Upton Sinclair - "Samuel the Seeker"

Alexandra Kuprin - "Yama (The Pit)"

Apollonius Rhodius - "The Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius "

Robert Hillyer - "The Five Books of Youth"

Russia in 1919

A >> Arthur Ransome >> Russia in 1919



This Etext prepared by Joseph Gallanar
Gallanar@microserve.net





RUSSIA IN 1919
BY ARTHUR RANSOME




PUBLISHER'S NOTE



On August 27, 1914, in London, I made this note in a
memorandum book: "Met Arthur Ransome at_____'s;
discussed a book on the Russian's relation to the war in the
light of psychological background--folklore." The book was
not written but the idea that instinctively came to him
pervades his every utterance on things Russian.


The versatile man who commands more than respect as the
biographer of Poe and Wilde; as the (translator of and
commentator on Remy de Gourmont; as a folklorist, has
shown himself to be consecrated to the truth. The document
that Mr. Ransome hurried out of Russia in the early days of
the Soviet government (printed in the New Republic and
then widely circulated as a pamphlet), was the first notable
appeal from a non-Russian to the American people for fair
play in a crisis understood then even less than now.


The British Who's Who--that Almanach de Gotha of
people who do things or choose their parents wisely--tells us
that Mr. Ransome's recreations are "walking, smoking, fairy
stories." It is, perhaps, his intimacy with the last named that
enables him to distinguish between myth and fact and that
makes his activity as an observer and recorder so valuable in
a day of bewilderment and betrayal.

B. W. H.




INTRODUCTION



I am well aware that there is material in this book which will
be misused by fools both white and red. That is not my
fault. My object has been narrowly limited. I have tried by
means of a bald record of conversations and things seen, to
provide material for those who wish to know what is being
done and thought in Moscow at the present time, and
demand something more to go upon than secondhand
reports of wholly irrelevant atrocities committed by either
one side or the other, and often by neither one side nor the
other, but by irresponsible scoundrels who, in the natural
turmoil of the greatest convulsion in the history of our
civilization, escape temporarily here and there from any kind
of control.


The book is in no sense of the word propaganda. For
propaganda, for the defence or attack of the Communist
position, is needed a knowledge of economics, both from the
capitalist and socialist standpoints, to which I cannot
pretend. Very many times during the revolution it has
seemed to me a tragedy that no Englishman properly
equipped in this way was in Russia studying the gigantic
experiment which, as a country, we are allowing to pass
abused but not examined. I did my best. I got, I think I may
say, as near as any foreigner who was not a Communist
could get to what was going on. But I never lost the bitter
feeling that the opportunities of study which I made for
myself were wasted, because I could not hand them on to
some other Englishman, whose education and training would
have enabled him to make a better, a fuller use of them.
Nor would it have been difficult for such a man to get the
opportunities which were given to me when, by sheer
persistence in enquiry, I had overcome the hostility which I
at first encountered as the correspondent of a "bourgeois"
newspaper. Such a man could be in Russia now, for the
Communists do not regard war as we regard it. The
Germans would hardly have allowed an Allied Commission
to come to Berlin a year ago to investigate the nature and
working of the Autocracy. The Russians, on the other hand,
immediatelya greed to the suggestion of the Berne
Conference that they should admit a party of socialists, the
majority of whom, as they well knew, had already expressed
condemnation of them. Further, in agreeing to this, they
added that they would as willingly admit a committee of
enquiry sent by any of the "bourgeois" governments actually
at war with them.


I am sure that there will be many in England who will
understand much better than I the drudgery of the revolution
which is in this book very imperfectly suggested. I repeat
that it is not my fault that they must make do with the eyes
and ears of an ignorant observer. No doubt I have not asked
the questions they would have asked, and have thought
interesting and novel much which they would have taken for
granted.


The book has no particular form, other than that given it by
a more or less accurate adherence to chronology in setting
down things seen and heard. It is far too incomplete to
allow me to call it a Journal. I think I could have made it
twice as long without repetitions, and I am not at all sure that
in choosing in a hurry between this and that I did not
omit much which could with advantage be substituted for
what is here set down. There is nothing here of my talk with
the English soldier prisoners and nothing of my visit to the
officers confined in the Butyrka Gaol. There is nothing of
the plagues of typhus and influenza, or of the desperate
situation of a people thus visited and unable to procure from
abroad the simplest drugs which they cannot manufacture at
home or even the anaesthetics necessary for their wounded
on every frontier of their country. I forgot to describe the
ballet which I saw a few days before leaving. I have said
nothing of the talk I had with Eliava concerning the Russian
plans for the future of Turkestan. I could think of a score of
other omissions. Judging from what I have read since my
return from Russia, I imagine people will find my book very
poor in the matter of Terrors. There is nothing here of the
Red Terror, or of any of the Terrors on the other side. But
for its poverty in atrocities my book will be blamed only by
fanatics, since they alone desire proofs of past Terrors as
justification for new ones.


On reading my manuscript through, I find it quite
surprisingly dull. The one thing that I should have liked to
transmit through it seems somehow to have slipped away. I
should have liked to explain what was the appeal of the
revolution to men like Colonel Robins and myself, both of
us men far removed in origin and upbringing from the
revolutionary and socialist movements in our own countries.
Of course no one who was able, as we were able, to watch
the men of the revolution at close quarters could believe for
a moment that they were the mere paid agents of the very
power which more than all others represented the stronghold
they had set out to destroy. We had the knowledge of the
injustice being done to these men to urge us in their defence.
But there was more in it than that. There was the feeling,
from which we could never escape, of the creative effort of
the revolution. There was the thing that distinguishes the
creative from other artists, the living, vivifying expression of
something hitherto hidden in the consciousness of humanity.
If this book were to be an accurate record of my own
impressions, all the drudgery, gossip, quarrels, arguments,
events and experiences it contains would have to be set
against a background of that extraordinary vitality which
obstinately persists in Moscow even in these dark days of
discomfort, disillusion, pestilence, starvation and unwanted
war.


ARTHUR RANSOME.





CONTENTS



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




RUSSIA IN 1919


TO PETROGRAD



On January 30 a party of four newspaper correspondents,
two Norwegians, a Swede and myself, left Stockholm to go
into Russia. We travelled with the members of the Soviet
Government's Legation, headed by Vorovsky and Litvinov,
who were going home after the breaking off of official
relations by Sweden. Some months earlier I had got leave
from the Bolsheviks to go into Russia to get further material
for my history of the revolution, but at the last moment there
was opposition and it seemed likely that I should be refused
permission. Fortunately, however, a copy of the Morning
Post reached Stockholm, containing a report of a lecture by
Mr. Lockhart in which he had said that as I had been out of
Russia for six months I had no right to speak of conditions
there. Armed with this I argued that it would be very
unfair if I were not allowed to come and see things for
myself. I had no further difficulties.


We crossed by boat to Abo, grinding our way through the
ice, and then travelled by rail to the Russian frontier, taking
several days over the journey owing to delays variously
explained by the Finnish authorities. We were told that the
Russian White Guards had planned an attack on the train.
Litvinov, half-smiling, wondered if they were purposely giving time
to the White Guards to organize such an attack. Several
nervous folk inclined to that opinion. But at Viborg we
were told that there were grave disorders in Petrograd and
that the Finns did not wish to fling us into the middle of a
scrimmage. Then someone obtained a newspaper and we
read a detailed account of what was happening. This
account was, as I learnt on my return, duly telegraphed to
England like much other news of a similar character. There
had been a serious revolt in Petrograd. The Semenovsky
regiment had gone over to the mutineers, who had seized the
town. The Government, however, had escaped to
Kronstadt, whence they were bombarding Petrograd with
naval guns.


This sounded fairly lively, but there was nothing to be done,
so we finished up the chess tournament we had begun on the
boat. An Esthonian won it, and I was second, by reason of
a lucky win over Litvinov, who is really a better player. By
Sunday night we reached Terijoki and on Monday moved
slowly to the frontier of Finland close to Bieloostrov. A
squad of Finnish soldiers was waiting, excluding everybody
from the station and seeing that no dangerous revolutionary
should break away on Finnish territory. There were no
horses, but three hand sledges were brought, and we piled
the luggage on them, and then set off to walk to the frontier
duly convoyed by the Finns. A Finnish lieutenant walked at
the head of the procession, chatting good-humouredly in
Swedish and German, much as a man might think it worth
while to be kind to a crowd of unfortunates just about to be
flung into a boiling cauldron. We walked a few hundred
yards along the line and then turned into a road deep in
snow through a little bare wood, and so down to the little
wooden bridge over the narrow frozen stream that
separates Finland from Russia. The bridge, not twenty yards
across, has a toll bar at each end, two sentry boxes and two
sentries. On the Russian side the bar was the familiar black
and white of the old Russian Empire, with a sentry box to
match. The Finns seemingly had not yet had time to paint
their bar and box.


The Finns lifted their toll bar, and the Finnish officers
leading our escort walked solemnly to the middle of the
bridge. Then the luggage was dumped there, while we stood
watching the trembling of the rickety little bridge under the
weight of our belongings, for we were all taking in with us as
much food as we decently could. We were none of us
allowed on the bridge until an officer and a few men had
come down to meet us on the Russian side. Only little Nina,
Vorovskv's daughter, about ten years old, chattering
Swedish with the Finns, got leave from them, and shyly, step
by step, went down the other side of the bridge and struck
up acquaintance with the soldier of the Red Army who stood
there, gun in hand, and obligingly bent to show her
the sign, set in his hat, of the crossed sickle and hammer
of the Peasants' and Workmen's Republic. At last the
Finnish lieutenant took the list of his prisoners and called out
the names "Vorovsky, wife and one bairn," looking
laughingly over his shoulder at Nina flirting with the sentry.
Then "Litvinov," and so on through all the Russians, about
thirty of them. We four visitors, Grimlund the Swede,
Puntervald and Stang, the Norwegians, and I, came last. At
last, after a general shout of farewell, and "Helse Finland"
from Nina, the Finns turned and went back into their
civilization, and we went forward into the new struggling
civilization of Russia. Crossing that bridge we passed from
one philosophy to another, from one extreme of the class
struggle to the other, from a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
to a dictatorship of the proletariat.


The contrast was noticeable at once. On the Finnish side of
the frontier we had seen the grandiose new frontier station,
much larger than could possibly be needed, but quite a good
expression of the spirit of the new Finland. On the Russian
side we came to the same grey old wooden station known
to all passengers to and from Russia for polyglot profanity
and passport difficulties. There were no porters, which was
not surprising because there is barbed wire and an extremely
hostile sort of neutrality along the frontier and traffic across
has practically ceased. In the buffet, which was very cold,
no food could be bought. The long tables once laden with
caviare and other zakuski were bare. There was, however, a
samovar, and we bought tea at sixty kopecks a glass and
lumps of sugar at two roubles fifty each. We took our tea
into the inner passport room, where I think a stove must
have been burning the day before, and there made some sort
of a meal off some of Puntervald's Swedish hard-bread. It
is difficult to me to express the curious mixture of
depression and exhilaration that was given to the party by
this derelict starving station combined with the feeling that
we were no longer under guard but could do more or less as
we liked. It split the party into two factions, of which one
wept while the other sang. Madame Vorovsky, who had not
been in Russia since the first revolution, frankly wept, but
she wept still more in Moscow where she found that even
as the wife of a high official of the Government she enjoyed
no privileges which would save her from the hardships of
the population. But the younger members of the party,
together with Litvinov, found their spirits irrepressibly rising
in spite of having no dinner. They walked about the village,
played with the children, and sang, not revolutionary songs,
but just jolly songs, any songs that came into their heads.
When at last the train came to take us into Petrograd, and we
found that the carriages were unheated, somebody got out a
mandoline and we kept ourselves warm by dancing. At the
same time I was sorry for the five children who were with
us, knowing that a country simultaneously suffering war,
blockade and revolution is not a good place for childhood.
But they had caught the mood of their parents,
revolutionaries going home to their revolution, and trotted
excitedly up and down the carriage or anchored themselves
momentarily, first on one person's knee and then on
another's.


It was dusk when we reached Petrograd. The Finland
Station, of course, was nearly deserted, but here there
were four porters, who charged two hundred and fifty
roubles for shifting the luggage of the party from one end of
the platform to the other. We ourselves loaded it into the
motor lorry sent to meet us, as at Bieloostrov we had loaded
it into the van. There was a long time to wait while rooms
were being allotted to us in various hotels, and with several
others I walked outside the station to question people about
the mutiny and the bombardment of which we had heard in
Finland. Nobody knew anything about it. As soon as the
rooms were allotted and I knew that I had been lucky
enough to get one in the Astoria, I drove off across the
frozen river by the Liteini Bridge. The trams were running.
The town seemed absolutely quiet, and away down the river
I saw once again in the dark, which is never quite dark
because of the snow, the dim shape of the fortress, and
passed one by one the landmarks I had come to know so
well during the last six years-the Summer Garden, the
British Embassy, and the great Palace Square where I had
seen armoured cars flaunting about during the July rising,
soldiers camping during the hysterical days of the
Kornilov affair and, earlier, Kornilov himself reviewing the
Junkers. My mind went further back to the March
revolution, and saw once more the picket fire of the
revolutionaries at the corner that night when the remains of
the Tzar's Government were still frantically printing
proclamations ordering the people to go home, at the very
moment while they themselves were being besieged in the
Admiralty. Then it flung itself further back still, to the day
of the declaration of war, when I saw this same square filled
with people, while the Tzar came out for a moment on the
Palace balcony. By that time we were pulling up at the
Astoria and I had to turn my mind to something else.


The Astoria is now a bare barrack of a place, but
comparatively clean. During the war and the first part of the
revolution it was tenanted chiefly by officers, and owing to
the idiocy of a few of these at the time of the first revolution
in shooting at a perfectly friendly crowd of soldiers and
sailors, who came there at first with no other object than to
invite the officers to join them, the place was badly smashed
up in the resulting scrimmage. I remember with Major
Scale fixing up a paper announcing the fall of Bagdad either
the night this happened or perhaps the night before. People
rushed up to it, thinking it some news about the revolution,
and turned impatiently away. All the damage has been
repaired, but the red carpets have gone, perhaps to make
banners, and many of the electric lights were not burning,
probably because of the shortage in electricity. I got my
luggage upstairs to a very pleasant room on the fourth floor.
Every floor of that hotel had its memories for me. In this
room lived that brave reactionary officer who boasted that
he had made a raid on the Bolsheviks and showed little
Madame Kollontai's hat as a trophy. In this I used to listen
to Perceval Gibbon when he was talking about how to write
short stories and having influenza. There was the room
where Miss Beatty used to give tea to tired revolutionaries
and to still more tired enquirers into the nature of revolution
while she wrote the only book that has so far appeared
which gives anything like a true impresionist picture of those
unforgettable days.* [(*)"The Red Heart of Russia."] Close
by was the room where poor Denis Garstin used to talk
of the hunting he would have when the war should come to
an end.


I enquired for a meal, and found that no food was to be had
in the hotel, but they could supply hot water. Then, to get
an appetite for sleep, I went out for a short walk, though I
did not much like doing so with nothing but an English
passport, and with no papers to show that I had any right to
be there. I had, like the other foreigners, been promised
such papers but had not yet received them. I went round to
the Regina, which used to be one of the best hotels in the
town, but those of us who had rooms there were
complaining so bitterly that I did not stay with them, but
went off along the Moika to the Nevsky and so back to my
own hotel. The streets, like the hotel, were only half lit, and
hardly any of the houses had a lighted window. In the old
sheepskin coat I had worn on the front and in my high fur
hat, I felt like some ghost of the old regime visiting a town
long dead. The silence and emptiness of the streets
contributed to this effect. Still, the few people I met or
passed were talking cheerfully together and the rare
sledges and motors had comparatively good roads, the
streets being certainly better swept and cleaned than they
have been since the last winter of the Russian Empire.





SMOLNI



Early in the morning I got tea, and a bread card on which I
was given a very small allowance of brown bread, noticeably
better in quality than the compound of clay and straw which
made me ill in Moscow last summer. Then I went to find
Litvinov, and set out with him to walk to the Smolni
institute, once a school for the daughters of the aristocracy,
then the headquarters of the Soviet, then the headquarters of
the Soviet Government, and finally, after the Government's
evacuation to Moscow, bequeathed to the Northern
Commune and the Petrograd Soviet. The town, in daylight,
seemed less deserted, though it was obvious that the
"unloading" of the Petrograd population, which was
unsuccessfully attempted during the Kerensky regime, had
been accomplished to a large extent. This has been partly
the result of famine and of the stoppage of factories,
which in its turn is due to the impossibility of bringing fuel
and raw material to Petrograd. A very large proportion of
Russian factory hands have not, as in other countries, lost
their connection with their native villages. There was always
a considerable annual migration backwards and forwards
between the villages and the town, and great numbers of
workmen have gone home, carrying with them the ideas of
the revolution. It should also be remembered that the bulk
of the earlier formed units of the Red Army is composed of
workmen from the towns who, except in the case of
peasants mobilized in districts which have experienced an
occupation by the counter-revolutionaries, are more
determined and better understand the need for discipline
than the men from the country.


The most noticeable thing in Petrograd to anyone returning
after six months' absence is the complete disappearance of
armed men. The town seems to have returned to a perfectly
peaceable condition in the sense that the need for
revolutionary patrols has gone. Soldiers walking about no
longer carry their rifles, and the picturesque figures of
the revolution who wore belts of machine-gun cartridges
slung about their persons have gone.


The second noticeable thing, especially in the Nevsky, which
was once crowded with people too fashionably dressed, is
the general lack of new clothes. I did not see anybody
wearing clothes that looked less than two years old, with the
exception of some officers and soldiers who are as well
equipped nowadays as at the beginning of the war.
Petrograd ladies were particularly fond of boots, and of
boots there is an extreme shortage. I saw one young woman
in a well-preserved, obviously costly fur coat, and beneath
it straw shoes with linen wrappings.


We had started rather late, so we took a train half-way up
the Nevsky. The tram conductors are still women. The
price of tickets has risen to a rouble, usually, I noticed, paid
in stamps. It used to be ten kopecks.


The armoured car which used to stand at the entrance of
Smolni has disappeared and been replaced by a horrible
statue of Karl Marx, who stands, thick and heavy, on a stout
pedestal, holding behind him an enormous top-hat like
the muzzle of an eighteen-inch gun. The only signs of
preparations for defence that remain are the pair of light
field guns which, rather the worse for weather, still stand
under the pillars of the portico which they would probably
shake to pieces if ever they should be fired. Inside the
routine was as it used to be, and when I turned down the
passage to get my permit to go upstairs, I could hardly
believe that I had been away for so long. The place is
emptier than it was. There is not the same eager crowd of
country delegates pressing up and down the corridors and
collecting literature from the stalls that I used to see in the
old days when the serious little workman from the Viborg
side stood guard over Trotsky's door, and from the alcove
with its window looking down into the great hall, the endless
noise of debate rose from the Petrograd Soviet that met
below.


Litvinov invited me to have dinner with the Petrograd
Commissars, which I was very glad to do, partly because I
was hungry and partly because I thought it would be better
to meet Zinoviev thus than in any other manner,
remembering how sourly he had looked upon me earlier
in the revolution. Zinoviev is a Jew, with a lot of hair, a
round smooth face, and a very abrupt manner. He was
against the November Revolution, but when it had been
accomplished returned to his old allegiance to Lenin and,
becoming President of the Northern Commune, remained in
Petrograd when the Government moved to Moscow. He is
neither an original thinker nor a good orator except in
debate, in answering opposition, which he does with extreme
skill. His nerve was badly shaken by the murders of his
friends Volodarsky and Uritzky last year, and he is said to
have lost his head after the attack on Lenin, to whom he is
extremely devoted. I have heard many Communists attribute
to this fact the excesses which followed that event in
Petrograd. I have never noticed anything that would make
me consider him pro-German, though of course he is
pro-Marx. He has, however, a decided prejudice against the
English. He was among the Communists who put
difficulties in my way as a "bourgeois journalist" in the
earlier days of the revolution, and I had heard that he had
expressed suspicion and disapproval of Radek's intimacy
with me.

Copyright (c) 2007. topbookz.net. All rights reserved.