Six Weeks in Russia, 1919

by Arthur Ransome

  MARCH 5

  Today all secrecy was dropped, a little prematurely, I fancy, for when I got to the Kremlin I found that the first note of opposition had been struck by the man who least of all was expected to strike it. Albrecht, the young German, had opposed the immediate founding of the Third International, on the double ground that not all nations were properly represented and that it might make difficulties for the political parties concerned in their own countries. Everyone was against him. Rakovsky pointed out that the same objections could have been raised against the founding of the First International by Marx in London. The German-Austrian combatted Albrecht’s second point. Other people said that the different parties concerned had long ago definitely broken with the Second International. Albrecht was in a minority of one. It was decided therefore that this conference was actually the Third International. Platten announced the decision, and the ‘International’ was sung in a dozen languages at once. Then Albrecht stood up, a little red in the face, and said that he, of course, recognised the decision and would announce it in Germany.

  MARCH 6

  The conference in the Kremlin ended with the usual singing and a photograph. Some time before the end, when Trotsky had just finished speaking and had left the tribune, there was a squeal of protest from the photographer who had just trained his apparatus. Some one remarked ‘The dictatorship of the photographer,’ and, amid general laughter, Trotsky had to return to the tribune and stand silent while the unabashed photographer took two pictures. The founding of the Third International had been proclaimed in the morning papers, and an extraordinary meeting in the Great Theatre announced for the evening. I got to the theatre at about five, and had difficulty in getting in, though I had a special ticket as a correspondent. There were queues outside all the doors. The Moscow Soviet was there, the Executive Committee, representatives of the trade unions and the factory committees, etc. The huge theatre and the platform were crammed, people standing in the aisles and even packed close together in the wings of the stage. Kamenev opened the meeting by a solemn announcement of the founding of the Third International in the Kremlin. There was a roar of applause from the audience, which rose and sang the ‘International’ in a way that I have never heard it sung since the All-Russian Assembly when the news came of the strikes in Germany during the Brest negotiations. Kamenev then spoke of those who had died on the way, mentioning Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, and the whole theatre stood again while the orchestra played, ‘You fell as victims’. Then Lenin spoke. If I had ever thought that Lenin was losing his personal popularity, I got my answer now. It was a long time before he could speak at all, everybody standing and drowning his attempts to speak with roar after roar of applause. It was an extraordinary, overwhelming scene, tier after tier crammed with workmen, the parterre filled, the whole platform and the wings. A knot of workwomen were close to me, and they almost fought to see him, and shouted as if each one were determined that he should hear her in particular. He spoke as usual, in the simplest way, emphasising the fact that the revolutionary struggle everywhere was forced to use the soviet forms. ‘We declare our solidarity with the aims of the Sovietists’, he read from an Italian paper, and added, ‘and that was when they did not know what our aims were, and before we had an established programme ourselves.’ Albrecht made a very long reasoned speech for Spartacus, which was translated by Trotsky. Guilbeau, seemingly a mere child, spoke of the socialist movement in France. Steklov was translating him when I left. You must remember that I had had nearly two years of such meetings, and am not a Russian. When I got outside the theatre, I found at each door a disappointed crowd that had been unable to get in.

  The proceedings finished up next day with a review in the Red Square and a general holiday.

  If the Berne delegates had come, as they were expected, they would have been told by the Communists that they were welcome visitors, but that they were not regarded as representing the International. There would then have ensued a lively battle over each one of the delegates, the Mensheviks urging him to stick to Berne, and the Communists urging him to express allegiance to the Kremlin. There would have been demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, and altogether I am very sorry that it did not happen and that I was not there to see.

  Twenty eight / Last talk with Lenin

  I went to see Lenin the day after the review in the Red Square, and the general holiday in honour of the Third International. The first thing he said was: ‘I am afraid that the jingoes in England and France will make use of yesterday’s doings as an excuse for further action against us. They will say “How can we leave them in peace when they set about setting the world on fire?” To that I would answer, “We are at war, Messieurs! And just as during your war you tried to make revolution in Germany, and Germany did her best to make trouble in Ireland and India, so we, while we are at war with you, adopt the measures that are open to us. We have told you we are willing to make peace.”’

  He spoke of Chicherin’s last note, and said they based all their hopes on it. Balfour had said somewhere, ‘Let the fire burn itself out.’ That it would not do. But the quickest way of restoring good conditions in Russia was, of course, peace and agreement with the Allies. ‘I am sure we could come to terms, if they want to come to terms at all. England and America would be willing, perhaps, if their hands were not tied by France. But intervention in the large sense can now hardly be. They must have learnt that Russia could never be governed as India is governed, and that sending troops here is the same thing as sending them to a Communist university.’

  I said something about the general hostility to their propaganda noticeable in foreign countries.

  Lenin. ‘Tell them to build a Chinese wall round each of their countries. They have their customs-officers, their frontiers, their coast-guards. They can expel any Bolsheviks they wish. Revolution does not depend on propaganda. If the conditions of revolution are not there no sort of propaganda will either hasten or impede it. The war has brought about those conditions in all countries, and I am convinced that if Russia today were to be swallowed up by the sea, were to cease to exist altogether, the revolution in the rest of Europe would go on. Put Russia under water for 20 years, and you would not affect by a shilling or an hour a week the demands of the shop stewards in England.’

  I told him, what I have told most of them many times, that I did not believe there would be a revolution in England.

  Lenin. ‘We have a saying that a man may have typhoid while still on his legs. Twenty, maybe 30 years ago I had abortive typhoid, and was going about with it, had had it some days before it knocked me over. Well, England and France and Italy have caught the disease already. England may seem to you to be untouched, but the microbe is already there.’

  I said that just as his typhoid was abortive typhoid, so the disturbances in England to which he alluded might well be abortive revolution, and come to nothing. I told him the vague, disconnected character of the strikes and the generally liberal as opposed to socialist character of the movement, so far as it was political at all, reminded me of what I had heard of 1905 in Russia and not at all of 1917, and that I was sure it would settle down.

  Lenin. ‘Yes, that is possible. It is, perhaps, an educative period, in which the English workmen will come to realize their political needs, and turn from liberalism to socialism. Socialism is certainly weak in England. Your socialist movements, your socialist parties … when I was in England I zealously attended everything I could, and for a country with so large an industrial population they were pitiable, pitiable … a handful at a street corner … a meeting in a drawingroom … a schoolclass … pitiable. But you must remember one great difference between Russia of 1905 and England of today. Our first soviet in Russia was made during the revolution. Your shop stewards committees have been in existence long before. They are without programme, without direction, but the opposition they will meet will force a programme upon them.’

  Speaking of the expected visit of the Berne deleg
ation, he asked me if I knew MacDonald, whose name had been substituted for that of Henderson in later telegrams announcing their coming. He said: ‘I am very glad MacDonald is coming instead of Henderson. Of course MacDonald is not a Marxist in any sense of the word, but he is at least interested in theory, and can therefore be trusted to do his best to understand what is happening here. More than that we do not ask.’

  We then talked a little on a subject that interests me very much, namely, the way in which insensibly, quite apart from war, the Communist theories are being modified in the difficult process of their translation into practice. We talked of the changes in ‘workers’ control’, which is now a very different thing from the wild committee business that at first made work almost impossible. We talked then of the antipathy of the peasants to compulsory communism, and how that idea also had been considerably whittled away. I asked him what were going to be the relations between the Communists of the towns and the property loving peasants, and whether there was not great danger of antipathy between them, and said I regretted leaving too soon to see the elasticity of the Communist theories tested by the inevitable pressure of the peasantry.

  Lenin said that in Russia there was a pretty sharp distinction between the rich peasants and the poor. ‘The only opposition we have here in Russia is directly or indirectly due to the rich peasants. The poor, as soon as they are liberated from the political domination of the rich, are on our side and are in an enormous majority.’

  I said that would not be so in the Ukraine, where property among the peasants is much more equally distributed.

  Lenin. ‘No. And there, in the Ukraine, you will certainly see our policy modified. Civil war, whatever happens, is likely to be more bitter in the Ukraine than elsewhere, because there the instinct of property has been further developed in the peasantry, and the minority and majority will be more equal.’

  He asked me if I meant to return, saying that I could go down to Kiev to watch the revolution there as I had watched it in Moscow. I said I should be very sorry to think that this was my last visit to the country which I love only second to my own. He laughed, and paid me the compliment of saying that, ‘although English’, I had more or less succeeded in understanding what they were at, and that he should be pleased to see me again.

  Twenty nine / The journey out

  MARCH 15

  There is nothing to record about the last few days of my visit, fully occupied as they were with the collection and packing of printed material and preparations for departure. I left with the two Americans, Messrs Bullitt and Steffens, who had come to Moscow some days previously, and travelled up in the train with Bill Shatov, the Commandant of Petrograd, who is not a Bolshevik but a fervent admirer of Prince Kropotkin, for the distribution of whose works in Russia he has probably done as much as any man. Shatov was an emigre in New York, returned to Russia, brought law and order into the chaos of the Petrograd-Moscow railway, never lost a chance of doing a good turn to an American, and with his levelheadedness and practical sense became one of the hardest worked servants of the Soviet, although, as he said, the moment people stopped attacking them he would be the first to pull down the Bolsheviks. He went into the occupied provinces during the German evacuation of them, to buy arms and ammunition from the German soldiers. Prices, he said, ran low. You could buy rifles for a mark each, field guns for 150 marks, and a field wireless station for 500. He had then been made Commandant of Petrograd, although there had been some talk of setting him to reorganise transport. Asked how long he thought the Soviet government could hold out, he replied, ‘We can afford to starve another year for the sake of the Revolution.’

  The End

  About the Author

  Arthur Ransome (1884–1967) achieved lasting fame as the author of the Swallows and Amazons series of children’s books. They came however relatively late in his life. Before that he was a miscellaneous writer – a biography of Oscar Wilde, Bohemia in London and A History of Story-Telling (reissued in Faber Finds) being examples – and a journalist. In the latter role, his two most famous books were Six Weeks in Russia and The Crisis in Russia, both reissued in Faber Finds. His second wife, Evgenia Shelepina, was Trotsky’s secretary.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

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  © Arthur Ransome, 1919

  Introductory essay © Paul Foot, 1992

  The right of Arthur Ransome to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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  ISBN 978–0–571–28761–1