‘Now,’ said my friend, when we got into the street, ‘what shall we do?’
‘We shall eat,’ I said at once. ‘And I want to go into one of the restaurants used by the workers.’
‘Very well/ he said. ‘But perhaps we shall not find one at this hour with food.’
We did find a restaurant that had food. As the mid-day rush was over we had plenty of room. We got served quickly. The food was bad but it was very cheap. I have no idea what it was. It might have been meat or fish. The most interesting part of the meal was an incident that occurred, just before we were going to leave.
In Moscow there are hordes of beautiful little gypsy girls, the most exquisite little creatures I have ever seen. They dance in the public squares and sleep on the grass plots and beg everywhere. They are always accompanied by ruffianly fathers or mothers, who probably take all their money and beat them. But they are really very beautiful, with features as delicate as flowers and little hands that are enchanting. All as brown as berries, with extraordinary eyes that look so wicked.
One of these little women entered the restaurant, came to our table and begged for money or food; I could not tell which. I put my hand in my pocket at once to give her some money; not because I pity beggars, but because she was beautiful. But my friend tried to stop me in an excited manner. In spite of that, I gave the little girl a few roubles. My friend got really horrified.
It is a crime,’ he cried. It is a counter-revolutionary act.’
‘Oh! Damn the revolution,’ I cried. ‘What harm will it do?’
He shook his head and said:
‘You are really hopeless. You are an anarchist. It is impossible to organise properly your psychology.’
The little person returned and began again to beg for something. Then she pointed to a mess of potatoes that lay on a plate. I was on the point of handing her the plate and asking her to sit down to table with us, when my friend jumped to his feet in a fury and threatened to call the police if the gypsy did not leave at once. As soon as she heard the word ‘Militia’ she fled, but at the door she turned back and said something. I’m certain it was an oath. Then she winked at me and blew me a kiss. I returned it with enthusiasm and I wanted to rush out after her; she was so perfect and tiny, like a little fairy animal. But my friend began to strike the table and then, seizing me by the shoulder, said furiously:
‘Comrade, I must warn you against such people. The situation is such. That girl is a gypsy. As in your countries, these gipsies have always lived by begging and robbery and such things. But here, since the revolution, they have been liquidated and settled on the land. Now the liquidated gypsies are a respectable fraction of the Soviet Union. Some of them are even doing good work for the Five Year Plan and the collectivisation of the land. But there are others that still remain unliquidated. This little girl is the child of such unliquidated people. By giving her money and food you only encourage her parents to remain unliquidated and therefore you are committing a counter-revolutionary act. For they take, of course, the money from her and drink it or speculate with it, being addicted to various illegal practices. Also, begging is condemned by Soviet law. So you see. . .
‘Oh! For Christ’s sake,’ I cried angrily, ‘do let a fellow have some fun. I can’t go on all day thinking of liquidating gypsies and Esquimos. Why can’t I give her money if she amuses me?’
‘But that also is false,’ he continued, ‘to do something wrong because it is amusing.’
‘But it’s not wrong. It’s human. I loved getting gifts when I was a child. It’s really so sweet and gives great pleasure to children and softens their little cruel natures. Fact.’
‘You are hopeless,’ he said. ‘You are by nature a bourgeois.’
Chapter XIV
Mingling With The Masses
For five days, comrade Levit accompanied me from morning until night. During that time, I grew extremely fond of him. It was impossible to do otherwise. He was such a delightful fellow. It seemed impossible to deprive him of his good temper. No service seemed too great to demand of him. His enthusiasm for life and his hope for the future, his steadfast belief in the Communist God and his exuberance gave me a fresh grip on reality, which the emptiness of a literary life in Western Europe (where God is dead) had made a faded dream. Yet he bored me to tears. I determined to get rid of him, lest my boredom should make me insolent and unmannerly towards him, who was so kind.
And I was seeing nothing of what I wanted to see, because of the sedulous care with which he convoyed me. He carried me along in such a hurry that I was blind and deaf to my surroundings. I saw churches, theatres, newspaper offices, clubs and creches which merely bewildered me without teaching me anything. Even a literary gathering, to which we went, seems to me at this moment nothing more than a prolonged shout.
On the fifth day I escaped. Another comrade and scholar whom I met at the Bureau offered to introduce me to an Englishwoman who had married a prominent Russian official. This comrade also specialised in English literature and as his period almost touched that of comrade Levit there was a certain rivalry between them. Comrade Kashkin was a Slavic Russian. He had a red head and he had fought in the army, where he received a wound which injured his nervous system considerably. For that reason, perhaps, he was more sane than most of his compatriots and not in the least fanatical. Of course he was an ardent Communist but being a highly educated man, belonging to a family that had been civilised before the revolution, his views on life were by no means violent.
Tall and slim, with a freckled face and a subdued voice, it was hard to differentiate between him and an intelligent English public schoolboy in manners. But he was exceedingly touchy and could not brook argument, owing, apparently, to his wounds. If one did not argue with him he was very charming; but then it is impossible to live in Russia without argument. Life is so vital there and everything is so new and in such a volcanic state that the simplest discussion becomes an argument to the death.
Indeed, comrade Kashkin disapproved of me; so that we began to argue at once on our way to meet the Englishwoman. When we got on a tram-car, he said to me:
‘Have you read much of our new Soviet literature?’
‘Not very much,’ I said. ‘A little of Pilniak and of Babel and a few other writers whose names I cannot remember.’
He shrugged his shoulders and said these writers were not the best.
‘Oh!’ I cried, eager to please him. I have read some of a book by a writer called Sholohov in a French translation. It was serialised in UHumanite. I thought it was really first-rate.’
Comrade Kashkin got furious at once.
‘But why?’ he cried irritably. It is a popular book, but there are others much better. Sholohov is not an intellectual.’
‘But that’s why I like his work,’ I said. It’s so fresh. It smells of the earth. He knows his art. It’s vital and genuine and simple.’
‘But there is no philosophic depth in it. It’s raw.’
‘But isn’t freshness what we want? We have had enough of pretentious philosophies. We want power and natural beauty to regenerate literature. There are skilled craftsmen by the thousand in most European countries, but they are only echoes of what has been written before, critics posing as creative artists.’
‘You are an anarchist,’ he cried angrily. ‘And for that reason you like blood and thunder, raw life.’
‘Why! Bless my soul,’ I cried, equally angry, ‘you speak like the most bourgeois English intellectual. I expected to find a love of life among Soviet literary people, but you are just as bad as Western European intellectuals, who only know of life what they have read of it. That’s why I like Sholohov because he seems to me to have lived the life of which he writes, to revel in it and to put it on paper exactly as he found it, without any theories as to how it should be.’
‘But that’s not the point,’ he cried. ‘A writer must be disciplined and educated. He must have culture.’
‘I grant you that it is
better if he has culture and it is an axiom that no writer can write anything intelligible or worth while without being disciplined, but nine intellectuals out of ten in Paris, London or Berlin have more culture than Shakespeare, as far as accumulated knowledge of books is concerned. Yet ten thousand of them combined could not write one scene of Hamlet. For God’s sake don’t tell me that what I am beginning to suspect is true.’ ‘What is that?’
‘That in Soviet Russia, Communist intellectuals are suffering from a most virulent inferiority complex, which manifests itself in trying to imitate the decadent writers of Western Europe, all the wordy subtlety that has no guts, no blood, no semen.’
‘You are utterly ridiculous. We are trying to raise the level of civilisation, trying to discipline the uncultured writers that are taking to literature, trying to tone down their rawness. . . .’
‘Tripe,’ I cried. ‘That is the worst form of romanticism. A writer can only express the life he sees around him.’
He aggravated me so much, more by his manner than by his ideas, which were probably better than mine, that I almost quarrelled violently with him. For the latter part of the journey we lapsed into an exhausted silence. We arrived at the flat occupied by the English wife of the important Soviet dignitary and I was deeply impressed by its simplicity. It was similar to a Council flat in London. I was still more impressed by the Englishwoman herself. In spite of many years’ residence in Soviet Russia she had retained every atom of her British middle-class solidity. It was obvious that she despised Russia and the Russians, was bored with Communism and hankered for London. From her conversation and her attitude towards things, I gathered that she was mildly socialistic and I wondered how she had got herself into her present position. But on consideration, I understood it.
After the World War, a section of the middle-class experienced an aching desire for some religion that would act as an antidote to the depression produced by the war; some vital and virile religion, different from the prevalent Christianity, which has grown unsexed and limp through old age. Those deplorable young men who shirked the war, giving their conscience as an excuse, found in socialism a justification for their lack of courage. Women of no great beauty also found in socialism a justification for forming with working men temporary associations, which they were unable to make among men of their own class, owing to the small numbers of the latter; the majority being slaughtered. But all these middle-class people, both male and female, were not really socialist or revolutionary. They were merely disgruntled and dissatisfied. They remained British and Imperialist to the core, although for the moment the Empire failed to satisfy their needs. To them the Russian Revolution came as a gift from God; but as the Revolution developed they began to see its real nature, that it was not a sentimental attempt to create an earthly paradise of free love and artistic communes, but a savage attempt by enormous masses of peasants to get bread and culture. Revolted by this spectacle, they drew back. Some returned to their Union Jacks. Others joined the British Labour Party and made it respectable. The unfortunate few who had committed themselves irrevocably became bitter.
In conversation with this Englishwoman, my distraught nerves forced me to become as violent in support of the Russians as I had been prone to disparage their efforts in conversation with Kashkin.
‘What’s the good of it all?’ she cried. ‘This Five Year Plan won’t make the world any more interesting. It will just give the Russians motor cars and newspapers and chewing gum, just as people have in America. Their ambition is to create a new America in Russia, only worse. There’s nothing new here.’
She really terrified me; for although I contradicted everything she said, I felt that she spoke the truth. And although I was trying to persuade myself that I had more in common with the Russian Bolsheviks than with her, my reason told me that I was just as convinced as she was that acquisitive lust rather than idealism was the driving power behind Russia’s energy. I left her house in a state of acute depression. I got rid of Kashkin and swore that I was finished with Russian intellectuals. They merely irritated me without teaching me anything of what I wanted to know.
And yet . . . what did I want to know? Was there anything to know? Had anything dealing with social relationships been discovered here fundamentally different from what had already been discovered in Europe and America? For another fortnight I wandered about trying to discover it and failed. Nowhere was I able to find a logical attitude towards the universe as one finds in France, the calm judgment and the sound social morality which distinguishes the English, the love of labour and the meticulous exactitude which have made the Germans such unerring craftsmen and designers. Everywhere I found the intellectual wreck of the old Russian grandeur, a nervous, pulsating, worried, unstable mass of human beings, merely held together by terror of the enemies that surrounded them and by the masses that pushed them from the rear, by hunger, by lack of all the necessities of life, by a mystical frenzy which envisaged the conquest of the world.
I had come like a fool to write Lies About Russia, foolishly believing that wise men had gone before me, bringing back true tales of a land where everything was new. Both those who denounced the Soviets and those who praised them had come back with tales that everything was new and different. Yet I found everything the same; merely a difference produced by climate and locality and racial habits.
They tried to persuade me to visit the south, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, the new cities that were springing up on the Socialist plan, the collective farms. But I stayed in Moscow, for I am more concerned with spiritual results than with material causes. Innovations do not begin in the villages, or in the provinces, where they are certain to meet with greater opposition than in the capital, to which all the intelligent flock in order to be near the centre of culture. In the capital I must stay, in order to understand the Soviet mind, in order to understand the lives and the aspirations of the proletarian masses, upon whom this Revolution is based.
Towards that end, I hid myself from all my intellectual friends and went among the masses, as the Communists say; but as I did not speak the language of the country, I was severely handicapped. I learned the utter idiocy of those ladies and gentlemen, who attempted to write books, giving an exact description of the institutions, the life and the ambitions of countries as vast as Russia, after a nodding acquaintance; like the foreign gentleman in Pickwick Papers. In a country as completely foreign as Russia, the mind of the visiting stranger is so confused by the mass of impressions that continually pour in upon it that it is incapable of seeing anything in a normal light. However, I avoided examining or judging individual things. I sought to get a general impression of the general life, and in that manner I succeeded in acclimatising myself to such an extent that I felt comparatively at home. I felt bored, excited, discontented, eager for change, enthusiastic, depressed, argumentative, ferocious, bigoted, fanatical, hungry, bitten by bed bugs, convinced that Europe was preparing war against me, convinced that a world revolution was imminent, that the Soviets were going to fail, that the Five Year Plan was going to be a magnificent success, that it would end in disaster, that socialism was going to be produced in a few years, that it would never materialise, that there were spies at every street corner, that I might be taken out at any moment and shot, that I might take out somebody at any moment and shoot him. ... In a word, I assumed the psychology of the Russian masses. I went to bed wherever I found myself at three o’clock in the morning. I slept in old monasteries, in communal lodging houses, in new flats on the American plan, in rooms of old houses that had once been clubs, palaces and town houses of the gentry. I met old nuns earning their living gathering firewood, peeling potatoes in kitchens, begging at street corners. I met ex-priests that were lousy and degenerate, also begging. I met couples that were divorced and still lived together owing to the housing shortage. I met men with two or more wives and women with two or more husbands. I swam naked in the river with women who wore bathing suits. I rowed on the river with soldiers, sa
ilors, male and female factory workers. I played the accordion at dances in private rooms and at factory outings. I went on a binge with an ex-prince, who had become a journalist, with a popular Soviet novelist who had been a Cossack, with a Kulak, with cab drivers, with odds and ends of humanity to be met in public houses and at street corners. I stood about kiosks drinking lemonade. I queued up for cigarettes for hours. I hung around the market and mingled with the gypsies, peasants, pick-pockets, speculators. I hung around the hotels at night and mingled with foreign capitalists and engineers and gawky Americans who were making scientific examination for their University theses of the Russian theatre, the Russian school system, the Russian prison system. I picked up girls in the streets, by the same method as in other countries. I kept cab drivers for days at a time, in the same manner as Irishmen used to do in Dublin before the war. I went to the intellectual cinemas, with Russians who shed tears, sang, cheered and shouted ‘Down with the bourgeois assassins’ when Lenin or the other Communist hierarchs were shown on the screen. I went to common cinemas with the masses, where Charles Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, cowboys and wild west criminals sent the masses into hysterics with delight and little children kept cheering when the hero rescued the heroine, or threatened to wreck the screen when the villain had the hero in a corner, exactly as they do in the slum cinemas of Dublin, London, New York, Shanghai, Jerusalem or Addis Abbaba. I went to the Circus where the masses roared applause for the acrobats, the sword swallowers and the clowns that delight audiences in the other cities I have mentioned. There they drank light beer and ate buns between the acts, as they do at Collins’ or the Holborn Empire in London. I went once to an intellectual theatre and fell asleep during a marvellous play executed by Georgians. I went to a trotting race meeting and lost five races, before I received the information that they were all squared, as in European countries, where racing is not properly controlled. I attended football matches and played football on waste plots with workmen who were enjoying their fifth day holiday. I forgot the day of the week and the day of the month and only stumbled by chance one Sunday into a church where the faithful were hearing Mass in the old style. Another day I visited the atheistic museum, where young people were taught in the new style that Mass was a delusion and a humbug. I frequented another church that had been turned into a library of foreign literature and periodicals, in order to keep in touch with English racing and cricket. Sometimes I had breakfast at four in the afternoon and lunch at three o’clock in the morning. I ate sturgeon, caviare, boeuf Strogonov and borsch. I got drunk on vodka, Napareouli, beer and French brandy. I did physical jerks and Russian dances with bands of workers in the public parks. I went to the Zoo and to a wedding and to a funeral. In other words, I lived completely the life of a knockabout and enjoyed myself and had practically the same experiences as a knock-about in London, Dublin, New York, Jerusalem or Addis Abbaba. I found that humanity in Russia was essentially the same as in any other country, that people had the same wants, the same ambitions, the same virtues and the same vices. The same things and the same types irritated me as at home. I was enthused by the same splendid types, generous, simple, courteous amusing, courageous, industrious, honest, trust- worthy types as one finds at home and in every other country in the world. I found also mean, scavenging, envious scoundrels. I found the same insufferable arrogance in the young.
I Went to Russia Page 18
