I Went to Russia

by Liam O'Flaherty

  I found that Moscow and, as a corollary, the whole of Russia was an enlargement of the ship on which I journeyed from London to Leningrad; the same ludicrous evangelistic Communism on the surface and the same greedy, ambitious, admirable human nature beneath. The only difference between the ship and Moscow was that there were fewer cranks, fanatical Jews and useless scoundrels on the ship than in Moscow.

  Anything new? Just one, which is not really new, but a recurring phenomenon in man’s history: New Tools Applied To Virgin Soil.

  Having come to this conclusion, I decided to call on Mr. Walter Duranty in order to compare my impressions with his. As one of the leading foreign correspondents, he is known in practically every country in the world among journalists as an authority on Soviet Russia. He had been in residence there for eight years and even though he is an educated Englishman of merely Liberal tendencies, he has earned the respect and gratitude of the Russian people for the fairness of his dispatches to the New York Times. Such an unbiassed observer, I felt, would be the exact opposite to myself. Therefore, a conversation with him would not fail to get me out of the intellectual muddle, in which my journey to Moscow had placed me. And having set the muddle in order, I was determined to return to Europe and continue my life, firmly convinced that new Gods were not the business of Europeans.

  Chapter XV

  Mr. Duranty Explains

  When I entered his study, Walter Duranty was typing a cable to his newspaper. He treated me to the luxury of a foreign cigarette and some French wine, told me that Blenheim had won the Derby and asked me to make myself comfortable while he finished his cable. His good-humoured, intelligent English face and his courteous manner at once made me feel more at home than I had felt since my arrival in Russia. Although the Russians had been outrageously courteous, polite and hospitable, this was something different. One did not have to make an effort.

  He broke off in the middle of a sentence to laugh loudly.

  ‘I have just returned from an extraordinary expedition,’ he said. Tm writing an account of an astonishing lunatic asylum I saw in Bokhara, We were all brought out there as the guests of the Government to examine the new Turkish railway. Well! You see the Emir of Bokhara fled on the approach of the Bolshevik forces, bringing with him all his camels, his six hundred mistresses and about three hundred boys. His magnificent palace was left to the Reds. They were at a loss what to do with it, so they turned it into a lunatic asylum. I went over the premises and certainly nothing could be more ludicrous than to see this fanatastic magnificence put to such use. The most spectacular thing I noticed was a Bolshevik warder lolling on a seat in a beautiful garden with fountains, reading a book on The Economic Causes of Insanity. I certainly hope to go there for treatment when I break down under the strain of Soviet life.’

  He laughed again and continued to write about the Emir’s palace turned into a lunatic asylum. Then he had his man take away the message, lit a cigarette and said to me:

  ‘What do you think of Russia? But that of course is a ridiculous question to ask, because it is impossible for anyone to form a clear opinion of Russia in anything under about thirty years. Everything is so different.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ I said. I find everything startlingly the same.’

  ‘What?’ he cried in amazement.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. I mean that the things I expected to find different are the same. The things that are different here to what they are in England or France are no more strange than the things that are different in England to what they are in the native parts of Central Africa.’

  I don’t understand you,’ he said.

  ‘Well!’ I said. It’s this way. I really believed before I set out for Moscow that the Russians were trying to establish socialism, in the official manner that socialist orators and Marxian doctrinaires talked about. Human nature was to be changed. There was to be peace, equality and brotherly love over all the earth. Personal ambition was to disappear and people would go about bowing to one another and saying: “Your turn, sir,” when it was a question of assuming public office: just as the preposterous soldiers of the eighteenth century bowed to one another in battle, before Napoleon made war a realistic business of victory at all costs. Yet here I find the struggle for existence going on in the same old way, if anything more fierce than it is in Europe. I don’t suppose there is any great difference between one particular trade and another in the matter of socialistic tendencies. If anything, people of my own trade are more likely to be advanced than bricklayers, coalheavers or woodcutters. Yet writers here are just as bourgeois as European writers. They are just as eager to get on and over-reach their fellows, to reach fame, security and private property at the expense of their fellows and society.’

  Duranty laughed.

  ‘Well!’ he said. If you really believed in the Liberti, Egalite, Fraternite Table you really deserve the agony of disillusion. I didn’t know any intelligent person beyond the twenties believed in that nowadays.’

  ‘One may not definitely believe in it,’ I said, ‘but one has a vague hope that it might sometime come into being. I was really disappointed to find it did not exist here and that there is no hope of its coming into existence. On the other hand, I am frankly pleased that man is a scoundrel and that he is going to remain one.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Duranty. ‘Have some more Burgundy. It’s not very good, but one must be grateful in Moscow. That’s the whole trouble with foreigners coming into Russia. They expect the sun, moon and stars of Utopia, and they are disappointed when they only find the faint dawn of sanity coming into human government. In fact, they are so enraged that they refuse to see the dawn. The Bolshies have been their own worst enemies in many ways, in so far as their foreign propaganda has been concerned. They have sent every foreigner bum that came here back to Europe, with the most amazing rubbish about the proletarian revolution and the Russian Utopia. As a result, the real work that they are doing has been largely passed by without notice.’

  ‘In what respect are they doing great things?’

  ‘In industry and agriculture especially and generally in bettering the social conditions of the workers.’

  I quite agree with you,’ I said, ‘but the point that chiefly interested me was to find out if there was anything fundamentally new discovered here, about giving a different direction to man’s social ambition. I find none. Take education, about which so much has been written by well-meaning men and women who have come back from Russia. So far as I have seen, the Russians are trying to inspire their youth with the moral outlook of the English public school-boy. I find among Russian youth the same cocky self-assurance, the same horror of expressing their individuality in a manner that might be considered “different” by their fellows, the same horror of being “different” in dress, in opinions, in conduct, the same ambition to be a correct exemplaire of the perfect Young Communist Russian, as the young English public school-boy wants to be the perfect Briton.’

  ‘But don’t you think it’s a wonderful achievement, if they manage to do that? Wouldn’t it be a vast improvement on. . . .’

  ‘The children of Dostoievsky’s time, with their rags, dirt and sadistic parents. Undoubtedly, but it’s nothing to raise a Civil War all over the wide world in its honour. The point I make is that the Russians are merely trying to give to the mass the education that the English give to the middle and upper classes. And as the English public school system has resulted in producing a machine-made Englishman, a worthy, decent, well-mannered fellow, fit to govern Indians and Zulus, so are the Russians aiming at the production of a similar Russian fit to govern the world. They are trying to produce an Imperialist Russian. They are laying the foundation of a new Roman Empire, based on the tractor, the aeroplane and the dynamo, just as the old one was based on straight roads, sewers and Legiones. A machine. I don’t want human beings turned into machines. Really, I find the little dirty-faced youths in the slums of London and Dublin more quick in intelligence and more a
musing than the perfectly groomed youths to be seen at the Eton and Harrow match.’

  ‘That’s all rubbish,’ said Duranty, becoming a trifle indignant with me. ‘You are a disgruntled sentimentalist. And I don’t exactly get your point. If the Russians can teach all their children to read and write and do little sums in arithmetic within the next fifty years, I think they’ll have done wonders. The danger of having replicas of the Eton and Harrow match at Moscow or at Stalingrad in the immediate future is ridiculous. You see, the Soviet Union is not Moscow. It’s one-sixth of the world. And therefore. . . .’

  I know, I know. I grant you that. I was merely trying to point out that we owe nothing to the Bolsheviks in the matter of social innovations. Take marriage for instance. People in Europe have been yelling about Bolshevik enlightenment for the past ten years. But I find the Russians much more puritanical in their sexual relationships than the English, the French, the Germans or the Americans. Granted that there may have been sexual debauchery after the Revolution, or very bright ideas about marriage among the highbrows at the present time, I find that the vast masses of the people still are just as reactionary about marriage as the masses all over the world. I have been told by ardent Communists here that the young women, when they are working in the factories, believe ardently in the Communal life and so forth, but as soon as they get husbands they begin to give their whole time to the little flat and are perfectly bourgeois in their greed for procuring a new arm chair, new chintz curtains, a new samovar. The fringe of the population that goes in for divorces and free love is just the same fringe that does the same sort of thing in the other countries I have mentioned. Indeed, on the whole, I find among the Russians the simplicity of peasants with regard to sex. I am certain that there is nothing new or socialistic about their attitude towards marriage. One would have to go to the heavy and cultured middle-aged women in England for that, examinations of complexes and companionate marriages and so forth. Here there are only primitive instincts, extreme delicacy, sentimentality; in fact, a very delightful, un-Marxian, pastoral chastity.’

  ‘But isn’t that all to the good?’

  ‘Certainly it is.’

  ‘Then what are you grousing about?’

  ‘Damned if I know.’

  ‘Have another drink. It’s just the nervous reaction from Russian life.’

  We both laughed heartily.

  ‘Well!’ I said. ‘Do tell me what you think of it in any case. Having liquidated, as the Russians say, my own irritation with myself, I’d like to hear what you think.’

  Duranty leaned back in his chair and said:

  ‘Did you ever read the life of Brigham Young?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘astonishing fellow. A small scale American Mahomet’.

  ‘Perhaps there is a resemblance between him and Mahomet,’ said Duranty. ‘Certainly there is a startling resemblance between him and the Bolsheviks. They both attempted to set up a government by priests. This is a clerical government. You might in the same way prove a resemblance between this and the Papacy, but Mormonism appears to be closer. Has it never struck you that the Russian Communist Party is an extremely religious and clerical organisation?’

  After some thought I agreed with him.

  ‘But it’s amazing,’ he cried, becoming a trifle excited. ‘The longer I live here the more I am struck by it.’

  ‘Damn true,’ I said. ‘Coming down on the train from Leningrad I had a conversation with two Civil servants . . .’

  I’m working out a theory,’ cried Duranty, ‘that Bolshevism is the real religious antidote to the materialism of the twentieth century. It seems ludicrous but it’s true. The rest of the world believes in Godless Russia, and yet Russia is practically the only country in the world where religion inspires the masses with an active enthusiasm. There is no other way of looking at Bolshevism than as a religion. It is now, in fact, more common to refer to it as Leninism, after its prophet. I think it’s very amusing and interesting. For instance, at the general congress of the Communist Party this year there is going to be a heated discussion about a slight change in the Soviet Koran, or Bible, the works of Lenin. It’s going to create almost a schism in the Soviet Church. Very probably new heretics may be burned at the stake or shot in the modern way.’

  ‘What is this change?’

  ‘Lenin has said that Soviet power in the villages is based on the poor peasant. Now they wish to say that Soviet power in the village is based on the collectivised peasant. It sounds trivial, but not more than the small points that caused schisms in the early Christian churches. If you examine the whole system of Bolshevist society you will find the same religious attitude towards life. Even their device, the sickle and hammer, is a form of mystical symbolism. Their ambition to convert the whole world to Communism or Leninism is in line with the apostolic mission of the Christians, causing them, even though they preached peace and goodwill, to massacre those who refused to become converted. Take the life of the high priests of Leninism, the Soviet ministers, heads of local parties and so on. As far as possible they live lives of absolute asceticism. Even the most severe of them, Djerjinsky the head of the police, was a fanatical Communist saint. I assure you it’s a remarkable attempt to achieve what the Christians failed to achieve.’

  ‘And do you think they’ll succeed?’

  Duranty shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘If the Five Year Plan is a success and I have no doubt but that it will be a partial success and that eventually the vast natural resources of the Soviet Union, in spite of Soviet inefficiency and the opposition of foreign countries, is going to make Russia exceedingly prosperous. Then the high priests and the lesser Communist clergy will lose their hold over the masses. I suppose things will repeat themselves. Still it’s an interesting experiment.’

  I’m interested to hear you say that,’ I said, ‘because I have maintained for years that Communism was definitely a new religion rather than a new social theory’.

  ‘Oh! But it’s a new social theory, too,’ said Duranty.

  ‘Only in so far as they have turned the whole of capitalist economy into one huge concern and then cut out the shareholders. It seems an attempt to run society by means of a civil service responsible to the government. But then the government, as you maintain, is a sort of a company with a great number of directors, who draw merely starvation salaries.’

  ‘But don’t you think that’s a great improvement on European and American methods?’

  ‘Obviously. It’s much more efficient and allows more scope for doing big things.’

  ‘Yes,’ cried Duranty enthusiastically. ‘This Russian life sometimes irritates me. I am sometimes revolted by their fanaticism and their inefficiency, but . . . My God! When one compares this intelligent government to the idiocy at home! It’s sad to think that we are doing nothing at home, just rotting away while these fellows are full of enthusiasm, full of hope for the future, working away like devils, trying to build up this rich, virgin country. The government knows where it is going. It has a plan. We have none. Muddle, muddle all the time.’

  ‘And then . . . when the Russians have got there, what happens?’

  It is impossible to say. Anything might happen here.’

  I feel that they are deliberately setting out to conquer the world, by necessity, that they are going to be forced to conquer the world in order to survive.’

  ‘I don’t believe that. The Bolsheviks are really pacifist. That is the funny thing about them. They are pacifist.’

  ‘But isn’t it only the Jews who are pacifist and religiously minded, Communist fanatics? They’ll get rid of the Jews and conquer the world. They have to. Like all people who make a machine of human beings they’ll be forced to use this machine, this army, for the sole work at which an army is useful, military conquest.’