As for the words - everything has, of course, in any case to be edited down, which makes them as malleable as the pictures. Thus, it has been established that some of the interviews in the much praised programme The Selling of the Pentagon were fitted together in such a way as to give a completely false impression of the sense of what was said. The programme nonetheless was given awards, and continues to be held in the highest esteem. Who can wonder that Mrs Gandhi cut up rough when a French cameraman-producer, Louis Malle, went handholding through India, producing pictures of misery, destitution, cruelty and superstition. More particularly as her dangerous neighbour, China, got prestige showing of purely propaganda film on the same screens by the simple expedient of never allowing foreign camera-crews into the country except under the most rigorous control.
Likewise, the Soviet Government had every reason to congratulate itself on the television compilations shown in the West for the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution in view of the fact that, lacking documentary footage, they fell back on extracts taken from Eisenstein’s films of incidents like the storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd. Cinema verité again!
Christopher Ralling, a gifted BBC producer, has given expression to his concern about this no-man’s-land between drama and documentary, into which makers of programmes increasingly incline to venture. More ominous and more difficult to pin down is the camera’s capacity to bring happenings to pass to meet its own needs. Like the Hebrew prophets of old, ensuring that things happen in order that the prophecy may be fulfilled. Once, returning to my New York hotel, I saw a little crowd gathered; bearded men and bra-less girls holding placards, a police van near by, and a number of cops, their truncheons out, standing by. Everything set for a demo. What’s happening? I asked, and was told, as though it should have been obvious, that they were waiting for the cameras. I waited, too, and saw them arrive, set up, roll; and then - Action! Placards lifted, slogans chanted, fists clenched. Pigs! Pigs! A few demonstrators arrested and pitched into the van, a few cops kicked; until - Cut! Soon, cops and demonstrators had gone, leaving the street silent and deserted.
The cameras are our ego’s eyes, our rage’s focus; the repository of our fraudulence. Take them into any Negro slum, any university campus, any place of conflict anywhere, and in a matter of minutes trouble stirs. Jerry Rubin, who, viewers may remember, celebrated his appearance on British television by aiming a water-pistol at David Frost and calling him a plastic man, has some relevant words on the subject. Television, he observes, creates myths bigger than reality. Whereas a demo may drag on for hours and hours, ‘TV packs all the action into two minutes - a commercial for the revolution.’ On the television screen, news is not so much reported as created; ‘an event happens when it goes on TV and becomes myth.’ Television, he continues, is a non-verbal instrument. So, turn off the sound, since no one remembers any words they hear; the mind being a techni-colour movie of images, not words. There is no such thing, he concludes, as bad coverage of a demo. It makes no difference what is said; the pictures are the story.
Brooding upon these sagacious observations, I ask myself, not just whether it is possible with television to win wars or put down insurrections, but whether, ultimately, government itself is possible. Frankly, I think not.
15
Russia Revisited
In 1933 there appeared in the Manchester Guardian, three articles I had written describing a visit to the Ukraine and the Caucasus, then suffering from a severe famine brought on as a direct result of Stalin’s ruthless enforcement of the collectivisation of agriculture and liquidation of the so-called kulaks, or better-off peasants.
For some months previously I had been acting as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, and hearing much talk of acute food shortages. So I decided to go and have a look at the state of affairs for myself. I knew that if I asked for official permission to undertake such a trip, either it would be refused out-of-hand, or I should be provided with a guide who would ensure that I only saw what the authorities wanted me to see, backed up by fraudulent statistics. Such were the conditions under which foreign journalists had to work, and I doubt if they are much different now.
I therefore got the Russian secretary of a fellow-correspondent, AT Cholerton, to buy me the equisite railway tickets, and set forth, making first for Rostov, and breaking my journey from time to time to look round. What I saw was unforgettably horrifying - empty villages, desperately hungry faces everywhere, neglected fields, peasants being loaded into goods-trains as alleged kulaks on their way to the labour-camps in Siberia, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. What I was seeing, I realised, was not just a famine, but amounted to a state of war with the peasants, and the consequent total breakdown of agriculture in some of the most fertile land in Europe.
When I got back to Moscow I wrote it all down, and sent off my three articles by diplomatic bag, obligingly made available, to ensure their safe arrival in Manchester. As I well knew, once they were published my situation in Moscow would become untenable. From being the correspondent of a paper well disposed towards the Soviet regime, and with credentials from Sidney and Beatrice Webb, my wife Kitty’s uncle and aunt, who were among the most abject and uncritical of the regime’s admirers - as Beatrice put it, they were icons in the USSR - I should be seen as a class enemy and anathema, and have my visa withdrawn. How many truths have been suppressed to save a visa! How many falsehoods propagated!
By the time the articles were published I had left Moscow, and no longer had any connection with the Guardian. The response was very much what I had expected - much criticism, and numerous accusations of my being a liar. It was not until Khrushchev’s famous speech at the 20th Party Congress denouncing Stalin that I was exonerated. Khrushchev put the deaths in the famine at five million -and he surely, as an important member of the Ukrainian Apparat, ought to have known - and altogether gave a more drastic account than mine of the consequences of the collectivisation of agriculture. No one, in the light of his revelations, apologised for accusing me of unfair and distorted reporting; the golden descriptions by Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, of granaries overflowing with grain, apple-cheeked dairymaids and plump contented cows, still stood. Indeed, he received several Pulitzer Awards for his reporting from Moscow.
In spite of a certain professional malaise resulting from my sojourn in the USSR, I had every reason to be thankful for it. From my point of view, it had been infinitely worthwhile, enabling me to understand as nothing else would what the Soviet regime was about, how it functioned and what was its impact on neighbouring countries and the world in general.
The dream of the early Socialists, myself among them, that the Russian Revolution would in due course bring about a brotherly, peaceful society which had shed the lure of war and conquest, and the exploitation of the poor by the rich, of the weak by the powerful, was lost for ever. The Soviet regime itself, I came to see, was about power, and little else; the disparity between the apparatchiks and the workers and peasants was, if anything, greater than between the skilled and the unskilled, the employers and the employed in the rest of the world.
As for bellicosity - the first priority soon became building up the defence forces, especially the Red Army, and getting rid of the Old Bolsheviks, the true begetters of the Russian Revolution, by the simple expedient of inducing them by one means or another to confess that they have been working for foreign intelligence services and sabotaging the fulfilment of the Five-Year Plan, and then shooting them. As a good number of them happen to have been Jews, liquidating them touched off a reversion to traditional Russian anti-semitism.
The conundrum that continued to occupy my mind - still does for that matter - was how it came about that some of the most famous and highly esteemed intellectuals or our time, in observing and assessing the Soviet regime, should have displayed a credulity and fatuity that would be surprising in any half-wit or bemused Marxist. Thus, for insta
nce, Bernard Shaw, expressing satisfaction that the Soviet Government balanced its budgets, and that the people of the Baltic States should have voted freely and overwhelmingly for incorporation into the USSR.
Or the venerable Dean of Canterbury, Dr Hewlett Johnson, in spite of the anti-God museums and propaganda, and the persecution of Christian believers, going on proclaiming in the pulpit that Stalin was building the Kingdom of Christ. Or Beatrice Webb, somewhat troubled by my Guardian articles, going to Mr Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador in London, to be put right. It was Mr Maisky, too, Beatrice Webb told me, with great satisfaction, who had been kind enough to go through the galleys of the book - Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? - she and Sidney had written about the Soviet regime to ensure that they had made no mistakes.
Surely some future Gibbon will derive great pleasure and satisfaction from describing how the fine flower of the intelligentsia of the twentieth century were prepared to believe anything however outrageous, admire anything however cruel, excuse anything however barbarous, in order to keep intact their conviction that under the auspices of the great Stalin a new, more just, more equitable society was coming to pass.
There an office-holder on some local branch of the League of Nations Union, there a godly Quaker who once had tea with Gandhi, there scarred and worthy veterans of a hundred battles for truth and freedom, all singing the praises of the most ruthless, comprehensive and murderous dictatorship the world has yet seen.
I assumed that after the appearance of my articles on the Stalin-made famine described in them, I should always be refused a visa to enter the USSR. On the one or two occasions that I applied for one, this proved to be the case. Being thus barred, to my surprise, rather saddened me; there still remains something rather wonderful about the country itself and its people. In them, a superb stoicism, a wry, underground humour, a brotherliness in their endurance of the appalling hardships and oppression to which they are subjected. Behind the dreary, cruel proposition of Marx, one seemed to hear the ancient greeting: ’Christ is risen!’
As it happens, despite being on the black-list, I did manage to [re]visit the USSR three times. The first occasion was accidental; I happened to be in Peking, and on an impulse applied at the Soviet Embassy for a transit visa to return to London via Moscow. This was stamped into my passport without any questions being asked, and I spent several days wandering about the streets of Moscow, finding them just as before, with the same nondescript crowd drifting along them. Maybe, I reflected, the only way of ensuring that no changes take place is to have a revolution. Those who bring about the revolution know how easy it is to make one, and so stick furiously to their status quo, like a man in a cold bath who keeps quite still to avoid feeling how cold the water is.
The second occasion was accompanying Harold Macmillan on his visit to the USSR when he was Prime Minister; a guarantee had been given that no accredited journalists should be barred, and this included even me. As it turned out, it was a somewhat ribald outing, and included a visit to a collective farm near Kiev, when the Prime Minister in his speech referred to how long ago a Ukrainian princess married into the English royal family, and went on to express the hope that this amicable relationship might be renewed. The crowds that turn out for distinguished visitors in the USSR always have a top layer of Lubianka men with bulges under their arms - then the GPU, now the KGB, but the same essential personnel. I took a look at their grey, stony faces as the Prime Minister made his point about the Ukrainian princess, and observed in them, not a smile, but a tiny twitch at the corners of the mouth.
The last occasion that I visited the USSR was in connection with a series of TV programmes called A Third Testament, jointly commissioned by Time magazine and the Canadian Broadcasting Commission. I did the commentary, and two of the programmes - on Tolstoy and Dostoievsky - were filmed in the USSR. No difficulty was made about my visa, doubtless because it was applied for in Ottawa, not London.
To describe all the complications and humorous situations that arose in presenting these two great and prophetic writers in the setting of the Soviet regime would require much more space than is available here. Suffice it to say that, quoting them, thinking about them, as it were living with them, gave me very strongly the feeling that out of the suffering, the moral, spiritual and intellectual vandalism that has befallen Russia since the Revolution, will come some great new fulfilment of the genius of the Russian people. As Solzhenitsyn has said, there are no Marxists in the Gulag Archipelago, and in losing freedom there, it is found.
16
Solzhenitsyn Reconsidered
Ever since Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard address the changed attitude of the media pundits in the West towards him has become manifest. Old media hands like myself get to know the signs - the casual innuendo, the throwaway line (‘not the liberal we would like him to be’), the tone more in sorrow than in anger, the barking in unison as the consensus pack moves collectively towards the kill. It was in the Harvard address that he deviated most drastically from the basic liberal orthodoxy that freedom consists in being allowed and provided with the means to do whatever anyone has a mind to, and that a free society is one in which this is possible and the means readily available, the supreme example of such a society being, of course, the United States.
What magnified his offence from the consensus point of view, making it quite intolerable, was that, on his own admission, Solzhenitsyn derived his view of freedom from the New Testament rather than from such impeccable sources as the American Declaration of Independence and the judgments of the US Supreme Court, in effect repeating to his Harvard audience what he had already written in his ‘Letter to the Soviet leaders: ’I myself see Christianity today as the only living spiritual force capable of undertaking the spiritual healing of Russia.’
In his Gulag books Solzhenitsyn established once and for all the role and extent of forced labour camps as an instrument of terrorism in the USSR. Thenceforth, thanks to him, apologists for the Soviet regime will have to take due account of the Gulag Archipelago rather than, as heretofore, seeking to deny its existence, or, like the ineffable Eleanor Roosevelt, dishing it up as part of as essentially humane penal system. Then, in his autobiographical work, The Oak and the Calf, he deals with the pains and penalties of a writer in the USSR, describing his own experiences as a dissident writer between his release from the labour camps and his expulsion abroad in 1974.
In a sense, of course, all serious writers are in some degree dissidents; but whereas in the so-called free world their concern is to earn a living in a society in which porn is a mighty industry and literature a campus waste-product, in the USSR conformity with the party line is obligatory, and to deviate from it in word or even in thought can involve, not just penury and obscurity, but a one-way ticket to the Gulag Archipelago as well. As a sometime political prisoner, or, in Soviet slang, a Zek, Solzhenitsyn was not allowed to come to Moscow. So, on his release, he worked as a teacher of mathematics in the provinces, devoting all his spare time and energies to writing.
In ordinary circumstances the procedure would have been to submit his work to some local or national publication or publishing setup. In Solzhenitsyn’s case this was precluded because the subject of his writings has been precisely the terrorism and mental chicanery whereby a Marxist oligarchy has ruthlessly imposed its will and ideology on a subservient population. Being a Zek himself, Solzhenitsyn felt a duty to the others he had left behind in the Gulag Archipelago to speak up for them, telling his fellow countrymen and the world about their suffering and privations and the monstrous injustice of their treatment. In all that he has written and spoken and done he has been true to this duty. And, let it be remembered, he could perfectly well have settled, as, for instance, Maxim Gorky did, for being a distinguished Soviet author, free to travel abroad, well provided with foreign currency, and honoured at home as well as abroad. All that would be required of him would be to keep off a few sensitive themes, but th
is was just what he was in no circumstances prepared to do. In the early thirties, as I well remember, on important occasions Gorky used to be brought on to the platform along with Stalin and the Politburo, looking for all the world like a performing seal - a role that would never have suited Solzhenitsyn even though Gorky’s reward was a commodious villa in Italy and a visa to come and go there.
Solzhenitsyn has the honesty to admit that his self-imposed duty has proved arduous and often frustrating. When he completed the first draft of The Oak and the Calf in the spring of 1967 he entertained a hope that he might be released from the agonizing role he had chosen for himself of being the Zeks’ champion. Six years later when he prepared the text for publication he asked himself more urgently than ever when the din of battle would cease for him. ‘If only,’ he writes, ‘I could go away from it all, go away many years to the back of beyond with nothing but fields and open skies and woods and horses in sight, and nothing to do but write my novel at my own pace.’ Now, in enforced exile, he has the additional anguish of observing how, in the West, where the means to be free still exist, people have wearied of freedom, finding it an intolerable burden, and are all unconsciously sleep-walking into the very servitude Solzhenitsyn has so valiantly and faithfully resisted and denounced.
In the circumstances in which he was placed on his release from the labour camps he had no choice but to hide away his writings as he completed them, in the expectation that they would one day be published and fulfil their purpose. In every moment away from his teaching, he tells us, he wrote and wrote, diligently, day after day, and sometimes night after night. When, as a veteran free-lance practitioner, I think of the difficulty of producing commissioned copy to meet a deadline, I marvel at the books he produced in this manner, so brilliantly, so conscientiously, and so nobly disinterested in their purpose. Take the case of the Gulag books, very dear to his heart, and not just a literary feat of the highest order, but, as well, an integral part of the history of our time, and for that reason alone ever memorable. They were no mere exercise in writing; he had to collect in the greatest secrecy the testimonies on which the books are based, at the same time scrupulously protecting his sources in the knowledge that the consequences for them would be ruinous if it came out that they had provided him with information. Nonetheless, the books were completed while he was still living in the USSR; and in due course a copy of the manuscript was sent abroad, so that whatever might happen to him, the peoples of the West would know what the Gulag Archipelago was like and what it signified to Russians and others forcibly absorbed into the Soviet sphere of influence.
Time and Eternity Page 15