I Went to Russia

by Liam O'Flaherty

  And as the mate was a typical Russian, of the old nationalistic type, obviously one of many millions of similar Russians, I became afraid that the Jews would not succeed in ‘liquidating’ themselves by means of Communism; no more than they succeeded in ‘liquidating’ themselves by means of Christianity. But in any case, the question is not of great importance, at least when compared with other more vital questions arising out of the giant Proletarian Revolution.

  Norway ahoy! It is an astounding country. If one looks at it on the map, one is amazed at how it ‘manages to stick together. It seems to be all rivers, like a soft road after sudden, heavy rain. Nobody would ever suspect people of living there. One shudders at the very thought of living there. Yet, in reality, it is as fresh and green, almost, as Ireland. Although it was still April, I saw signs of full blown spring on either side of the ship, green fields, woods, pretty houses, cattle, human beings fully equipped in modern fashion. The doctor told me that part of Norway was farther south than Moscow. I was startled.

  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘I wish I had stayed at home. I detest cold.’

  ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘I like cold. I make expedition on ice-breaker Krassin to North Pole to save Italian explorers. Very good. Very much learn. Very soon, Soviet Union stretch to North Pole. Very interesting Soviet movement among Esquimos and such other illiterate people. Very interesting when there is autonomous Soviet Republic of North Polar Regions.’

  Devil take it! The doctor was beginning to make me feel inferior. I began to grow jealous of his enthusiasm, his sanity, his interest: in the world, his assurance that the Revolution would inevitably succeed, spread out and cover the earth.

  ‘No,’ I thought. ‘It’s no good fighting against this urge to become a Bolshevik, by sub-consciously accusing the Revolution of being inspired by Jews or by sub-consciously persuading myself that it is going to develop into a movement of Russian nationalist expansion. What power it has! Its grandeur and the immense possibilities of its future spring to my mind, as soon as I bring it to bear on any question.’

  Yet I kept on fighting against it, trying to keep it outside myself and to watch it with cynical detachment. Or perhaps it was because we were in sight of Norway that I was trying to feel more detached. While the ship was at sea, I was completely surrounded by a Bolshevik world. There was nothing to contrast with it, nothing to denote that a bourgeois world existed, except the abnormal sounds distributed by the Broadcasting Company. It was like being in a church, where even atheists are affected by the grandeur of the priest, who wears shining garments, murmurs strange words and swings a thurible, from which perfumes of an exciting nature issue to drug the senses into a belief that God really exists. The same priest, dressed in a similar manner in a public street, swinging the same incense, but surrounded by traffic and the indifferent crowd of a city, is merely an object of ridicule for young children, who point at him and say: ‘Look at the funny man, daddy.’ No religion, whether it is Bolshevism or Christianity, is really impressive when confronted with the gross realities of life.

  That evening, after supper, I had a further conversation with the captain. In keeping with my mood, I found that he also was less impressive. We discussed literature, history, politics. He amazed me as much by all he knew as by his incapacity for thought, when confronted with abstract ideas and with the necessity for judging what he had read in the light of his own intellect. He did not question anything which had been written by his own prophets, Marx, Lenin and such people. He denied everything which they denied and refused to find virtue in anything that was opposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat; except, perhaps, things that were essentially favourable to his position as a Russian, such as Morosov’s insane dream of a Byzantine world Empire. I also felt that he talked in order to impress, in order to air all he knew in the hearing of a foreign writer. And he then went to bed with a book by Edgar Wallace.

  I awoke next morning to find myself confronted by the whole beauty of Norway. Through the open port-hole I saw a mountain rising like a wall, covered with trees, snow and dazzling sunlight. The ship rode at anchor. The air was still and warm. The mountain seemed to be within arm’s reach. Yet the pine trees on its side seemed the size of geranium plants. It was overwhelmingly beautiful. I crawled on tip-toe to the porthole and stuck out my head, making no sound; either afraid of breaking the spell of the mountain’s beauty by sound, or through fear that it was unreal, a ghost that would fly from sound. But it stayed and, becoming assured of its reality, I cried out and looked joyously from side to side, at the mountain’s snowy summit, blazing in the sun, at the blue lagoon that wound away to the left , at little Odda to the right, within its mountain walls. Oh! How gorgeous it looked! What a birthplace for Vikings!

  Half-naked, I ran on deck and sought the highest point on the ship to gloat on the scene. Vikings! Sun, snow, mountains, deep gorges, water-falls, winding bays to bear the savage plunderers in their boats to distant lands. I felt a stirring of my blood and even in my bones the marrow quivered in ecstasy. Pride in that glorious race. What did Marx know of that beautiful insanity, the romance of the beautiful earth and of great peoples, who spring up in strange places and act their piece upon the world’s battle stage and then die or wither into insignificance? How can they ‘liquidate’ this beautiful insanity, with their milky gospels of human brotherhood, the abnegation of race? Here is what Christ could not understand. Neither shall any Jew ever understand it and man shall go on being subject to this beautiful insanity, until the earth is a dry crater like the moon.

  So I thought, looking at the sunlit snow and at the mountains that flung down proud shadows from their swelling sides on to the shimmering waters.

  It seemed that all the crew was equally moved by the beauty of the Norwegian earth and sea. The officers drank one another’s health in a merry fashion. It was while going from one room to another, drinking healths, that I met the Chief Engineer, a most interesting man from my point of view.

  He looked like a horseman and I was not surprised when he told me that he was a Cossack. He was short of stature, with a thick neck, short nose and long arms. His hands were large but his feet were extremely small. His mouth and his eyes looked cruel. His face was sallow and with a skin that looked unhealthy at first sight, but was really a horseman’s skin. It is odd how hereditary horsemen revert to that type all over the world, so that there is hardly any difference of body between a Cossack from the Don, an Argentine Gaucho and those western Irish horsemen that come riding easily from the mountains on a fair day.

  He was a powerful drinker, and drank rapidly for the obvious purpose of getting drunk as soon as possible. It was the first time I had spoken to him and I was amazed at the indifference with which he let me see what his political opinions were.

  ‘This ship is no good/ he said, speaking in a mixture of English and French. ‘Vous savez, very many of crew hired to make propaganda. All ship hired to make propaganda. No good. No drink. No banquets. Settlement, comrades, the situation is so. All the time watching. Vous savez, such a thing is impossible, to live like a monk, all live like monks. II y a des types, vous savez, but not all. It’s mieux, so you say, besser, let men take money how they can get it, fight for it. Ach! It is impossible to explain.’

  He struck his chest and cried with great violence:

  ‘I have forgotten my languages. All life has been turned like this, bottom top, top bottom.’

  ‘Are you not a Communist?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he cried with an oath. ‘I’m a Cossack. I fought against them. But I am Russian. I no want to be emigrant. I stay. Build up Russia. C’est mon pays. Here they hate me. Why? I get more money than captain. On other ships, captains no Communists, banquets all time in port.’

  ‘So you are a Cossack,’ I said, filling his glass.

  ‘When I a little boy,’ he said, ‘my father take me out to herd of horses and say take one. He wild. I catch him, tame him. My people have hands like that. Strong iron. Comprenez? These
Jews. But I have a son in Moscow. I must stay, work for him. I hate this life. I want Cossack country. Wild horses. Great fields. Drinking with strong men.’

  He picked up a novel by a Soviet writer and said:

  ‘Brusski by Panferov. No good. That my country. I know. He know nothing. They tell him write so. He write so.’

  At that moment the doctor knocked and entered. Immediately, the Chief Engineer went out.

  ‘Beware of him,’ said the doctor. ‘The situation is such. This man is drunkard. Such types are no good for our Union. They are exotic types, of interest only to foreigners. It is our proletarian duty to liquidate such types. We shall do this by education. Yes? This afternoon we go on shore, observe Norwegian country. Here, there are very fine factories and such works to observe.’

  He went out. I struck my table and said:

  ‘God! What a collection of odd human beings! This doctor always hovering about, with his system for the liquidation of evil, so free from the ordinary human impulses that he wants to observe factories in Norway instead of observing water-falls, mountains and snow; and the engineer, who is a Cossack, dreaming of wild horses, while he wipes the clammy engine-oil from his hands. Is it the genius of the Russian race always to struggle against the flood of human passion, to lacerate itself by self-denial and to waste half its energies cutting out from its being impulses that have led other races to great achievements? And when Russians give those impulses free rein, they regard them with horror and a consciousness of sin, so that they lead to barren excess, as in drunkenness, lust and intellectual despair. But hold! Is not the doctor a Jew? And have the Jews, by a strange freak of fortune, taken charge of the hysterical Russian genius, as this doctor is watching the engineer, by means of the dictatorship of the proletariat? Excellent joke, if it is so. Shall the hated Jew, by means of his extraordinary philosophical system, his new God (offered to man after man had rejected the former philosophical system of Christianity, also offered by the Jews, as useless for the purposes of the machine age), cure the wild Russian of his anarchy and make him a fit person to rule the earth?’

  Such reflections amused me intensely. Certainly the Chief Engineer was a braggart and somewhat of a ruffian. He needed some sort of dictatorship, as was proved a few days later when he went drunk into his engine room, tried to tamper with the machines and had to be ejected by the second engineer, a Jew. At the same time, I found it amusing that the despised race of Jews, whose thighs have become alien to a horse’s flanks, should have tamed and made servant the wild horsemen of the steppes, by means of a few pleasing phrases.

  Wandering about the ship, I found that our Norwegian pilot had got terribly drunk. I met him in the mess room, where he was attempting to get on good terms with Dunya. He asked me for a drink, which I refused him. He was a wretched old man from whom I wanted to learn nothing, since he was not a Bolshevik.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Ha! Ha! You no Russian man?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m an Irishman.’

  ‘Ha! Ha!’ he said. ‘I know New York ten years. Irishman. Tammany Hall. Very good.’

  Then he winked and said:

  ‘Why do they come for cargo of zinc? To put roofs on houses? No sir. To make war. Russian man getting ready for war. Yes, sir. Goddam. All fools. All countries fools. Make war. Russian man sells food and clothes to buy bullets. He is hungry and he has no shoes on his feet, because he wants bullets to make war. Damn fool.’

  He tottered away, singing. Again I reflected that even though this withered Norseman was drunk and strangely pacifist for a descendant of Vikings, he seemed to be more sane than the Russians. Ho! Ho! It was one way of looking at the Five Year Plan. But was it good to sneer at the Russian lust for war and conquest?

  The drunken pilot met me on the deck a little later and said, pointing to a large and ugly factory that lay on a peninsula in the harbour:

  ‘There is the factory. Goddam! They have ruined that place with their bloody factory. Before it was beautiful. Also, look this side.’ He pointed to the town, where another large factory towered over the houses, sending flashes of fire and clouds of fiery smoke into the air. ‘Carbide they make there in that other one. Dirty bloody Belgian and French capitalists. The smoke cannot rise out of the valley. It will bring disease. Dirty bloody factories. Never mind. To-morrow it will all go. The world will be again beautiful.’

  The doctor came up and drew me aside and said in an excited fashion:

  ‘Very strong Communist Party in Odda. Perhaps we make good propaganda here.’

  He pointed to the factories and said:

  ‘Very good. Very beautiful. Factories very good for Communism. The machines, it is effected so, that they create proletariat. Very good. Then great dynamic energy becomes. Wonderful. Yes?’

  ‘It is strange,’ I thought, ‘that the Norsemen once had a new idea which sent them out to ravage the earth; some dynamic force that drove them to conquest. Now they are pacifist and the Russians have that spirit in turn.’

  When we went ashore during the afternoon, I was convinced that the Norsemen had lost whatever dynamic force they ever possessed. Nothing could be more dull than the town, or more bovine than its inhabitants. The houses were neat, well-built, exquisitely clean. There were signs of prosperity everywhere. All the appliances of modern civilisation were in evidence, electricity, telephones, motor cars. In the shops I saw all the latest products of American industry. The people were healthy and of fine physique. They were excessively polite in manner, calm, orderly, industrious. Yet they repelled me. I saw not a sign of the Viking spirit in their faces; nothing but placidity and stagnation. It seemed that they were robots, manufactured on the latest model of pacifism, hygiene and efficiency. In the cafés I found strong, silent, young men drinking large tumblers of hygienic milk, while gramophones, manipulated by hygienic young women, played sentimental jazz tunes of American origin. When I asked for beer I was given a poisonous concoction. When I asked for food the result was still worse. Rarely have I been offered less appetising garbage, cooked and served in a truly barbarous fashion.

  The Russians looked odd beside the Norwegians. And although the Norwegians had a melancholy effect on me, because they had lost the fierce grandeur of their ancestors, I still felt akin to them and hostile towards the hairy Russians who were not of my blood. These latter looked unkempt, lean, inquisitive, out of place, a horde of prowlers. In their company I felt the snobbish shame one feels in the company of a disreputable person. What was it to me that the ancient Norsemen were probably as disreputable as these Russians when they began their career of plunder? Neither did it interest me that the Russian expansion had for its stated objective the creation of a great world civilisation.

  A machine civilisation such as the Russians sought lay before me in the town and it was abhorrent to my senses. Why should I want to destroy the calm beauty of English villages in order to create a senseless ugliness such as this? Why should I want to destroy French culture, where the delicacies of the table and of the boudoir are considered of greater importance than this speechless worship of tinned food, canned music, standarised morality?

  Out upon the Russians and their ambitions.

  They made no secret of their contempt for the Norwegians. I was indignant at the greedy way they looked at the factories, the motor cars and the shops that contained the products of European and American machine-labour, as if to say: ‘All this shall be ours by conquest or by subtlety.’

  They obviously regarded themselves, not as friendly traders but as scouts, seeking information for conquering armies that were to follow them. Their laughter, their exuberance, their energy did not hide their uncouthness and their lack of individual beauty. They were a herd, with a mass consciousness of a religious idea that was to send them careering, tails up, bellowing, into the rich towns of Europe, to pillage ancient store rooms that are full to bursting point with rich treasure.

  Sadly I stole away from them and wandered up into the mountains. I h
ad not far to go. No sooner had I left the outskirts of the town than the mammoth sides of the mountains hid from sight the factories and the ships. They drowned the strident noises of the machines. All signs of machine life disappeared. The earth regained its mystic power and its atmosphere of unchangeability. There was utter silence. There was snow and smooth rocks that had been trodden by the feet of ancient, hide-wearing men, toothy savages whose gods were sounds and the flashing rage of nature, seas in triumph, cloud bursts, avalanches of snow, icebergs in movement, the terror of mountain shadows.

  The earth’s power drugged my intellect, so that I laughed at the foolish social philosophies of the Bolsheviks and saw that they were but the superstitions of savages to glorify the lust of conquest. It was the same lust that had driven the Norse pirates over the sea.

  Here brutal nature, by her sinister silence, brought vividly to my mind the realisation that human life is governed by the same ruthless competition and brazen anarchy which governs the growth of nature. Plant wars with plant, insect with insect, animal with animal. The elements destroy life with the same power that generates and feeds life. All is in continual movement, ever-changing, blindly moving, being born, flowering, dying, from a miraculous beginning to an un-explainable end, beautiful only in movement, incomprehensible in purpose.

  So are man’s ambitious movements incomprehensible and without purpose when examined by reason. Each successive culture crumbles into ruin and desolation spreads over the sites of his proud cities. His gods are forgotten. His works of art become dust. His philosophies and religions become a gibberish, unintelligible to his descendants. His music becomes the moaning of the rough winds. Hordes of ants march over battlefields, where his armies, with their banners, passed to victory.