Qass XI K ^ 6*5* Book-' W 87 PRESENTED BV" | Q ^ I RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS H. G. WELLS STEEET SCENERY IN PETERSBURG: SITE OF A DEMOLISHED WOODEN HOUSE. Frontispiece. RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS J'. BY AUTHOR OF "the OUTLINE OF HISTORY,'* **MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH," ETC., ETC. ILLUSTRATED NEW XBr YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1921, BT GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANT Gift HAS n ^9 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONTENTS CHAPTER Ii Petersburg in Collapse ? * k {»AGB 15 II Drift and Salvage . . • . 41 III The Quintessence of Bolshevism: 71 IV The Creative Effort in Russia . 105 V The Petersburg Soviet: A Legis- lative Mass Meeting . 135 VI The Dreamer in the Kremlin , 145 VII The Envoy .•,,.. 171 ILLUSTRATIONS PLATB I Street Scenery in Petersburg: Site of Demolished Wooden House ..... Frontispiece PAGE II Street Scenery in Petersburg . 24 Mr. Wells Discovers a Street UNDER Repair 24 III A Petersburg Street Car En Route . 33 Messrs. Lenin and Wells in Conversation 33 IV Gorky in the Great Dump op Art AND Virtuosity in Petersburg . 56 V The Statue of Marx outside the Smolny Institute ( Headquar- ters OF THE Communist Party) 73 YI The Baku Conference Swears Un- dying Hostility to Capitalism AND British Imperialism: Zeno- vieff, Radek and Bela Kun . 92 VII The Baku Conference Swears Un- dying Hostility to Capitalism and British Imperialism: The Body of the Hall ., s . . 93 Vll ILLUSTRATIONS PLATE PAGE VIII Proletarians of Asia a la Baku . 112 IX Guests at the Home of Rest for Workmen on the Kamenni OSTROF 129 X The Petersburg Soviet in Ses- sion: Lenin at the Rostrum, Zenovieff ani> the President, Officials and Official Visitors 148 XI Lenin, Gorky, Zorin, Zenovieff AND Radek * 165 VIU I. PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE IN January 1914 I visited Petersburg and Moscow for a couple of weeks; in Sep- tember 1920 I was asked to repeat this visit by Mr. Kameney, 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 15 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS old friend, Maxim Gorky. The guide and interpreter assigned to assist us was a lady I Bad met in Russia in 1914, the 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 dele- gations, perhaps, a certain distracting tu- mult 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, wander- ing observantly often in different directions. 16 PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE Naturally, when one demands to see a school or a prison one 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 Rus- sian is an impression of a vast irreparable breakdown. The great monarchy that was here in 1914 and 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 rottenness and by the thrusts and strains of aggressive imperial- ism the Russian part of the old civilised world that existed before 1914 fell, and is now gone. The peasant, who was the base of the old pyramid, remains upon the land, living very much as he has always lived. Everything else is broken down, or is break- ing down. Amid this vast disorganisation IT RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS an emergency Government, supported by a disciplined party of perhaps 150,000 adher- ents — the Communist Party — has taken control. It has — at the price of much shoot- ing — 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 pos- sible 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 dis- concerting fact, is that a social and economic system very like our own and intimately con- nected with our own has crashed. Nowhere in all Russia is the fact of that crash so completely evident as it is in Peters- burg. Petersburg was the artificial creation of Peter the Great; his bronze statue in the little garden near the Admiralty still prances amid the ebbing life of the city. Its palaces are still and empty, or strangely refurnished with the typewriters and tables and plank partitions of a new Administra- 18 PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE tion which is engaged chiefly in a strenuous struggle against famine and the foreign in- vader. Its streets were streets of busy shops. In 1914 I loafed agreeably in the Peters- burg 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 wonder- ful fact, I think, that in this city, in which most of the shrinldng population is already nearly starving, and hardly any one pos- sesses 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. 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 19 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS in Russia. It is not like Bond Street or Piccadilly on a Sunday, with the blinds neat- ly drawn down in a decorous sleep, and ready to wake up and begin again on Mon- day. 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 des- perate 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 "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. 20 PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE People hurry past — a thin traffic compared with my memories of 1914. 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 hun- dredth 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 fre- quently pushed off, and accidents are fre- quent. We saw a crowd collected round a child cut in half by a tramcar, and two peo- ple in the little circle in which we moved in Petersburg had broken their legs in tram- way accidents. The roads along which these tramcars run are in a frightful condition. They have not been repaired for three or four years; they 21 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS are full of holes like shell-holes, often two or three feet deep. Frost has eaten ovX great cavities, drains have collapsed, and people have torn up the wood pavement 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 concus- sions. These surviving motor-cars are run- ning 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 in those houses remains in ruinous gaps, be- tween 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, 22 STREET SCENERY IN PETERSBURG. MR. WELLS DISCOVERS A STREET UNDER REPAIR. PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE gives one an impression as though the en- tire population was setting out in flight. That impression is not altogether mislead- ing. The Bolshevik statistics I have seen are perfectly frank and honest in the matter. The population of Petersburg has fallen from 1,200,000 to a little over 700,000, and it is still falling. Many of the 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 Euro- pean cities at 22. The birth-rate of the underfed and profoundly depressed popula- tion is about 15. It was formerly about 30. These bundles that every one carries 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 trad- ing and bargaining population. Even in 1914 there were but few shops in Peters- burg whose prices were really fixed prices. Tariffs were abominated ; in Moscow taking 25 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS a droshky meant always a haggle, ten ko- pecks 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 block- ade, and with a currency in complete dis- order, the only possible way to save the towns from a chaos of cornering, profiteer- ing, starvation, and at last a mere savage fight for the remnants of food and common necessities, was some sort of collective con- trol and rationing. The Soviet Government rations on prin- ciple, but any Government in Russia now would have to ration. If the war in the West had lasted up to the present time Lon- don would be rationing too — food, cloth- ing, and housing. But in Russia this has to be done on a basis of uncontrollable peas- ant production, with a population tempera- mentally indisciplined and self-indulgent. The struggle is necessarily a bitter one. The detected profiteer, the genuine profiteer who 26 PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE profiteers on any considerable scale, gets short shrift; he is shot. Quite ordinary trading may be punished severely. All trad- ing is called "speculation," and is now il- legal. But a queer street-corner trading in food and so forth is winked at in Peters- burg, 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 rail- way station at which one stops is an open market. We would find a crowd of peasants at every stopping-place waiting to sell milk, eggs, apples, bread, and so forth. The pas- sengers clamber down and accumulate bun- dles. An egg or an apple costs 300 roubles. The peasants look well fed, and I doubt if they are very much worse oif than they were in 1914. Probably they are better off. They have more land than they had, and they have got rid of their landlords. They will not help in any attempt to overthrow 27 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS the Soviet Government because they are convinced that while it endures this state of things will continue. This does not pre- vent their resisting whenever they can the attempts of the Red Guards to collect food at regulation prices. Insufficient forces of Red Guards may be attacked and massacred. Such incidents are magnified in the London Press as peasant insurrections against the Bolsheviks. They are nothing of the sort. It is just the peasants making themselves comfortable under the existing regime. But every class above the peasants — in- cluding the official class — is now in a state of extreme privation. The credit and indus- trial system that produced commodities 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 Eng- land in 1917, and the Soviet State match is quite a good match. But such things as 28 PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE collars, ties, shoelaces, sheets and blankets, spoons and forks, all the haberdashery and crockery of life, are unattainable. There is no replacing 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. IMost of the men one meets strike one at first as being carelessly shaven, and at first we were in- clined to regard that as a sign of a general apathy, but we understood better 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 un- attainable. There is nothing to take for a cold or a headache; no packing off to bed with a hot-water bottle. Small ailments de- velop 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 29 ^ RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS very rare in this atmosphere of discomforts and petty deficiencies. If any one falls into a real illness the out- look is grim. ]My son paid a \dsit to the big ObuchoYskayai 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 impossibihty of deal- ing with more patients if they came in. Strengthening and stimulating food is out of the question unless the patient's family can by some miracle procure it outside and send it in. Operations 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 impos- sible, 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 comLmunication but a few overcrowded tramcars,* old, leaky, and ill-fitting boots * I saw one passenger steamboat on the Neva crowded with passengers. Usually; the river was quite deserted ex- cept for a rare Government tug or a solitary boatman pick- ing up drift timber. 30 PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE 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 dap- per. He was wearing a dinner suit with a blue serge waistcoat. Several of the dis- tinguished 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 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 com- pany present in order that I might see for myself the rags and tatters and pitiful ex- pedients 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 un- derclad town population in this dismantled and ruinous city is, in spite of all the furtive 31 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS trading that goes on, appallingly underfed. With the best will in the world the Soviet Government is unable to produce 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 compensate for a lack of material. The lowest grade ration consisted of a basin- ful of thin skilly and about the same quan- tity of 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 read- er an idea of what ordinary life in Peters- burg 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 32 A PETERSBURG STREET CAR EN ROUTE. MESSRS. LENIN AND WELLS IN CONVERSATION. PETERSBURG IN <:OLLAPSE 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 lea^^'-s went whirling before a drive of snowflaKcs. It was the first breath of the coming winter. Every one shivered and looked out of the double win- dows — already sealed up — and talked to us of the previous year. Then the glow of October returned. It was still glorious sunshine when we left Russia. But when I think of that com- ing winter my heart sinks. The Soviet Gov- ernment 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 every- where 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 consequences. Peo- ple huddled together in the ill-lit rooms, and kept themselves alive with tea and talk. 35 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 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 maxi- mum of 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 Bolshe- vist rule! I do not believe it is. I will deal with the Bolshevist Government w^hen 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 something vigorous and mahg- nant. It is an unsound system that has 36 PETERSBURG IN COLLAPSE worked itself out and fallen down. It was not communism which built up these great, impossible cities, but capitalism. It was not communism that plunged this huge, creaking, bankrupt empire into six years of exhausting war. It was European imperial- ism. Nor is it communism that has pestered this suffering and perhaps dying Russia with a 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 real- ities of the Russian collapse that we can see and estimate the Bolshevist Government in its proper proportions. m n. DRIFT AND SALVAGE II DRIFT AND SALVAGE AMONG the things I wanted most to see amidst 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 whet- ted my desire for a closer view of what was going on. Mr. Bertrand Russell's account 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 41 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS passage. He found Gorky in bed and af- flicted by a fit of coughing, and his imagina- tion made the most of it. Gorky's position in Russia is a quite ex- traordinary 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 Peters- burg, and Zalutsky, one of the rising leaders of the Communist party. It was a very re- assuring display of free speech, for Gorky did not so much argue as denounce — and this in front of two deeply interested Eng- lish enquirers. But he has gained the confidence and re- spect 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 passionate sense of the value of Western science and culture, and by the necessity of preserving the intellectual continuity of Russian life through these dark years of famine and war 42 DRIFT AND SALVAGE and social stress, with the general intellec- tual Hfe of the world. He has found a steady supporter in Lenin. His work il- luminates the situation to an extraordinary degree because it collects together a num- ber of significant factors and makes the essentially catastrophic nature of the Rus- sian situation plain. The Russian smash at the end of 1917 was certainly the completest that has ever happened to any modern social organisation. After the failure of the Kerensky Govern- ment to make peace and of the British naval authorities to relieve the military situation in the Baltic, 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 dis- order. It was a social dissolution. In many jparts of Russia there was a peasant revolt. There was chateau-burning often accompa- nied by quite horrible atrocities. It was an explosion of the very worst side of human 4a RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS nature in despair, and for most of the abomi- nations committed the Bolsheviks are about as responsible as the Government of Aus- tralia. 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 disre- garded in the gutters sometimes for a whole day, with passengers on the footwalk gcAng to and fro. Armed men; often professing to be Red Guards, entered houses and looted and murdered. The early months of 1918 saw a violent struggle of the new Bolshevik Government not only with counter-revolu- tions but with robbers and brigands of every description. It was not until the summer of 1918, and after thousands of looters and plunderers had been shot, that life began to be ordinarily safe again in the streets of the Russian great towns. For a time Russia was not a civilisation, but a torrent of law- less violence, with a weak central Govern- ment of inexperienced rulers, fighting not only against unintelligent foreign interven- tion but against the completest internal dis- 44 DRIFT AND SALVAGE order. It is from such chaotic conditions that Russia still struggles to emerge. Art, literature, science, all the refinements and elaboration of life, all that we mean by "civilisation," were involved in this torren- tial catastrophe. For a time the stablest thing in Russia culture was the theatre. There stood the theatres, and nobody want- ed to loot them or destroy them ; the artists were accustomed to meet and work in them and went on meeting and working; the tradi- tion of official subsidies held good. So quite amazingly the Russian dramatic and ope- ratic life kept on through the extremest storms of 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 con- ductor still held out valiantly in swallow tails and a white tie; we saw a performance of SadkOj we saw Monachof in The Tzarevitch 45 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS Aleccei and as lago 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 a uniform 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 go to the theatre. For one performance the tick- ets 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 I had not met him personally there. We made his acquaintance this time in Peters- burg, we dined with him and saw something 46 DRIFT AND SALVAGE of his very jolly household. There are two stepchildren almost grown up, and two little daughters, who speak a nice, stilff, 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 ab- solutely to sing except for pay — 200,000 roubles a performance, 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 main- tains what is perhaps the last fairly com- fortable home in Russia. And Madame Shalyapin we found so unbroken by the revolution that she asked us what people were wearing in London. The last fashion 47 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS papers she had seen — thanks to the blockade — dated from somewhen early in 1918. But the position of the theatre among the arts is peculiar. For the rest of the arts, for literature generally and for the scientific worker, the catastrophe of 1917-18 was over- whelming. 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-hun- dredth part of their original value. The new crude social organisation, fighting rob- bery, murder, and the wildest disorder, had no place for them; it had forgotten them. For the scientific man 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 re- duced, therefore, to a state of the utmost privation and misery. It was to their assist- ance and 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 48 DRIFT AND SALVAGE 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 headquarters of a special rationing system which provides as well as it can for the needs of four thousand scientific workers and their dependents — 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 institution and to meet there, as careworn and unpros- perous-looking figures, some of the great survivors of the Russian scientific world. Here were such men as Oldenburg the ori- entahst, Karpinsky the geologist, Pavloff the Nobel prizeman, Radloff, Bielopolsky, and the hke, names of world-wide celebrity. 49 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 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 scientifiq literature outside Russia. They are with- out new instruments, they are short of paper, the work they do has to go on in un- warmed laboratories. It is amazing they do any work at all. Yet they are getting work done; Pavloff is carrying on research of astonishing scope and ingenuity upon the mentality of animals; Manuchin claims to have worked out an effectual cure for tuber- culosis, even in advanced cases; and so on. I have brought back abstracts of Manuchin's work for translation and publication here, 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 eflPort on its behalf — ^will starve too, but these scientific men said very little to m§ 50 DRIFT AND SALVAGE about the possibility of sending them in sup- plies. 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 Lon- don, 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 Bur- lington House, W.), but the assent of the Bolshevik Government and our own to this mental provisioning of Russia has been se- cured, 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 51 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 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 evidently 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 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 jail. All musical people in England know the work of Glazounov; he has conducted con- 52 DRIFT AND SALVAGE certs 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 very big florid man, but now he is pallid and very much fallen away, so that his clothes hang loosely on him. He came and talked of his friends Sir Hubert Parry and Sir Charles Vilhers 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 Ox- ford; I could see that he was consumed by an almost intolerable longing for some great city full of life, a city wdth abundance, with pleasant crowds, a city that would give him still 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 Eng- land there will be no revolution — no ? I had 53 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS many friends in England — many good friends in England. ..." 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 impover- ished ruins of the fallen imperialist system has made me realise how helplessly depend- ent the man of exceptional gifts is upon a securely organised civilisation. The ordi- nary man can turn from this to that occupa- tion; 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 thing and nothing else, which compels him to be a particular thing or die. But a Shalyapin must be Shalyapm or nothing, Pavloff is Pavloff and Glazoun- ov is 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 54 GORKY IN THE GREAT DUMP OF ART AND VIRTUOSITY IN PI;TERSBURG DRIFT AND SALVAGE potatoes and carrots he grows in his spare time; Glazounov will compose until the pa- per runs out. But many of the others are evi- dently stricken much harder. The mortality among the intellectually distinguished men of Russia has been terribly high. ]\Iuch, 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 fu- tile has been the determining cause. They could no more live in the Russia of 1919 than they could have lived in a Kaffir kraal. Science, art, and hterature 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 work- er. 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 proletariat, which sees all social life as a stupidly simple * 'class war," had no knowledge of the conditions 57 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS necessary for the collective mental life. But it is to the credit of the Bolshevik Govern- ment that it has now risen to the danger of a universal intellectual destruction in Rus- sia, 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 permitting and helping these salvage organisations. Parallel with the House of Science is the House of Literature and Art. The writing of new books, except for some poetry, and the painting of pictures have ceased in Rus- sia. But the bulk of the writers and artists have been found employment upon a gran- diose scheme for the publication of a sort of Russian encyclopaedia of the literature of the world. In this strange Russia of con- flict, 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 Eng- land and America the production of good literature at popular prices has practically ceased now — "because of the price of paper." 58 DRIFT AND SALVAGE The mental food of the English and Ameri- can masses dwindles and deteriorates, and nobody in authority cares a rap. The Bol- shevik 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 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 59 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS of the community one discovers that Marx- ist 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 "Utopianism," that is to say, has been 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 Rus- sian Communist Government now finds 'it- self face to face, among a multiplicity of other constructive problems, with the prob- lem of sustaining scientific life, of sustain- ing thought and discussion, of promoting 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 — clumsi- ly, and is reduced to these pathetic attempts to salvage the wreckage of the intellectual life of the old order. And that life is very 60 DRIFT AND SALVAGE 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 organisation as- sociated with him. This is the Expertise Commission, which has its headquarters in the former British Embassy. When a social order based on private property crashes, when private property is with some abrupt- ness and no qualification 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 oiB- cials and, perhaps less inadvertently, by 61 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS their wives. But the general spirit of Bol- shevism is quite honest, and it is set very stoutly against looting and suchlike develop- ments of individual enterprise. There has evidently been comparatively little looting either in Petersburg or JNIoscow since the days of the debacle. Looting died against the wall in Moscow in the spring of 1918. In the guest houses and suchhke 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 62 DRIFT AND SALVAGE of art by this Expertise Commission. The palace that once sheltered the British Em- bassy 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 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 ceiUng; a room full of cases of old lace, piles of magnificent furniture. This accu- mulation has been counted and catalogued. And there it is. I could not find out that any one had any 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 63 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS when they had aboHshed shopping and marketing. Just as they had never thought out the problem of converting a city of pri- vate palaces into a Communist gathering- place. Marxist theory had led their minds up to the "dictatorship of the class-conscious proletariat" and then intimated — ^we dis- cover 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 dislo- cated machinery 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 Conmiunist rule, which I will proceed to de- 64 DRIFT AND SiiLVAGE scribe in my next paper, is quite secondary to that. It is something that has happened in the ruin and because of the ruin. It is of primary importance that 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 prob- ably have repeated, with local variations, the Russian crash. The state of affairs we have seen in Russia is only the intensifica- tion and completion of the state of affairs towards which Britain was drifting in 1918. Here also there are shortages such as we had in England, but they are relatively mon- strous; here also is rationing, but it is rela- tively feeble and inefficient; the profiteer in Russia is not fined but shot, and for the English D.O.R.A. you have the Extraor- dinary 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 drift- ing even now towards a parallel crash. I am not by any means sure that we have turned the comer. War, self-indulgence, 65 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS and unproductive speculation may still be wasting more than the Western world is pro- ducing; in which case our own crash — cur- rency 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 destitu- tion of Russia to-day is to any large extent the result merely of Communist effort; that the wicked Communists have pulled down Russia to her present plight, and that if you can overthrow the Communists every one and everything in Russia will suddenly be- come happy again. Russia fell into its pres- ent miseries through the world war and the moral and intellectual insufficiency of its ruling and wealthy people. (As our own British State — as presently even the Ameri- can State — may fall. ) They had neither the 66 DRIFT AND SALVAGE brains nor the conscience to stop warfare, stop wa^te of all sorts, and stop taking the best of everything and lea\^ng 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 will describe in my next paper, the Com- munist came in. . . .j 67 m. THE QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM Ill THE QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM: IN the two preceding papers I have tried to give the reader my impression of Rus- sian life as I saw it in Petersburg and Mos- cow, as a spectacle of collapse, as the col- lapse of a political, social, and economic sys- tem, akin to our own but weaker and more rotten than our own, which has crashed un- der the pressure of six years of war and misgovernment. The main collapse oc- curred in 1917 when Tsarism, brutishly in- * competent, 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 degen- erated into a regime of violence and brigand- age. It fell inevitably. And there was no alternative government. 71 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS For generations the chief energies of Tsar- ism had been directed to destroying any possibility of an alternative government. 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, there- fore, turned Russia into a debating society and a political scramble. The liberal forces of the country, unaccustomed to action or responsibility, set up a clamorous discussion whether Russia was to be a constitutional monarchy, a liberal republic, a socialist re- public, or what not. Over the confusion gesticulated Kerensky in attitudes of the finest liberalism. Through it loomed vari- ous ambiguous adventurers, *'strong men," sham strong men, Russian monks and Rus- sian Bonapartes. What remained of so- cial order collapsed. In the closing months of 1917 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 for- merly directed the affairs of the American 72 THE STATUE OF MARX OUTSIDE THE SMOLNY INSTITUTE. (Headquarters of the Communist Party.) QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM Harvester Company in Russia. He had been in Moscow during this phase of com- plete disorder. He discribed hold-ups in open daylight in busy streets, dead bodies lying for hours in the gutter — as a dead kit- ten might do in a western town — ^while crowds went about their business along the sidewalk. Through this fevered and confused coun- try 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 effectual 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, deliri- ous, staggered towards a further stage of collapse. 75 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS From end to end of Russia, and in the 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 com- mon will, and that was the Communist party. While all the rest of Russia was either apa- thetic like the peasantry or garrulously at sixes and sevens or given over to violence or fear, the Communists believed and were pre- pared to act. Numerically they were and are a very small part of the Russian popu- lation. At the present time not one per cent, of the people in Russia are Commu- nists ; 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 administra- tive solidarity possible in Russia. These ambiguous adventurers who have been and 76 QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM 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 Com- munist 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 iCome against it. It at once secured the passive support of the peasant mass by per- mitting 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 without au- thority was shot. This action was clumsy and bloody but effective. To retain its pow- er this Communist Government organised Extraordinary Commissions, with practical- ly unlimited powers, and crushed out all opposition by a Red Terror. Much that that Red Terror did was cruel and frightful, it was largely controlled by narrow-minded 77 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 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 Gov- ernment 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 achieve- ment. I saw little of the Russian army my- self, it was not what I went to Russia to see, but Mr. Vanderlip, the distinguished American financier, whom I found in Mos- cow engaged in some financial negotiations with the Soviet Government, had been treat- 78 jQUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM ed to a review of several thousand troops, and was very enthusiastic ahout their spirit and equipment. My son and I saw a num- ber of drafts going to the front, and also bodies of recruits joining up, and our im- pression 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 Brit- ish 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 meth- ods of the Bolsheviks, nor anything quite less like a secret society than their organiza- tion. But in England we cultivate a pe- culiar style of thinking, so impervious to any general ideas that it must needs fall back upon the notion of a conspiracy to ex- plain the simplest reactions of the human mind. If, for instance, a day labourer in 79 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 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 Morn- ing Post will trace his resentment to the insidious propaganda of some mysterious so- ciety 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 con- strained 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 Marxists Sociahsts. Marx died in London nearly forty years -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- 80 QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM wide economic conditions. Everywhere it expresses the same hmited 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 Bol- shevism. The enquirer will find them all in the London Plebs or the New York Uhera- ior 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 at- tempt 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 ex- tremest sort. His vast unfinished work, Das Kapitalj a cadence of wearisome volumes about such phantom unrealities as the bour- geoisie and the proletariat^ a 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 ac- tive hostility to Marx. I avoided his works, and when I encountered Marxists I disposed 81 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS of them by asking them to tell me exactly what people constituted the proletariat. None of them knew. No Marxist knows. In Gorky'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 Dictator- ship of the Proletariat in Petersburg, it was interesting to note the fine difficulties of the argument. The "proletarian" in the Marx- ist jargon is hke the "producer" in the jar- gon of some political economists, who is sup- posed to be a creature absolutely distinct and different from the "consumer." So the proletarian is a figure put into flat opposi- tion to something called capital. I find in large type outside the current number of the Plehs, "The working class and the employ- ing class have nothing in common." Apply this to a works foreman 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 82 QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM these immiscibles does he belong, employer or employed? The stuff is sheer nonsense. In Russia I must confess my passive ob- jection to Marx has changed to a very active hostility. Wherever we went we encoun- tered 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 exer- cise impossible. It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard culti- vated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world. It is exactly like Das Kapi- tal 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 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 Marx- 83 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS ist and not with Marx that we are now deal- ing. Few Marxists have read much of Das Kapital, The Marxist is very much the same sort of person in all modern communi- ties, and I will confess that by my tempera- ment and circumstances I have the very warmest sympathy for him. He adopts Marx as his prophet simply because he be- lieves 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 pro- letariat), and a Communist millennium aris- ing out of that dictatorship. Now this doc- trine and this prophecy have appealed in every country with extraordinary power to young persons, and particularly to young men of energy and imagination who have found themselves at the outset of life im- perfectly 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 neg- 84 QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM ligence, the colossal incivility of our system ; they realise that they are insulted and sacri- ficed 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 movement 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 detest- able shop, and I was 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 hope- less. I would have set fire to that place if I had not been convinced it was over-in- sured. 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 likable 85 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS human being and a humorous and very pop- ular speaker in the Petersburg Soviet. He and I e:s:changed 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. Be- tween us was the freemasonry of a common, indignation. It is that indignation of youth and en- ergy, thwarted and misused, it is that and no mere economic theorising, which is the living and linking inspiration of the Marxist move- ment throughout the world. It is not that Marx was profoundly wise, but that our economic system has been stupid, selfish, wasteful, and anarchistic. The Communis- tic organisation has provided for this angry recalcitrance certain shibboleths and pass- words: "Workers of the World unite," and so forth. It has suggested to them an idea of a great conspiracy against human happi- 86 QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM ness concocted by a mysterious body of wick- ed men called capitalists. For in this men-, tally 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 Communist 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 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 im- practicability of the Russian and acquired a certain habit of getting things done, who 87 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 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 Bolshe- vism. 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 tradition the Bol- sheviks have put most of the Zionist leaders in Russia in prison, and they have prescribed the teaching of Hebrew as a "reactionary" language. Several of the most interesting Bolsheviks I met were not Jews at all, but blonde Nordic men. Lenin, the beloved lead- er 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 experienced governing body in the world. In some di- rections its incompetence is amazing. In 88 QUINTESSENCE OF BOLSHEVISM most its ignorance is profound. Of the dia- bolical cunning of "capitalism" and of the subtleties of reaction it is ridiculously sus- picious, 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 so- cial revolution going to happen in Eng- land ?" Lenin asked me that, Zenovieff , 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 hap- pen 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 de- veloped industrialism, with a large, definite, mainly propertyless, mainly wages-earning working class (proletariat) . It should have begun in Britain, and spread to France and 89 RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS Germany, then should have come America's turn and so on. Instead they find Commu- nism in power in Russia, which really pos- sesses 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 whom I talked I saw clearly that there dawns now a chill suspicion of the reahty of the case, a realisa- tion 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 disconcerting discovery. And also I in- dulged 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 90 I— I « g Eh -3 ^ 'J «§• g^ t-l 0) in