I pLEA cr. DO NOT REMOVE THIS BOOK CARD, ^•IIBRARYQ \omy^ University Research Library • r i MAY 19 1927 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below , a UMJRL FEB 27 1924? | 5 • 1W iipi D JUL 81977 AH< * 1929 i JUN 11 1930 MAR l 9 193f FEB 1 193? MAN 7 i33fc; fWAR 3 198|. W/ ^ J * T93| ft APR 2 6 1939 h : \ 5 1933 Form L-9-15m-8,'26 ^ Qfl.! / Y Russia in the Shadows Streei Scenery in Petersburg: Site of a Demolished Wooden House. • Frontnbiece. Russia in the Shadows 3y H. G. Wells i I • g w ft I . • » ' * ■ , > J ) HODDER AND STOUGHTON LIMITED LONDON 3i^ • • •• # * • * I « •.- • * • • -• - . • « , t » • • rf • • • • I ; * • v> ft, w O Contents I. Petersburg in Collapse g II. Drift and Salvage .... 31 III. The Quintessence of Bolshevism . 59 IV. The Creative Effort in Russia . 87 V. The Petersburg Soviet ... .113 VI. The Dreamer in the Kremlin . . 123 VII. The Envoy 145 /. Petersburg in Collapse /. Petersburg in Collapse IN January 19 14 I visited Petersburg and Moscow for a couple of weeks ; in September 1920 I was asked to repeat this visit by Mr. Kamenev, of the Russian Trade Delegation in London. I snatched at this suggestion, and went to Russia at the end of September with my son, who speaks a little Russian. We spent a fortnight and a day in Russia, passing most of our time in Petersburg, where we went about freely by ourselves, and were shown nearly everything we asked to see. We visited Moscow, and I had a long conversation with Mr. Lenin, which I shall relate. In Petersburg I did not stay at the Hotel International, to which foreign visitors are usually sent, but with my old friend, Maxim Gorky. The guide and interpreter assigned to assist us was a lady I had met in Russia in 19 14, the io Russia in the Shadows niece of a former Russian Ambassador to London. She was educated at Newnham, she has been imprisoned five times by the Bolshevist Government, she is not allowed to leave Petersburg because of an attempt to cross the frontier to her children in Esthonia, and she was, therefore, the last person likely to lend herself to any attempt to hoodwink me. I mention this because on every hand at home and in Russia I had been told that the most elaborate camouflage of realities would go on, and that I should be kept in blinkers throughout my visit. As a matter of fact, the harsh and terrible realities of the situation in Russia cannot be camouflaged. In the case of special delegations, perhaps, a certain distracting tumult of receptions, bands, and speeches may be possible, and may be attempted. But it is hardly possible to dress up two large cities for the benefit of two stray visitors, wandering observantly often in different directions. Naturally, when one demands to see a school or a prison one Petersburg in Collapse 1 1 is not shown the worst. Any country would in the circumstances show the best it had, and Soviet Russia is no excep- tion. One can allow for that. Our dominant impression of things Russian is an impression of a vast irre- parable breakdown. The great monarchy that was here in 19 14, the administrative, social, financial, and commercial systems connected with it have, under the strains of six years of incessant war, fallen down and smashed utterly. Never in all history has there been so great a ddbdcle before. The fact of the Revolution is, to our minds, altogether dwarfed by the fact of this downfall. By its own inherent rotten- ness and by the thrusts and strains of aggressive imperialism the Russian part of the old civilised world that existed before 1914 fell, and is now gone. The peasant, who was the base of the old pyramid, remains upon the land, living very much as he has always lived. Everything else is broken down, or is breaking down. Amid this vast disorganisation an emer- 12 Russia in the Shadows gency Government, supported by a disci- plined party of perhaps 150,000 adherents — the Communist Party — has taken con- trol. It has — at the price of much shooting — suppressed brigandage, established a sort of order and security in the exhausted towns, and set up a crude rationing system. It is, I would say at once, the only possible Government in Russia at the present time. It is the only idea, it supplies the only solidarity, left in Russia. But it is a secondary fact. The dominant fact for the Western reader, the threatening and disconcerting fact, is that a social and economic system very like our own and intimately connected with our own has crashed. Nowhere in all Russia is the fact of that crash so completely evident as it is in Petersburg. Petersburg was the artificial creation of Peter the Great ; his bronze statue in the little garden near the Admi- ralty still prances amid the ebbing life of the city. Its palaces are still and empty, Petersburg in Collapse 13 or strangely refurnished with the type- writers and tables and plank partitions of a new Administration which is engaged chiefly in a strenuous struggle against famine and the foreign invader. Its streets were streets of busy shops. In 19 14 I loafed agreeably in the Petersburg streets — buying little articles and watching the abundant traffic. All these shops have ceased. There are perhaps half a dozen shops still open in Petersburg. There is a Government crockery shop where I bought a plate or so as a souvenir, for seven or eight hundred roubles each, and there are a few flower shops. It is a wonderful fact, I think, that in this city, in which most of the shrinking population is already nearly starving, and hardly any one possesses a second suit of clothes or more than a single change of worn and patched linen, flowers can be and are still bought and sold. For five thousand roubles, which is about six and eightpence at the current rate of exchange, one can get a very pleasing bunch of big chrysanthemums. 14 Russia in the Shadows I do not know if the words " all the shops have ceased " convey any picture to the Western reader of what a street looks like in Russia. It is not like Bond Street or Piccadilly on a Sunday, with the blinds neatly drawn down in a decorous sleep, and ready to wake up and begin again on Monday. The shops have an utterly wretched and abandoned look ; paint is peeling off, windows are cracked, some are broken and boarded up, some still display a few fly-blown relics of stock in the window, some have their windows covered with notices ; the windows are growing dim, the fixtures have gathered two years' dust. They are dead shops. They will never open again. All the great bazaar-like markets are closed, too, in Petersburg now, in the desperate struggle to keep a public control of necessities and prevent the profiteer driving up the last vestiges of food to incredible prices. And this cessation of shops makes walking about the streets seem a silly sort of thing to do. Nobody Petersburg in Collapse 15 " walks about " any more. One realises that a modern city is really nothing but long alleys of shops and restaurants and the like. Shut them up, and the meaning of a street has disappeared. People hurry past — a thin traffic compared with my memories of 19 14. The electric street cars are still running and busy — until six o'clock. They are the only means of locomotion for ordinary people remaining in town — the last legacy of capitalist enter- prise. They became free while we were in Petersburg. Previously there had been a charge of two or three roubles — the hundredth part of the price of an egg. Freeing them made little difference in their extreme congestion during the home- going hours. Every one scrambles on the tramcar. If there is no room inside you cluster outside. In the busy hours festoons of people hang outside by any handhold ; people are frequently pushed off, and accidents are frequent. We saw a crowd collected round a child cut in half by a tramcar, and two people in the little 1 6 Russia in the Shadows circle in which we moved in Petersburg had broken their legs in tramway accidents. The roads along which these tramcars run are in a frightful condition. They have not been repaired for three or four years ; they are full of holes like shell-holes, often two or three feet deep. Frost has eaten out great cavities, drains have collapsed, and people have torn up the wood pave- ment for fires. Only once did we see any attempt to repair the streets in Petrograd. In a side street some mysterious agency had collected a load of wood blocks and two barrels of tar. Most of our longer journeys about the town were done in official motor-cars — left over from the former times. A drive is an affair of tremendous swerves and concussions. These surviving motor-cars are running now on kerosene. They disengage clouds of pale blue smoke, and start up with a noise like a machine-gun battle. Every wooden house was demolished for firing last winter, and such masonry as there was Petersburg in Collapse 17 in those houses remains in ruinous gaps, between the houses of stone. Every one is shabby ; every one seems to be carrying bundles in both Petersburg and Moscow. To walk into some side street in the twilight and see nothing but ill-clad figures, all hurrying, all carrying loads, gives one an impression as though the entire population was setting out in flight. That impression is not altogether misleading. The Bolshevik statistics I have seen are perfectly frank and honest in the matter. The population of Peters- burg has fallen from 1,200,000 (before 1919) to a little over 700,000, and it is still falling. Many people have returned to peasant life in the country, many have gone abroad, but hardship has taken an enormous toll iof this city. The death-rate in Petersburg lis over 81 per 1,000 ; formerly it was high among European cities at 22. The birth- rate of the underfed and profoundly de- pressed population is about 15. It was formerly about 30. These bundles that every one carries c 1 8 Russia in the Shadows are partly the rations of food that are doled out by the Soviet organisation, partly they are the material and results of illicit trade. The Russian population has always been a trading and bargaining population. Even in 19 14 there were but few shops in Peters- burg whose prices were really fixed prices. Tariffs were abominated ; in Moscow taking a droshky meant always a haggle, ten kopecks at a time. Confronted with a shortage of nearly every commodity, a shortage caused partly by the war strain, — for Russia has been at war continuously now for six years — partly by the general collapse of social organisation, and partly by the blockade, and with a currency in complete disorder, the only possible way to save the towns from a chaos of cornering, profiteering, starvation, and at last a mere savage fight for the remnants of food and common necessities, was some sort of collective control and rationing. The Soviet Government rations on prin- ciple, but any Government in Russia now would have to ration. If the war in the Petersburg in Collapse 19 West had lasted up to the present time London would be rationing too — food, clothing, and housing. But in Russia this has to be done on a basis of uncon- trollable peasant production, with a popu- lation temperamentally indisciplined and self-indulgent. The struggle is necessarily a bitter one. The detected profiteer, the genuine profiteer who profiteers on any considerable scale, gets short shrift ; he is shot. Quite ordinary trading may be punished severely. All trading is called " speculation," and is now illegal. But a queer street-corner trading in food and so forth is winked at in Petersburg, and quite openly practised in Moscow, because only by permitting this can the peasants be induced to bring in food. There is also much underground trade between buyers and sellers who know each other. Every one who can supplements his public rations in this way. And every railway station at which one stops is an open market. We would find a crowd of peasants at every sjtopping-place waiting c 2 20 Russia in the Shadows to sell milk, eggs, apples, bread, and so forth. The passengers clamber down and accumulate bundles. An egg or an apple costs 300 roubles. The peasants look well fed, and I doubt if they are very much worse off than they were in 1914. Probably they are better off. They have more land than they had, and they have got rid of their landlords. They will not help in any attempt to over- throw the Soviet Government because they are convinced that while it endures this state of things will continue. This does not prevent their resisting whenever they can the attempts of the Red Guards to collect food at regulation prices. In- sufficient forces of Red Guards may be attacked and massacred. Such incidents are magnified in the London Press as peasant insurrections against the Bol- sheviks. They are nothing of the sort. It is just the peasants making themselves comfortable under the existing regime. But every class above the peasants — including the official class — is now in a Petersburg in Collapse 21 state of extreme privation. The credit and industrial system that produced com- modities has broken down, and so far the attempts to replace it by some other form of production have been ineffective. So that nowhere are there any new things. About the only things that seem to be fairly well supplied are tea, cigarettes, and matches. Matches are more abundant in Russia than they were in England in 1917, and the Soviet State match is quite a good match. But such things as collars, ties, shoelaces, sheets and blankets, spoons and forks, all the haberdashery and crockery of life, are unattainable. There is no replac- ing a broken cup or glass except by a sedulous search and illegal trading. From Petersburg to Moscow we were given a sleeping car de luxe, but there were no water-bottles, glasses, or, indeed, any loose fittings. They have all gone. Most of the men one meets strike one at first as being carelessly shaven, and at first we were inclined to regard that as a sign of a general apathy, but we understood better 22 Russia in the Shadows how things were when a friend mentioned to my son quite casually that he had been using one safety razor blade for nearly a year. Drugs and any medicines are equally unattainable. There is nothing to take for a cold or a headache ; no packing off to bed with a hot-water bottle. Small ailments develop very easily therefore into serious trouble. Nearly everybody we met struck us as being uncomfortable and a little out of health. A buoyant, healthy person is very rare in this atmosphere of discomforts and petty deficiencies. If any one falls into a real illness the outlook is grim. My son paid a visit to the big Obuchovskaya Hospital, and he tells me things were very miserable there indeed. There was an appalling lack of every sort of material, and half the beds were not in use through the sheer impos- sibility of dealing with more patients if they came in. Strengthening and stimu- lating food is out of the question unless the patient's family can by some miracle Petersburg in Collapse 23 procure it outside and send it in. Opera- tions are performed only on one day in the week, Dr. Federoff told me, when the necessary preparations can be made. On other days they are impossible, and the patient must wait. Hardly any one in Petersburg has much more than a change of raiment, and in a great city in which there remains no means of communication but a few over- crowded tramcars,* old, leaky, and ill- fitting boots are the only footwear. At times one sees astonishing makeshifts by way of costume. The master of a school to which we paid a surprise visit struck me as unusually dapper. He was wearing a dinner suit with a blue serge waistcoat. Several of the distinguished scientific and literary men I met had no collars and wore neck-wraps. Gorky possesses only the one suit of clothes he wears. At a gathering of literary people in * I saw one passenger steamboat on the Neva crowded with passengers. Usually the river was quite deserted except for a rare Government tug or a solitary boatman picking up drift timber. 24 Russia in the Shadows Petersburg, Mr. Amphiteatroff, the well- known writer, addressed a long and bitter speech to me. He suffered from the usual delusion that I was blind and stupid and being hoodwinked. He was for taking off the respectable-looking coats of all the company present in order that I might see for myself the rags and tatters and pitiful expedients beneath. It was a painful and, so far as I was concerned, an unnecessary speech, but I quote it here to emphasise this effect of general destitution. And this underclad town population in this dis- mantled and ruinous city is, in spite of all the furtive trading that goes on, appallingly underfed. With the best will in the world the Soviet Government is unable to pro- duce a sufficient ration to sustain a healthy life. We went to a district kitchen and saw the normal food distribution going on. The place seemed to us fairly clean and fairly well run, but that does not com- pensate for a lack of material. The lowest grade ration consisted of a basinful of thin skilly and about the same quantity of Street Scenery in Petersburg. Mr. Wells Discovers a Si km i Under Repair. Petersburg in Collapse 25 stewed apple compote. People have bread cards and wait in queues for bread, but for three days the Petersburg bakeries stopped for lack of flour. The bread varies greatly in quality ; some was good coarse brown bread, and some I found damp, clay-like, and uneatable. I do not know how far these disconnected details will suffice to give the Western reader an idea of what ordinary life in Petersburg is at the present time. Moscow, they say, is more overcrowded and shorter of fuel than Petersburg, but superficially it looked far less grim than Petersburg. We saw these things in October, in a particularly fine and warm October. We saw them in sunshine in a setting of ruddy and golden foliage. But one day there came a chill, and the yellow leaves went whirling before a drive of snowflakes. It was the first breath of the coming winter. Every one shivered and looked out of the double windows — already sealed up — and talked to us of the previous year. Then the glow of October returned. 26 Russia in the Shadows It was still glorious sunshine when we left Russia. But when I think of that coming winter my heart sinks. The Soviet Government in the commune of the north has made extraordinary efforts to prepare for the time of need. There are piles of wood along the quays, along the middle of the main streets, in the courtyards, and in every place where wood can be piled. Last year many people had to live in rooms below the freezing point ; the water-pipes froze up, the sanitary machinery ceased to work. The reader must imagine the con- sequences. People huddled together in the ill-lit rooms, and kept themselves alive with tea and talk. Presently some Russian novelist will tell us all that this has meant to heart and mind in Russia. This year it may not be quite so bad as that. The food situation also, they say, is better, but this I very much doubt. The railways are now in an extreme state of deterioration ; the wood-stoked engines are wearing out ; the bolts start and the rails shift as the trains rumble along at a maximum of Petersburg in Collapse 27 twenty-five miles per hour. Even were the railways more efficient, Wrangel has got hold of the southern food supplies. Soon the cold rain will be falling upon these 700,000 souls still left in Petersburg, and then the snow. The long nights extend and the daylight dwindles. And this spectacle of misery and ebbing energy is, you will say, the result of Bolshevist rule ! I do not believe it is. I will deal with the Bolshevist Government when I have painted the general scenery of our problem. But let me say here that this desolate Russia is not a system that has been attacked and destroyed by some- thing vigorous and malignant. It is an unsound system that has worked itself out and fallen down. It was not communism which built up these great, impossible cities, but capitalism. It was not com- munism that plunged this huge, creaking, bankrupt empire into six years of exhaust- ing war. It was European imperialism. Nor is it communism that has pestered this suffering and perhaps dying Russia with a 28 Russia in the Shadows series of subsidised raids, invasions, and insurrections, and inflicted upon it an atrocious blockade. The vindictive French creditor, the journalistic British oaf, are far more responsible for these deathbed miseries than any communist. But to these questions I will return after I have given a little more description of Russia as we saw it during our visit. It is only when one has some conception of the physical and mental realities of the Russian collapse that one can see and estimate the Bolshevist Government in its proper proportions. v^n^BMnawHi 77. Drift and Salvage //. Drift and S ah age AMONG the things I wanted most to see amid this tremendous spectacle of social collapse in Russia was the work of my old friend Maxim Gorky. I had heard of this from members of the returning labour delegation, and what they told me had whetted my desire for a closer view of what was going on. Mr. Bertrand Russell's description of Gorky's health had also made me anxious on his own account ; but I am happy to say that upon that score my news is good. Gorky seems as strong and well to me now as he was when I knew him first in 1906. And as a personality he has grown immensely. Mr. Russell wrote that Gorky is dying and that perhaps culture in Russia is dying too. Mr. Russell was, I think, betrayed by the artistic temptation of a dark and purple concluding passage. He found Gorky in 31 32 Russia in the Shadows bed and afflicted by a fit of coughing, and his imagination made the most of it. Gorky's position in Russia is a quite extraordinary and personal one. He is no more of a communist than I am, and I have heard him argue with the utmost freedom in his flat against the extremist positions with such men as Bokaiev, recently the head of the Extraordinary Commission in Petersburg, and Zalutsky, one of the rising leaders of the Communist party. It was a very reassuring display of free speech, for Gorky did not so much argue as denounce — and this in front of two deeply interested English enquirers. But he has gained the confidence and respect of most of the Bolshevik leaders, and he has become by a kind of necessity the semi-official salvage man under the new regime. He is possessed by a pas- sionate sense of the value of Western science and culture, and by the necessity of pre- serving the intellectual continuity of Russian life through these dark years of famine and war and social stress, with the Drift and Salvage 33 general intellectual life of the world. He has found a steady supporter in Lenin. His work illuminates the situation to an extraordinary degree because it collects together a number of significant factors and makes the essentially catastrophic nature of the Russian situation plain. The Russian smash at the end of 1917 was certainly the completest that has ever happened to any modern social organ- isation. After the failure of the Kerensky Government to make peace and of the British naval authorities to relieve the situation upon the Baltic flank, the shattered Russian armies, weapons in hand, broke up and rolled back upon Russia, a flood of peasant soldiers making for home, without hope, without supplies, without discipline. That time of debacle was a time of complete social disorder. It was a social dissolution. In many parts of Russia there was a peasant revolt. There was chateau-burning, often accompanied by quite horrible atrocities. It was an ex- plosion of the very worst side of human D 34 Russia in the Shadows nature in despair, and for most of the abominations committed the Bolsheviks are about as responsible as the Government of Australia. People would be held up and robbed even to their shirts in open daylight in the streets of Petersburg and Moscow, no one interfering. Murdered bodies lay disregarded in the gutters sometimes for a whole day, with passengers on the footwalk going to and fro. Armed men, often professing to be Red Guards, entered houses and looted and murdered. The early months of 1918 saw a violent struggle of the new Bolshevik Government not only with counter-revolutions but with robbers and brigands of every description. It was not until the summer of 1918, and after thousands of looters and plunderers had been shot, that life began to be ordinarily safe again in the streets of the Russian great towns. For a time Russia was not a civilisation, but a torrent of lawless violence, with a weak central Government of inexperienced rulers, fight- ing not only against unintelligent foreign Drift and Salvage 35 intervention but against the completest internal disorder. It is from such chaotic conditions that Russia still struggles to emerge. Art, literature, science, all the refine- ments and elaboration of life, all that we mean by " civilisation," were involved in this torrential catastrophe. For a time the stablest thing in Russian culture was the theatre. There stood the theatres, and nobody wanted to loot them or destroy them ; the artists were accustomed to meet and work in them and went on meet- ing and working ; the tradition of official subsidies held good. So quite amazingly the Russian dramatic and operatic life kept on through the extremest stormsof violence, and keeps on to this day. In Petersburg we found there were more than forty shows going on every night ; in Moscow we found very much the same state of affairs. We heard Shalyapin, greatest of actors and singers, in The Barber of Seville and in Chovanchina ; the admirable orchestra was variously attired, but the conductor still D 2 36 Russia in the Shadows held out valiantly in swallow tails and a white tie ; we saw a performance of Sadko, we saw Monachof in The Tsarevitch Alexei and as Iago in Othello (with Madame Gorky — Madame Andreievna — as Desde- mona). When one faced the stage, it was as if nothing had changed in Russia ; but when the curtain fell and one turned to the audience one realised the revolution. There were now no brilliant uniforms, no evening dress in boxes and stalls. The audience was an undifferentiated mass of people, the same sort of people everywhere, attentive, good- humoured, well-behaved and shabby. Like the London Stage Society, one's place in the house is determined by ballot. And for the most part there is no paying to enter the theatre. For one performance the tickets go, let us say, to the professional unions, for another to the Red Army and their families, for another to the school children, and so on. A certain selling of tickets goes on, but it is not in the present scheme of things. I had heard Shalyapin in London, but Drift and Salvage 37 I had not met him personally there. We made his acquaintance this time in Peters- burg, we dined with him and saw something of his very jolly household. There are two stepchildren almost grown up, and two little daughters, who speak a nice, stiff, correct English, and the youngest of whom dances delightfully. Shalyapin is certainly one of the most wonderful things in Russia at the present time. He is the Artist, defiant and magnificent. Off the stage he has much the same vitality and abounding humour that made an encounter with Beerbohm Tree so delightful an experience. He refuses absolutely to sing except for pay — 200,000 roubles a per- formance, they say, which is nearly £15 — ■ and when the markets get too tight, he insists upon payment in flour or eggs or the like. What he demands he gets, for Shalyapin on strike would leave too dismal a hole altogether in the theatrical world of Petersburg. So it is that he maintains what is perhaps the last fairly comfortable home in Russia. And Madame Shalyapin 38 Russia in the Shadows we found so unbroken by the revolution that she asked us what people were wearing in London. The last fashion papers she had seen — thanks to the blockade — dated from somewhen early in 191 8. But the position of the theatre among the arts is peculiar. For the rest of the arts, for literature generally and for the scientific worker, the catastrophe of 1917-18 was overwhelming. There remained no one to buy books or pictures, and the scientific worker found himself with a salary of roubles that dwindled rapidly to less than the five-hundredth part of their original value. The new crude social organisation, fighting robbery, murder, and the wildest disorder, had no place for them ; it had forgotten them. For the scientific men at first the Soviet Government had as little regard as the first French revolution, which had " no need for chemists." These classes of worker, vitally important to every civilised system, were reduced, there- fore, to a state of the utmost privation and misery. It was to their assistance and Drift and Salvage 39 salvation that Gorky's first efforts were directed. Thanks very largely to him and to the more creative intelligences in the Bolshevik Government, there has now been organised a group of salvage establishments, of which the best and most fully developed is the House of Science in Petersburg, in the ancient palace of the Archduchess Marie Pavlova. Here we saw the head- quarters of a special rationing system which provides as well as it can for the needs of four thousand scientific workers and their dependants — in all perhaps for ten thousand people. At this centre they not only draw their food rations, but they can get baths and barber, tailoring, cobbling and the like conveniences. There is even a small stock of boots and clothing. There are bedrooms, and a sort of hospital accommodation for cases of weakness and ill-health. It was to me one of the strangest of my Russian experiences to go to this institu- tion and to meet there, as careworn and unprosperous-looking figures, some of the 4-0 Russia in the Shadows great survivors of the Russian scientific world. Here were such men as Oldenburg the orientalist, Karpinsky the geologist, Pavloffthe Nobel prizeman, Radloff, Bielo- polsky, and the like, names of world-wide celebrity. They asked me a multitude of questions about recent scientific progress in the world outside Russia, and made me ashamed of my frightful ignorance of such matters. If I had known that this would happen I would have taken some sort of report with me. Our blockade has cut them off from all scientific literature outside Russia. They are without new instru- ments, they are short of paper, the work they do has to go on in unwarmed labora- tories. It is amazing they do any work at all. Yet they are getting work done ; Pavloff is carrying on research of astonish- ing scope and ingenuity upon the mentality of animals ; Manuchin claims to have worked out an effectual cure for tubercu- losis, even in advanced cases ; and so on. I have brought back abstracts of Manuchin 's work for translation and publication here, A Petersburg Street Car en Route. Messrs. Lenin and Wells in Conversation'. Drift and Salvage 41 and they are now being put into English. The scientific spirit is a wonderful spirit. If Petersburg starves this winter, the House of Science — unless we make some special effort on its behalf — will starve too, but these scientific men said very little to me about the possibility of sending them in supplies. The House of Literature and Art talked a little of want and miseries, but not the scientific men. What they were all keen about was the possibility of getting scientific publications ; they value knowledge more than bread. Upon that matter I hope I may be of some help to them. I got them to form a committee to make me out a list of all the books and publications of which they stood in need, and I have brought this list back to the Secretary of the Royal Society of London, which had already been stirring in this matter. Funds will be needed, three or four thousand pounds perhaps (the address of the Secretary of the Royal Society is Burlington House, W.), but the assent of the Bolshevik Government and our own 42 Russia in the Shadows to this mental provisioning of Russia has been secured, and in a little time I hope the first parcel of books will be going through to these men, who have been cut off for so long from the general mental life of the world. If I had no other reason for satisfaction about this trip to Russia, I should find quite enough in the hope and comfort our mere presence evidently gave to many of these distinguished men in the House of Science and in the House of Literature and Art. Upon many of them there had settled a kind of despair of ever seeing or hearing anything of the outer world again. They had been living for three years, very grey and long years indeed, in a world that seemed sinking down steadily through one degree of privation after another into utter darkness. Possibly they had seen something of one or two of the political deputations that have visited Russia — I do not know ; but manifestly they had never expected to see again a free and independent individual Drift and Salvage 43 walk in, with an air of having come quite easily and unofficially from London, and of its being quite possible not only to come but to go again into the lost world of the West. It was like an unexpected afternoon caller strolling into a cell in a gaol. All musical people in England know the work of Glazounov ; he has conducted concerts in London and is an honorary doctor both of Oxford and Cambridge. I was very deeply touched by my meeting with him. He used to be a big florid man, but now he is pallid and much fallen away, so that his clothes hang loosely on him. He came and talked of his friends Sir Hubert Parry and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. He told me he still composed, but that his stock of music paper was almost exhausted. " Then there will be no more." I said there would be much more, and that soon. He doubted it. He spoke of London and Oxford ; I could see that he was consumed by an almost intolerable longing for some great city full of life, a city with abundance, with 44 Russia in the Shadows pleasant crowds, a city that would give him stirring audiences in warm, brightly-lit places. While I was there, I was a sort of living token to him that such things could still be. He turned his back on the window which gave on the cold grey Neva, deserted in the twilight, and the low lines of the fortress prison of St. Peter and St. Paul. " In England there will be no revolution — no ? I had many friends in England — many good friends in Eng- land. ..." I was loth to leave him, and he was very loth to let me go. Seeing all these distinguished men living a sort of refugee life amidst the im- poverished ruins of the fallen imperialist system has made me realise how helplessly dependent the man of exceptional gifts is upon a securely organised civilisation. The ordinary man can turn from this to that occupation ; he can be a sailor or a worker in a factory or a digger or what not. He is under a general necessity to work, but he has no internal demon which compels him to do a particular Drift and Salvage 45 thing and nothing else, which compels him to be a particular thing or die. But a Shalyapin must be Shalyapin or nothing, Pavloff is Pavloff and Glazounov, Glazounov. So long as they can go on doing their particular thing, such men will live and flourish. Shalyapin still acts and sings magnificently — in absolute defiance of every Communist principle ; Pavloff still continues his marvellous researches — in an old coat and with his study piled up with the potatoes and carrots he grows in his spare time ; Glazounov will compose until the paper runs out. But many of the others are evidently stricken much harder. The mortality among the intel- lectually distinguished men of Russia has been terribly high. Much, no doubt, has been due to the general hardship of life, but in many cases I believe that the sheer mortification of great gifts become futile has been the determining cause. They could no more live in the Russia of 1919 than they could have lived in a Kaffir kraal. 46 Russia in the Shadows Science, art, and literature are hothouse plants demanding warmth and respect and service. It is the paradox of science that it alters the whole world and is produced by the genius of men who need protection and help more than any other class of worker. The collapse of the Russian imperial system has smashed up all the shelters in which such things could exist. The crude Marxist philosophy which divides all men into bourgeoisie and pro- letariat, which sees all social life as a stupidly simple " class war," had no knowledge of the conditions necessary for the collective mental life. But it is to the credit of the Bolshevik Government that it has now risen to the danger of a universal intellectual destruction in Russia, and that, in spite of the blockade and the unending struggle against the subsidised revolts and invasions with which we and the French plague Russia, it is now per- mitting and helping these salvage organisa- tions. Parallel with the House of Science is the House of Literature and Art. The Drift and Salvage 47 writing of new books, except for some poetry, and the painting of pictures have ceased in Russia. But the bulk of the writers and artists have been found employ- ment upon a grandiose scheme for the publication of a sort of Russian encyclo- paedia of the literature of the world. In this strange Russia of conflict, cold, famine and pitiful privations there is actually going on now a literary task that would be inconceivable in the rich England and the rich America of to-day. In England and America the production of good literature at popular prices has practically ceased now — " because of the price of paper." The mental food of the English and American masses dwindles and de- teriorates, and nobody in authority cares a rap. The Bolshevik Government is at least a shade above that level. In starving Russia hundreds of people are working upon translations, and the books they translate are being set up and printed, work which may presently give a new Russia such a knowledge of world thought 48 Russia in the Shadows as no other people will possess. I have seen some of the books and the work going on. " May " I write, with no certainty. Because, like everything else in this ruined country, this creative work is essentially improvised and fragmentary. How this world literature is to be distributed to the Russian people I do not know. The book- shops are closed and bookselling, like every other form of trading, is illegal. Probably the books will be distributed to schools and other institutions. In this matter of book distribution the Bolshevik authorities are clearly at a loss. They are at a loss upon very many such matters. In regard to the intellectual life of the community one discovers that Marxist Communism is without plans and without ideas. Marxist Communism has always been a theory of revolution, a theory not merely lacking in creative and constructive ideas, but hostile to creative and constructive ideas. Every Communist orator has been trained to contemn 11 Utopianism," that is to say, has been Gorky in the Great Dump ov Art and Virtuosity in Petersburg. Drift and Salvage 49 trained to contemn intelligent planning. Not even a British business man of the older type is quite such a believer in things righting themselves and in " mud- dling through " as these Marxists. The Russian Communist Government now finds itself face to face, among a multiplicity of other constructive problems, with the problem of sustaining scientific life, of sustaining thought and discussion, of pro- moting artistic creation. Marx the Prophet and his Sacred Book supply it with no lead at all in the matter. Bolshevism, having no schemes, must improvise therefore — clumsily, and is reduced to these pathetic attempts to salvage the wreckage of the intellectual life of the old order. And that life is very sick and unhappy and seems likely to die on its hands. It is not simply scientific and literary work and workers that Maxim Gorky is trying to salvage in Russia. There is a third and still more curious salvage organ- isation associated with him. This is the Expertise Commission, which has its head- E jo Russia in the Shadows quarters in the former British Embassy. When a social order based on private property crashes, when private property is with some abruptness and no qualifica- tion abolished, this does not abolish and destroy the things which have hitherto constituted private property. Houses and their gear remain standing, still being occupied and used by the people who had them before — except when those people have fled. When the Bolshevik authorities requisition a house or take over a deserted palace, they find themselves faced by this problem of the gear. Any one who knows human nature will understand that there has been a certain amount of quiet annexa- tion of desirable things by inadvertent officials and, perhaps less inadvertently, by their wives. But the general spirit of Bolshevism is quite honest, and it is set very stoutly against looting and suchlike developments of individual enterprise. There has evidently been comparatively little looting either in Petersburg or Moscow since the days of the debacle. Looting died Drift and Salvage 51 against the wall in Moscow in the spring of 1 91 8. In the guest houses and suchlike places we noted thnt everything was numbered and listed. Occasionally we saw odd things astray, fine glass or crested silver upon tables where it seemed out of place, but in many cases these were things which had been sold for food or suchlike necessities on the part of the original owners. The sailor courier who attended to our comfort to and from Moscow was provided with a beautiful little silver teapot that must once have brightened a charming drawing-room. But apparently it had taken to a semi-public life in a quite legitimate way. For greater security there has been a gathering together and a cataloguing of everything that could claim to be a work of art by this Expertise Commission. The palace that once sheltered the British Embassy is now like some congested second-hand art shop in the Brompton Road. We went through room after room piled with the beautiful lumber of the E 2 52 Russia in the Shadows former Russian social system. There are big rooms crammed with statuary ; never have I seen so many white marble Venuses and sylphs together, not even in the Naples Museum. There are stacks of pictures of every sort, passages choked with inlaid cabinets piled up to the ceiling ; a room full of cases of old lace, piles of magnificent furniture. This accumulation has been counted and catalogued. And there it is. I could not find out that any one had an idea of what was ultimately to be done with all this lovely and elegant litter. The stuff does not seem to belong in any way to the new world, if it is indeed a new world that the Russian Communists are organising. They never anticipated that they would have to deal with such things. Just as they never really thought of what they would do with the shops and markets when they had abolished shopping and marketing. Just as they had never thought out the problem of converting a city of private palaces into a Communist gathering-place. Marxist theory had led Drift and Salvage ^ their minds up to the " dictatorship of the class-conscious proletariat " and then inti- mated — we discover now how vaguely — that there would be a new heaven and a new earth. Had that happened it would indeed have been a revolution in human affairs. But as we saw Russia there is still the old heaven and the old earth, covered with the ruins, littered with the abandoned furnishings and dislocated ma- chinery of the former system, with the old peasant tough and obstinate upon the soil — and Communism, ruling in the cities quite pluckily and honestly, and yet, in so many matters, like a conjurer who has left his pigeon and his rabbit behind him, and can produce nothing whatever from the hat. Ruin ; that is the primary Russian fact at the present time. The revolution, the Communist rule, which I will proceed to describe in my next paper, is quite secon- dary to that. It is something that has happened in the ruin and because of the ruin. It is of primary importance that 54 Russia in the Shadows people in the West should realise that. If the Great War had gone on for a year or so more, Germany and then the Western Powers would probably have repeated, with local variations, the Russian crash. The state of affairs we have seen in Russia is only the intensification and completion of the state of affairs towards which Britain was drifting in 191 8. Here also there are shortages such as we had in England, but they are relatively monstrous ; here also is rationing, but it is relatively feeble and inefficient ; the profiteer in Russia is not fined but shot, and for the English D.O.R.A. you have the Extraordinary Commission. What were nuisances in England are magnified to disasters in Russia. That is all the difference. For all I know, Western Europe may be still drifting even now towards a parallel crash. I am not by any means sure that we have turned the corner. War, self-indulgence, and unproductive speculation may still be wasting more than the Western world is producing ; in which case our own crash — Drift and Salvage 55 currency failure, a universal shortage, social and political collapse and all the rest of it — is merely a question of time. The shops of Regent Street will follow the shops of the Nevsky Prospect, and Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Bennett will have to do what they can to salvage the art treasures of Mayfair. It falsifies the whole world situation, it sets people altogether astray in their political actions, to assert that the frightful destitution of Russia to-day is to any large extent the result merely of Com- munist effort ; that the wicked Commun- ists have pulled down Russia to her present plight, and that if you can overthrow the Communists every one and everything in Russia will suddenly become happy again. Russia fell into its present miseries through the world war and the moral and intellec- tual insufficiency of its ruling and wealthy people. (As our own British State — as presently even the American State — may fall.) They had neither the brains nor the conscience to stop warfare, stop waste of all sorts, and stop taking the best of every- 5 6 Russia in the Shadows thing and leaving every one else dangerously unhappy, until it was too late. They ruled and wasted and quarrelled, blind to the coming disaster up to the very moment of its occurrence. And then, as I describe in the next chapters, the Communist came in. . . . Lenin Behind him stands Gorky ; to the right of Gorky (i.e. on his left) are Zorin (ha/) rind Zenovieft. Behind with cigarette is Radels ///. The Quintessence of Bolshevism ///. The Quintessence of Bolshevism IN the two preceding chapters I have tried to give the reader my impression of Russian life as I saw it in Petersburg and Moscow, as a spectacle of collapse, as the collapse of a political, social, and economic system, akin to our own but weaker and more rotten than our own, which has crashed under the pressure of six years of war and misgovernment. The main col- lapse occurred in 19 17 when Tsarism, brutishly incompetent, became manifestly impossible. It had wasted the whole land, lost control of its army and the confidence of the entire population. Its police system had degenerated into a regime of violence and brigandage. It fell inevitably. And there was no alternative govern- ment. For generations the chief energies of Tsarism had been directed to destroying 59 60 Russia in the Shadows any possibility of an alternative govern- ment. It had subsisted on that one fact that, bad as it was, there was nothing else to put in its place. The first Russian Revolution, therefore, turned Russia into a debating society and a political scramble. The liberal forces of the country, un- accustomed to action or responsibility, set up a clamorous discussion whether Russia was to be a constitutional monarchy, a liberal republic, a socialist republic, or what not. Over the confusion gesticulated Kerensky in attitudes of the finest liberal- ism. Through it loomed various ambiguous adventurers, " strong men," sham strong men, Russian Monks and Russian Bona- partes. What remained of social order collapsed. In the closing months of 19 17 murder and robbery were common street incidents in Petersburg and Moscow, as common as an automobile accident in the streets of London, and less heeded. On the Reval boat was an American who had formerly directed the affairs of the Ameri- can Harvester Company in Russia. He The Statue of Marx outside the Smolny Institute. (Headquarters of the Communist Party.) The Quintessence of Bolshevism 61 had been in Moscow during this phase of complete disorder. He described hold-ups in open daylight in busy streets, dead bodies lying for hours in the gutter — as a dead kitten might do in a western town — while crowds went about their business along the side-walk. Through this fevered and confused country went the representatives of Britain and France, blind to the quality of the immense and tragic disaster about them, intent only upon the war, badgering the Russians to keep on fighting and make a fresh offensive against Germany. But when the Germans made a strong thrust towards Petersburg through the Baltic provinces and by sea, the British Admiralty, either through sheer cowardice or through Royalist intrigues, failed to give any effec- tual help to Russia. Upon this matter the evidence of the late Lord Fisher is plain. And so this unhappy country, mortally sick and, as it were, delirious, staggered towards a further stage of collapse. From end to end of Russia, and in the 62 Russia in the Shadows Russian-speaking community throughout the world, there existed only one sort of people who had common general ideas upon which to work, a common faith and a common will, and that was the Com- munist party. While all the rest of Russia was either apathetic like the peasantry or garrulously at sixes and sevens or given over to violence or fear, the Communists believed and were prepared to act. Numerically they were and are a very small part of the Russian population. At the present time not one per cent, of the people in Russia are Communists ; the organised party certainly does not number more than 600,000 and has probably not much more than 150,000 active members. Nevertheless, because it was in those terrible days the only organisation which gave men a common idea of action, common formulae, and mutual confidence, it was able to seize and retain control of the smashed empire. It was and it is the only sort of administrative solidarity possible in Russia. These ambiguous adventurers The Quintessence of Bolshevism 63 who have been and are afflicting Russia, with the support of the Western Powers, Deniken, Kolchak, Wrangel and the like, stand for no guiding principle and offer no security of any sort upon which men's confidence can crystallise. They are essentially brigands. The Communist party, however one may criticise it, does embody an idea and can be relied upon to stand by its idea. So far it is a thing morally higher than anything that has yet come against it. It at once secured the passive support of the peasant mass by permitting them to take land from the estates and by making peace with Germany. It restored order — after a frightful lot of shooting— in the great towns. For a time everybody found carrying arms with- out authority was shot. This action was clumsy and bloody but effective. To retain its power this Communist Govern- ment organised Extraordinary Commis- sions, with practically unlimited powers, and crushed out all opposition by a Red Terror. Much that that Red Terror did 64 Russia in the Shadows was cruel and frightful, it was largely controlled by narrow-minded men, and many of its officials were inspired by social hatred and the fear of counter-revolution, but if it was fanatical it was honest. Apart from individual atrocities it did on the whole kill for a reason and to an end. Its bloodshed was not like the silly aimless butcheries of the Deniken regime, which would not even recognise, I was told, the Bolshevik Red Cross. And to-day the Bolshevik Government sits, I believe, in Moscow as securely established as any Government in Europe, and the streets of the Russian towns are as safe as any streets in Europe. It not only established itself and restored order, but — thanks largely to the genius of that ex-pacifist Trotsky — it re-created the Russian army as a fighting force. That we must recognise as a very remarkable achievement. I saw little of the Russian army myself, it was not what I went to Russia to see, but Mr. Vanderlip, the enter- prising American financier, whom I found < IS. J. y. < The Quintessence of Bolshevism 65 in Moscow engaged in some mysterious negotiations with the Soviet Government, had been treated to a review of several thousand troops, and was very enthusiastic about their spirit and equipment. My son and I saw a number of drafts going to the front, and also bodies of recruits joining up, and our impression is that the spirit of the men was quite as good as that of similar bodies of British recruits in London in 1917-18. Now who are these Bolsheviki who have taken such an effectual hold upon Russia ? According to the crazier section of the British Press they are the agents of a mysterious racial plot, a secret society, in which Jews, Jesuits, Freemasons, and Germans are all jumbled together in the maddest fashion. As a matter of fact, nothing was ever quite less secret than the ideas and aims and methods of the Bol- sheviks, nor anything quite less like a secret society than their organisation. But in England we cultivate a peculiar style of thinking, so impervious to any general F 66 Russia in the Shadows ideas that it must needs fall back upon the notion of a conspiracy to explain the simplest reactions of the human mind. If, for instance, a day labourer in Essex makes a fuss because he finds that the price of his children's boots has risen out of all proportion to the increase in his weekly wages, and declares that he and his fellow- workers are being cheated and underpaid, the editors of The Times and of the Morning Post will trace his resentment to the insidious propaganda of some mysterious society at Konigsberg or Pekin. They cannot conceive how otherwise he should get such ideas into his head. Conspiracy mania of this kind is so prevalent that I feel constrained to apologise for my own immunity. I find the Bolsheviks very much what they profess to be. I find myself obliged to treat them as fairly straightforward people. I do not agree with either their views or their methods, but that is another question. The Bolsheviks are Marxist Socialists. Marx died in London nearly forty years The Quintessence of Bolshevism 67 ago ; the propaganda of his views has been going on for over half a century. It has spread over the whole earth and finds in nearly every country a small but enthusiastic following. It is a natural result of world-wide economic conditions. Everywhere it expresses the same limited ideas in the same distinctive phrasing. It is a cult, a world-wide international brotherhood. No one need learn Russian to study the ideas of Bolshevism. The enquirer will find them all in the London Plebs or the New York Liberator in exactly the same phrases as in the Russian Pravda. They hide nothing. They say everything. And just precisely what these Marxists write and say, so they attempt to do. It will be best if I write about Marx without any hypocritical deference. I have always regarded him as a Bore of the extremest sort. His vast unfinished work, Das Kapital, a cadence of wearisome volumes about such phantom unrealities as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, a F 2 68 Russia in the Shadows book for ever maundering away into tedious secondary discussions, impresses me as a monument of pretentious pedantry. But before I went to Russia on this last occasion I had no active hostility to Marx. I avoided his works, and when I en- countered Marxists I disposed of them by asking them to tell me exactly what people constituted the proletariat. None of them knew. No Marxist knows. In Gorki's flat I listened with attention while Bokaiev discussed with Shalyapin the fine question of whether in Russia there was a proletariat at all, distinguishable from the peasants. As Bokaiev has been head of the Extraordinary Commission of the Dic- tatorship of the Proletariat in Petersburg, it was interesting to note the fine difficulties of the argument. The " proletarian " in the Marxist jargon is like the " producer ' in the jargon of some political economists, who is supposed to be a creature absolutely distinct and different from the " con- sumer." So the proletarian is a figure put into flat opposition to something called The Quintessence of Bolshevism 69 capital. I find in large type outside the current number of the Plebs, " The working class and the employing class have nothing in common." Apply this to a works fore-, man who is being taken in a train by an engine-driver to see how the house he is having built for him by a building society is getting on. To which of these im- miscibles does he belong, employer or employed ? The stuff is sheer nonsense. In Russia I must confess my passive objection to Marx has changed to a very active hostility. Wherever we went we encountered busts, portraits, and statues of Marx. About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast solemn woolly uneventful beard that must have made all normal exercise impossible. It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world. It is exactly like Das Kapital in its inane abundance, and the human part of the face looks over it owlishly as if it looked to see how the growth impressed mankind. I found the 7