ARTHUR RANSOME
Six Weeks in Russia, 1919
Contents
Title Page
Arthur Ransome in Revolutionary Russia
The truth about Russia
Six weeks in Russia, 1919
Introduction
To Petrograd
Smolni
Petrograd to Moscow
First days in Moscow
The Executive Committee on the reply to the Prinkipo proposal
Kamenev and the Moscow Soviet
An ex-capitalist
A theorist of revolution
Effects of isolation
An evening at the opera
The Committee of State Constructions
The Executive Committee and the terror
Notes of conversations with Lenin
The Supreme Council of Public Economy
The race with ruin
A play of Chekhov
The Centro-Textile
Modification in the agrarian programme
Foreign trade and munitions of war
The proposed delegation from Berne
The Executive Committee on the rival parties
Commissariat of Labour
Education
A Bolshevik fellow of the Royal Society
Digression
The Opposition
The Third International
Last talk with Lenin
The journey out
About the Author
Copyright
PAUL FOOT
Arthur Ransome in revolutionary Russia
Millions of people in the English-speaking world have heard of Arthur Ransome. His books for children, most of them adventure stories based on messing about in boats, were a staggering success almost from the moment he started writing them. They have fascinated children of both sexes and all classes for more than sixty years. Ransome died, aged 83, in 1967, but his books are still being republished in paperback editions, tape-recordings and television serials.
Even the most pedantic Ransome addict would be hard pressed to find in any of these children’s books a single word about politics. The subject simply doesn’t arise. There is nothing even of the implied radicalism of that other great children’s story-writer, whom Arthur Ransome much admired, E Nesbit. The children’s world in Ransome’s books is, quite deliberately, hived off from the adult world outside. Though all the famous books were written in times of slump, war or postwar reconstruction, there is hardly a whisper of any of this in any of them.
Ransome did not develop this mastery of the separate children’s world until his late middle age. The first of the long string of famous children’s stories, Swallows and Amazons, was published in 1930, when Ransome was 46. Though he hankered after writing children’s books as early as 1906, most of his youth was spent as a journalist and foreign correspondent. His few attempts at writing for children, though not unsuccessful, were entirely overshadowed by his work as a journalist. Most of that work was carried out in Russia where he fled in 1913 from a disastrous marriage. He quickly taught himself Russian, and before long was taken on by the liberal Daily News. Though he lived in different places, he wrote copiously on Russia for the News and later for the Manchester Guardian for 14 years.
From 1914 to 1918 he was in Russia almost all the time. When he started there, his main aim was to put the Russian case to her Allies in the Great War effort. But before long he became absorbed by the political developments in Russia, and started to predict the end of the suffocating dictatorship of Tsar Nicholas.
The two books and the pamphlet reprinted here for the first time since the 1920s are Ransome’s contemporary account and analysis of the two Russian revolutions of 1917 and the events which followed. They are exceptional for a number of reasons. First, Ransome’s writing style is as plain and clear as in any of his children’s books. His prose, in Orwell’s famous phrase, is ‘like a window pane’. There were other English writers who visited Russia both during and after the revolution whose writing style was every bit as irresistible as Ransome’s: Bertrand Russell, for instance, or H G Wells. There are also a series of brilliant accounts of revolutionary Russia from committed sympathisers. John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World is an obvious example, as is Victor Serge’s Year One of the Russian Revolution or Alfred Rosmer’s Lenin’s Moscow.
Ransome’s contribution is quite different. Unlike Wells and Russell, he had been in Russia since the start of the First World War and knew it well. His interviews with the Bolshevik leaders were not one-off affairs, conducted by the travelling journalist eager to get back home. He came to know people like Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin almost as personal friends. In 1918, he fell in love with Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, Trotsky’s secretary, whom he married as soon as his divorce came through. He lived for a time in the same house as the Bolshevik leader, Karl Radek.
He differed from men like Reed, Rosmer and Serge in another way. All three of them were convinced revolutionaries when they came to Russia. Reed had taken part in and reported the Mexican revolution, and had campaigned for socialism across the United States. Rosmer and Serge were, in their different ways, convinced of the case for the overthrow of capitalism. Ransome was extraordinary in that both before and after his involvement in Russia he does not seem to have had any ideological commitment to socialism.
This can be exaggerated. In his excellent and painstaking biography, The Life of Arthur Ransome, published by Cape in the hundredth year after Ransome’s birth, 1984, Hugh Brogan refers to Ransome’s ‘vast ignorance of polities’. This seems unlikely. Hugh Brogan tells us that one of the most formative influences on Ransome’s youth was J W Mackail’s biography of William Morris. Anyone turned on by William Morris cannot possibly have had a ‘vast ignorance’ of politics. Again, even before he left for Russia, Ransome had built up an enormous library, and had written workmanlike, if uninspiring, books on Edgar Allen Poe and Oscar Wilde. He was not ignorant of politics. What he lacked was any sort of clear commitment. Perhaps he yearned for the sort of world which William Morris painted in News from Nowhere, but felt that the reality of Britain in the first 14 years of the century was so far distant from anything Morris had hoped for that there was no point in taking up a political position.
So Ransome went to Russia entirely without political enthusiasms or commitment. He had not joined the newly-formed Labour Party or shown the slightest interest in any of the great issues which racked prewar Britain: women’s suffrage, Irish independence or the great strikes of 1911 and 1912 which effectively destroyed the Liberal Party and shook the Tories to their foundations.
It is this detachment from previous political commitment which gives to Arthur Ransome’s reports of revolutionary Russia their singular fascination and verve. He saw the world as it was, or rather as it was changing. What he saw excited him so much that he became for the first and last time in his life politically committed.
The three works published here span a period of three years, from 1917 to 1920. Ransome was in Petrograd during the 1917 February revolution. Infuriatingly for him and for us, he returned to Britain on holiday in September and so missed the October revolution. As soon as he heard about it, he returned to Russia as quickly as he could, arriving in Petrograd on Christmas Day. He threw himself at once into investigating and reporting what was happening in Russia. His reports were greeted with contempt and fury by the British government, which regarded the new Russian government as a threat to their alliance and the war effort. Ransome’s dispatches were systematically censored by the British government and their security services which (then as now) were controlled by a wildly hysterical anti-communist right. At one stage, MI5 proposed that Ransome should be prosecuted
as a traitor under the Defence of the Realm Act.
Nothing infuriated Ransome more than what he called ‘the intellectual sloth, the gross mental indolence’ which infected the British government and their newspapers whenever anyone mentioned Russia. No one seemed capable of making the leap in imagination necessary to understand even a little of the stupendous events in revolutionary Russia. In April 1918, Ransome was approached by an American journalist, Raymond Robins, with an idea for a pamphlet for the American people on what was really happening in Russia. To avoid the censor, Robins suggested he take it back to the States with him on his next visit. Nothing much happened for a week or two, when suddenly Robins arrived at Ransome’s lodgings to announce that he was off in 36 hours and the pamphlet had better be written by then. Ransome sat down and, almost without stopping, typed out The Truth About Russia. Robins arrived to collect it just as it was being finished. So it is almost unchecked, a result of the free flow of Ransome’s uninhibited and even unedited prose style, and probably much the better for it.
Hugh Brogan devotes only two pages of his biography to this remarkable pamphlet, which he obviously regards as a bit embarrassing. An honest biographer, Brogan takes great care not to distort the facts or the views of those with whom he disagrees. But he had little sympathy with the Bolsheviks and it is hard for him properly to convey Arthur Ransome’s untrammelled enthusiasm for them.
The Truth About Russia starts with Ransome’s feelings as he hurried round Petrograd, often in great danger, during the February revolution. His language is extreme: ‘I do not think I shall ever be so happy in my life as I was during those first days when I saw working men and peasant soldiers sending representatives of their class and not of mine. I remembered Shelley’s:
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many – they are few’.
The key to his excitement was the new democracy. Representatives of a new class, previously dispossessed of property and power, were suddenly entering the political arena. News from Nowhere was News from Everywhere. Here at once Ransome parted company with the ephemeral enthusiasts who described these events in the liberal press. The liberals were excited by the prospect of the old Tsarist tyranny being replaced by safe parliamentary institutions like those in England or France or the United States. Ransome noticed at once that the real democratic force introduced by the Russian Revolution – the workers’ council, the soviet – was a hundred thousand times more democratic than the parliaments of the West, which had never really interested him.
The soviets were directly elected. Their delegates were recallable. They were therefore responsive and sensitive to the working people. The Provisional government and its parliament were none of these things. The two sources of power were locked in a life-and-death struggle, which, Ransome observed, was continually being won by the soviets.
As the power struggle became more and more intense, it had to be resolved. Inside the soviets the mood changed. They were controlled originally by parliamentarians, by Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries who wanted to be subservient to the Provisional government. The Bolsheviks on the other hand wanted to take power in the name of the people they represented. Arthur Ransome, who had been sceptical, even dismissive of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, swung round in their support.
This led him to the main thrust of his argument in The Truth About Russia. Liberals then and now (Hugh Brogan chimes in as well) argued that the dissolution of the elected Constituent Assembly (parliament) by the Bolsheviks in January 1918 was the decisive moment at which Bolshevism parted company with democracy. On the contrary, Ransome argued, the only way democracy could possibly proceed was through the soviets. In fact, as he also records and was plain from the near-unanimous reports at the time (though not in the memory of latter-day liberals) the Constituent Assembly in the reality of Russia in early 1918 was a complete irrelevance and passed away without incident and without mourning. In its place was the living, vibrant democracy of the soviets. Watching Trotsky in action explaining the government’s policies to hundreds of freezing soviet delegates in crude clothes, this moderate and restrained reporter, trained in the reserved language of British upper class education, wrote this:
‘I felt I would willingly give the rest of my life if it could be divided into minutes and given to men in England and France so that those of little faith who say that the Russian Revolution is discredited could share for one minute each that wonderful experience’.
The riddle of how this unlikely revolutionary had become such an enthusiastic one is to some extent solved in a revealing passage in The Truth about Russia: ‘Socialists especially who had long dreamed of revolution found it particularly difficult to recognise in this clouded tremendous struggle the thing which their dreams had softened for them into something more docile, less self-willed’.
Those, unlike Ransome, who had become socialists by working out utopias, by imagining that socialism would all be dancing round a maypole for the common people, while intelligent and benevolent governments handed down plans for industry and welfare, were a bit shocked by the rough and ready soviets, and by the fact that everything did not come right all of a sudden. Ransome, who had never been impressed by utopias or dreams, was inspired by the reality in front of him, especially the way in which the will of the people was being brought to bear on the political process.
This enthusiasm intensified as the World War ended and the war of intervention on Russia by the Western powers became clear for what it was – a blatant attempt by capitalist powers to drown socialist Russia in blood. Ransome was outraged by the continued hostility of his own government to the Russian regime and continued to defend the Bolsheviks in his reports. He and Evgenia, by now devoted to the Bolshevik government though she had been a Menshevik in 1917, left Russia for Stockholm in 1918, soon after The Truth About Russia was published. They were thrown out of Sweden by a combination of red-baiting governments, and ended up in Tallin, Estonia, from where Ransome repeatedly travelled to Russia as a reporter.
In the spring of 1919, on a trip to England, he wrote Six Weeks in Russia in 1919. Much of the warm glow of triumph in The Truth About Russia has vanished from this kaleidoscope of revolutionary pictures. Instead, pervading everything, there are the cold and hunger of the cities, the apparently insuperable problems of transport and food supply, all of them directly attributable to the blockade and the war. Yet Ransome’s enthusiasm for the achievement of the Bolsheviks and their system of government is not at all diminished by the terrible privations of the Russian people.
The most consistent theme of these thirty reports is the survival of the Bolshevik regime in the face of everything which has being thrown against it. People were hungry, but there was little or no exploitation in their hunger. There were free meals for every school child. Housing policy was based on the ‘rough and ready’ principle that until everyone had one room, no one should have two. Universities and libraries were growing. A night at the opera where the audience was all roughly-dressed working men and women, freezing in their tattered overcoats, was far more exhilarating than in the old days when all was tinsel and glitter. It was not true that opposition was cut out of public life. Even in spite of the war and the blockade, opponents of Bolshevism like Sukhanov and Martov were still at work, expressing their views with all their accustomed vehemence. In an interview, Martov conceded that his paper should have been shut down for excessive opposition to a government harassed on all sides by rampaging White armies. Martov did not like the Bolsheviks, but he preferred them any day to the White generals.
Ransome’s lack of ideology was not always useful to him. He never even started to understand the central Bolshevik strategy of exporting revolution to other European countries. But his report of the decision to form the Third International, and the huge meeting which inaugurated it, is perhaps the most thrilling episode in this thrilling little book.
Six Weeks In Russia publishe
d by Allen and Unwin, was a great success. It was published in America, where it sold widely. It coincided with the upsurge of socialist thinking on both sides of the Atlantic and the growing working class impatience with their government’s war against Russia. Many radical publishers reprinted the book. Ransome, who was born in Leeds, must have been specially delighted with the paperback edition printed at the relatively cheap price of half a crown by the Yorkshire Reformers’ Bookshop in Bradford. But Six Weeks In Russia was not a popular book in the sixty years from 1930 to 1990. Like John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, it did not mention the man who according to the folklore of the left for half a century was as important a figure in the Russian Revolution as Lenin or Trotsky. It did not mention Stalin. It shuffled him off where he belonged, to the fringe of the revolution. This was intolerable to Communist Party orthodoxy. Lawrence and Wishart, the Party’s publishers, eventually republished John Reed’s book (with Stalinist footnotes) in 1960. Ransome’s Six Weeks in Russia has not been reprinted since the 1920s.
Nor has Crisis in Russia, which was written almost a year after Six Weeks, and takes the revolution forward to the early months of 1920. This was never reprinted by anyone. It came out in 1921, as the postwar upsurge in socialist agitation started to die down and the ruling class on both sides of the Atlantic began to breathe more confidently. Yet it is in my view the best of Ransome’s work on revolutionary Russia.
By now the cold and hunger had entered into the very heart of the Russian cities. With his usual skill and humility, Arthur Ransome lets us know that everyone he meets is hungry and cold before everything else, and that well-fed foreign journalists are not well placed to lecture the Russians about their political failures.
He notices one of the key elements of the collapse of the Russian economy: the flight to the countryside by industrial workers who cannot find any other way of getting something to eat. He predicts that the future for Russia was ‘something like barbarism’. Either the industrial production would collapse through the voluntary movement of workers to the countryside, or that production would have to be restored by entirely over-ruling all voluntary movement: by a dictatorship over the proletariat not of the proletariat. He sees and mourns the rapid disappearance of the class which made the revolution and kept it going: the industrial working class. Most of that class had been killed in the wars; another large part of it had become the administration and now almost all that was left was vanishing, starving, into the countryside, Yet the book is not all gloomy. It is in many ways a much clearer and more persuasive argument for the Bolsheviks either than the grand revolutionary rhetoric of The Truth about Russia or the patchwork of vignettes, Six Weeks in Russia.
Six Weeks in Russia, 1919 Page 1
