Six Weeks in Russia, 1919

by Arthur Ransome

  The Soviet government and the Allies

  From the moment of the October Revolution on, the best illustration of the fact that the Soviet government is the natural government of the Russian people, and has deep roots in the whole of the conscious responsible part of the working classes and the peasantry, has been the attitude of the defeated minorities who oppose it. Whereas the Bolsheviks worked steadily in the Soviets when the majority was against them, and made their final move for power only when assured they had the overwhelming majority of the Soviets behind them, their opponents see their best hope of regaining power not in the Soviets, not even in Russia itself, but in some extraordinary intervention from without. By asking for foreign help against the Soviet government they prove that such help should not be given, and that they do not deserve it. The Soviet has stood for six months and more, absolutely unshaken by any movement against it inside Russia. In the Ukraine the anti-Soviet minority asked for intervention and received it. German bayonets and German organisation destroyed the Soviets of the Ukraine, and then destroyed the mock government that had invited their help. We, the Allies, supported that anti-Soviet minority, and, in so far as our help was efficacious, contributed our share in obtaining for Germany a victorious progress from one end of the Black Sea coast to the other. In helping the Ukrainian minority we helped the Germans to secure the Ukrainian bread and coal and iron that would otherwise have gone to help Russia to recuperate. In Finland we repeated the mistake. We gave at least moral help to the White Finns, simply because they were opposed to the Red Finns who were supported by the Soviets, not realising that the White Finns were the pawns of Germany, and that in the defeat of the Red Finns we witnessed the defeat of the only party in Finland which was bound, by its socialistic nature, to be an enemy of imperialistic Germany. Do not let us make the same mistake in Russia. If the Allies lend help to any minority that cannot overturn the Soviets without their help, they will be imposing on Free Russia a government which will be in perpetual need of external help, and will, for simple reasons of geography, be bound to take that help from Germany. Remember that for the German autocracy, conscious of the socialistic mass beneath it, the mere existence of the Soviet government of Russia is a serious danger. Remember that any no-Soviet government in Russia would be welcomed by Germany and, reciprocally, could not but regard Germany as its protector. Remember that the revolutionary movement in Eastern Europe, no less than the American and British navies, is an integral part of the Allied blockade of the Central Empires.

  And, apart from the immediate business of the war, remember that Germany is seeking by every means, open and secret, to obtain such command over Russia’s resources as will in the long run allow her to dictate her will to Russia’s people. Remember that the Soviet government, fully aware of this, would be glad of your help, of your cooperation, would be glad even to give you control over some part of her resources, if only to prevent that ominous ultimate dominion within Russia of a single foreign power.

  Remember all these things, if indeed you need, as I think you do not need, such selfish motives to prompt you to the support of men who, if they fail, will fail only from having hoped too much. Every true man is in some sort, until his youth dies and his eyes harden, the potential builder of a New Jerusalem. At some time or other, every one of us has dreamed of laying his brick in such a work. And even if this thing that is being built here with tears and blood is not the golden city that we ourselves have dreamed, it is still a thing to the sympathetic understanding of which each one of us is bound by whatever he owes to his own youth. And if each one of us, then all the more each nation is bound by what it owes to those first daring days of its existence, when all the world looked askance upon its presumptuous birth. America was young once, and there were men in America who would have brought in foreign aid to re-establish their dominion over a revolted nation. Are those the men to whom America now looks back with gratitude and pride?

  *

  Well, writing at speed to break my pen, and with the knowledge that in a few hours the man leaves Moscow who is to carry this letter with him to America, I have failed to say much that I would have said. I write now with my messenger waiting for my manuscript and somehow or other, incoherent, incomplete as it is, must bring it to an end. I will end, as I began, with a quotation from your own Emerson.

  ‘What is the scholar, what is the man for, but for hospitality to every new thought of his time? Have you leisure, power, property, friends? You shall be the asylum and patron of every new thought, every unproven opinion, every untried project, which proceeds out of good will and honest seeking. All the newspapers, all the tongues of today will of course at first defame what is noble; but you who hold not of today, not of the Times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it; and the highest compliment man ever receives from heaven is the sending to him its disguised and discredited angels.’

  No one contends that the Bolsheviks are angels. I ask only that men shall look through the fog of libel that surrounds them and see that the ideal for which they are struggling, in the only way in which they can struggle, is among those lights which every man of young and honest heart sees before him somewhere on the road, and not among those other lights from which he resolutely turns away. These men who have made the Soviet government in Russia, if they must fail, will fail with clean shields and clean hearts, having striven for an ideal which will live beyond them. Even if they fail, they will none the less have written a page of history more daring than any other which I can remember in the history of humanity. They are writing it amid slinging of mud from all the meaner spirits in their country, in yours and in my own. But when the thing is over, and their enemies have triumphed, the mud will vanish like black magic at noon, and that page will be as white as the snows of Russia, and the writing on it as bright as the gold domes that I used to see glittering in the sun when I looked from my windows in Petrograd.

  And when in after years men read that page they will judge your country and mine, your race and mine, by the help or hindrance they gave to the writing of it.

  Arthur Ransome

  1918

  Six weeks in Russia, 1919

  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, immediately agreed 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 jail. 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

  One / 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 organise 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 Estonian 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 worthwhile 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, Vorovsky’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 30 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 frontie
r 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 caviar and other zakuski were bare. There was, however, a samovar, and we bought tea at 60 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 hardbread. 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 mandolin 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.