Russia in the shadows

6

Russia in the Shadows

Street Scenery in Petersburg: Site of a Demolished
Wooden House.

Frontispiece.

Russia in the
Shadows

H. Q. Wells

17. s'. a 1

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LIMITED LONDON

Contents

I. Petersburg in Collapse ... 9

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

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 1914, 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 debacle 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
1 9 14 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 19 19)
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
of this city. The death-rate in Petersburg
is 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

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 1 9 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 stopping-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 tgg 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 19 14. 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 2 1

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 191 7,
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 Street Under Repa]

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

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.

II. Drift and Salvage

77. Drift and Salvage

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

Corky in the Great Dump of Art and Virtuosity in
Petersburg.

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 191 7
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 191 8 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 191 8, 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 Sadkoy
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 191 7-1 8 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<D 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, RadlofT, 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,

■■•■■ ,^^^HHBj^R

I;

•v. ill a ji ■ dBir 'S i ^v ^ y m

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 19 19
than they could have lived in a Kaffir
kraal.

46 Russia in the Shadows

» 1

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

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

50 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
1 918. In the guest houses and suchlike
places we noted that 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 53

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 $$

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-

56 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. . . .

777. 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

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 191 7
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 6 1

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

The Quintessence of Bolshevism 6$

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

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<D Russia in the Shadows

omnipresent images of that beard more
and more irritating. A gnawing desire
grew upon me to see Karl Marx shaved.
Some day, if I am spared, I will take up
shears and a razor against Das Kapital ; I
will write The Shaving of Karl Marx.

But Marx is for the Marxists merely an
image and a symbol, and it is with the
Marxist and not with Marx that we are
now dealing. Few Marxists have read
much of Das Kapital. The Marxist is
very much the same sort of person in all
modern communities, and I will confess
that by my temperament and circumstances
I have the very warmest sympathy for
him. He adopts Marx as his prophet
simply because he believes that Marx
wrote of the class war, an implacable war
of the employed against the employer, and
that he prophesied a triumph for the
employed person, a dictatorship of the
world by the leaders of these liberated
employed persons (dictatorship of the
proletariat), and a Communist millennium
arising out of that dictatorship. Now this

The Quintessence of Bolshevism 7 1

doctrine and this prophecy have appealed
in every country with extraordinary power
to young persons, and particularly to
young men of energy and imagination wTho
have found themselves at the outset of
life imperfectly educated, ill-equipped, and
caught into hopeless wages slavery in our
existing economic system. They realise
in their own persons the social injustice,
the stupid negligence, the colossal in-
civility of our system ; they realise that
they are insulted and sacrificed by it ;
and they devote themselves to break it
and emancipate themselves from it. No
insidious propaganda is needed to make
such rebels ; it is the faults of a system
that half-educates and then enslaves them
which have created the Communist move-
ment wherever industrialism has developed.
There would have been Marxists if Marx
had never lived. When I was a boy of
fourteen I was a complete Marxist, long
before I had heard the name of Marx. I
had been cut off abruptly from education,
caught in a detestable shop, and I was

72 Russia in the Shadows

being broken in to a life of mean and
dreary toil. I was worked too hard and
for such long hours that all thoughts of
self-improvement seemed hopeless. I
would have set fire to that place if I had
not been convinced it was over-insured.
I revived the spirit of those bitter days in
a conversation I had with Zorin, one of
the leaders of the Commune of the North.
He is a young man who has come back
from unskilled work in America, a very
likeable human being and a humorous and
very popular speaker in the Petersburg
Soviet. He and I exchanged experiences,
and I found that the thing that rankled
most in his mind about America was the
brutal incivility he had encountered when
applying for a job as packer in a big dry
goods store in New York. We told each
other stories of the way our social system
wastes and breaks and maddens decent
and willing men. Between us was the
freemasonry of a common indignation.

It is that indignation of youth and
energy, thwarted and misused, it is that

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The Quintessence of Bolshevism 73

and no mere economic theorising, which
is the living and linking inspiration of the
Marxist movement throughout the world.
It is not that Marx was profoundly wise,
but that our economic system has been
stupid, selfish, wasteful, and anarchistic.
The Communistic organisation has pro-
vided for this angry recalcitrance certain
shibboleths and passwords ; " Workers
of the World unite, " and so forth. It has
suggested to them an idea of a great con-
spiracy against human happiness concocted
by a mysterious body of wicked men called
capitalists. For in this mentally enfeebled
world in which we live to-day conspiracy
mania on one side finds its echo on the
other, and it is hard to persuade a Marxist
that capitalists are in their totality no more
than a scrambling disorder of mean-spirited
and short-sighted men. And the Com-
munist propaganda has knitted all these
angry and disinherited spirits together into
a world-wide organisation of revolt — and
hope — formless though that hope proves
to be on examination. It has chosen Marx

74 Russia in the Shadows

for its prophet and red for its colour. . . .
And so when the crash came in Russia,
when there remained no other solidarity
of men who could work together upon any
but immediate selfish ends, there came
flowing back from America and the West
to rejoin their comrades a considerable
number of keen and enthusiastic young
and youngish men, who had in that more
bracing Western world lost something of
the habitual impracticability of the Russian
and acquired a certain habit of getting
things done, who all thought in the same
phrases and had the courage of the same
ideas, and who were all inspired by the
dream of a revolution that should bring
human life to a new level of justice and
happiness. It is these young men who
constitute the living force of Bolshevism.
Many of them are Jews, because most of
the Russian emigrants to America were
Jews ; but few of them have any strong
racial Jewish feeling. They are not out
for Jewry but for a new world. So far
from being in continuation of the Jewish

The Quintessence of Bolshevism 75

tradition the Bolsheviks have put most of
the Zionist leaders in Russia in prison,
and they have proscribed the teaching of
Hebrew as a " reactionary " language.
Several of the most interesting Bolsheviks
I met were not Jews at all, but blond
Nordic men. Lenin, the beloved leader
of all that is energetic in Russia to-day,
has a Tartar type of face and is certainly
no Jew.

This Bolshevik Government is at once
the most temerarious and the least experi-
enced governing body in the world. In
some directions its incompetence is amaz-
ing. In most its ignorance is profound.
Of the diabolical cunning of " capitalism "
and of the subtleties of reaction it is
ridiculously suspicious, and sometimes it
takes fright and is cruel. But essentially
it is honest. It is the most simple-minded
Government that exists in the world to-day.

Its simple-mindedness is shown by one
question that I was asked again and again
during this Russian visit. " When is the
social revolution going to happen in

76 Russia in the Shadows

England ? " Lenin asked me that, Zeno-
vieff, who is the head of the Commune of
the North, Zorin, and many others.

Because it is by the Marxist theory all
wrong that the social revolution should
happen first in Russia. That fact is
bothering every intelligent man in the
movement. According to the Marxist
theory the social revolution should have
happened first in the country with the
oldest and most highly developed indus-
trialism, with a large, definite, mainly
propertyless, mainly wages-earning work-
ing class (proletariat). It should have
begun in Britain, and spread to France and
Germany, then should have come America's
turn and so on. Instead they find Com-
munism in power in Russia, which really
possesses no specialised labouring class at
all, which has worked its factories with
peasant labourers who come and go from
the villages, and so has scarcely any
" proletariat " — to unite with the workers
of the world and so forth — at all. Behind
the minds of many of these Bolsheviks with

The Quintessence of Bolshevism 77

whom I talked I saw clearly that there
dawns now a chill suspicion of the reality
of the case, a realisation that what they
have got in Russia is not truly the promised
Marxist social revolution at all, that in
truth they have not captured a State but
got aboard a derelict. I tried to assist the
development of this novel and disconcert-
ing discovery. And also I indulged in a
little lecture on the absence of a large
" class-conscious proletariat " in the
Western communities. I explained that in
England there were two hundred different
classes at least, and that the only " class-
conscious proletarians " known to me in
the land were a small band of mainly
Scotch workers kept together by the
vigorous leadership of a gentleman named
MacManus. Their dearest convictions
struggled against my manifest candour.
They are clinging desperately to the belief
that there are hundreds of thousands of
convinced Communists in Britain, versed
in the whole gospel of Marx, a proletarian
solidarity, on the eve of seizing power and

78 Russia in the Shadows

proclaiming a British Soviet Republic.
They hold obstinately to that after three
years of waiting — but their hold weakens.

Among the most amusing things in this
queer intellectual situation are the repeated
scoldings that come by wireless from
Moscow to Western Labour because it
does not behave as Marx said it would
behave. It isn't red — and it ought to be.
It is just yellow.

My conversation with ZenovierT was
particularly curious. He is a man with
the voice and animation of Hilaire Belloc,
and a lot of curly coal-black hair. " You
have civil war in Ireland," he said.
" Practically," said I. " Which do you
consider are the proletarians, the Sinn
Feiners or the Ulstermen ? " We spent
some time while Zenovieff worked like a
man with a jigsaw puzzle trying to get
the Irish situation into the class war
formula. That jigsaw puzzle remained
unsolved, and we then shifted our attention
to Asia. Impatient at the long delay of
the Western proletarians to emerge and

The Quintessence of Bolshevism 79

declare themselves, Zenovieff, assisted by
Bela Kun, our Mr. Tom Quelch, and a
number of other leading Communists, has
recently gone on a pilgrimage to Baku to
raise the Asiatic proletariat. They went
to beat up the class-conscious wages slaves
of Persia and Turkestan. They sought out
factory workers and slum dwellers in the
tents of the steppes. They held a congress
at Baku, at which they gathered together
a quite wonderful accumulation of white,
black, brown, and yellow people, Asiatic
costumes and astonishing weapons. They
had a great assembly in which they swore
undying hatred of Capitalism and British
imperialism ; they had a great procession in
which I regret to say certain batteries of
British guns, which some careless, hasty
empire-builder had left behind him,
figured ; they disinterred and buried again
thirteen people whom this British empire-
builder seems to have shot without trial,
and they burnt Mr. Lloyd George, M.
Millerand, and President Wilson in effigy.
I not only saw a five-part film of this

80 Russia in the Shadows

remarkable festival when I visited the
Petersburg Soviet, but, thanks to Zorin,
I have brought the film back with me. It is
to be administered with caution and to
adults only. There are parts of it that
would make Mr. Gwynne of the Morning
Post or Mr. Rudyard Kipling scream in
their sleep. If so be they ever slept again
after seeing it.

I did my best to find out from Zenovieff
and Zorin what they thought they were
doing in the Baku Conference. And
frankly I do not think they know. I
doubt if they have anything clearer in
their minds than a vague idea of hitting
back at the British Government through
Mesopotamia and India, because it has
been hitting them through Kolchak,
Deniken, Wrangel, and the Poles. It is a
counter-offensive almost as clumsy and
stupid as the offensives it would counter.
It is inconceivable that they can hope for
any social solidarity with the miscellaneous
discontents their congress assembled. One
item " featured " on this Baku film is a

The Quintessence of Bolshevism 81

dance by a gentleman from the neighbour-
hood of Baku. He is in fact one of the
main features of this remarkable film. He
wears a fur-trimmed jacket, high boots,
and a high cap, and his dancing is a very
rapid and dexterous step dancing. He
produces two knives and puts them between
his teeth, and then two others which he
balances perilously with the blades danger-
ously close to his nose on either side of it.
Finally he poises a fifth knife on his
forehead, still stepping it featly to the
distinctly Oriental music. He stoops and
squats, arms akimbo, sending his nimble
boots flying out and back like the Cossacks
in the Russian ballet. He circles slowly
as he does this, clapping his hands. He is
now rolled up in my keeping, ready to
dance again when opportunity offers. I
tried to find out whether he was a specimen
Asiatic proletarian or just what he sym-
bolised, but I could get no light on him.
But there are yards and yards of film of
him. I wish I could have resuscitated
Karl Marx, just to watch that solemn stare

G

82 Russia in the Shadows

over the beard, regarding him. The film
gives no indication of the dancer's reception
by Mr. Tom Quelch.

I hope I shall not offend Comrade Zorin,
for whom I have a real friendship, if I
thus confess to him that I cannot take his
Baku Conference very seriously. It was
an excursion, a pageant, a Beano. As a
meeting of Asiatic proletarians it was
preposterous. But if it was not very much
in itself, it was something very important
in its revelation of shifting intentions. Its
chief significance to me is this, that it
shows a new orientation of the Bolshevik
mind as it is embodied in Zenovieff. So
long as the Bolsheviki held firmly with
unshaken conviction to the Marxist formula
they looked westward, a little surprised
that the " social revolution " should have
begun so far to the east of its indicated
centre. Now as they begin to realise that
it is not that prescribed social revolution
at all but something quite different which
has brought them into power, they are
naturally enough casting about for a new

The Quintessence of Bolshevism 83

system of relationships. The ideal figure
of the Russian republic is still a huge
western " Worker/ ' with a vast hammer or
a sickle. A time may come, if we maintain
the European blockade with sufficient
stringency and make any industrial
recuperation impossible, when that ideal
may give place altogether to a nomadic-
looking gentleman from Turkestan with a
number of knives. We may drive what
will remain of Bolshevik Russia to the
steppes and the knife. If we help some new
Wrangel to pull down the by no means
firmly established Government in Moscow,
under the delusion that thereby we shall
bring about " representative institutions "
and a " limited monarchy/' we may find
ourselves very much out in our calculations.
Any one who destroys the present law and
order of Moscow will, I believe, destroy
what is left of law and order in Russia.
A brigand monarchist government will
leave a trail of fresh blood across the Rus-
sian scene, show what gentlemen can do
when they are roused, in a tremendous

G 2

84 Russia in the Shadows

pogrom and White Terror, flourish
horribly for a time, break up and vanish.
Asia will resume. The simple ancient
rhythm of the horseman plundering the
peasant and the peasant waylaying the
horseman will creep back across the plains
to the Niemen and the Dniester. The cities
will become clusters of ruins in the waste ;
the roads and railroads will rot and rust ;
the river traffic will decay. . . .

This Baku Conference has depressed
Gorky profoundly. He is obsessed by a
nightmare of Russia going east. Perhaps
I have caught a little of his depression.

IV, The Creative Effort in Russia

IV. The Creative Effort in Russia

IN the previous three chapters I have
tried to give my impression of the
Russian spectacle as that of a rather
ramshackle modern civilisation completely
shattered and overthrown by misgovern-
ment, under-education, and finally six
years of war strain. I have shown science
and art starving and the comforts and
many of the decencies of life gone. In
Vienna the overthrow is just as bad ; and
there too such men of science as the
late Professor Margules starve to death.
If London had had to endure four more
years of war, much the same sort of thing
would be happening in London. We
should have now no coal in our grates
and no food for our food tickets, and
the shops in Bond Street would be as
desolate as the shops in the Nevsky
Prospect. Bolshevik government in Russia

88 Russia in the Shadows

is neither responsible for the causation nor
for the continuance of these miseries.

I have also tried to get the facts of
Bolshevik rule into what I believe is their
proper proportions in the picture. The
Bolsheviks, albeit numbering less than
five per cent, of the population, have been
able to seize and retain power in Russia
because they were and are the only body
of people in this vast spectacle of Russian
ruin with a common faith and a common
spirit. I disbelieve in their faith, I ridicule
Marx, their prophet, but I understand and
respect their spirit. They are — with all
their faults, and they have abundant faults
— the only possible backbone now to a
renascent Russia. The recivilising of
Russia must be done with the Soviet
Government as the starting phase. The
great mass of the Russian population is
an entirely illiterate peasantry, grossly
materialistic and politically indifferent.
They are superstitious, they are for ever
crossing themselves and kissing images, —
in Moscow particularly they were at it —

The Creative Effort in Russia 89

but they are not religious. They have
no will in things political and social beyond
their immediate satisfactions. They are
roughly content with Bolshevik rule. The
Orthodox priest is quite unlike the Catholic
priest in Western Europe ; he is himself
typically a dirty and illiterate peasant
with no power over the wills and con-
sciences of his people. There is no con-
structive quality in either peasant or
Orthodoxy. For the rest there is a con-
fusion of more or less civilised Russians,
in and out of Russia, with no common
political ideas and with no common will.
They are incapable of producing anything
but adventurers and disputes.

The Russian refugees in England are
politically contemptible. They rehearse
endless stories of " Bolshevik outrages " ;
chateau-burnings by peasants, burglaries
and murders by disbanded soldiers in
the towns, back street crimes — they tell
them all as acts of the Bolshevik Govern-
ment. Ask them what government they
want in its place, and you will get rubbishy

90 Russia in the Shadows

generalities — usually adapted to what the
speaker supposes to be your particular
political obsession. Or they sicken you
with the praise of some current super-man,
Deniken or Wrangel, who is to put every-
thing right — God knows how. They
deserve nothing better than a Tsar, and
they are incapable even of deciding which
Tsar they desire. The better part of the
educated people still in Russia are — for the
sake of Russia — slowly drifting into a
reluctant but honest co-operation with
Bolshevik rule.

The Bolsheviks themselves are Marxists
and Communists. They find themselves
in control of Russia, in complete contra-
diction, as I have explained, to the theories
of Karl Marx. A large part of their
energies have been occupied in an entirely
patriotic struggle against the raids, inva-
sions, blockades, and persecutions of every
sort that our insensate Western Governments
have rained upon their tragically shattered
country. What is left over goes in the
attempt to keep Russia alive, and to

The Creative Effort in Russia 91

organise some sort of social order among
the ruins. These Bolsheviks are, as I have
explained, extremely inexperienced men,
intellectual exiles from Geneva and Hamp-
stead, or comparatively illiterate manual
workers from the United States. Never
was there so amateurish a government
since the early Moslim found themselves
in control of Cairo, Damascus, and
Mesopotamia.

I believe that in the minds of very many
of them there is a considerable element of
dismay at the tremendous tasks they find
before them. But one thing has helped
them and Russia enormously, and that is
their training in Communistic ideas. As
the British found out during the submarine
war, so far as the urban and industrial
population goes there is nothing for it
during a time of tragic scarcity but collapse
or collective control. We in England had
to control and ration, we had to suppress
profiteering by stringent laws. These
Communists came into power in Russia
and began to do at once, on principle, the

92 Russia in the Shadows

first most necessary thing in that chaos of
social wreckage. Against all the habits
and traditions of Russia, they began to
control and ration — exhaustively. They
have now a rationing system that is, on
paper, admirable beyond cavil ; and per-
haps it works as well as the temperament
and circumstances of Russian production
and consumption permit. It is easy to
note defects and failures, but not nearly
so easy to show how in this depleted and
demoralised Russia they could be avoided.
And things are in such a state in Russia
now that even if we suppose the Bolsheviks
overthrown and any other Government in
their place, it matters not what, that
Government would have to go on with the
rationing the Bolsheviks have organised,
with the suppression of vague political
experiments, and the punishment and
shooting of profiteers. The Bolsheviki in
this state of siege and famine have done
upon principle what any other Government
would have had to do from necessity.
And in the face of gigantic difficulties

The Creative Effort in Russia 93

they are trying to rebuild a new Russia
among the ruins. We may quarrel with
their principles and methods, we may call
their schemes Utopian and so forth, we
may sneer at or we may dread what they
are doing, but it is no good pretending
that there is no creative effort in Russia
at the present time. A certain section of
the Bolsheviks are hard-minded, doctrinaire
and unteachable men, fanatics who believe
that the mere destruction of capitalism,
the disuse of money and trading, the
effacement of all social differences, will in it-
self bring about a sort of bleak millennium.
There are Bolsheviki so stupid that they
would stop the teaching of chemistry in
schools until they were assured it was
11 proletarian " chemistry, and who would
suppress every decorative design that was
not an elaboration of the letters R.S.F.S.R.
(Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic)
as reactionary art. I have told of the
suppression of Hebrew studies because
they are " reactionary " ; and while I was
with Gorky I found him in constant bitter

94 Russia in the Shadows

disputes with extremist officials who would
see no good in any literature of the past
except the literature of revolt. But there
were other more liberal minds in this new
Russian world, minds which, given an
opportunity, will build and will probably
build well. Among men of such con-
structive force I would quote such names
as Lenin himself, who has developed
wonderfully since the days of his exile,
and who has recently written powerfully
against the extravagances of his own
extremists ; Trotsky, who has never been
an extremist, and who is a man of very
great organising ability ; Lunacharsky, the
Minister for Education ; Rikoff , the head
of the Department of People's Economy ;
Madame Lilna of the Petersburg Child
Welfare Department ; and Krassin, the
head of the London Trade Delegation.
These are names that occur to me ; it is
by no means an exhaustive list of the
statesmanlike elements in the Bolshevik
Government. Already they have achieved
something, in spite of blockade and civil

The Creative Effort in Russia 95

and foreign war. It is not only that they
work to restore a country depleted of
material to an extent almost inconceivable
to English and American readers, but they
work with an extraordinarily unhelpful
personnel. Russia to-day stands more in
need of men of the foreman and works-
manager class than she does of medica-
ments or food. The ordinary work in the
Government offices of Russia is shockingly
done ; the slackness and inaccuracy are
indescribable. Everybody seems to be
working in a muddle of unsorted papers
and cigarette ends. This again is a state
of affairs no counter-revolution could
change. It is inherent in the present
Russian situation. If one of these military
adventurers the Western Powers patronise
were, by some disastrous accident, to
get control of Russia, his success would
only add strong drink, embezzlement, and
a great squalour of kept mistresses to the
general complication. For whatever else
we may say to the discredit of the Bolshevik
leaders, it is undeniable that the great

96 Russia in the Shaaows

majority lead not simply laborious but
puritanical lives.

I write of this general inefficiency in
Russia with the more asperity because it
was the cause of my not meeting Luna-
charsky. About eighty hours of my life
were consumed in travelling, telephoning,
and waiting about in order to talk for
about an hour and a half with Lenin and
for the same time with Tchitcherin. At
that rate, and in view of the intermittent
boat service from Reval to Stockholm, to
see Lunacharsky would have meant at
least a week more in Russia. The whole
of my visit to Moscow was muddled in the
most irritating fashion. A sailor-man carry-
ing a silver kettle who did not know his
way about Moscow was put in charge of
my journey, and an American who did not
know enough Russian to telephone freely
was set to make my appointments in the
town. Although I had heard Gorky
arrange for my meeting with Lenin by
long - distance telephone days before,
Moscow declared that it had had no notice

The Creative Effort in Russia 97

of my coming. Finally I was put into the
wrong train back to Petersburg, a train
which took twenty-two hours instead of
fourteen for the journey. These may seem
petty details to relate, but when it is
remembered that Russia was really doing
its best to impress me with its vigour
and good order, they are extremely signifi-
cant. In the train, when I realised that it
was a slow train and that the express had
gone three hours before while we had
been pacing the hall of the guest house with
our luggage packed and nobody coming for
us, the spirit came upon me and my lips
were unsealed. I spoke to my guide, as
one mariner might speak to another, and
told him what I thought of Russian
methods. He listened with the profoundest
respect to my rich incisive phrases. When
at last I paused, he replied — in words that
are also significant of certain weaknesses
of the present Russian state of mind.

11 You see," he said, " the blockade "

But if I saw nothing of Lunacharsky
personally, I saw something of the work

H

98 Russia in the Shadows

he has organised. The primary material
of the educationist is human beings, and
of these at least there is still no shortage
in Russia, so that in that respect Luna-
charsky is better off than most of his
colleagues. And beginning with an initial
prejudice and much distrust, I am bound
to confess that, in view of their enormous
difficulties, the educational work of the
Bolsheviks impresses me as being as-
tonishingly good.

Things started badly. Directly I got to
Petersburg I asked to see a school, and
on the second day of my visit I was taken
to one that impressed me very unfavourably.
It was extremely well equipped, much
better than an ordinary English grammar
school, and the children were bright and
intelligent ; but our visit fell in the recess.
I could witness no teaching, and the
behaviour of the youngsters I saw indi-
cated a low standard of discipline. I
formed an opinion that I was probably
being shown a picked school specially
prepared for me, and that this was all that

The Creative Effort in Russia 99

Petersburg had to offer. The special
guide who was with us then began to
question these children upon the subject
of English literature and the writers they
liked most. One name dominated all
others. My own. Such comparatively
trivial figures as Milton, Dickens, Shake-
speare ran about intermittently between
the feet of that literary colossus. Being
questioned further, these children pro-
duced the titles of perhaps a dozen of my
books. I said I was completely satisfied
by what I had seen and heard, that I
wanted to see nothing more — for indeed
what more could I possibly require ?— -and
I left that school smiling with difficulty
and thoroughly cross with my guides.

Three days later I suddenly scrapped
my morning's engagements and insisted
upon being taken at once to another
school — any school close at hand. I was
convinced that I had been deceived about
the former school, and that now I should
see a very bad school indeed. Instead I
saw a much better one than the first I

H 2

ioo Russia in the Shadows

had seen. The equipment and building
were better, the discipline of the children
was better, and I saw some excellent
teaching in progress. Most of the teachers
were women, very competent-looking
middle-aged women, and I chose ele-
mentary geometrical teaching to observe
because that on the blackboard is in the
universal language of the diagram. I saw
also a heap of drawings and various models
the pupils had done, and they were very
good. The school was supplied with
abundant pictures. I noted particularly a
well-chosen series of landscapes to assist
the geographical teaching. There was
plenty of chemical and physical apparatus,
and it was evidently put to a proper use.
I also saw the children's next meal in
preparation — for children eat at school in
Soviet Russia — and the food was excellent
and well cooked, far above the standard
of the adult rations we had seen served
out. All this was much more satisfactory.
Finally by a few questions we tested the
extraordinary vogue of H. G. Wells among

The Creative Effort in Russia 101

the young people of Russia. None of
these children had ever heard of him.
The school library contained none of his
books. This did much to convince me
that I was seeing a quite normal school.
I had, I now begin to realise, been taken
to the previous one not, as I had supposed
in my wrath, with any elaborate intention
of deceiving me about the state of educa-
tion in the country, but after certain
kindly intrigues and preparations by a
literary friend, Mr. Chukovsky the critic,
affectionately anxious to make me feel
myself beloved in Russia, and a little
oblivious of the real gravity of the business
I had in hand.

Subsequent enquiries and comparison of
my observations with those of other visitors
to Russia, and particularly those of Dr.
Haden Guest, who also made surprise
visits to several schools in Moscow, have
convinced me that Soviet Russia, in the
face of gigantic difficulties, has made and
is making very great educational efforts,
and that in spite of the difficulties of the

102 Russia in the Shadows

general situation the quality and number
of the schools in the towns has risen abso-
lutely since the Tsarist rigime. (The
peasant, as ever, except in a few " show "
localities, remains scarcely touched by
these things.) The schools I saw would
have been good middle schools in England.
They are open to all, and there is an
attempt to make education compulsory.
Of course Russia has its peculiar difficulties.
Many of the schools are understaffed,
and it is difficult to secure the attendance
of unwilling pupils. Numbers of children
prefer to keep out of the schools and
trade upon the streets. A large part of
the illicit trading in Russia is done by
bands of children. They are harder to
catch than adults, and the spirit of Russian
Communism is against punishing them.
And the Russian child is, for a northern
child, remarkably precocious.

The common practice of co-educating
youngsters up to fifteen or sixteen, in a
country as demoralised as Russia is now,
has brought peculiar evils in its train.

The Creative Effort in Russia 103

My attention was called to this by the
visit of Bokaiev, the former head of the
Petersburg Extraordinary Commission, and
his colleague Zalutsky to Gorky to consult
him in the matter. They discussed their
business in front of me quite frankly, and
the whole conversation was translated to
me as it went on. The Bolshevik authori-
ties have collected and published very
startling, very shocking figures of the moral
condition of young people in Petersburg,
which I have seen. How far they would
compare with the British figures — if there
are any British figures — of such bad dis-
tricts for the young as are some parts of
East London or such towns of low type
employment as Reading I do not know.
(The reader should compare the Fabian
Society's report on prostitution, Down-
ward Paths, upon this question.) Nor do
I know how they would show in com-
parison with preceding Tsarist conditions.
Nor can I speculate how far these phe-
nomena in Russia are the mechanical
consequence of privation and overcrowding

104 Russia in the Shadows

in a home atmosphere bordering on despair.
But there can be no doubt that in the
Russian towns, concurrently with increased
educational effort and an enhanced intel-
lectual stimulation of the young, there is
also an increased lawlessness on their part,
especially in sexual matters, and that this
is going on in a phase of unexampled
sobriety and harsh puritanical decorum so
far as adult life is concerned. This hectic
moral fever of the young is the dark side
of the educational spectacle in Russia. I
think it is to be regarded mainly as an
aspect of the general social collapse ; every
European country has noted a parallel
moral relaxation of the young under the
war strain ; but the revolution itself, in
sweeping a number of the old experienced
teachers out of the schools and in making
every moral standard a subject of debate,
has no doubt contributed also to an as
yet incalculable amount in the excessive
disorder of these matters in present-day
Russia.
Faced with this problem of starving and

The Creative Effort in Russia 105

shattered homes and a social chaos, the
Bolshevik organisers are institutionalising
the town children of Russia. They are
making their schools residential. The
children of the Russian urban population
are going, like the children of the British
upper class, into boarding schools. Close
to this second school I visited stood two
big buildings which are the living places of
the boys and of the girls respectively. In
these places they can be kept under some
sort of hygienic and moral discipline.
This again happens to be not only in
accordance with Communist doctrine, but
with the special necessities of the Russian
crisis. Entire towns are sinking down
towards slum conditions, and the Bolshevik
Government has had to play the part of a
gigantic Dr. Barnardo.

We went over the organisation of a sort
of reception home to which children are
brought by their parents who find it
impossible to keep them clean and decent
and nourished under the terrible conditions
outside. This reception home is the old

106 Russia in the Shadows

Hotel de 1'Europe, the scene of countless
pleasant little dinner-parties under the old
regime. On the roof there is still the
summertime roof garden, where the string
quartette used to play, and on the staircase
we passed a frosted glass window still
bearing in gold letters the words Coiffure
des Dames.

Slender gilded pointing hands directed
us to the " Restaurant/' long vanished from
the grim Petersburg scheme of things.
Into this place the children come ; they
pass into a special quarantine section for
infectious diseases and for personal cleanli-
ness— nine-tenths of the newcomers har-
bour unpleasant parasites — and then into
another section, the moral quarantine,
where for a time they are watched for bad
habits and undesirable tendencies. From
this section some individuals may need to
be weeded out and sent to special schools
for defectives. The rest pass on into
the general body of institutionalised
children, and so on to the boarding
schools.

The Creative Effort in Russia 107

Here certainly we have the " break-up
of the family " in full progress, and the
Bolshevik net is sweeping wide and taking
in children of the most miscellaneous
origins. The parents have reasonably free
access to their children in the daytime, but
little or no control over their education,
clothing, or the like. We went among the
children in the various stages of this
educational process, and they seemed to
us to be quite healthy, happy, and con-
tented children. But they get very good
people to look after them. Many men and
women, politically suspects or openly dis-
contented with the existing political con-
ditions, and yet with a desire to serve
Russia, have found in these places work
that they can do with a good heart and
conscience. My interpreter and the lady
who took us round this place had often
dined and supped in the Hotel de l'Europe
in its brilliant days, and they knew each
other well. This lady was now plainly clad,
with short cut hair and a grave manner ;
her husband was a White and serving with

108 Russia in the Shadows

the Poles ; she had two children of her own
in the institution, and she was mothering
some scores of little creatures. But she
was evidently keenly proud of the work of
her organisation, and she said that she
found life — in this city of want, under the
shadow of a coming famine — more interest-
ing and satisfying than it had ever been in
the old days.

I have no space to tell of other educa-
tional work we saw going on in Russia.
I can give but a word or so to the Home of
Rest for Workmen in the Kamenni Ostrof .
I thought that at once rather fine and not a
little absurd. To this place workers are
sent to live a life of refined ease for two or
three weeks. It is a very beautiful country
house with big gardens, an orangery, and
subordinate buildings. The meals are
served on white cloths with flowers upon
the table and so forth. And the worker
has to live up to these elegant surroundings.
It is a part of his education. If in a forget-
ful moment he clears his throat in the
good old resonant peasant manner and

The Creative Effort in Russia 109

spits upon the floor, an attendant, I was
told, chalks a circle about his defilement
and obliges him to clean the offended
parquetry. The avenue approaching this
place has been adorned with decoration in
the futurist style, and there is a vast figure
of a " worker " at the gates resting on his
hammer, done in gypsum, which was
obtained from the surgical reserves of the
Petersburg hospitals. . . . But after all,
the idea of civilising your workpeople by
dipping them into pleasant surroundings
is, in itself, rather a good one. . . .

I find it difficult to hold the scales of
justice upon many of these efforts of
Bolshevism. Here are these creative and
educational things going on, varying be-
tween the admirable and the ridiculous,
islands at least of cleanly work and, I
think, of hope, amidst the vast spectacle of
grisly want and wide decay. Who can
weigh the power and possibility of their
thrust against the huge gravitation of this
sinking system ? Who can guess what
encouragement and enhancement they may

no Russia in the Shadows

get if Russia can win through to a respite
from civil and foreign warfare and from
famine and want ? It was of this re-created
Russia, this Russia that may be, that I
was most desirous of talking when I went
to the Kremlin to meet Lenin. Of that
conversation I will tell in my final
chapter.

V. The Petersburg Soviet

V. The Petersburg Soviet

ON Thursday the 7th of October we at-
tended a meeting of the Petersburg
Soviet. We were told that we should find
this a very different legislative body from
the British House of Commons, and we
did. Like nearly everything else in the
arrangements of Soviet Russia it struck us
as extraordinarily unpremeditated and im-
provised. Nothing could have been less
intelligently planned for the functions it
had to perform or the responsibilities it
had to undertake.

The meeting was held in the old Winter
Garden of the Tauride Palace, the former
palace of Potemkin, the favourite of
Catherine the Second. Here the Imperial
Duma met under the Tsarist regime, and
I visited it in 19 14 and saw a languid
session in progress. I went then with Mr.
Maurice Baring and one of the Bencken-

"3 T

U4 Russia in the Shadows

dorffs to the strangers' gallery, which ran
round three sides of the hall. There was
accommodation for perhaps a thousand
people in the hall, and most of it was empty.
The president with his bell sat above a
rostrum, and behind him was a row of
women reporters. I do not now remember
what business was in hand on that occasion ;
it was certainly not very exciting business.
Baring, I remember, pointed out the large
proportion of priests elected to the third
Duma ; their beards and cassocks made
a distinctive feature of that scattered
gathering.

On this second visit we were no longer
stranger onlookers, but active participants
in the meeting ; we came into the body of
the hall behind the president's bench, where
on a sort of stage the members of the
Government, official visitors, and so forth
find accommodation. The presidential
bench, the rostrum, and the reporters
remained, but instead of an atmosphere of
weary parliamentarianism, we found our-
selves in the crowding, the noise, and the

The Petersburg Soviet 1 1 5

peculiar thrill of a mass meeting. There
were, I should think, some two hundred
people or more packed upon the semi-
circular benches round about us on the
platform behind the president, comrades
in naval uniforms and in middle-class and
working-class costume, numerous intelli-
gent-looking women, one or two Asiatics
and a few unclassiflable visitors, and the
body of the hall beyond the presidential
bench was densely packed with people who
filled not only the seats but the gangways
and the spaces under the galleries. There
may have been two or three thousand people
down there, men and women. They were
all members of the Petersburg Soviet,
which is really a sort of conjoint meeting
of its constituent Soviets. The visitors'
galleries above were equally full.

Above the rostrum, with his back to us,
sat ZenovierT, his right-hand man Zorin,
and the president. The subject under
discussion was the proposed peace with
Poland. The meeting was smarting with
the sense of defeat and disposed to resent

I 2

1 1 6 Russia in the Shadows

the Polish terms. Soon after we came in
Zenovieff made a long and, so far as I could
judge, a very able speech, preparing the
minds of this great gathering for a Russian
surrender. The Polish demands were out-
rageous, but for the present Russia must
submit. He was followed by an oldish
man who made a bitter attack upon the
irreligion of the people and government of
Russia ; Russia was suffering for her sins,
and until she repented and returned to
religion she would continue to suffer one
disaster after another. His opinions were
not those of the meeting, but he was
allowed to have his say without interruption.
The decision to make peace with Poland
was then taken by a show of hands. Then
came my little turn. The meeting was told
that I had come from England to see the
Bolshevik regime ; I was praised profusely ;
I was also exhorted to treat that regime
fairly and not to emulate those other recent
visitors (these were Mrs. Snowden and
Guest and Bertrand Russell) who had
enjoyed the hospitality of the republic and

The Petersburg Soviet 117

then gone away to say unfavourable things
of it. This exhortation left me cold ; I
had come to Russia to judge the Bolshevik
Government and not to praise it. I had
then to take possession of the rostrum and
address this big crowd of people. This
rostrum I knew had proved an unfor-
tunate place for one or two previous
visitors, who had found it hard to explain
away afterwards the speeches their trans-
lators had given the world through the
medium of the wireless reports. Happily,
I had had some inkling of what was coming.
To avoid any misunderstanding I had
written out a short speech in English, and
I had had this translated carefully into
Russian. I began by saying clearly that
I was neither Marxist nor Communist,
but a Collectivist, and that it was not to a
social revolution in the West that Russians
should look for peace and help in their
troubles, but to the liberal opinion of the
moderate mass of Western people. I
declared that the people of the Western
States were determined to give Russia

J

1 1 8 Russia in the Shadows

peace, so that she might develop upon her
own lines. Their own line of development
might be very different from that of
Russia. When I had done I handed a
translation of my speech to my interpreter,
Zorin, which not only eased his task but
did away with any possibility of a subse-
quent misunderstanding. My speech was
reported in the Pravda quite fully and
fairly.

Then followed a motion by Zorin that
Zenovieff should have leave to visit Berlin
and attend the conference of the Indepen-
dent Socialists there. Zorin is a witty and
humorous speaker, and he got his audience
into an excellent frame of mind. His
motion was carried by a show of hands,
and then came a report and a discussion
upon the production of vegetables in the
Petersburg district. It was a practical
question upon which feeling ran high.
Here speakers rose in the body of the hall,
discharging brief utterances for a minute
or so and subsiding again. There were
shouts and interruptions. The debate was

The Petersburg Soviet 119

much more like a big labour mass meeting
in the Queen's Hall than anything that a
Western European would recognise as a
legislature.

This business disposed of, a still more
extraordinary thing happened. We who
sat behind the rostrum poured down into
the already very crowded body of the hall
and got such seats as we could find, and
a white sheet was lowered behind the
president's seat. At the same time a band
appeared in the gallery to the left. A
five-part cinematograph film was then run,
showing the Baku Conference to which I
have already alluded. The pictures were
viewed with interest but without any
violent applause. And at the end the band
played the Internationale, and the audience
— I beg its pardon ! — the Petersburg Soviet
dispersed singing that popular chant. It
was in fact a mass meeting incapable of
any real legislative activities ; capable at
the utmost of endorsing or not endorsing
the Government in control of the plat-
form. Compared with the British Parlia-

120 Russia in the Shadows

ment it has about as much organisation,
structure, and working efficiency as a big
bagful of miscellaneous wheels might have,
compared to an old-fashioned and inac-
curate but still going clock.

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VI, The Dreamer in the Kremlin

VI. The Dreamer in the Kremlin

MY chief purpose in going from
Petersburg to Moscow was to see
and talk to Lenin. I was very curious to
see him, and I was disposed to be hostile
to him. I encountered a personality
entirely different from anything I had
expected to meet.

Lenin is not a writer ; his published
work does not express him. The shrill
little pamphlets and papers issued from
Moscow in his name, full of misconcep-
tions of the labour psychology of the West
and obstinately defensive of the impossible
proposition that it is the prophesied Marxist
social revolution which has happened in
Russia, display hardly anything of the real
Lenin mentality as I encountered it.
Occasionally there are gleams of an inspired
shrewdness, but for the rest these publica-
tions do no more than rehearse the set
123

124 Russia in the Shadows

ideas and phrases of doctrinaire Marxism.
Perhaps that is necessary. That may be
the only language Communism under-
stands ; a break into a new dialect would
be disturbing and demoralising. Left
Communism is the backbone of Russia
to-day ; unhappily it is a backbone without
flexible joints, a backbone that can be bent
only with the utmost difficulty and which
must be bent by means of flattery and
deference.

Moscow under the bright October sun-
shine, amidst the fluttering yellow leaves,
impressed us as being altogether more lax
and animated than Petersburg. There is
much more movement of people, more
trading, and a comparative plenty of
droshkys. Markets are open. There is
not the same general ruination of streets
and houses. There are, it is true, many
traces of the desperate street fighting of
early 19 18. One of the domes of that
absurd cathedral of St. Basil just outside
the Kremlin gate was smashed by a shell
and still awaits repair. The tramcars we

The Dreamer in the Kremlin 125

found were not carrying passengers ; they
were being used for the transport of
supplies of food and fuel. In these matters
Petersburg claims to be better prepared
than Moscow.

The ten thousand crosses of Moscow
still glitter in the afternoon light. On one
conspicuous pinnacle of the Kremlin the
imperial eagles spread their wings ; the
Bolshevik Government has been too busy
or too indifferent to pull them down. The
churches are open, the kissing of ikons is
a flourishing industry, and beggars still
woo casual charity at the doors. The cele-
brated miraculous shrine of the Iberian
Madonna outside the Redeemer Gate was
particularly busy. There were many
peasant women, unable to get into the
little chapel, kissing the stones outside.

Just opposite to it, on a plaster panel on
a house front, is that now celebrated
inscription put up by one of the early
revolutionary administrations in Moscow :
" Religion is the Opium of the People."
The effect this inscription produces is

126 Russia in the Shadows

greatly reduced by the fact that in Russia
the people cannot read.

About that inscription I had a slight
but amusing argument with Mr. Vanderlip,
the American financier, who was lodged in
the same guest house as ourselves. He
wanted to have it effaced. I was for
retaining it as being historically interesting,
and because I think that religious tolera-
tion should extend to atheists. But Mr.
Vanderlip felt too strongly to see the
point of that.

The Moscow Guest House, which we
shared with Mr. Vanderlip and an adven-
turous English artist who had somehow
got through to Moscow to execute busts
of Lenin and Trotsky, was a big, richly-
furnished house upon the Sofiskaya
Naberezhnaya (No. 17), directly facing the
great wall of the Kremlin and all the
clustering domes and pinnacles of that
imperial inner city. We felt much less
free and more secluded here than in
Petersburg. There were sentinels at the
gates to protect us from casual visitors,

The Dreamer in the Kremlin 127

whereas in Petersburg all sorts of un-
authorised persons could and did stray in
to talk to me. Mr. Vanderlip had been
staying here, I gathered, for some weeks,
and proposed to stay some weeks more.
He was without valet, secretary, or inter-
preter. He did not discuss his business
with me beyond telling me rather care-
fully once or twice that it was strictly
financial and commercial and in no sense
political. I was told that he had brought
credentials from Senator Harding to Lenin,
but I am temperamentally incurious and
I made no attempt whatever to verify this
statement or to pry into Mr. Vanderlip 's
affairs. I did not even ask how it could
be possible to conduct business or financial
operations in a Communist State with
any one but the Government, nor how it
was possible to deal with a Government
upon strictly non-political lines. These
were, I admitted, mysteries beyond my
understanding. But we ate, smoked, drank
our coffee and conversed together in an
atmosphere of profound discretion. By

128 Russia in the Shadows

not mentioning Mr. Vanderlip's " mis-
sion," we made it a portentous, omni-
present fact.

The arrangements leading up to my
meeting with Lenin were tedious and
irritating, but at last I found myself
under way for the Kremlin in the company
of Mr. Rothstein, formerly a figure
in London Communist circles, and an
American comrade with a large camera who
was also, I gathered, an official of the
Russian Foreign Office.

The Kremlin as I remembered it in
1 9 14 was a very open place, open much
as Windsor Castle is, with a thin trickle
of pilgrims and tourists in groups and
couples flowing through it. But now it
is closed up and difficult of access. There
was a great pother with passes and permits
before we could get through even the outer
gates. And we were filtered and inspected
through five or six rooms of clerks and
sentinels before we got into the presence.
This may be necessary for the personal
security of Lenin, but it puts him out of

The ~D reamer in the Kremlin ■ 129

reach of Russia, and, what perhaps is more
serious, if there is to be an effectual
dictatorship, it puts Russia out of his
reach. If things must filter up to him,
they must also filter down, and they may
undergo very considerable changes in the
process.

We got to Lenin at last and found him,
a little figure at a great desk in a well-lit
room that looked out upon palatial spaces.
I thought his desk was rather in a litter.
I sat down on a chair at a corner of the
desk, and the little man — his feet scarcely
touch the ground as he sits on the edge of
his chair — twisted round to talk to me,
putting his arms round and over a pile of
papers. He spoke excellent English, but
it was, I thought, rather characteristic of
the present condition of Russian affairs
that Mr. Rothstein chaperoned the conver-
sation, occasionally offering footnotes and
other assistance. Meanwhile the American
got to work with his camera, and un-
obtrusively but persistently exposed plates.
The talk, however, was too interesting for

K

130 Russia in the Shadows

that to be an annoyance. One forgot
about that clicking and shifting about
quite soon.

I had come expecting to struggle with
a doctrinaire Marxist. I found nothing of
the sort. I had been told that Lenin
lectured people ; he certainly did not do
so on this occasion. Much has been made
of his laugh in the descriptions, a laugh
which is said to be pleasing at first and
afterwards to become cynical. This laugh
was not in evidence. His forehead re-
minded me of someone else — I could not
remember who it was, until the other
evening I saw Mr. Arthur Balfour sitting
and talking under a shaded light. It is
exactly the same domed, slightly one-sided
cranium. Lenin has a pleasant, quick-
changing, brownish face, with a lively
smile and a habit (due perhaps to some
defect in focussing) of screwing up one
eye as he pauses in his talk ; he is not very
like the photographs you see of him because
he is one of those people whose change of
expression is more important than their

The Dreamer in the Kremlin 131

features ; he gesticulated a little with his
hands over the heaped papers as he talked,
and he talked quickly, very keen on his
subject, without any posing or pretences
or reservations, as a good type of scientific
man will talk.

Our talk was threaded throughout and
held together by two — what shall I call
them ?■ — motifs. One was from me to him :
" What do you think you are making of
Russia ? What is the state you are trying
to create ? ,! The other was from him to
me : " Why does not the social revolution
begin in England ? Why do you not work
for the social revolution ? Why are you
not destroying Capitalism and establishing
the Communist State ? " These motifs
interwove, reacted on each other, illumi-
nated each other. The second brought
back the first : " But what are you making
of the social revolution ? Are you making
a success of it ? " And from that we got
back to two again with : "To make it a
success the Western world must join in.
Why doesn't it ? "

K 2

132 Russia in the Shadows

In the days before 191 8 all the Marxist
world thought of the social revolution as
an end. The workers of the world were to
unite, overthrow Capitalism, and be happy
ever afterwards. But in 19 18 the Com-
munists, to their own surprise, found them-
selves in control of Russia and challenged
to produce their millennium. They have a
colourable excuse for a delay in the pro-
duction of a new and better social order
in their continuation of war conditions, in
the blockade and so forth, nevertheless it
is clear that they begin to realise the
tremendous unpreparedness which the
Marxist methods of thought involve. At
a hundred points — I have already put a
finger upon one or two of them — they
do not know what to do. But the common-
place Communist simply loses his temper
if you venture to doubt whether every-
thing is being done in precisely the best
and most intelligent way under the new
regime. He is like a tetchy housewife
who wants you to recognise that every-
thing is in perfect order in the middle of

The Dreamer in the Kremlin 133

an eviction. He is like one of those now
forgotten suffragettes who used to promise
us an earthly paradise as soon as we
escaped from the tyranny of " man-made
laws." Lenin, on the other hand, whose
frankness must at times leave his disciples
breathless, has recently stripped off the
last pretence that the Russian revolution
is anything more than the inauguration of
an age of limitless experiment. " Those
who are engaged in the formidable task
of overcoming capitalism,' ' he has recently
written, " must be prepared to try method
after method until they find the one which
answers their purpose best."

We opened our talk with a discussion of
the future of the great towns under Com-
munism. I wanted to see how far Lenin
contemplated the dying out of the towns
in Russia. The desolation of Petersburg
had brought home to me a point I had
never realised before, that the whole form
and arrangement of a town is determined
by shopping and marketing, and that the
abolition of these things renders nine-

134 Russia in the Shadows

tenths of the buildings in an ordinary town
directly or indirectly unmeaning and use-
less. " The towns will get very much
smaller,' ' he admitted. " They will be
different. Yes, quite different/ ' That, I
suggested, implied a tremendous task. It
meant the scrapping of the existing towns
and their replacement. The churches and
great buildings of Petersburg would
become presently like those of Novgorod
the Great or like the temples of Paestum.
Most of the town would dissolve away.
He agreed quite cheerfully. I think it
warmed his heart to find someone who
understood a necessary consequence of
collectivism that many even of his own
people fail to grasp. Russia has to be
rebuilt fundamentally, has to become a
new thing. . . .

And industry has to be reconstructed —
as fundamentally ?

Did I realise what was already in hand
with Russia ? The electrification of
Russia ?

For Lenin, who like a good orthodox

The Dreamer in the Kremlin 135

Marxist denounces all " Utopians/ ' has
succumbed at last to a Utopia, the Utopia
of the electricians. He is throwing all his
weight into a scheme for the development
of great power stations in Russia to serve
whole provinces with light, with transport,
and industrial power. Two experimental
districts he said had already been electrified.
Can one imagine a more courageous project
in a vast flat land of forests and illiterate
peasants, with no water power, with no
technical skill available, and with trade
and industry at the last gasp ? Projects
for such an electrification are in process
of development in Holland and they have
been discussed in England, and in those
densely-populated and industrially highly-
developed centres one can imagine them as
successful, economical, and altogether bene-
ficial. But their application to Russia is an
altogether greater strain upon the con-
structive imagination. I cannot see any-
thing of the sort happening in this dark
crystal of Russia, but this little man at the
Kremlin can ; he sees the decaying railways

136 Russia in the Shadows

replaced by a new electric transport, sees
new roadways spreading throughout the
land, sees a new and happier Communist
industrialism arising again. While I talked
to him he almost persuaded me to share
his vision.

" And you will go on to these things
with the peasants rooted in your soil ? "

But not only are the towns to be rebuilt ;
every agricultural landmark is to go.

" Even now," said Lenin, " all the agri-
cultural production of Russia is not peasant
production. We have, in places, large scale
agriculture. The Government is already
running big estates with workers instead
of peasants, where conditions are favour-
able. That can spread. It can be extended
first to one province, then another. The
peasants in the other provinces, selfish and
illiterate, will not know what is happening
until their turn comes. . . ."

It may be difficult to defeat the Russian
peasant en masse ; but in detail there is
no difficulty at all. At the mention of the
peasant Lenin's head came nearer to

Lenin.
Behind him stands Gorky ; to the right of Gorky (i.e. on his left)
are Zorin (hat) and Zenovieff. Behind with cigarette is Radek.

The Dreamer in the Kremlin 137

mine ; his manner became confidential.
As if after all the peasant might over-
hear.

It is not only the material organisation
of society you have to build, I argued, it
is the mentality of a whole people. The
Russian people are by habit and tradition
traders and individualists ; their very souls
must be remoulded if this new world is to
be achieved. Lenin asked me what I had
seen of the educational work afoot. I
praised some of the things I had seen.
He nodded and smiled with pleasure.
He has an unlimited confidence in his work.

" But these are only sketches and begin-
nings,' ' I said.

" Come back and see what we have done
in Russia in ten years' time," he answered.

In him I realised that Communism
could after all, in spite of Marx, be
enormously creative. After the tiresome
class-war fanatics I had been encountering
among the Communists, men of formulae
as sterile as flints, after numerous experi-
ences of the trained and empty conceit of

138 Russia in the Shadows

the common Marxist devotee, this amaz-
ing little man, with his frank admission
of the immensity and complication of the
project of Communism and his simple
concentration upon its realisation, was
very refreshing. He at least has a vision
of a world changed over and planned
and built afresh.

He wanted more of my Russian impres-
sions. I told him that I thought that in
many directions, and more particularly in
the Petersburg Commune, Communism
was pressing too hard and too fast, and
destroying before it was ready to rebuild.
They had broken down trading before
they were ready to ration ; the co-operative
organisation had been smashed up instead
of being utilised, and so on. That brought
us to our essential difference, the difference
of the Evolutionary Collectivist and Marxist,
the question whether the social revolution
is, in its extremity, necessary, whether it is
necessary to overthrow one economic
system completely before the new one can
begin. I believe that through a vast sus-

The Dreamer in the Kremlin 139

tained educational campaign the existing
Capitalist system can be civilised into a
Collectivist world system ; Lenin on the
other hand tied himself years ago to the
Marxist dogmas of the inevitable class war,
the downfall of Capitalist order as a
prelude to reconstruction, the proletarian
dictatorship, and so forth. He had to
argue, therefore, that modern Capitalism
is incurably predatory, wasteful, and un-
teachable, and that until it is destroyed
it will continue to exploit the human
heritage stupidly and aimlessly, that it will
fight against and prevent any administra-
tion of natural resources for the general
good, and that, because essentially it is a
scramble, it will inevitably make wars.

I had, I will confess, a very uphill
argument. He suddenly produced Chiozza
Money's new book, The Triumph of
Nationalisation, which he had evidently
been reading very carefully. " But you
see directly you begin to have a good
working collectivist organisation of any
public interest, the Capitalists smash it up

140 Russia in the Shadows

again. They smashed your national ship-
yards ; they won't let you work your coal
economically. " He tapped the book. " It
is all here."

And against my argument that wars
sprang from nationalist imperialism and not
from a Capitalist organisation of society
he suddenly brought : " But what do you
think of this new Republican Imperialism
that comes to us from America ? "

Here Mr. Rothstein intervened in
Russian with an objection that Lenin
swept aside.

And regardless of Mr. Rothstein's plea
for diplomatic reserve, Lenin proceeded
to explain the projects with which one
American at least was seeking to dazzle
the imagination of Moscow. There was
to be economic assistance for Russia and
recognition of the Bolshevik Government.
There was to be a defensive alliance against
Japanese aggression in Siberia. There was
to be an American naval station on the
coast of Asia, and leases for long terms of
sixty or fifty years of the natural resources

The Dreamer in the Kremlin 141

of Khamskhatka and possibly of other large
regions of Russian Asia. Well, did I think
that made for peace ? Was it anything
more than the beginning of a new world
scramble ? How would the British Im-
perialists like this sort of thing ?

Always, he insisted, Capitalism competes
and scrambles It is the antithesis of
collective action. It cannot develop into
social unity or into world unity.

But some industrial power had to come
in and help Russia, I said. She cannot
reconstruct now without such help. . . .

Our multifarious argumentation ended
indecisively. We parted warmly, and I
and my companion were filtered out of
the Kremlin through one barrier after
another in much the same fashion as we
had been filtered in.

" He is wonderful/ ' said Mr. Rothstein.
" But it was an indiscretion "

I was not disposed to talk as we made
our way, under the glowing trees that
grow in the ancient moat of the Kremlin,
back to our Guest House. I wanted to

142 Russia in the Shadows

think Lenin over while I had him fresh
in my mind, and I did not want to
be assisted by the expositions of my com-
panion. But Mr. Rothstein kept on talking.

He was still pressing me not to mention
this little sketch of the Russian- American
outlook to Mr. Vanderlip long after I
assured him that I respected Mr. Vander-
lip Js veil of discretion far too much to
pierce it by any careless word.

And so back to No. 17 Sofiskaya
Naberezhnaya, and lunch with Mr. Vander-
lip and the young sculptor from London.
The old servant of the house waited on
us, mournfully conscious of the meagreness
of our entertainment and reminiscent of
the great days of the past when Caruso
had been a guest and had sung to all that
was brilliant in Moscow in the room up-
stairs. Mr. Vanderlip was for visiting the
big market that afternoon — and later
going to the Ballet, but my son and I were
set upon returning to Petersburg that
night and so getting on to Reval in time
for the Stockholm boat.

VII. The Envoy

VII. The Envoy

IN the preceding chapters I have written
in the first person and in a familiar
style because I did not want the reader
to lose sight for a moment of the shortness
of our visit to Russia and of my personal
limitations. Now in conclusion, if the
reader will have patience with me for a
few final words, I would like in less
personal terms and very plainly to set
down my main convictions about the
Russian situation. They are deep-seated
convictions, and they concern not merely
Russia but the whole present outlook of
our civilisation. They are merely one
man's opinion, but as I feel them strongly,
so I put them without weakening
qualifications.

First, then, Russia, which was a modern
civilisation of the Western type, least
disciplined and most ramshackle of all

145

146 Russia in the Shadows

the Great Powers, is now a modern
civilisation in extremis. The direct cause
of its downfall has been modern war
leading to physical exhaustion. Only
through that could the Bolsheviks have
secured power. Nothing like this Russian
downfall has ever happened before. If it
goes on for a year or so more the process
of collapse will be complete. Nothing
will be left of Russia but a country of
peasants ; the towns will be practically
deserted and in ruins, the railways will be
rusting in disuse. With the railways will
go the last vestiges of any general govern-
ment. The peasants are absolutely
illiterate and collectively stupid, capable
of resisting interference but incapable of
comprehensive foresight and organisation.
They will become a sort of human swamp
in a state of division, petty civil war, and
political squalour, with a famine whenever
the harvests are bad ; and they will be
breeding epidemics for the rest of Europe.
They will lapse towards Asia.

The collapse of the civilised system in

The Envoy 147

Russia into peasant barbarism means that
Europe will be cut off for many years from
all the mineral wealth of Russia, and from
any supply of raw products from this
area, from its corn, flax, and the like. It
is an open question whether the Western
Powers can get along without these sup-
plies. Their cessation certainly means
a general impoverishment of Western
Europe.

The only possible Government that can
stave off such a final collapse of Russia now
is the present Bolshevik Government, if it
can be assisted by America and the
Western Powers. There is now no alter-
native to that Government possible. There
are of course a multitude of antagonists —
adventurers and the like — ready, with
European assistance, to attempt the over-
throw of that Bolshevik Government, but
there are no signs of any common purpose
and moral unity capable of replacing it.
And moreover there is no time now for
another revolution in Russia. A year
more of civil war will make the final

l 2

148 Russia in the Shadows

sinking of Russia out of civilisation in-
evitable. We have to make what we can,
therefore, of the Bolshevik Government,
whether we like it or not.

The Bolshevik Government is inexperi-
enced and incapable to an extreme degree ;
it has had phases of violence and cruelty ;
but it is on the whole honest. And it
includes a few individuals of real creative
imagination and power, who may with
opportunity, if their hands are strengthened,
achieve great reconstructions. The Bol-
shevik Government seems on the whole to
be trying to act up to its professions, which
are still held by most of its supporters with
a quite religious passion. Given generous
help, it may succeed in establishing a new
social order in Russia of a civilised type
with which the rest of the world will be
able to deal. It will probably be a miti-
gated Communism, with a large-scale
handling of transport, industry, and (later)
agriculture.

It is necessary that we should under-
stand and respect the professions and

The Envoy 149

principles of the Bolsheviks if we Western
peoples are to be of any effectual service
to humanity in Russia. Hitherto these
professions and principles have been
ignored in the most extraordinary way by
the Western Governments. The Bolshevik
Government is, and says it is, a Communist
Government. And it means this, and will
make this the standard of its conduct.
It has suppressed private ownership and
private trade in Russia, not as an act of
expediency but as an act of right ; and
in all Russia there remain now no com-
mercial individuals and bodies with whom
we can deal who will respect the conven-
tions and usages of Western commercial
life. The Bolshevik Government, we have
to understand, has, by its nature, an
invincible prejudice against individual busi-
ness men ; it will not treat them in a
manner that they will consider fair and
honourable ; it will distrust them and, as
far as it can, put them at the completest
disadvantage. It regards them as pirates —
or at best as privateers. It is hopeless and

150 Russia in the Shadows

impossible therefore for individual persons
and firms to think of going into Russia to
trade. There is only one being in Russia
with whom the Western world can deal,
and that is the Bolshevik Government
itself, and there is no way of dealing with
that one being safely and effectually except
through some national or, better, some
international Trust. This latter body,
which might represent some single Power
or group of Powers, or which might even
have some titular connection with the
League of Nations, would be able to
deal with the Bolshevik Government on
equal terms. It would have to recognise
the Bolshevik Government and, in
conjunction with it, to set about the now
urgent task of the material restoration of
civilised life in European and Asiatic
Russia. It should resemble in its general
nature one of the big buying and con-
trolling trusts that were so necessary and
effectual in the European States during
the Great War. It should deal with its
individual producers on the one hand, and

The Envoy 151

the Bolshevik Government would deal
with its own population on the other.
Such a Trust could speedily make itself
indispensable to the Bolshevik Govern-
ment. This indeed is the only way in
which a capitalist State can hold commerce
with a Communist State. The attempts
that have been made during the past year
and more to devise some method of private
trading in Russia without recognition
of the Bolshevik Government were
from the outset as hopeless as the
search for the North-West passage from
England to India. The channels are
frozen up.

Any country or group of countries with
adequate industrial resources which goes
into Bolshevik Russia with recognition and
help will necessarily become the supporter,
the right hand, and the consultant of the
Bolshevik Government. It will react upon
that Government and be reacted upon. It
will probably become more collectivist in
its methods, and, on the other hand, the
rigours of extreme Communism in Russia

152 Russia in the Shadows

will probably be greatly tempered through
its influence.

The only Power capable of playing this
role of eleventh-hour helper to Russia
single-handed is the United States of
America. That is why I find the adven-
ture of the enterprising and imaginative
Mr. Vanderlip very significant. I doubt
the conclusiveness of his negotiations ;
they are probably only the opening phase
of a discussion of the Russian problem
upon a new basis that may lead it at last
to a comprehensive world treatment of this
situation. Other Powers than the United
States will, in the present phase of world-
exhaustion, need to combine before they
can be of any effective use to Russia.
Big business is by no means antipathetic
to Communism. The larger big business
grows the more it approximates to Collec-
tivism. It is the upper road of the few
instead of the lower road of the masses to
Collectivism.

The only alternative to such a helpful
intervention in Bolshevik Russia is, I

The Envoy 153

firmly believe, the final collapse of all that
remains of modern civilisation throughout
what was formerly the Russian Empire.
It is highly improbable that the collapse
will be limited to its boundaries. Both
eastward and westward other great regions
may, one after another, tumble into the
big hole in civilisation thus created.
Possibly all modern civilisation may
tumble in.

These propositions do not refer to any
hypothetical future ; they are an attempt
to state the outline facts and possibilities
of what is going on — and going on with
great rapidity — in Russia and in the world
generally now, as they present themselves
to my mind. This in general terms is the
frame of circumstance in which I would
have the sketches of Russia that have
preceded this set and read. So it is I
interpret the writing on the Eastern wall of
Europe.

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