204 HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
to Russia, not one per cent, or one in a hundred and fifty,
can speak Russian. (Persons who formerly lived in Russia
are almost without exception refused a visa.) It follows that
visitors are completely dependent on their guides and hosts;
there is an invisible wall between them and the populace, and
they have not the faintest notion of the conditions under which
the latter live. Furthermore, the local population is in a per-
manent state of mental depression and has a feeling of personal
inferiority, the result of hunger, malnutrition, continuous
worry, the general dreariness of existence, and not least fear
of tyranny and persecution. The result is that even if they could,
without attracting notice, establish contact with the foreigners
—those members of a higher and happier milieu—they would
on principle avoid them. Instead, the foreign visitors are
regaled from morning till evening with the special sights and
the record achievements—all this according to a fixed plan.
The same objects, such as the Dnieprostroi dam, are shown
again and again.
As the inhabitants avoid contact with the strangers, and the
few who approach them know the part they have to play, the
visitors do not even suspect that they are being kept at a distance
from the life of the people. This is true also of foreigners who
stay in Moscow privately, i.e. not in a hotel. During a debate
following a recent lecture at Cambridge a young student stated
that he had travelled to Moscow out of curiosity and had taken
a comfortable room with a Russian lady, where there were ikons
on the walls; he added that his landlady went to church every
day. He should be told that in the whole of Moscow, apart
from members or friends of the Ogpu, there is not a single
person who has rooms free to let to foreigners, still less any-
one regularly going to church—in other words, no one osten-
tatiously vaunting his non-Communist opinions.
Certainly foreigners who go to Russia see much that is
valuable in the fields of art and science. The mistake they
make is in supposing that life and economic conditions