Irish proletariat to the Five Year Plan. He shook hands with me five times, invited me to come to the theatre with him and treated me with a great deal of affectionate courtesy, even holding forth for ten minutes on the history of his life, describing in great detail the suffering of his family on arrival as immigrants in the United States of America, the corruption of officials in the American Federation of Labour, the possibility of organising Russian industry without the assistance of foreign capital, through the agency of skilled American workers of revolutionary integrity, detailing his conception of world civilisation one hundred years after the final disappearance of classes, and hinting that he had a scheme for the overthrow of world capitalism through the development of a certain branch of science, which at the moment was considered inopportune by the comrades with whom he had discussed the idea.

There were now some ten citizens waiting to be served at his counter, but that did not prevent the young man from spending a further twenty-five minutes in an excited fashion telling me about his conception of the ‘social basis’ of literature. Trembling, I began to chew a slip of paper which I found on the counter and listened to an extraordinary theory that world literature from the earliest times has been inspired by the revolt of the masses against exploitation. While my new acquaintance was explaining to me that the philosophic idea in Hamlet was typical of the demoralizes sation of Western European intellectuals, principally in their attitude towards the re-organisation of the family, I became absorbed in the examination of the theory of insanity. Was I insane or was he insane? Was my chewing a slip of paper caused by my hunger or by the weakening of my senses, so that I was no longer able to establish the difference between nourishing food and paper? Did I really want to get to my publishers? Was I in Moscow or in London?

However, he finally wrote down the required address on a slip of paper and was handing it to me, when he suddenly swore and said that he was doubtful if that was the address I required. But I grabbed it from him, shook his hand with violence and dashed from the shop. I showed it to three policemen whom I met as I hurried along. It made no impression on them. I was at last on the point of giving up the effort to find the place when I heard two men in front of me talking English. I seized one of them by the shoulder and begged him to help me. He was an American engineer and the man with him was his Russian guide.

The American pointed to his guide and said to me:

‘Get hold of one of these birds and stick to him, otherwise you’re lost in this town. And say, when you have time come around and have a drink with me. Give this bird the address. Now lead on, Russky, at full speed to that address. Say, this bird knows the town. I don’t know how he does it, but he can get around. I’ve been here a month, but I can hardly find my room at the hotel. Whoever made this town must have been in the rats, it’s all so mixed up I can’t see the difference between one street and another. And as for finding the number of any particular house in a street, it’s certainly impossible. Say, look. He’s got it already. The man is a wonder. What did I tell you? Well! See you later.’

Leaving me in front of a building, the American and his guide dashed off in a hurry that is typical of Moscow. I entered, walked up a stairway and interrogated a man whom I met on a landing. He shook his head after I had spoken for some ten minutes. Then he tried to escape, but I seized him by the arm and held him. He shook his head once more and brought me into a large room, where a number of people were seated at desks. A middle-aged lady came over and asked me what I wanted in French, which language she spoke almost as badly as myself. But as soon as I saw her I felt at home and much happier than I had done since my arrival in Russia.

One is always inclined to judge classes, sects, nationalities and professions by the evil or good impression made by a single individual one has met. For that reason, I have an unreasoning admiration for Quakers because an Englishwoman of my acquaintance belongs to that religious conviction. Her kindness, her breeding, her intelligence, her spiritual beauty seem to me as near perfection as is possible for humanity. So I immediately likened this Russian woman to a Quaker.

She was between forty and fifty years of age, pale of countenance, with grey hair, frail of body, timid in expression and movement, with a refined and nervous voice. It was obvious at once that she was a woman of good breeding, educated and cultured above the ordinary, one of that class which does not really belong to any country and is to be found in almost every civilised country, women who come very near to attaining the ideal of Christianity, by kindness, humility and good works.

When I explained to her who I was and the situation in which I found myself, she welcomed me heartily and immediately placed herself at my disposal, until I should ‘get in touch with the competent authorities.’

‘Oh! Dear! But why didn’t you notify us that you were coming?’

I was, of course, ashamed to tell her why I had sneaked into the country without letting anybody know I was coming and more than ever, I wished I had stayed at home; for how could one lie about such a charming woman and in face of such hospitality?

I shall take you/ she said, ‘to the Bureau of Revolutionary Literature, where everything shall be arranged for you.’

We set forth into the street. How nervous she was! The least noise made her start and clutch my arm. Crossing a street was an ordeal for her. Yet her conversation was as orderly as her nervous system was the reverse. And her attitude towards life, judging from her conversation, was that of an enthusiast, whose social activities gave full expression to her passion for civilisation and human happiness. She said little and spoke gently, without exaggeration or excitement, without hatred for the bourgeoisie or zeal for the class war, but she inspired me, while I was with her, with an enthusiasm for Communism and for the work being done in Russia to achieve an ideal society. Listening to her speak and feeling the influence of the peace and good-will that emanated from her personality, life seemed a joyous dream and the world a fairyland in which there was no evil, nothing but laughter and singing and love.

‘May I call you comrade?’ she said. ‘Thank you. Comrade, you must associate as much as possible with our young people while you stay in Russia. The older generations have been corrupted and embittered by the old life that has passed away. Their nerves are gone and they cannot transmit to their feelings the theory of society which they accept with their intelligence. But the young people have grown up with the new ideal as their reality and it is among them that you may hope to find the essential beauty of the Communist idea. Forgive the old their fanaticism, which is but the outcome of exhaustion and suffering. And among the young also there is a lot to forgive, the arrogance of youth. But even so, how I wish I were young, even to be tactless and arrogant like the young, but to have that vision of a wonderful future. We others must content ourselves with working for that, to prepare the way for the young. Seret prudens agricola arbores, quarumfruges aspiciet nunquam. It is as if one were the mother of a whole generation. Oh! I hope they are going to give us time to finish our work.’

She turned towards me and said with fear in her eyes:

‘Do you think they are really going to make war on us soon, the others?’

How could I tell this Communist saint that it was my earnest hope that war would break out as soon as possible, to hasten the conquest of Europe by the Bolsheviks, since it was now obvious to me that the latter had a higher idea of civilisation than the Europeans, as well as being younger, fresher and more strong. This woman confused Lenin with Christ and would not understand that her male counterpart, the captain of the ship on which I arrived, that other Bolshevik saint, had somewhat different ideas about the development of the proletarian revolution. Such is life. Timid English Quaker women, who would not willingly shorten the life of a wounded fly, are used by violent, red-faced generals to keep the Indians in subjection. To me they are all equally beautiful, the kind women, the red-nosed generals, the idealists, the enslavers, the Quakers and the brooding fanatics with visions of world conquest and of human equality to be imposed by violence. How could I explain that to her? Or to myself, how could I explain my almost insane incapacity for believing in the topical religions of rampant mankind? They all play their parts and mine is the role of the onlooker in the stalls, who claps his hands in applause or hisses in condemnation, according as they play well or badly, the hero, the villain, the clown and all the different minor characters who flavour the piece with the divers sauces of their actions and philosophies.

There was nobody in the office of the Bureau of Revolutionary Literature, so the lady brought me to the room of one of the members a long distance away. He was at home and she left me in charge of him. He was a Roumanian Jew and a man of the world, who made me feel at home immediately, treating me with kindness. Although he and his wife had but one room, in which they both lived and where he kept all his books, of which he had a considerable number, by extraordinary ingenuity they contrived to give their lodging an air of luxury and refinement that was exceedingly comfortable. After one glance, he decided that I must have a shave and a bath as soon as possible. He himself had just finished his toilet. While I shaved at his writing desk and had a bath in a large tub behind a screen, I related my adventures since my arrival in Leningrad. He laughed heartily and accused me of incredible eccentricity.

If you change the word eccentricity into folly you’ll be nearer the point,’ I said. Tndeed my folly borders on insanity, for I have arrived here with eight roubles and with hardly any kit.’

He laughed again and assured me that I had no need to worry about money or luggage. On the contrary, my eccentricities would but serve to endear me to the Moscow intellectuals, who were rather wearied by the pompousness of European writers.

‘Let us hope so,’ I said. ‘Unfortunately, I have a habit of becoming wearisome after a little while.’

It is quite true/ he said. ‘There is nothing more boring than the pose assumed by English writers especially, although the French are nearly as bad. They attach so much importance to themselves that it is impossible for others to attach any further importance, so contempt is attached instead. It is sad that the supply of literary geniuses is not equal to the number of people who wish to assume genius.’

I was delighted with this man. He told me he had been eight years in Russia and that he had become Russified and intended never to leave the country. He then invited me to have breakfast with him. It was excellent. Residence in France had given him an appreciation of food which I found invaluable at that moment. We had delicious Russian olives, various kinds of fish, eggs and excellent coffee.

I recommend this kind of fish, especially/ said my host. It comes from the Caspian Sea and is very rare. It is very curious. One had read that the Russians were interested in food, but it is quite the contrary. They have no interest in food.’

In Ireland during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries/ I replied, ‘food and the eating of it were highly respected, so that it was a country pleasant for travellers and famous for its hospitality, joy of life and gay living. Now the contrary holds good, owing to the disappearance of a leisured aristocracy and the appearance of a bourgeoisie that is not yet prosperous or civilised. The same thing is probably happening in Russia.’

He shook his head and began to discuss literature, with which he seemed to be conversant to a high degree.

I find American literature more interesting than modern English, French or German literature,’ he said. ‘Everything seems to have been already written in these latter countries, whereas in America hardly anything has been written. Beginnings are always more interesting than ends, in literature as in love.’

‘And in Russia?’

‘Here politics are so interesting that they absorb all the talent of the country. Even those who go in for literature as a form of expression do so from political motives rather than for a love of art for art’s sake. I am a critic and journalist, but I am primarily a Communist. I love literature, but I am more interested in politics. And you? Are you interested in politics or in literature?’

I am interested in everything,’ I replied. ‘Politics are an aspect of life; that is all. So is horse racing. Literature for me is my means of expressing my personality. Therefore my interest in it is immeasurably greater than my interest in politics. If I were a Russian it might be different. After all, Napoleon began his career as a writer. Were it not for the French Revolution he might have continued as a writer. Even at my age I can understand how delightful it would be to plunge into Russian politics; especially ten years hence. This fish is certainly excellent.’

I admired the character and appearance of my host. In dress he was somewhat of a dandy, but achieved by tidiness what is usually achieved by consummate tailoring and expensive materials in Western European cities. In that way, he retained the appearance of a proletarian while satisfying his innate love of fashion. In the same way, he affected a harmony between his conservative and essentially middle-class nature and the ideals of revolutionary Communism. How? I can never understand this trick of self-effacement, of being one thing and effectively pretending to be something else, of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, of being a successful adventurer, of being so useful to everybody that nobody feels inclined to take offence; and at the same time being perfectly mannered, moderately worthy, good company, almost a gentleman, not objectionably cunning.

After breakfast we set out to the Bureau of Revolutionary Literature.

Chapter XII. I State My Position

We arrived at a little square off the Kusnetsky Most. It was obviously very new. The grass was just sprouting on the grass plots. The garden seats were new and the gravel on the paths was still rough and practically untrodden. But every seat was occupied and there were children already playing on the paths.

‘You see this little square?’ said my friend.

‘Yes,i I said. It is a pretty little square. It gives me great joy to see people lounging on seats in the heart of a city and children playing. Moscow is a pleasant place, entirely unlike London.’

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘But let me tell you that this square is made on the site of a church.’

‘How pleasant!’ I cried in rapture. ‘That is entirely in keeping with my idea of civilisation.’

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ he said. ‘You have heard of course in England of the persecution of religion in Soviet Russia.’

I was pleased to hear of it,’ I replied. I have suffered all my life at the hands of organised religion. To desire revenge is human.’

‘But you will find,’ he said, ‘that there is no persecution. The situation is such. In Russia we no longer require the aid of superstitious practices. Except, of course, the old and ignorant and the parasites who made their living out of the old and ignorant, the priests.’

‘What is that magnificent new building in process of construction over there?’ I asked, pointing to an interesting red brick house that had already reached its tenth storey and looked like going farther. ‘Is it a new Communist church to take the place of the old Christian church? I have a theory of religion. One God is always deposed by another. He never gives place to vacuum or atheism.’

‘That is a romantic theory,’ said my friend, ‘disproved in this case by the fact that that building has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, but is concerned with the very matter-of-fact business of guarding the state and the revolution. That new building is for the workers in the G.P.U., our national police force.’

‘Really?’

‘Quite true.’

‘But then it has a religious significance.’

‘How?’

‘What is that other large and ugly building to the left ?’

‘That is the Commisariat of Foreign Affairs.’

‘And that statue?’

‘That is a monument to the memory of Djerjinsky, former chief of the G.P.U.’

It is an ugly monument and reminds me strangely of the artistic taste of the early Christians, just as the G.P.U. building reminds me of the barracks of the Swiss Guards at Rome and the Foreign Office of the College of Cardinals. Indeed I shall be greatly surprised if history does not prove that God, instead of being annihilated by the Russian Revolution, has merely assumed Russian nationality. I have been convinced for the past ten years that Dostoievsky was the father of the Russian Revolution.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ he said.

I told you I was mad,’ I answered, with a laugh.

He also laughed and said:

‘Here is the bureau, in this building.’

We entered an office building opposite the new brick house of the Bolshevik Swiss Guards, mounted two flights of stairs and entered the office of the Bureau of Revolutionary Literature. The room was crowded with men and women, who gave me a reception worthy of a worthier person than myself. When I had shaken hands with everybody, I was seated at a table, given a sheet of paper and a pen and asked to state my position should capitalist Europe declare war on the Soviet Union.

In order to explain the situation to me, I was told that the Bureau had telegraphed to various prominent writers in Western Europe asking similar questions. George Bernard Shaw, when asked what would be his position, telegraphed in reply, ‘The hanging position.’

‘This is a nice how d’ye do,’ I said to myself. ‘God bless the Jesuits.’

For, upon my honour, I have no intention whatsoever of taking part in any war, great or small, in future, unless it be of my own making. I have had enough of war. I loathe war. I consider it a stupid, ungainly and unpleasant business, concerned with hunger, thirst, wet feet, lack of sleep, too much noise, disease, lice, wounds and horrible death. As far as I am concerned, war to end capitalism is war and unpleasant, just as much as the war in which I participated, which was the war to end war. The only people who want war are those who have no intention of taking part in war, people who are protected by their sex or their infirmities or their age or their position in society from ever toting a gun or a pack or a sheepskin. I, on the other hand, am like the wretched fellow whom I saw standing on the brink of the pier at Leningrad, a muit to whom somebody gives a gun and a pat on the back and sends the blighter shuddering but gallant to Hell. Bo! Bo! Catch me at it again. Shaw is too old to fight and I hope he enjoys being hanged; but if there is a cave anywhere, deep enough to withstand air bombs, I’m for it in case of hostilities.

I looked slyly around the room at the revolutionary writers of Moscow and saw that they were all intelligent above the ordinary, not the sort of people one would be likely to find up to their necks in mud and water on a night of heavy bombardment. Indeed, it was easy to see that they all belonged with one or two exceptions to the race that is chosen, for the last two thousand years, for commerce but not for war.

‘Why pick on me?’ I thought. ‘My teeth are bad and my liver is diseased. But still. ... I have only eight roubles and I’m far from home.’

So I wrote, God forgive me, having no intention of ever again firing a shot at anybody but my creditors:

‘Should capitalist Europe declare war on the Soviet Union, I’ll make war on capitalist Europe with every means in my power.’

This warlike statement was received with deafening applause and I grew rather sorry I was not of the stuff with which they make heroes. But in any case, my answer served its immediate purpose. The cashier at once paid me for a story which had been printed in the Bureau’s magazine five years previously. I was informed that on the following day the State Publishing House would pay me a thousand roubles on account of royalties due to me. Arrangements were made for getting me a room and I was given a guide to attend to all my wants and comforts.

I do not wish to infer that I would have been treated with discourtesy had I told the truth, that I would not have been paid my royalties and that I would have been left without a room or a guide. I merely want to point out how ungainly is the Russian method of greasing the palms of writers compared to the methods in vogue in capitalist countries, especially in England. The Russian method rather resembles the French method, where journalists are almost openly and in public subsidised by the government. In England recalcitrant writers are gently allowed to starve, unless they bow their heads to the British gods of good form and imperial expediency. It is much more subtle, the British method, and it does not leave such a bad taste in the mouths of sensitive persons; although it certainly leaves an extreme emptiness in the stomachs of persons who are too sensitive to be bought.

In the same manner, the whole Bureau of Revolutionary Literature appeared to me a crude and ungainly affair. Under the direction of the Russian Communist Party (the Keepers of the Word, the Communist Hierarchy), this organization aimed at uniting the principal writers of the world under its control, for the purpose of demoralizing capitalism and encouraging the working class of the world to make war on their oppressors. A perfectly laudable and admirable scheme, were it possible or intelligently carried out. But writers, especially creative writers, are curious individuals. They dislike any form of control and are continually at war with their wives, who try to keep them sober, tidy and industrious, with their publishers, who try to rob them, with their editors, who try to curb their passion for obscenity, and with the philistine public, which tries to censor their passion for life. When cthe situation is such’ in Western Europe, where a dying civilization grants liberal privileges to men of talent, how much more difficult must it be to govern men who are by nature anarchists, jealous of governance, by the rules of a community where a nascent civilization is being created in territories inhabited by people who are almost savage and therefore alien to liberal principles? In such a nascent civilization a strict censorship of conduct is necessary as well as a violent personal dictatorship. The citizens are for the most part peasants and submit peaceably to dictatorship, being ignorant of that development of personal initiative which breeds anarchy. Now the fault of the Russian Bureau of Revolutionary Literature is that it tries to govern civilised Europeans on the same principle that it governs uncivilised Russians; it tries to treat Europeans as if they were naive children like the Russians; which is impossible.

In any case, the Bureau was manned almost entirely by Jews and that race is notoriously dogmatic and fanatical. An organisation governed entirely by Jews is sure to be full of sound and fury, unless it has to deal entirely with Jews who love sound and fury. And Jews have never been able to understand the creative passion. No doubt they have given great artists to the world, but as a rule, Jewish men of genius are critics like Marx and fanatics like Jesus Christ rather than poets like Shakespeare. They prefer to push their genius down throats with violence and bitterness rather than let it enter passionately through the pores into the blood, in the intoxicating manner preferred by less intense races.

Jews analyse life. They document. They catalogue. They treat life as if it were a warehouse, stocked with goods for sale. They are bitten by the gad-fly of hysteria, whose poison they seek to eject from their system by continual appeals to one god after another; and in despair at the failure of their gods to cure them, they reject their gods almost as soon as they have created them. Whereas the lazy gentiles worship beauty for her own sake and are loath to dissect her and hold up her entrails to the microscope.

So here was this Bureau of Revolutionary Literature in Moscow, trying to harness literature to the wheels of Communism and trying to enrol me as one of its progandists. I said nothing against the idea. What the devil had it got to do with me? You can put a uniform on anybody but you cannot make him march unless his brain wills to move his feet.

I was put in charge of a comrade, who spoke English very well. He was a very charming fellow, very intense and very enthusiastic, eminently learned in literature, master of some six or seven languages, an ardent communist, twenty-five years of age, Levit by name. He at once proceeded to explain to me the construction and objective of the Bureau. He was slim and tall. He had a pale, intellectual countenance and he wore pince-nez, and spoke as if he were at the telephone trying to explain to a police-sergeant that his house had just been robbed.

‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘the situation is such. This Bureau is such a place. It is the centre of a world organisation to co-ordinate the activities of proletarian writers. This is the foreign section of the Bureau. We have centres, similar to this, in Tchecho-Slovakia, Germany, France and in many other countries. All foreign writers coming into Russia come to us and we give them information, and guidance, except such as are entirely bourgeois, which go to the society for cultural relations. Such people, which we cannot very well forbid to come, are nevertheless brought around by that other society, so that they may see what is best and be unable to tell too many lies.’

‘Good God!’ I thought. If he only knew my real purpose!’

In the same way,’ he continued, ‘all foreign books translated into Russian pass through our hands and such books are translated as we consider useful to the proletarian revolution and only such. We also publish in our magazine such stories and articles by foreign writers as are useful for our proletariat. The situation is such. There is also, of course, in Russia, the Bureau of Proletarian Writers, which is under the direction of this Bureau, because all writers must be organised and literature must play a revolutionary role in building up the Soviet Union and also help greatly with the Five Year Plan. Later you shall see all that. Now we shall go at first to a cinema with all the comrades and then arrange about your room and other things.’

However, I had to remain in the room while a long argument went on about something which I could not understand. This lasted an hour and there seemed to be no reason why it should not last for ever. Everybody talked at once and there seemed to be nobody in charge, although there was a secretary and treasurer and various other officials present. This intrigued me, especially as every once in a while somebody approached and jocularly told me in bad French what an anarchist I was and that I would do well to study a little proletarian discipline. What damned humbug!

The noise got on my nerves to such an extent that I felt utterly dazed when they all finally dashed out of the Bureau into the street, on the way to the Sovkino studio, where the film was to be shown. On the way we met a troupe of German actors and actresses who were also going to the film. It was, in fact, shown for their benefit. They were playing in Moscow just then. We all went together.

Moving in the same anarchical fashion, with a great deal of shouting and laughter, we arrived finally at the showroom (I could not for the life of me say where it was or how we got there, for even though I enquired several times as to names of streets and other things, the last thing one can get in Russia is a plain answer to a plain question). Still shouting and laughing, we all sat down and the film was thrown on the screen. The shouting and the laughter continued.

I love this new art of the cinematograph. No other art can give such a respite from reality, which is sometimes a torture, being the consciousness of poverty, sorrow or pain. In the gloom of the cinema theatre one can dream in peace, in silence, although one is surrounded by people, while the farthest ends of the earth are brought to one’s immediate vision. In the theatre where living actors are on the stage, the dream illusion is not sufficiently strong, as the flesh and blood of the actors thrust themselves into the foreground. But on the screen all is an illusion, everything is remote and completely detached from one’s immediate environment. One is spying on an imitation of life, concealed and unknown.

For that reason, I hate films that are educational or dogmatic and I hate being spoken to when in a film theatre. The dream illusion is destroyed. For that reason also, I cannot understand the craze of our intellectuals for the modern Russian film. All of them that I have seen amuse me less than the wild films of cowboy life which used to be such a popular export from the Hollywood studios; certainly much less interesting than the early comic films of Chaplin and the serious products of the German studios.

All modern Russian films that I have seen are based on a theory of some sort. Art, on the other hand, is not based on a theory, nor on any preconceived dogma; but it springs out of life and is brought to life by a vision in the mind of the artist, which, in itself, comes into the mind from a wild fever in the bowels and is inexplicable. To me this Russian deification of the mass as the sole material for artistic creation is atavistic drivel, the child of mediocrity, which, in its jealousy of genius, throws itself on the bosom of the mob. Neither is it anything new, but an intense form of the decadent theories current in western European capitals in the years immediately preceding the War. In art, ambitious theories are always a sign of impotence and laziness and mediocrity.

Here a film was thrown on the screen dealing with the naval revolt at Kronstadt during the revolution of 1917. Its sole importance was that it dealt with the revolution of 1917, which is an historical event of great importance. Even so, I was prepared to enjoy it, but my friend Levit insisted on translating the sub-titles in a loud voice, right into my ear. At the same time two other guides were translating the sub-titles into German for the benefit of the Germans, while still another guide was translating the sub-titles into Japanese for the benefit of a Japanese visitor. The others, at the same time, were carrying on conversations, passing loud remarks on the film and laughing. The guides tried to shout one another down and sometimes argued about the translations. I tried to stop my guide, saying I was not interested in the sub-titles. But he refused to stop, being obviously solely interested in shouting down his rivals and showing off his knowledge of English. Finally, in order to escape, I whispered in his ear that I wanted to go to the lavatory.

‘But certainly,’ said comrade Levit, ‘we shall go-’

Straightaway, we fetched my kit from the Grand Hotel and brought it to The House of the East, where a room had already been found for me. I was given a magnificent room, larger than most flats in London and Paris. In fact, it was a suite of rooms all in one, for there were two large alcoves, curtained off, one containing two small beds and the other being a dressing room. The main room was furnished as a sitting room. I appreciated the civilised motives which inspired the two beds; as if the management understood that I might very easily get married at any moment during the day or night.

It was seven o’clock by the time we had finished arrangements about my room and as I had eaten nothing since breakfast, I suggested a meal.

‘Wonderful,’ said my friend. ‘We shall eat at the House of the Press.’

He had no objection to Isvostiks, so I was at last able to satisfy my craving for a ride in one. I found it very pleasant. One is almost on a level with the street, not enclosed in any way, able to observe the pedestrians and the scenery in comfort, owing to the extremely slow motion of the horse, and yet persuaded that the journey is being made at the greatest possible speed by the furious oaths and whippings of the driver. On the way my friend told me a great deal about himself.

‘You see,’ he said, pointing at Moscow with a circular wave of his arms, ‘this city is not suitable for the building of socialism. It is, like many European writers, a mass of nonsense, all twists and turns and very much irregularity. All this very probably must be torn down and a new city built in its place. All the streets must be torn up, the cobble stones taken away and the holes filled up and the surface covered with asphalt. The districts must be organised on a rational basis. Communal housing systems must be made, department stores built, everything on a mass scale as is necessary for socialism, and the ideas of proletarian culture and hygiene, put into practice by the introduction of so-tospeak rus in urbe and local facilities for the satisfaction of the mass craving for art and such things of the intellect. So you see, the situation is such, immense work is to be done, not only here but in all the Union. And we all look upon ourselves as soldiers in this great, and I may say holy, war, to build a beautiful life, which is socialism. It is an immense work. Sometimes I shudder and sweat when I think of this immense work.’

Here he shuddered and put his hand on his heart.

‘But already,’ he cried, ‘the work has begun.’

At that moment the cab jolted violently and the horse, whipped fiercely, dashed aside to avoid a huge hole in the ground.

‘See,’ cried my friend excitedly. ‘This hole was not there this morning but already during the day it has been made. Wonderful.’

We turned a corner and halted. Instead of a thoroughfare there was a great mountain of earth and stones. The driver cursed and turned back to go another way.

‘Everywhere,’ cried my friend excitedly, ‘holes are made and streets torn up in order to put down asphalt. It is wonderful. In two years Moscow shall be all asphalt. In ten years every sign of the old city shall be swept away and a new socialist city shall be built. Wonderful. Hey!’

We were thrown into one another’s arms and one wheel went into the air, as the cab escaped another hole by the skin of its teeth. Before we could recover our balance another cab dashed into ours and a furious whipping and cursing began, which lasted for three minutes, ending in the victory of our driver over his enemy, who fled in confusion.

It’s terrible,’ cried my friend. ‘Why don’t they get Ford taxis and abolish this anarchy?’

But almost immediately he became enthusiastic once more as our cab found a street that was not torn up and jolted along peacefully at the rate of a mile an hour.

I must talk to you about your books,’ he continued. I like them. They are very good, but here in Russia you must learn a new ideology. Then they shall be better. You must now begin to write for the revolution. Otherwise, literature is useless. For myself, I am such a person, what you call a bookworm, a critic. I am such a man, who reads everything, a walking bookshop. My speciality is English literature of the nineteenth century. But I also have studied English literature of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries. But especially the nineteenth century is interesting for us in Russia, as it was in that period that England became an industrial country. Therefore, the literature of that period must bear a relation to our present needs, when we are building our industries. You see that among us everything is intelligently organised. That bloody fellow! What is he doing?’

This time the cab had got into a hole and was trying to get out again; but that was difficult as one of the wheels kept slipping along a tram track that had been exposed by the street excavations. A number of workmen engaged in digging the street looked on with amusement; but finally a couple of them helped the driver to lift the wheel on to the untorn surface. We moved on.

‘You see,’ said my friend, ‘the Five Year Plan is everywhere, in the streets as well as in the factories and fields.’

‘Don’t you find it uncomfortable?’ I said. ‘I mean, in order to carry out the Five Year Plan, you have to put up with all sorts of discomfort, in moving from one place to another, in the matter of food and cigarettes and clothes.’

‘Comrade,’ he cried, ‘the situation is such. For all good citizens of the Soviet Union, these discomforts and hardships are a pleasure. And more especially for citizens like myself. I must tell you I was not always a proletarian. My parents belonged to the bourgeoisie. Even I myself was such a dreadful type, that I opposed the revolution when the time of the great famine came. Then I realised that my position was incorrect, seeing that the whole capitalist world was in league with the whites and the social revolutionaries against the Communists. So I have since been a Bolshevik. I am not a member of the Party and therefore cannot call myself a Communist. But I hope one day, perhaps, the proletariat is going to forgive me my ancestry and my past errors and take me into the Party. To that end I work hard and try to annihilate in my nature all defects. I try all the time to annihilate my personality and to become absorbed in the mass. I try very hard to cease to be an individual and to become a unit in the broad bosom of the masses. I try to forget completely that I am such a one, Theodore Levit, and I would like just to call myself by a number and to work without recognition, work day and night, all the time, until my death, so that finally, this great crime shall be forgiven and I shall become completely a brother of the lowest and most humble proletarian, who is greater than I, even though he does nothing but stand so, with his arms folded, greater because he has not sinned like I and he is a pure proletarian.’

‘Christ!’ I thought. ‘How little it has changed in two thousand years, this religion of seeking God through self-effacement!’

‘Therefore comrade,’ he continued, almost in a state of frenzy, ‘the situation is such. To suffer is a pleasure for me. And very many Russian intellectuals are like, being of bourgeois ancestry. In our Bureau there are many such. They also struggle to annihilate their personality and to learn how to suffer with the masses. For us it is even necessary to be more eager than the masses, because we are on trial. In that way, we are watch dogs of the revolution, as somebody has said. One day, on a tramcar, I heard three workers talking about the shortage of food in a loud voice, complaining in a counter-revolutionary manner that it was difficult to get butter. At the next stop I called a militia man and these three men were brought to the militia post where I made a statement against them. In such a way we are the watch dogs of the revolution. But now we have arrived and eating shall take place.’

The House of the Press, or as we should call it, the Press Club was open to everybody connected with journalism and publishing in Moscow. Here the members could have their meals and amuse themselves at billiards and other games. It was not a very ornate place, its restaurant being rather like those foreign restaurants in Bloomsbury frequented by the younger intellectuals. But the food was excellent and the atmosphere was pleasant. Over some excellent soup, roast goose and vodka, my friend continued to enlighten me on the subject of Soviet intellectuals.

In Russia we have no use for the bohemian writer,’ he said. ‘We look upon the writer as a worker, like a carpenter or a dock labourer. Therefore he is paid by the number of words he writes and he must write a certain number of words every month in order to live. Just as the carpenter must make a fixed number of chairs or tables. It is better so.’

It is difficult to believe that,’ I said. ‘Do novelists, for instance, all write a certain number of words a month and do they get paid by the word?’

‘All get paid that way,’ he said. ‘A novel is paid for at the rate of one thousand roubles for six typographical pages. It does not matter if the writer is famous or not, all get paid alike. In England it is different.’

‘But do all writers get paid just one thousand roubles for the complete rights of their books?’

‘Oh! No,’ he said. ‘The situation is such. This money is paid on publication. Then if another edition is published another thousand roubles is paid. Each edition counts as one book. Also in Russia there is no monopoly. A writer may sell his book several times, if he can find publishers for it.’

‘But that amounts to the same thing as in England/ I said. ‘The popular writer can get rich while the unpopular writer merely gets one thousand roubles per book.’

It is so,’ he said. ‘But there are other means of preventing the popular writer from getting too rich.’

‘How?’ I said.

It is a Russian method,’ he said, but refused to disclose the method.

From other sources, I learned this method, which is an ingenious one. It was the case of a writer called Boris Pilniak which disclosed the method. Pilniak was an efficient and popular writer who prospered exceedingly. He bought himself a house and stocked it with choice furniture, which he found in the antique shops of Moscow. He took holidays abroad where he lived comfortably on his foreign royalties, as his books were also popular in central Europe. He brought from abroad choice raiment and other amenities, which his Soviet brothers were unable to procure. In a word, Comrade Pilniak began to lead a life which resembled remarkably that of a rich bourgeois writer in England, America or France. He thus aroused the jealousy of his brother writers and of the government, who were forced by law to starve on three hundred roubles a month. Becoming conceited by too much prosperity, he wrote a novel which was a trifle too daring. The government officials, seeing their chance of putting him in his proper place, refused to publish the manuscript in Russia, but allowed it to be exported to Germany, where it was received with enthusiasm by the Russian counter-revolutionary groups and published broadcast in serial form in their newspapers. These newspapers being imported into Russia were used by the government as a proof that Pilniak was a counter-revolutionary in tendency. The man was disgraced. His popularity disappeared and he is again a struggling Soviet writer.

‘Tell me,’ said comrade Levit suddenly, ‘the exact meaning of the word piobrach and whether it is an Irish or a Scotch word?’

It means piping,’ I said, ‘from piob, meaning pipe, a musical instrument popular among the Irish Gaels. It is an Irish word and not a Scotch word, as there is no such thing as a Scotch word properly speaking, except such local corruptions of the Irish and English languages as have come to be regarded as a Scottish dialect. Northern Scotland was conquered and colonised by the Irish Gaels and given the Irish language. The difference between Irish and Scotch is merely the difference between proper English, as spoken in England and American English, as spoken by Americans. Even though the difference between proper English and American is large, it is not yet sufficiently great to allow the Americans the honour of having created a new language. And in any case, English must always remain the property of the English. It could never become the property of the Americans. Neither could Irish become the property of the Scotch.’

I shall take that down,’ said comrade Levit, excitedly. It is an extremely important statement. For the situation is such. I am now engaged in a violent struggle with another comrade, a great scoundrel, who also specialises in English literature. He is such a man. A great fool. He makes such mistakes. He claims that Peacock was a greater novelist than Defoe. This I will admit. Peacock is greater than the Defoe of Robinson Crusoe. But the Defoe of Moll Flanders is a writer of monstrous size, while Peacock is only, so to speak, entertaining and on a level with such men as Meredith. And he also makes such mistakes. He translates the name Gertrude Atherton into Russian as if the a in Atherton were pronounced short as in bad, instead of long as in the exclamation eh. It is a foolish error and shows great ignorance. I shall at once write an article on the word piobrach.’

During the remainder of the evening, I was unable to get as much information from him about Russian intellectuals and their position in the new society as I wished, for I had unfortunately stirred into activity the chief enthusiasm of his life. But he amazed me by his knowledge of books, writers, and in fact of everything to be found in museums, libraries, art galleries all over the world. Although he had never set foot in England, indeed he had never left Russia, he knew the British Museum almost as well as Richard GarneIt must have known its library. The most obscure English writers were familiar to him. At one moment he discoursed on the origin of the Limerick. At the next he became enthusiastic over the researches of Dr. McNeill into ancient Irish sagas. Now and again, he pulled himself together and tried to relate his enthusiasm for scholarship to the Five Year Plan and the industrialisation of the Soviet Union, but he soon relapsed.

It is terrible,’ he cried once, waving his arms in despair, ‘the housing crisis. Now I can hardly enter my room because of my books and it is impossible to get a second room. Because of my books I have to lead the life of a bachelor, being married only one night every week. At first I was a married man, but three wives, one after the other, all refused to share my love for these invaluable possessions, which are books. Therefore, I now am a bachelor except one night every week, I marry in order to liquidate these congestions of the human body.’

In the intervals of discoursing on his pet subjects, he showed me the Press Club and later The House of Hertzen, which has been given by the government to writers as a club. This is the house that figured in War and Peace, as the home of Count Rostov. It was, in fact, the residence of a Polish nobleman, living in Russia, and the man’s coat-of-arms still stands over the door. It has been largely rebuilt, but the exterior still remains exactly what it was in Tolstoy’s time, with the difference that the stables are in ruins and the great courtyard in a state of great disorder. I was also amused to see the old stairway. It would be impossible to find as mean a staircase in a London tenement house. I could only come to the conclusion, from looking at it and mounting it, that the Russian aristocracy in the nineteenth century was much more primitive than Russian writers cared to admit.

But the present proprietors of the house struck me as even more peculiar in their habits and ideas than the most insane Russian aristocrats of the old regime. There are in England and America (especially in the latter country) ridiculous institutions for the manufacture of writers, schools of journalism and courses in dramatic art and such things. But even the wildest insanities born of the American love of mass production and of standardisation could not equal the Russian insanity as explained to me proudly by comrade Levit.

As we went from one room to another, he explained the purpose of each room in a few words, interrupting for a moment his more important remarks on Western European culture.

‘This room,’ he would say, ‘is such a place. Here there is always silence or only whispers. You see it is arranged in such a way. It is large. The colours sombre. The woodwork is smooth and not adorned. All is straight lines and there are no curves, which leads to romanticism and mysticism. Straight lines produce realism. Through the windows may be seen various tall buildings, also in straight lines, factories and such useful social structures, to give the impression of social creative energy. Indeed from this room one may see many buildings of the Five Year Plan. Therefore in this room writing is done by young writers who are learning to write. Older writers who are already qualified as Soviet writers give them assistance and instruction in the proper social attitude and the art of writing. The situation is such. At present there are no writers at work, because this is the scheduled time for social recreation. In another room I shall show you this.’

In another room he showed me a large chart on the wall and explained its meaning. There were statistics of the number of writers in the Soviet Union, divided into males and females and further divided into various categories, poets, novelists, dramatists and journalists. But a much more interesting item was the schedule for the daily-routine of a writer at work. The writer must arise at seven-thirty. He must spend twenty-five minutes at physical exercises. Then he must meditate for half an hour on his work for the day. Then he has breakfast, which takes half an hour. Then he lounges for an hour over a cigarette or two, making further reflections. Then he works for two hours. Then he walks or takes some other exercise for an hour. Afterwards there were three hours spent in conversation, a further three hours spent in working and some time for social duties. I cannot remember the whole routine correctly, but it aroused horror in me.

‘This,’ cried comrade Levit, cis part of the scheme for the liquidation of anarchy in literary production. It is a war on bohemianism and individualism. The situation is such within the Soviet Union and it is much better than in Western Europe. When one thinks how such a great writer as Baudelaire was ruined by the lack of such discipline it is sad.’

‘But is it a success?’ I asked. ‘Do all writers submit to this discipline?’

He paused for a moment and then said:

I hope so. Indeed I hope so. But the situation is such. Our generation is still infected with the poison of our bourgeois upbringing. The next generation shall be organised in such a manner. Then individualism shall finally disappear.’

‘But where did this idea come from? Did it originate with the writers themselves or did the government impose it on the writers?’

‘Comrade,’ he cried, ‘please understand that such a situation cannot exist that the government interferes with the freedom of writers. The writers themselves govern this building and all it contains through the Federation of Writers, which is a trade union and a member of the Russian Federation of Trade Unions, like all other worker organisations. Of course, members of the Party are on the committee, but then members of the Party are on all such committees.’

‘Well then,’ I said, ‘how do you explain the suicide of Mayakovsky, if such discipline exists?’

‘We shall go,’ he said suddenly. ‘That is a question which must be discussed to-morrow. I shall think of it. Because the suicide of Mayakovsky is a serious question which I have not for myself analysed. Indeed, as I mentioned Baudelaire just now, so also is the case of Mayakovsky something which it is difficult to analyse. The situation is such. Poetry, like romantic love, is a strange disease and perhaps it is a form of insanity which cannot be organised. But in any case, we shall discuss it to-morrow, while on our way to the police office about your passport. At this moment, I should prefer to have your view as to the effect of the rise of the proletariat in England on the poetry of Shelley. Here in Russia, at this moment, we are attempting a scientific examination of world literature, with special emphasis on the role played by social movements in creating the genius of writers. I myself have written a thesis on Defoe in that relation. Now the case of Shelley is beginning to arouse my interest.’

Finally, he left me at one o’clock in the morning and I got into bed, where I fell asleep at once.

Chapter XIII. I Think things Over

There was hardly any night. And although I was very tired as the result of my long voyage and the exciting events of the day, a few hours sleep seemed to be sufficient for my body. For I awoke fresh at about four o’clock in the morning. It was broad daylight. I went to the window and looked out. The dawn was wonderful and strange, because of the city that lay before me, gleaming in the morning light, with its golden domes all shimmering. The hotel was on a height and my room was on the sixth floor, so that I could see that quarter of the city right to the very outskirts and into the flat country that lay beyond. When I leaned out and turned to the right, I could see the walls of the Kremlin and leaning a little farther I could see the Tsar’s golden eagle gleaming at the very highest point of the Kremlin buildings, surrounded by the red flags of Communism.

By virtue of its own beauty, Moscow was a magnificent sight in the dawnlight, with the sun fresh upon it. But the mind added fresh interest, by the consciousness of all the mystery and all the violent passion that lay concealed beneath those golden domes and especially within that Kremlin, where the red flags and the golden eagle stood side by side, the eagle surrounded by red flags, as by an army that had captured and caged it. And I peered at it around the corner of a window, from a height, like a scout from that Europe which, I felt sure, this mysterious power was going to destroy.

So I stood, looking out the window, brooding. Then the events of the previous day came to my mind, in a hurricane of confused impressions, in which I could find no meaning. They knew nothing, those individuals whom I had met. They knew nothing at least of the inner significance of this stupendous drama in which they were taking part; being merely camp sweepers in this great headquarters of the world revolution; or, if one would prefer to call it, this head-quarters of the most ambitious attempt at world conquest ever dreamed by man. Nay! Even those people within the Kremlin, that mass of buildings on a height, surrounded by hoary walls, with its golden eagle and its red flags and its glittering domes, truly like a city from the Bible, even they did not probably understand whither they went, or the purpose of their furious planning, working within that fortress day and night without rest. Rather were they like people under the power of a lasting drug; and that drug the blood-lust, the lust of conquest of a vast horde that came singing, shouting, dancing, moaning from the steppes, driving their leaders before them, to some goal, of which no one, neither leaders nor followers, had any definite idea. Again I heard the wailing noise of myriads as I had heard on board the ship, when the choir of children were singing at Leningrad and their voices were carried out over the sea by the electric waves.

In this strange silence of the dawn this impression assumed the qualities of magic, as of the mental state which is caused by presence in an old ruined fortress dating from unknown times, or by the ruins of an ancient city peeping through the tangled growth of forests that have sprung up among the ruins. I grew afraid and thought of the strange faces I had seen in the hotel on the previous evening, Chinese and Kurds and Tatars and Siberians from the far East, strange flat faces with dark skins and slanting eyes and hooked noses and curious ears, all utterly alien, all cut off by an immense barrier from my own consciousness. Such must have been the Mongolian hordes that swept down upon Europe with the fall of Rome.

Now the northern Russians whom I had seen in Leningrad were like blood brothers compared to these people whom I sensed about me. And yet Moscow was but the outpost of the East. All the great breeding grounds lay beyond to the East.

It is impossible to reproduce in words the strange effect produced in me by this sight, Moscow in the silence of dawn, in the fresh sunlight, with its shimmering golden domes and the Kremlin, where the golden eagle of the Tsars shone proudly within the circle of red flags.

Then I stole quietly down the stairs and into the hall where the night porter stared at me in silence, a dark-faced man who stood with folded arms, his sallow face golden in the morning light. I went out into the street. How fresh and pure the air was! I just wandered away, heedless of where I was going, up a narrow street which was cobbled and had no pavement, where there were heaps of earth and large slabs of cut granite leaning against the house walls. I moved into another street and suddenly came across a soldier, who had a rifle slung across his shoulder. He stared at me with curiosity as I went past. Wondering why he stared at me in such a manner, I heard the rattle of typewriters in a large building that occupied all one side of the street. I looked up. It was the headquarters of the Russian Communist Party. At that hour of the morning, these people were working at full speed and the armed soldier stood guard outside lest anybody might peer too closely to find out the nature of the work. I hurried away instinctively and suddenly found myself in the Red Square in front of the Kremlin. There Lenin’s Mausoleum was surrounded by a great wooden barricade and a little farther on I saw the gate of the Kremlin fortress, guarded by a soldier who slouched with his weapon in his arms, exactly like the man I had seen on the pier at Leningrad. But suddenly I saw three giant officers cross the square towards the Kremlin gate. One must have been seven feet in height and the smallest was at least six feet and a half. They wore black top boots and their swords clung close to their sides, held by their left hands. They took little short steps, hardly moving their hips or their shoulders and their heads were like the heads of Prussian officers and their faces were bronzed almost dark brown. Their immense size, their curious gait and the clanking of their spurs excited me and when they passed, as stiff as iron posts, by the sentry, who barely moved to salute them, in through the gate into the Kremlin fortress, I started as if I had seen something which it might be dangerous for me to have seen.

‘Good God!’ I thought, as I hurried past the Red Square, as far from the gate of the fortress as possible. ‘Suppose one of these giants had seen me and picked me up on the tip of his sword. Oh! My poor butlers and effeminate dandies of Western Europe! What ARE they to do when these giants pounce on them?’

I reached the Moscow river and stood on a bridge and looked up at the towers and churches of the Kremlin.

‘Odd!’ I thought. Very odd, indeed, that this structure should become the central point of a revolutionary movement, aiming to free the proletariat of the world from the chains of capitalism. Nothing could be more odd. Nothing could have less in common with the machine age and the cold materialism of the machine age. Nothing could be less like America, which is the product of the machine age. These hoary walls, with their ridiculous towers and the barbaric churches they enclose, smell of ancient times, of mysticism and of the East as we have come to know it, the land of strange Gods and of horrifying superstitions and of occult governments, most cruel tyrannies, savage laws and strange vices. How can these people live within these walls and still bear homage to the philosophic principles of dull, sentimental German sociologists and irascible Jews, who are always so enamoured of change and destruction? Surely residence within those walls must turn the most cold-blooded materialists into mystics. So, they have kept the Tsar’s golden eagle flying above the red flags and the flags themselves bear a mystic emblem, the sickle and hammer, something akin to the mystic symbols of the Egyptians and the Hindoos and the other races of the East.’

As I pondered, dawn passed and already there were crowds in the streets hurrying to their work. The gangs that had worked all night tearing up the streets and laying down new roadways were now going home. Other gangs were taking their places. On every side there was a great clanking and hammering and the rumbling of traffic. New buildings, surrounded with great wooden cages, lay here and there and the workmen were already mounted on the scaffoldings, beginning their work, some of them singing, women with red bonnets among them and at the four corners of each building little red flags fluttered, similar to those that fluttered about the golden eagle over the Kremlin, mystical symbols, signifying that all work, both the building of houses and the night-long conferences in the Communist Party headquarters, was for the glory of the new god.

Never have I seen, not even in New York, such a frenzy of work, all rendered more apparent by the unity of control and the absence of the anarchy caused by senseless competition in our countries.

Wandering through the streets I felt happy and enthusiastic because of the labour I saw about me, glad that at last an attempt was being made to organise modern society on a rational basis: just as I had been irritated by the attempt to organise the writers at the House of Hertzen. This activity was real and positive, whereas the other activity was childish and negative. This activity was manifestly necessary, an attempt to create order out of chaos. The other useless, an attempt to reach heaven by building a Tower of Babel. Looking at these thin, ill-clad, half-starved workers, going eagerly to their duties, I understood all that was real and beautiful in the Russian revolution, a glorious attempt by a people to save themselves from barbarism, tyranny and the continual recurrence of famine. On the other hand, the foolish pranks of the intellectuals made manifest the fact that every crank in the world has made the Soviet Union his happy hunting ground, bringing schemes impossible of realisation and living on the backs of these workers, who are doing their utmost to perform an almost impossible task.

As a little boy I remember how delighted I was watching the basket makers and how I stared in amazement as the baskets assumed shape from the wilderness of willow rods that were twisted to and fro in their supple fingers. And the tailors, sitting cross-legged on their tables, equally excited me and I thought it a deep mystery how they managed to make a garment quickly and without error from a piece of cloth, with their scissors and their tape and their piece of chalk and their needle and their thread. So did the sowers in the fields in spring fill me with awe, how they spread their seeds on the grass that had faded under the manure and then tore up the earth with spades and covered the earth and in some mysterious manner the seeds reproduced themselves and in late summer, when that place was again opened with a spade, there was fruit hanging to the roots of the stalks that grew.

But again, work in our cities has become tarnished and dull by the suffering it causes, by the hordes of slaves it has brought into existence and by the immoral ends to which it is generally put. Nobody gets excited over a new building because there are already too many buildings. Nobody cheers when a new factory is built because there are already too many and because the goods produced are generally without social value. Even the growing of corn and of other necessary foodstuff has ceased to have a meaning, for its immediate and beautiful significance is lost in the fact that it is generally grown for unknown stomachs and is gambled with on strange markets by malicious men whose greed has turned into insanity.

In Moscow, on the other hand, I regained the joy of childhood in watching the people work. Here it was just as glorious and beautiful and exciting as at home. For I felt that the people knew why they were working and that the result of their work was an addition to their comfort and to their pride of life.

After four hours’ wandering around the streets in this manner I returned to my hotel, for a bath and some breakfast. My enthusiasm and happiness vanished at once. The food was dreadful in the hotel restaurant. One could only get a glass of tea, two slices of black bread that was exceedingly unappetising and either cheese or cold fish. I drank the tea and went to look for a bath. A very charming old woman managed to understand what I wanted and she sent me a very charming young man who set about preparing the bath. However he was not as efficient as he was charming; neither was the bath-room equipment very efficient. Together we managed to light a fire of wood in the little oven under the boiler and by stoking the wood fire for an hour or so, the water got slightly warm. Then the difficulty arose of getting the hot water to run into the bath. The conducting pipes would not work properly. It took us another hour to fill the tub. Then I had no soap and I had to bribe one of the old women to fetch a small piece. At last, to my extreme delight, I stripped and dived into the bath.

I had scarcely dressed when my friend Levit knocked at my door. No sooner was he in the room than he announced:

‘Comrade, the situation is such. Having considered the problem from all angles I have come to such a conclusion. The strain of overwork on Comrade Mayakovsky was such that his brain began to function in an improper fashion, which caused him to be unable to endure a sudden depression. Therefore, he performed the unsocial act of killing himself. So it must have been. But he was a great man and he re-organised poetry. It shall be therefore forgiven to him, this unsocial act and the proletariat of Moscow manifested this forgiveness, by thousands following him to his grave.’

He took off his glasses, held them in his right hand, leaned forward, blinked at me for several moments and then said:

It is impossible to organise women on a rational basis. I have already told you that I marry one night in the week. Last night was the night in question for this week. Now I must explain that my girl is very talented and of great social disposition. She is a student of architecture. This summer she proposes to go to a Siberian city to work as a stone mason for one month and as a bricklayer for another month, in order to study these two crafts. Therefore, she is practical and entirely free from nonsense associated with her sex. And yet, she was jealous last night because it was after one o’clock when I reached my room. I explained to her about you, but she only becomes more jealous and says I am a homo-sexual. What nonsense! So I think, even the most intelligent women are anarchists and nothing can be done with them. Now we must go as there is a great programme for to-day. Already this morning I have worked to organise three days.’

On the way he explained to me that we were going at first to the fiction publishing department of the government.

‘The situation is such,’ he said. ‘You have told me that you have a book about to be published in London. Therefore we shall sell that to the publisher and receive money. Then you shall telegraph for the manuscript. It happens so. It is impossible for us to send money abroad to writers for their work, owing to the difficulty of getting foreign valuta. The bloody bourgeoisie does not recognise Soviet currency. It is part of their war on our Union. Therefore it is difficult for us to get foreign money except in exchange for our exported goods. Also, every kopeck is needed for the Five Year Plan, all the foreign money, as we have to buy machinery with it. But when a foreign writer comes to Russia then he can receive payment in Soviet currency. The situation is such.’

We entered a large house, which was about ten times as large as the largest publishing house in London. There was a horde of clerks and offices that seemed innumerable and we wandered along corridors and up stairways for some time until we came to the palatial office of the manager. A most excellent and extremely efficient and charming man. I shook hands with him at twelve o’clock exactly. At fifteen minutes past twelve I had signed his contract for the book in question. At thirty-five minutes past twelve I had received five hundred roubles in advance royalties at the cash desk downstairs.

He had served his apprenticeship to publishing in the United States, which may have explained his efficiency. Even so, he must have been a man of great ability to make Russians as efficient as himself. I was told that he had received various decorations from the government as a reward for his good work. He was, of course, like everybody, practically, connected with publishing, journalism and letters in Moscow, a Jew; a large man with a pale face and a hare lip, bright, eager eyes and a habit of always smiling.

Armed with these roubles, Levit and myself went forth into the city to beard the passport people. We had first to visit the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, in order to get a ratification of my bona fides. This sounds odd, but everything in Russia is arranged in this odd fashion. It is just as if James Joyce had to go before the Academie Frangaise before going to the Prefecture de Police for permission to live in Paris.

This society occupied a large house, which had formerly, in all probability, been the town house of some aristocrat. As far as I could gather it was directly under the control of the police; at least in so far as the surveillance of foreigners resident in Moscow is concerned. It provided very charming girl guides and instructors in the Russian language, together with inviting important foreigners to visit the Soviet Union and publishing a journal which is widely distributed abroad to keep the world in touch with the developments in Russia.

That such organisations, influenced by the police, exist among us in Western Europe goes without saying. But espionage is managed in a much more subtle manner. In England, especially, foreigners and people of doubtful patriotism are rarely conscious of police supervision; yet the English espionage system is probably the most efficient in the world. That it failed in Ireland during the revolutionary troubles in that country is no proof of its inefficiency; for the reason that the Irish are still more clever at the business and provide a large percentage of the Imperial spies. At least they did so in former times.

But the Russians carry espionage and police surveillance to such an extent as to make it ridiculous. They certainly succeed in antagonising foreigners who might otherwise be sympathetic. Nobody likes to be followed about and watched continually.

In the office of this society I was presented to a gentleman who announced that he was in charge of the English and American section. He had been in America and spoke English moderately well. He produced an unpleasant effect on me, for some reason; especially by his fixed habit of never looking me straight in the face and speaking as if I had done him some injury.

I am very interested to find out,’ he said, ‘whether you could help us in setting up a branch of the Friends of Soviet Russia in Ireland.’

I’m afraid that I am not very good at organising things,’ I said. I imagine that the Trade Unions are the best means of doing that.’

‘Yes,’ he said, rubbing his hands together slowly, ‘but that has nothing to do with us. We are not connected with the Trade Union movement. We are interested solely in cultural relations. We would like to get in touch with people like Mr. George Russell and Mr. W. B. Yeats and other people of consequence, who are also prominent in the world of letters in Ireland.’

‘But in what way could they help you?’ I said. ‘Mr. Yeats is interested in Fascism rather than in Communism and Mr. Russell is interested almost solely in the religions of the Far East.’

‘Yes, but they might help to propagate the ideas of the new Russian culture. It is not necessary for people to be Communist or even Socialist in order to be of assistance. They might help to counteract the campaign of lies that is being directed against us.’

‘Excuse me,’ I said. I’m not very brilliant as a politician or as a judge of political tendencies, but I feel sure that your efforts to make use of intellectuals who earn their living under capitalism, who are better off under capitalism than they could possibly be in Soviet Russia, is hopeless. The Soviet theory of politics is based on the assumption that there are in society only two classes, the working class and the capitalist class and that there is perpetual war between these two classes and that the Soviet Union is the champion of the working class against the capitalist class. All these intellectuals know that. They are all, more or less, adherents of the capitalist class, even ones like Mr. Shaw, who amuse themselves by claiming an alliance with socialist ideas. You are wasting your time by trying to do anything with them. Build up your cultural societies among the workers. It will pay you better. It is sheer folly to imagine that any favourable publicity on the part of European intellectuals will prevent Europe from going to war with the Soviet Union. Look at history. After the French revolution, various English intellectuals became Jacobins. But they became English at once when Napoleon began to look with greedy eyes at England.!

‘But the situation is different,’ he cried. ‘We have no Napoleon here.’

‘Worse luck for you,’ I thought, but I kept silent.

I was astonished at the difference in psychology between this gentleman and the comrades I had met at the Bureau of Revolutionary Literature. They had to deal with writers who were of revolutionary tendency. This gentleman had as a rule to deal with writers who were of liberal tendency, with business men and with ‘important people’ from the capitalist world. Not a word did he speak about the revolution, or about the liberation of the world proletariat. He was concerned solely with the aggrandisement of his country, Russia. I marvelled at the existence of two such societies, side by side, in Moscow. And then I thought of the headquarters of the Communist Party, outside the walls of the Kremlin and of the Executive Power, within the walls of the Kremlin. I began to see a meaning in the whole thing. There were two forces, operating concurrently, meeting at the head, as there was only one head, but almost diametrically opposed at the base. One was nationalist and imperialist. The other was communist, proletarian, whatever you wish to call it, out to impose the idea of equality on the whole world. It was significant that this man was not a Jew, but a pukka Russian.

‘Ho! Ho!’ I said to myself. I’m beginning to see where I am.’

When we got out of the office, my friend Levit said to me:

‘The situation is such. This organisation is somewhat bourgeois. But it is also necessary. It deals with bourgeois people. Therefore bourgeois types must be found to deal with these bourgeois people. But it is all to the same end. For the world revolution.’

I felt depressed, in spite of his explanation. I hated that man at the Society’s office. He looked so cunning and insincere.

‘So it must go on and on like this,’ I thought, ‘to the end of the world, all this plotting by mean people, in Soviet Russia as well as in England and France and Germany and America, all that filthy plotting that drove my generation into the shambles of the World War. How horrible! That dream of liberation from the nightmare of plotting and intrigue which was inherent in the Russian Revolution seems to have vanished like all dreams, and there is left only individuals like this man, with sly ways, exactly like the individuals who plotted the World War. Fellows like him will plot and plan for another war and it’s going to go on for ever like that.’

The beauty of the morning, when I saw the masses of workers building and singing as they built, with their triumphant little red flags fluttering now vanished. For I saw it would only lead in one direction. When they had built their houses and their roads, sly fellows like this office hack would send them out to the shambles of war; for sly fellows like this office hack live on war. Christ! What stupidity, all this spying and plotting! It makes one want to spew out one’s human soul and revert to the clean savagery of the forest beast of prey; an animal that springs boldly upon his prey and sleeps when sated. But they are never satisfied, these little plotting adders and even when glutted they love to sting.

Even the giant officers whom I had seen, spurred and with swords at their hips, marching proudly, lordly beings, into the Kremlin fortress, also lost their beauty. They were but pawns to be used by these little plotters. Their beautiful human bodies would grow black and verminous in death upon some battlefield, as I have seen fine men like them lie black upon the shell-holed fields of France. And the little fellows would still be crouching over their desks, plotting.

Plotting for what? The object of their plotting does not affect the result, which is war, horrible and loathsome war that devours beauty. And if it were a war really to end war, perhaps the sacrifice would be worth making; perhaps mankind would be justified in staining its soul with this final sin. War is like an accession of lust, which satisfaction but accentuates.

But the inexhaustible enthusiasm of my scholarly friend Levit soon dispelled my gloom, and as I hastened along by his side he cheered me by an oration, which might well have been made by one of the cakemakers of Lerne.

‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘the situation is such. The whole of the Soviet Union is at this present time an armed camp. That must be understood. We are at war, although war is not yet declared. And all these societies and organisations are therefore necessary. Night and day we are being attacked by the plotters and spies of the bourgeoisie. They hire men to burn our factories and to destroy our railways and to disorganise our food supplies. So we all have to watch. On our frontiers there is Poland and Roumania hired to jump on us when the proper moment comes. But we are ready. We are all ready to fight.’

He halted in the street, turned towards me and put his two hands on his slender breast.

‘Look at me,’ he cried. I am not such a man, a big fellow with a fierce nature. I love books, so to speak. But I also shall take a gun in my hands and stab these fellows who come to attack us. Oh! Yes. I shall stab them like a Siberian or a Tatar that cannot read or write.’

A few yards farther on, he saw a little bookstall on the pavement and immediately forgot the war for liberating the world proletariat. He pounced on the books, uttering excited cries and at last found something, a novel by an obscure French writer of the early nineteenth century. He haggled fiercely with the seller and finally bought the book for a few kopecks. Then he began to tell me about the author and about early nineteenth century French literature in general.

I have many such obscure books in my possession,’ he explained as we entered by a large gate into the courtyard of the police office. I hope to write a thesis some time on this question, the effect of the Napoleonic wars on the French novel in the early nineteenth century.’

An amazing sight, the office where I had to register. In an enormous room, there was a crowd of people, representative of one hundred or more Eastern peoples, all babbling excitedly. There were even Esquimos, as far as I could gather. There were certainly Chinese, Japanese, Kurds, Afghans, Hindoos, Pathans, Tibetans, Tatars, Gipsies, Turks, Persians, Siberians and scores of other species unknown to me. Hardly any two people were dressed alike. The disorder was terrible, as the people could not read or write for the most part and crowds of guides and interpreters kept running to and fro with forms, shouting into the ears and mouths of the illiterates, who also seemed to be as foolish as they were illiterate. My friend managed somehow or other to get hold of a clerk, who got my business done. Had I waited my turn I should still be there. We were fortunate to get away after three hours.

‘Now,’ said my friend, when we got into the street, ‘what shall we do?’

‘We shall eat,’ I said at once. ‘And I want to go into one of the restaurants used by the workers.’

‘Very well/ he said. ‘But perhaps we shall not find one at this hour with food.’

We did find a restaurant that had food. As the mid-day rush was over we had plenty of room. We got served quickly. The food was bad but it was very cheap. I have no idea what it was. It might have been meat or fish. The most interesting part of the meal was an incident that occurred, just before we were going to leave.

In Moscow there are hordes of beautiful little gypsy girls, the most exquisite little creatures I have ever seen. They dance in the public squares and sleep on the grass plots and beg everywhere. They are always accompanied by ruffianly fathers or mothers, who probably take all their money and beat them. But they are really very beautiful, with features as delicate as flowers and little hands that are enchanting. All as brown as berries, with extraordinary eyes that look so wicked.

One of these little women entered the restaurant, came to our table and begged for money or food; I could not tell which. I put my hand in my pocket at once to give her some money; not because I pity beggars, but because she was beautiful. But my friend tried to stop me in an excited manner. In spite of that, I gave the little girl a few roubles. My friend got really horrified.

It is a crime,’ he cried. It is a counter-revolutionary act.’

‘Oh! Damn the revolution,’ I cried. ‘What harm will it do?’

He shook his head and said:

‘You are really hopeless. You are an anarchist. It is impossible to organise properly your psychology.’

The little person returned and began again to beg for something. Then she pointed to a mess of potatoes that lay on a plate. I was on the point of handing her the plate and asking her to sit down to table with us, when my friend jumped to his feet in a fury and threatened to call the police if the gypsy did not leave at once. As soon as she heard the word ‘Militia’ she fled, but at the door she turned back and said something. I’m certain it was an oath. Then she winked at me and blew me a kiss. I returned it with enthusiasm and I wanted to rush out after her; she was so perfect and tiny, like a little fairy animal. But my friend began to strike the table and then, seizing me by the shoulder, said furiously:

‘Comrade, I must warn you against such people. The situation is such. That girl is a gypsy. As in your countries, these gipsies have always lived by begging and robbery and such things. But here, since the revolution, they have been liquidated and settled on the land. Now the liquidated gypsies are a respectable fraction of the Soviet Union. Some of them are even doing good work for the Five Year Plan and the collectivisation of the land. But there are others that still remain unliquidated. This little girl is the child of such unliquidated people. By giving her money and food you only encourage her parents to remain unliquidated and therefore you are committing a counter-revolutionary act. For they take, of course, the money from her and drink it or speculate with it, being addicted to various illegal practices. Also, begging is condemned by Soviet law. So you see. . .

‘Oh! For Christ’s sake,’ I cried angrily, ‘do let a fellow have some fun. I can’t go on all day thinking of liquidating gypsies and Esquimos. Why can’t I give her money if she amuses me?’

‘But that also is false,’ he continued, ‘to do something wrong because it is amusing.’

‘But it’s not wrong. It’s human. I loved getting gifts when I was a child. It’s really so sweet and gives great pleasure to children and softens their little cruel natures. Fact.’

‘You are hopeless,’ he said. ‘You are by nature a bourgeois.’

Chapter XIV. Mingling With The Masses

For five days, comrade Levit accompanied me from morning until night. During that time, I grew extremely fond of him. It was impossible to do otherwise. He was such a delightful fellow. It seemed impossible to deprive him of his good temper. No service seemed too great to demand of him. His enthusiasm for life and his hope for the future, his steadfast belief in the Communist God and his exuberance gave me a fresh grip on reality, which the emptiness of a literary life in Western Europe (where God is dead) had made a faded dream. Yet he bored me to tears. I determined to get rid of him, lest my boredom should make me insolent and unmannerly towards him, who was so kind.

And I was seeing nothing of what I wanted to see, because of the sedulous care with which he convoyed me. He carried me along in such a hurry that I was blind and deaf to my surroundings. I saw churches, theatres, newspaper offices, clubs and creches which merely bewildered me without teaching me anything. Even a literary gathering, to which we went, seems to me at this moment nothing more than a prolonged shout.

On the fifth day I escaped. Another comrade and scholar whom I met at the Bureau offered to introduce me to an Englishwoman who had married a prominent Russian official. This comrade also specialised in English literature and as his period almost touched that of comrade Levit there was a certain rivalry between them. Comrade Kashkin was a Slavic Russian. He had a red head and he had fought in the army, where he received a wound which injured his nervous system considerably. For that reason, perhaps, he was more sane than most of his compatriots and not in the least fanatical. Of course he was an ardent Communist but being a highly educated man, belonging to a family that had been civilised before the revolution, his views on life were by no means violent.

Tall and slim, with a freckled face and a subdued voice, it was hard to differentiate between him and an intelligent English public schoolboy in manners. But he was exceedingly touchy and could not brook argument, owing, apparently, to his wounds. If one did not argue with him he was very charming; but then it is impossible to live in Russia without argument. Life is so vital there and everything is so new and in such a volcanic state that the simplest discussion becomes an argument to the death.

Indeed, comrade Kashkin disapproved of me; so that we began to argue at once on our way to meet the Englishwoman. When we got on a tram-car, he said to me:

‘Have you read much of our new Soviet literature?’

‘Not very much,’ I said. ‘A little of Pilniak and of Babel and a few other writers whose names I cannot remember.’

He shrugged his shoulders and said these writers were not the best.

‘Oh!’ I cried, eager to please him. I have read some of a book by a writer called Sholohov in a French translation. It was serialised in UHumanite. I thought it was really first-rate.’

Comrade Kashkin got furious at once.

‘But why?’ he cried irritably. It is a popular book, but there are others much better. Sholohov is not an intellectual.’

‘But that’s why I like his work,’ I said. It’s so fresh. It smells of the earth. He knows his art. It’s vital and genuine and simple.’

‘But there is no philosophic depth in it. It’s raw.’

‘But isn’t freshness what we want? We have had enough of pretentious philosophies. We want power and natural beauty to regenerate literature. There are skilled craftsmen by the thousand in most European countries, but they are only echoes of what has been written before, critics posing as creative artists.’

‘You are an anarchist,’ he cried angrily. ‘And for that reason you like blood and thunder, raw life.’

‘Why! Bless my soul,’ I cried, equally angry, ‘you speak like the most bourgeois English intellectual. I expected to find a love of life among Soviet literary people, but you are just as bad as Western European intellectuals, who only know of life what they have read of it. That’s why I like Sholohov because he seems to me to have lived the life of which he writes, to revel in it and to put it on paper exactly as he found it, without any theories as to how it should be.’

‘But that’s not the point,’ he cried. ‘A writer must be disciplined and educated. He must have culture.’

‘I grant you that it is better if he has culture and it is an axiom that no writer can write anything intelligible or worth while without being disciplined, but nine intellectuals out of ten in Paris, London or Berlin have more culture than Shakespeare, as far as accumulated knowledge of books is concerned. Yet ten thousand of them combined could not write one scene of Hamlet. For God’s sake don’t tell me that what I am beginning to suspect is true.’ ‘What is that?’

‘That in Soviet Russia, Communist intellectuals are suffering from a most virulent inferiority complex, which manifests itself in trying to imitate the decadent writers of Western Europe, all the wordy subtlety that has no guts, no blood, no semen.’

‘You are utterly ridiculous. We are trying to raise the level of civilisation, trying to discipline the uncultured writers that are taking to literature, trying to tone down their rawness. . . .’

‘Tripe,’ I cried. ‘That is the worst form of romanticism. A writer can only express the life he sees around him.’

He aggravated me so much, more by his manner than by his ideas, which were probably better than mine, that I almost quarrelled violently with him. For the latter part of the journey we lapsed into an exhausted silence. We arrived at the flat occupied by the English wife of the important Soviet dignitary and I was deeply impressed by its simplicity. It was similar to a Council flat in London. I was still more impressed by the Englishwoman herself. In spite of many years’ residence in Soviet Russia she had retained every atom of her British middle-class solidity. It was obvious that she despised Russia and the Russians, was bored with Communism and hankered for London. From her conversation and her attitude towards things, I gathered that she was mildly socialistic and I wondered how she had got herself into her present position. But on consideration, I understood it.

After the World War, a section of the middle-class experienced an aching desire for some religion that would act as an antidote to the depression produced by the war; some vital and virile religion, different from the prevalent Christianity, which has grown unsexed and limp through old age. Those deplorable young men who shirked the war, giving their conscience as an excuse, found in socialism a justification for their lack of courage. Women of no great beauty also found in socialism a justification for forming with working men temporary associations, which they were unable to make among men of their own class, owing to the small numbers of the latter; the majority being slaughtered. But all these middle-class people, both male and female, were not really socialist or revolutionary. They were merely disgruntled and dissatisfied. They remained British and Imperialist to the core, although for the moment the Empire failed to satisfy their needs. To them the Russian Revolution came as a gift from God; but as the Revolution developed they began to see its real nature, that it was not a sentimental attempt to create an earthly paradise of free love and artistic communes, but a savage attempt by enormous masses of peasants to get bread and culture. Revolted by this spectacle, they drew back. Some returned to their Union Jacks. Others joined the British Labour Party and made it respectable. The unfortunate few who had committed themselves irrevocably became bitter.

In conversation with this Englishwoman, my distraught nerves forced me to become as violent in support of the Russians as I had been prone to disparage their efforts in conversation with Kashkin.

‘What’s the good of it all?’ she cried. ‘This Five Year Plan won’t make the world any more interesting. It will just give the Russians motor cars and newspapers and chewing gum, just as people have in America. Their ambition is to create a new America in Russia, only worse. There’s nothing new here.’

She really terrified me; for although I contradicted everything she said, I felt that she spoke the truth. And although I was trying to persuade myself that I had more in common with the Russian Bolsheviks than with her, my reason told me that I was just as convinced as she was that acquisitive lust rather than idealism was the driving power behind Russia’s energy. I left her house in a state of acute depression. I got rid of Kashkin and swore that I was finished with Russian intellectuals. They merely irritated me without teaching me anything of what I wanted to know.

And yet . . . what did I want to know? Was there anything to know? Had anything dealing with social relationships been discovered here fundamentally different from what had already been discovered in Europe and America? For another fortnight I wandered about trying to discover it and failed. Nowhere was I able to find a logical attitude towards the universe as one finds in France, the calm judgment and the sound social morality which distinguishes the English, the love of labour and the meticulous exactitude which have made the Germans such unerring craftsmen and designers. Everywhere I found the intellectual wreck of the old Russian grandeur, a nervous, pulsating, worried, unstable mass of human beings, merely held together by terror of the enemies that surrounded them and by the masses that pushed them from the rear, by hunger, by lack of all the necessities of life, by a mystical frenzy which envisaged the conquest of the world.

I had come like a fool to write Lies About Russia, foolishly believing that wise men had gone before me, bringing back true tales of a land where everything was new. Both those who denounced the Soviets and those who praised them had come back with tales that everything was new and different. Yet I found everything the same; merely a difference produced by climate and locality and racial habits.

They tried to persuade me to visit the south, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, the new cities that were springing up on the Socialist plan, the collective farms. But I stayed in Moscow, for I am more concerned with spiritual results than with material causes. Innovations do not begin in the villages, or in the provinces, where they are certain to meet with greater opposition than in the capital, to which all the intelligent flock in order to be near the centre of culture. In the capital I must stay, in order to understand the Soviet mind, in order to understand the lives and the aspirations of the proletarian masses, upon whom this Revolution is based.

Towards that end, I hid myself from all my intellectual friends and went among the masses, as the Communists say; but as I did not speak the language of the country, I was severely handicapped. I learned the utter idiocy of those ladies and gentlemen, who attempted to write books, giving an exact description of the institutions, the life and the ambitions of countries as vast as Russia, after a nodding acquaintance; like the foreign gentleman in Pickwick Papers. In a country as completely foreign as Russia, the mind of the visiting stranger is so confused by the mass of impressions that continually pour in upon it that it is incapable of seeing anything in a normal light. However, I avoided examining or judging individual things. I sought to get a general impression of the general life, and in that manner I succeeded in acclimatising myself to such an extent that I felt comparatively at home. I felt bored, excited, discontented, eager for change, enthusiastic, depressed, argumentative, ferocious, bigoted, fanatical, hungry, bitten by bed bugs, convinced that Europe was preparing war against me, convinced that a world revolution was imminent, that the Soviets were going to fail, that the Five Year Plan was going to be a magnificent success, that it would end in disaster, that socialism was going to be produced in a few years, that it would never materialise, that there were spies at every street corner, that I might be taken out at any moment and shot, that I might take out somebody at any moment and shoot him. ... In a word, I assumed the psychology of the Russian masses. I went to bed wherever I found myself at three o’clock in the morning. I slept in old monasteries, in communal lodging houses, in new flats on the American plan, in rooms of old houses that had once been clubs, palaces and town houses of the gentry. I met old nuns earning their living gathering firewood, peeling potatoes in kitchens, begging at street corners. I met ex-priests that were lousy and degenerate, also begging. I met couples that were divorced and still lived together owing to the housing shortage. I met men with two or more wives and women with two or more husbands. I swam naked in the river with women who wore bathing suits. I rowed on the river with soldiers, sailors, male and female factory workers. I played the accordion at dances in private rooms and at factory outings. I went on a binge with an ex-prince, who had become a journalist, with a popular Soviet novelist who had been a Cossack, with a Kulak, with cab drivers, with odds and ends of humanity to be met in public houses and at street corners. I stood about kiosks drinking lemonade. I queued up for cigarettes for hours. I hung around the market and mingled with the gypsies, peasants, pick-pockets, speculators. I hung around the hotels at night and mingled with foreign capitalists and engineers and gawky Americans who were making scientific examination for their University theses of the Russian theatre, the Russian school system, the Russian prison system. I picked up girls in the streets, by the same method as in other countries. I kept cab drivers for days at a time, in the same manner as Irishmen used to do in Dublin before the war. I went to the intellectual cinemas, with Russians who shed tears, sang, cheered and shouted ‘Down with the bourgeois assassins’ when Lenin or the other Communist hierarchs were shown on the screen. I went to common cinemas with the masses, where Charles Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, cowboys and wild west criminals sent the masses into hysterics with delight and little children kept cheering when the hero rescued the heroine, or threatened to wreck the screen when the villain had the hero in a corner, exactly as they do in the slum cinemas of Dublin, London, New York, Shanghai, Jerusalem or Addis Abbaba. I went to the Circus where the masses roared applause for the acrobats, the sword swallowers and the clowns that delight audiences in the other cities I have mentioned. There they drank light beer and ate buns between the acts, as they do at Collins’ or the Holborn Empire in London. I went once to an intellectual theatre and fell asleep during a marvellous play executed by Georgians. I went to a trotting race meeting and lost five races, before I received the information that they were all squared, as in European countries, where racing is not properly controlled. I attended football matches and played football on waste plots with workmen who were enjoying their fifth day holiday. I forgot the day of the week and the day of the month and only stumbled by chance one Sunday into a church where the faithful were hearing Mass in the old style. Another day I visited the atheistic museum, where young people were taught in the new style that Mass was a delusion and a humbug. I frequented another church that had been turned into a library of foreign literature and periodicals, in order to keep in touch with English racing and cricket. Sometimes I had breakfast at four in the afternoon and lunch at three o’clock in the morning. I ate sturgeon, caviare, boeuf Strogonov and borsch. I got drunk on vodka, Napareouli, beer and French brandy. I did physical jerks and Russian dances with bands of workers in the public parks. I went to the Zoo and to a wedding and to a funeral. In other words, I lived completely the life of a knockabout and enjoyed myself and had practically the same experiences as a knock-about in London, Dublin, New York, Jerusalem or Addis Abbaba. I found that humanity in Russia was essentially the same as in any other country, that people had the same wants, the same ambitions, the same virtues and the same vices. The same things and the same types irritated me as at home. I was enthused by the same splendid types, generous, simple, courteous amusing, courageous, industrious, honest, trust- worthy types as one finds at home and in every other country in the world. I found also mean, scavenging, envious scoundrels. I found the same insufferable arrogance in the young.

I found that Moscow and, as a corollary, the whole of Russia was an enlargement of the ship on which I journeyed from London to Leningrad; the same ludicrous evangelistic Communism on the surface and the same greedy, ambitious, admirable human nature beneath. The only difference between the ship and Moscow was that there were fewer cranks, fanatical Jews and useless scoundrels on the ship than in Moscow.

Anything new? Just one, which is not really new, but a recurring phenomenon in man’s history: New Tools Applied To Virgin Soil.

Having come to this conclusion, I decided to call on Mr. Walter Duranty in order to compare my impressions with his. As one of the leading foreign correspondents, he is known in practically every country in the world among journalists as an authority on Soviet Russia. He had been in residence there for eight years and even though he is an educated Englishman of merely Liberal tendencies, he has earned the respect and gratitude of the Russian people for the fairness of his dispatches to the New York Times. Such an unbiassed observer, I felt, would be the exact opposite to myself. Therefore, a conversation with him would not fail to get me out of the intellectual muddle, in which my journey to Moscow had placed me. And having set the muddle in order, I was determined to return to Europe and continue my life, firmly convinced that new Gods were not the business of Europeans.

Chapter XV. Mr. Duranty Explains

When I entered his study, Walter Duranty was typing a cable to his newspaper. He treated me to the luxury of a foreign cigarette and some French wine, told me that Blenheim had won the Derby and asked me to make myself comfortable while he finished his cable. His good-humoured, intelligent English face and his courteous manner at once made me feel more at home than I had felt since my arrival in Russia. Although the Russians had been outrageously courteous, polite and hospitable, this was something different. One did not have to make an effort.

He broke off in the middle of a sentence to laugh loudly.

‘I have just returned from an extraordinary expedition,’ he said. Tm writing an account of an astonishing lunatic asylum I saw in Bokhara, We were all brought out there as the guests of the Government to examine the new Turkish railway. Well! You see the Emir of Bokhara fled on the approach of the Bolshevik forces, bringing with him all his camels, his six hundred mistresses and about three hundred boys. His magnificent palace was left to the Reds. They were at a loss what to do with it, so they turned it into a lunatic asylum. I went over the premises and certainly nothing could be more ludicrous than to see this fanatastic magnificence put to such use. The most spectacular thing I noticed was a Bolshevik warder lolling on a seat in a beautiful garden with fountains, reading a book on The Economic Causes of Insanity. I certainly hope to go there for treatment when I break down under the strain of Soviet life.’

He laughed again and continued to write about the Emir’s palace turned into a lunatic asylum. Then he had his man take away the message, lit a cigarette and said to me:

‘What do you think of Russia? But that of course is a ridiculous question to ask, because it is impossible for anyone to form a clear opinion of Russia in anything under about thirty years. Everything is so different.’

‘On the contrary,’ I said. I find everything startlingly the same.’

‘What?’ he cried in amazement.

‘Yes,’ I replied. I mean that the things I expected to find different are the same. The things that are different here to what they are in England or France are no more strange than the things that are different in England to what they are in the native parts of Central Africa.’

I don’t understand you,’ he said.

‘Well!’ I said. It’s this way. I really believed before I set out for Moscow that the Russians were trying to establish socialism, in the official manner that socialist orators and Marxian doctrinaires talked about. Human nature was to be changed. There was to be peace, equality and brotherly love over all the earth. Personal ambition was to disappear and people would go about bowing to one another and saying: “Your turn, sir,” when it was a question of assuming public office: just as the preposterous soldiers of the eighteenth century bowed to one another in battle, before Napoleon made war a realistic business of victory at all costs. Yet here I find the struggle for existence going on in the same old way, if anything more fierce than it is in Europe. I don’t suppose there is any great difference between one particular trade and another in the matter of socialistic tendencies. If anything, people of my own trade are more likely to be advanced than bricklayers, coalheavers or woodcutters. Yet writers here are just as bourgeois as European writers. They are just as eager to get on and over-reach their fellows, to reach fame, security and private property at the expense of their fellows and society.’

Duranty laughed.

‘Well!’ he said. If you really believed in the Liberti, Egalite, Fraternite Table you really deserve the agony of disillusion. I didn’t know any intelligent person beyond the twenties believed in that nowadays.’

‘One may not definitely believe in it,’ I said, ‘but one has a vague hope that it might sometime come into being. I was really disappointed to find it did not exist here and that there is no hope of its coming into existence. On the other hand, I am frankly pleased that man is a scoundrel and that he is going to remain one.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Duranty. ‘Have some more Burgundy. It’s not very good, but one must be grateful in Moscow. That’s the whole trouble with foreigners coming into Russia. They expect the sun, moon and stars of Utopia, and they are disappointed when they only find the faint dawn of sanity coming into human government. In fact, they are so enraged that they refuse to see the dawn. The Bolshies have been their own worst enemies in many ways, in so far as their foreign propaganda has been concerned. They have sent every foreigner bum that came here back to Europe, with the most amazing rubbish about the proletarian revolution and the Russian Utopia. As a result, the real work that they are doing has been largely passed by without notice.’

‘In what respect are they doing great things?’

‘In industry and agriculture especially and generally in bettering the social conditions of the workers.’

I quite agree with you,’ I said, ‘but the point that chiefly interested me was to find out if there was anything fundamentally new discovered here, about giving a different direction to man’s social ambition. I find none. Take education, about which so much has been written by well-meaning men and women who have come back from Russia. So far as I have seen, the Russians are trying to inspire their youth with the moral outlook of the English public school-boy. I find among Russian youth the same cocky self-assurance, the same horror of expressing their individuality in a manner that might be considered “different” by their fellows, the same horror of being “different” in dress, in opinions, in conduct, the same ambition to be a correct exemplaire of the perfect Young Communist Russian, as the young English public school-boy wants to be the perfect Briton.’

‘But don’t you think it’s a wonderful achievement, if they manage to do that? Wouldn’t it be a vast improvement on. . . .’

‘The children of Dostoievsky’s time, with their rags, dirt and sadistic parents. Undoubtedly, but it’s nothing to raise a Civil War all over the wide world in its honour. The point I make is that the Russians are merely trying to give to the mass the education that the English give to the middle and upper classes. And as the English public school system has resulted in producing a machine-made Englishman, a worthy, decent, well-mannered fellow, fit to govern Indians and Zulus, so are the Russians aiming at the production of a similar Russian fit to govern the world. They are trying to produce an Imperialist Russian. They are laying the foundation of a new Roman Empire, based on the tractor, the aeroplane and the dynamo, just as the old one was based on straight roads, sewers and Legiones. A machine. I don’t want human beings turned into machines. Really, I find the little dirty-faced youths in the slums of London and Dublin more quick in intelligence and more amusing than the perfectly groomed youths to be seen at the Eton and Harrow match.’

‘That’s all rubbish,’ said Duranty, becoming a trifle indignant with me. ‘You are a disgruntled sentimentalist. And I don’t exactly get your point. If the Russians can teach all their children to read and write and do little sums in arithmetic within the next fifty years, I think they’ll have done wonders. The danger of having replicas of the Eton and Harrow match at Moscow or at Stalingrad in the immediate future is ridiculous. You see, the Soviet Union is not Moscow. It’s one-sixth of the world. And therefore. . . .’

I know, I know. I grant you that. I was merely trying to point out that we owe nothing to the Bolsheviks in the matter of social innovations. Take marriage for instance. People in Europe have been yelling about Bolshevik enlightenment for the past ten years. But I find the Russians much more puritanical in their sexual relationships than the English, the French, the Germans or the Americans. Granted that there may have been sexual debauchery after the Revolution, or very bright ideas about marriage among the highbrows at the present time, I find that the vast masses of the people still are just as reactionary about marriage as the masses all over the world. I have been told by ardent Communists here that the young women, when they are working in the factories, believe ardently in the Communal life and so forth, but as soon as they get husbands they begin to give their whole time to the little flat and are perfectly bourgeois in their greed for procuring a new arm chair, new chintz curtains, a new samovar. The fringe of the population that goes in for divorces and free love is just the same fringe that does the same sort of thing in the other countries I have mentioned. Indeed, on the whole, I find among the Russians the simplicity of peasants with regard to sex. I am certain that there is nothing new or socialistic about their attitude towards marriage. One would have to go to the heavy and cultured middle-aged women in England for that, examinations of complexes and companionate marriages and so forth. Here there are only primitive instincts, extreme delicacy, sentimentality; in fact, a very delightful, un-Marxian, pastoral chastity.’

‘But isn’t that all to the good?’

‘Certainly it is.’

‘Then what are you grousing about?’

‘Damned if I know.’

‘Have another drink. It’s just the nervous reaction from Russian life.’

We both laughed heartily.

‘Well!’ I said. ‘Do tell me what you think of it in any case. Having liquidated, as the Russians say, my own irritation with myself, I’d like to hear what you think.’

Duranty leaned back in his chair and said:

‘Did you ever read the life of Brigham Young?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘astonishing fellow. A small scale American Mahomet’.

‘Perhaps there is a resemblance between him and Mahomet,’ said Duranty. ‘Certainly there is a startling resemblance between him and the Bolsheviks. They both attempted to set up a government by priests. This is a clerical government. You might in the same way prove a resemblance between this and the Papacy, but Mormonism appears to be closer. Has it never struck you that the Russian Communist Party is an extremely religious and clerical organisation?’

After some thought I agreed with him.

‘But it’s amazing,’ he cried, becoming a trifle excited. ‘The longer I live here the more I am struck by it.’

‘Damn true,’ I said. ‘Coming down on the train from Leningrad I had a conversation with two Civil servants . . .’

I’m working out a theory,’ cried Duranty, ‘that Bolshevism is the real religious antidote to the materialism of the twentieth century. It seems ludicrous but it’s true. The rest of the world believes in Godless Russia, and yet Russia is practically the only country in the world where religion inspires the masses with an active enthusiasm. There is no other way of looking at Bolshevism than as a religion. It is now, in fact, more common to refer to it as Leninism, after its prophet. I think it’s very amusing and interesting. For instance, at the general congress of the Communist Party this year there is going to be a heated discussion about a slight change in the Soviet Koran, or Bible, the works of Lenin. It’s going to create almost a schism in the Soviet Church. Very probably new heretics may be burned at the stake or shot in the modern way.’

‘What is this change?’

‘Lenin has said that Soviet power in the villages is based on the poor peasant. Now they wish to say that Soviet power in the village is based on the collectivised peasant. It sounds trivial, but not more than the small points that caused schisms in the early Christian churches. If you examine the whole system of Bolshevist society you will find the same religious attitude towards life. Even their device, the sickle and hammer, is a form of mystical symbolism. Their ambition to convert the whole world to Communism or Leninism is in line with the apostolic mission of the Christians, causing them, even though they preached peace and goodwill, to massacre those who refused to become converted. Take the life of the high priests of Leninism, the Soviet ministers, heads of local parties and so on. As far as possible they live lives of absolute asceticism. Even the most severe of them, Djerjinsky the head of the police, was a fanatical Communist saint. I assure you it’s a remarkable attempt to achieve what the Christians failed to achieve.’

‘And do you think they’ll succeed?’

Duranty shrugged his shoulders.

‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘If the Five Year Plan is a success and I have no doubt but that it will be a partial success and that eventually the vast natural resources of the Soviet Union, in spite of Soviet inefficiency and the opposition of foreign countries, is going to make Russia exceedingly prosperous. Then the high priests and the lesser Communist clergy will lose their hold over the masses. I suppose things will repeat themselves. Still it’s an interesting experiment.’

I’m interested to hear you say that,’ I said, ‘because I have maintained for years that Communism was definitely a new religion rather than a new social theory’.

‘Oh! But it’s a new social theory, too,’ said Duranty.

‘Only in so far as they have turned the whole of capitalist economy into one huge concern and then cut out the shareholders. It seems an attempt to run society by means of a civil service responsible to the government. But then the government, as you maintain, is a sort of a company with a great number of directors, who draw merely starvation salaries.’

‘But don’t you think that’s a great improvement on European and American methods?’

‘Obviously. It’s much more efficient and allows more scope for doing big things.’

‘Yes,’ cried Duranty enthusiastically. ‘This Russian life sometimes irritates me. I am sometimes revolted by their fanaticism and their inefficiency, but . . . My God! When one compares this intelligent government to the idiocy at home! It’s sad to think that we are doing nothing at home, just rotting away while these fellows are full of enthusiasm, full of hope for the future, working away like devils, trying to build up this rich, virgin country. The government knows where it is going. It has a plan. We have none. Muddle, muddle all the time.’

‘And then . . . when the Russians have got there, what happens?’

It is impossible to say. Anything might happen here.’

I feel that they are deliberately setting out to conquer the world, by necessity, that they are going to be forced to conquer the world in order to survive.’

‘I don’t believe that. The Bolsheviks are really pacifist. That is the funny thing about them. They are pacifist.’

‘But isn’t it only the Jews who are pacifist and religiously minded, Communist fanatics? They’ll get rid of the Jews and conquer the world. They have to. Like all people who make a machine of human beings they’ll be forced to use this machine, this army, for the sole work at which an army is useful, military conquest.’

‘You are romantic. They are too cute for that. They have more subtle methods of destroying Europe than by military conquest. They are first going to destroy the world markets. This autumn they are going to attack the wheat market by dumping. You watch.’

‘But it will inevitably result in war. Europe is not going to allow them to destroy their markets by dumping. They’ll strike back. If the government is pacifist, then Napoleonism will arise.’

‘That is possible,’ said Duranty. ‘As I said before everything is possible. But in any case it’s not a matter of years but of generations. It will take decades to make the Russian machine efficient. And the struggle is not going to be between Russia and Europe but between Russia and America. Europe is going to be squeezed out of existence by these enormous pincers.’

‘Oh! Well!’ I said. ‘The only thing for a decadent European like myself is to retire and leave them to it. I am convinced that we Europeans have nothing to gain from either Russia or America. We have stabilised our cultures and our civilisations. We can gain nothing by giving them violent shocks. We should hasten our demise. I am still convinced that there is nothing here which gives me as much satisfaction as things to be found in Ireland, England and France.’

‘Ah! France,’ said Duranty. ‘There is civilisation, conversation, food, drink, intelligence, wit . . . marvellous country.’

‘I don’t like French racing,’ I said.

‘Why?’ said Duranty aggressively.

Thereupon we forgot about Bolshevism, Russia and the effort to improve the world by means of a new religion, and we entered into a long, enthusiastic conversation about horse racing, becoming for the first time really interested.

Indeed as I came away from Duranty’s house I felt convinced that religion, be it Bolshevism or Christianity, Mormonism, or Mahomedanism, is the least important thing in life for a normal person. I decided to return at once to Western Europe where life is so pleasant owing to the death of God.

Chapter XVI. Back To London

And then, as I crossed the border into Poland, going down into Europe, I felt a sense of depression and of loneliness. I felt that I was leaving the battlefield, where honour might be won, where I could at least die in the effort to achieve a higher dignity for man, and that I was sneaking back behind the lines, to eat and drink in comfort and degeneration. Nearly all those in the train with me were bourgeois foreigners and I grew disgusted at the swinish way they fell upon the rich feast spread before them by the Poles for purposes of propaganda. I was disgusted by the comic opera Poles, all dressed in gaudy uniforms, for which they had probably not paid the French. The ruling Poles in glittering uniforms and the wretched peasant Poles crawling about the fields, in rags and bare feet. I missed the simple poverty of Soviet Russia, the eagerness, the shouting, the earnestness, the intense, almost maniacal vitality of those fanatics who were trying to build a new world. My irritation with their fanaticism vanished, when I was confronted with European hypocrisy, stupidity and cruelty. The farther I got from Soviet Russia the more my admiration for the Bolsheviks increased. Yet I did not want to go back. I was deliberately flying from the battlefield, unashamed and revelling in my cowardice like another Horace.

Even when I reached Berlin, that vulgar caravanserai of beerhouses and brothels, I still did not want to return to militant, covenanting Moscow; for there was sober, half-starved effort to achieve the almost impossible, while here was rich, juicy sausage, paganism and easy living for the cunning. Yet I despised Berlin after Moscow. It seemed a sweltering, senseless, uncultured human warren, without a future, without sane ambition. Paris looked even worse, a still more shameless brothel, where a human soul was almost as cheap as a beefsteak. Here a terrible melancholy settled on me. I felt indeed lost, an outcast from both camps, too old and too degenerate to belong to the Bolshevist religion, too intelligent to worship the degraded wreck of what was once European civilisation.

But when I reached London, a delicious sense of the futility of human effort drowned my melancholy. This city represented the culmination of an imperial effort greater than that of the Romans, if not in military conquest, at least by the diversity of its achievements. Yet it was now halted, stagnant, beginning to rot at the core and to wither at the extremities, using all its ancient skill to maintain its power. So does everything come to an end. So will the Leninist movement come to an end and give way to another. The star of human genius is not fixed.

Content

I Went To Russia by Liam O’Flaherty

Chapter I. The Soviet Ship

Chapter II. I Make Friends With The Crew

Chapter III. The Bolshevik Skipper

Chapter IV. Jews And Vikings

Chapter V. A Discourse On Various Subjects

Chapter VI. I Reach The Promised Land

Chapter VII. The Corpse Of Tsarism

Chapter VIII. The Doctor’s Wife

Chapter IX. She Could Not Convert Me

Chapter X. The Keepers Of The Satchel

Chapter XI. I Promise To Make War

Chapter XII. I State My Position

Chapter XIII. I Think things Over

Chapter XIV. Mingling With The Masses

Chapter XV. Mr. Duranty Explains

Chapter XVI. Back To London