Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  For over a decade G.B.S. conducted an advanced Fabian course on Soviet Communism. He explained that Lenin had candidly admitted his mistakes – or ‘atrocities’, as they were sometimes called – and scrapped them. He gently guided the kulaks back at gunpoint to the farms from which they had been evicted; ushered the hordes of wandering thieves into well-appointed penal colonies; introduced compulsory labour to assist the unemployed; brought back ex-tsarist officers into the army to improve everyone’s protection; and established the famous Cheka, a sort of Scotland Yard ‘which took over the necessary shooting’.

  But Shaw was critical of Soviet foreign policy which enmeshed itself in British domestic politics. The First International had been an Old Testament with Marx as its Moses. The New Testament of World Socialism was the Second International, a catholic narrative that included, besides Shaw himself, figures as diverse as MacDonald and Mussolini. But the Third International, which was founded in 1919 and was dedicated to crusades and coups d’état abroad, seemed to Shaw an apocrypha that had no place in evolutionary socialism. It reminded him of the extravagances of colonialism. He maintained that internationally ‘the only objectionable Communist was the one who took his pay and orders from Moscow,’ David Dunn wrote. The British Communist Party was losing public credibility by doing this, Shaw believed, as surely as he himself would have lost his integrity by accepting fees for his political speeches. He resigned in 1921 from the Labour Research Department, protesting that ‘if the gaff is blown at the fatal time’ about its banking of Russian funds, then ‘the General Election will be wrecked for Labour’. The truth of this seemed to be borne out three years later when the notorious ‘Zinoviev Letter’, containing revolutionary instructions for a communist uprising in Britain, helped to bring Baldwin back for a second term as Conservative Prime Minister.

  Between Lenin’s death in 1924 and the economic débâcle of MacDonald’s second Labour administration in 1931, Shaw added little to what he had already said about Soviet politics. He was in agreement with Sidney Webb’s view that the job of the Fabians was ‘simply waiting for Russia to prove its case’ and then finding out how best to convey the consequences of this verdict into British life.

  The slump of the early 1930s was in Shaw’s eyes a sign of capitalism’s old age (it ‘has passed its climax here, and is getting unsteady on its feet of clay’) rather than evidence of the Marxist crash that was to end in world revolution. He could see no justification for the faith of an ‘unteachable doctrinaire’ like Trotsky in the concept of permanent revolutions abroad, and described Stalin’s victory as ‘a triumph of common sense’ because it represented the principle of ‘Socialism in a single country’ over the interventionary excesses of the Third International. Instead of relying on military invasions and economic subversion, Stalin’s nationalism seemed to hand over to people like himself the vital missionary work of spreading communism ‘to the rest of the world by permeation, example, and success’. As for Trotsky, exiled by Stalin in 1929, he should be ‘warmly invited to favour us with his very interesting presence’ in Britain.

  ‘The Moscow Government may not be any fonder of really independent observers than other governments are,’ Shaw wrote in 1922. ‘...We want something from a capable observer and effective writer who is neither a fanatical Communist nor a scandalized bourgeois.’ He could have accepted handsome terms from the American newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst to report on events in Russia, but ‘I did not go because people were expecting miracles from Soviet Communism,’ he told the communist composer Rutland Boughton in 1928. Three years later, however, when the Astors ‘challenged me to go with them’, Shaw agreed. ‘I felt, at my age, that if I did not seize the opportunity, I should never see Russia at all,’ he told Horace Plunkett. As Hesketh Pearson observed, he was ‘curiously dependent on external pressures for any activity outside his daily routine’: Charlotte’s friend ‘Lion’ Phillimore described him as ‘an old tramcar, always on the same set of rails’. But to many people’s minds he was about to go wildly off the rails.

  *

  It was a mercy he would be looked after by Nancy. ‘But Nancy, I do trust you,’ Charlotte wrote. ‘You will take the right sort of care of him... It will be difficult: but if anyone can keep him in hand you can!’

  Nancy Astor was additionally in charge of her own husband and their nineteen-year-old son David, and was accompanied by two Christian Scientists: Charles Tennant, who fell ill during the trip, and Philip Kerr, eleventh Marquis of Lothian, who had been Lloyd George’s private secretary and was later to be appointed Britain’s ambassador to the United States. There was also a Russian-born, American-Jewish author Maurice Hindus, the only member of the party who spoke Russian. The Associated Press tended to overlook these minor characters and regularly wrote of Charlotte’s appearance at Russian art galleries, railway stations and collective farms – an example for G.B.S. of inaccurate reporting on all things Soviet.

  Charlotte was careful to see that he took cereals and biscuits. There were no single sleeping berths on Russian trains, so he paid double fares and secured compartments all to himself in which to stretch out during overnight journeys. He had sent a telegram to Bela Illesh, General Secretary of the International Federation of Revolutionary Writers, stating that though his visit would be brief, he was coming for ‘serious business’ and did not want to be ‘burdened with parades, receptions or banquets’. Nevertheless, he warned Waldorf Astor, they could ‘expect a salute of at least 101 guns on our arrival in Moscow’.

  At eleven o’clock on the morning of 18 July, the party started out from Victoria Station, paused in Brussels for some sightseeing and, the following morning, arrived in Berlin. They were to be joined by Maxim Litvinov, Commissar of Foreign Affairs, who had timed his return from Geneva to coincide with their visit. That evening they all caught the night express to Warsaw, crossing the double frontier between Poland and the Soviet Union at 4 p.m. on 20 July. Armed guards mounted the train as they moved across the strip of no-man’s-land, past flanks of sentries and fortifications, and under an arch inscribed ‘Communism will do away with frontiers’ to the areas of passport inspection, currency control and customs clearance. Here they were transferred to a wide-gauge Russian train. ‘You are not hurried or fussed,’ Shaw reported: ‘the Moscow train will not start for ever so long.’

  During the three and a half hours it took to refuel this train and attach a sleeping car, he wandered into the railway buffet, followed deferentially by a deputation of publishers, and was introduced to a couple of young waitresses familiar, the interpreter emphasized, with his plays. After pausing in wonderment, he rejoined his party and, there still being plenty of time, they strolled off into a village nearby called Negoreloje. This was simply a line of human kennels made of unpainted wood and spaced at wide intervals along both sides of a dirt track, a monument to the old Russia. ‘Inside is a frowsy cupboard without a door, which is the family bed, and a kiln, politely called a stove, on the top of which you can sleep if you are chilly,’ Shaw later wrote. ‘The rest of the space is kept as free from furniture as possible for the accommodation of the live stock of the strip of land which the peasant cultivates.’ The place reminded him of an impoverished Irish settlement.

  Walking back to the station they came across half a dozen burly women with shovels. These ‘volunteers’ provided G.B.S. with the subject for his first ironically tinted essay in adulation.

  ‘A bevy of girls were seated in two rows, one above the other, on some agricultural contraption that lent itself to this theatrically effective arrangement. They were armed with long-handled spades. There was neither stocking, sock, nor shoe among them; and their athletic freedom of limb and fearless air, which marked even the youthfully shy ones, had such a pleasant effect that we at once crowded round them...

  Whilst we were talking and chaffing, a freight train came in. Instantly these girls sprang to their feet and bounded to the train with a rhythmic grace and vigour that would have d
elighted Diaghileff. It was the only Russian ballet we saw in Russia.’

  Their arrival next morning at Belorussko-Galtiyskiy Station was everything a film producer could have dreamed: ‘I hear that the only two other people who had anything like a similar reception were Gorky and Fairbanks (with Mary Pickford).’ They were welcomed by an official body of ‘authors, artists, men of science, industrial managers and the like who,’ Shaw told readers in the West, ‘with a little Savile Row or Conduit Street tailoring and here and there a touch of shaving cream, would have been at home in any of our West End bourgeois clubs’. Besides Karl Radek, a Jewish revolutionary with the aspect of a French Communard who was the leading commentator on foreign affairs, and the former Commissar of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky, the delegation featured Artashes Khalatov, president of the State Publishing House, a swarthy cartoon figure in breeches, high boots and with a deep black beard. ‘The one thing they forgot was to put in his mouth a knife dripping with bourgeois blood.’

  These Soviet characters were knocked across the platform by an on-rushing American newspaperman, Henry Dana. Shaw was already getting used to this event. In each country, ‘the official or deputation advancing to receive me was shoved aside by an enthusiastic American, beaming with hospitality, and shouting genially, “Mr Shaw: welcome to France (or Poland or Russia or Germany, as the case might be): I am an American.”’ Henry Dana was clutching a genuine Dubliner called Verschoyle, apparently born in Synge Street (‘a fellow Scotsman,’ Izvestia noted), who had come briefly to Moscow to work for the Writers’ Union. ‘If I were as young as you are I should move to Moscow altogether,’ Shaw politely greeted him. Then he was whirled away to ‘a salvo of fifty cameras’, gliding through a corridor of Red Guards and out of the station. Walter Duranty of the New York Times caught an awed murmur through the crowd: ‘What a noble old man!’ The Daily Herald reporter conjured up ‘wild applause’ and shouts of ‘Hail Shaw!’ that could be heard, through the blaring of a brass band, from ‘several thousands of people’. What was not clear from such accounts was that these crowds were football fans who had gathered at the station to see a team travelling on the same train. They were driven to the Hotel Metropole where Nancy Astor, ‘assuring everyone that I must immediately be left alone to sleep in the hotel, found me utterly out of control,’ Shaw wrote happily to Charlotte. ‘I insisted on sightseeing at express speed.’ They hurried out to Lenin’s mausoleum and on to the Kremlin. In the Council Hall G.B.S. climbed the speaker’s podium and experimented with the acoustics by yodelling. He was like a schoolboy, suddenly springing on to a bundle of cannonballs to be photographed at the base of the giant tsarist cannon, then jumping off and slipping into a little church where he found a priest officiating.

  ‘The congregation was a very devout one: their worship was so fervently demonstrative as they knelt and smote the ground with their foreheads, punctuating the priest’s intonations with moans of intense faith, that in Westminster Abbey they would have been handed over to the police and charged with “brawling”; but there were very few of them, not more than fifteen at the outside, including myself.’

  Having registered this freedom to worship, Shaw allowed Nancy to lead him back to their hotel.

  Next day he started on an official programme of visits, accompanied by Litvinov and Lunacharsky, to Young Pioneer camps, Centres of Repose and Culture and model institutions. The Soviet establishment was nervous of Shaw. In 1925 Lunacharsky had responded to his criticism of the Third International by deriding him as an agile belletrist who had set the hearts of bourgeois ladies aflutter in Britain ‘without shaking to any serious extent the basis of the solid affluence of their lords & masters’. But Lunacharsky has now modified his tone. In an article entitled ‘Bernard Shaw is our Guest’ he calls G.B.S. ‘one of the freest-thinking minds of the civilized world’, but cautions readers of Izvestia that ‘people like Bernard Shaw – brilliant representatives of the intelligentsia, turn out to be too “free-thinking”... they start to get ironical’. The article is a skilful blend of welcome and warning, enabling his audiences to value Shaw’s approval while discounting his criticism. His wit, ‘like dazzling bursts of flame in the darkness, illuminates the dense twilight of the nightfall of capitalism’, but his jokes at the expense of communism are the peculiar reflexes of an individualist outside the Party who cannot help ‘treating everything with semi-seriousness’. Yet the Soviet people had a ‘burning desire to achieve a closer understanding with this amazing old man,’ Lunacharsky concludes, because he was coming to test his suspicions ‘that the bourgeois press lies, that it gives a distorted view of our socialist set-up’.

  Shaw’s account of ‘Touring in Russia’ is as happy a fantasy as his ‘Joy Riding at the Front’ had been during the war. He likened the penal colony at Bolshevo to Battersea Park, salivating over its menus, applauding its entertainments and sympathizing with the criminals who ‘will not leave at the expiration of their sentences’. He congratulated Soviet citizens engaged in compulsory labour on working for the public service and not for the private profit of a few individuals: ‘I wish we had forced labour in England,’ he added, ‘in which case we would not have 2,000,000 unemployed.’ His imagination bleached away all signs of pain and horror. He looks forward to a good performance at ‘the torture chamber of the Tcheka... [with] a victim or two ready, so that we may witness the process’. In place of ‘shooting’ he uses the word ‘pistolling’, a swashbuckling term such as might be used in Arms and the Man or Annajanska.

  Below this parody of ideological engineering swarmed a mass of irregularities, as Lunacharsky had predicted. ‘The interpreter groaned at the utter unexpectedness of my answers to questions,’ Shaw noted. After visiting the Museum of Revolution he told nonplussed journalists that the government was ‘mad’ to allow such a dangerous exhibition. ‘The moment a revolution becomes a government it necessarily sets to work to exterminate revolutionists... For when the revolution triumphs revolution becomes counter-revolution. The young Russian fired with enthusiasm for the glorious old slayers of tsars, Grand Dukes, & chiefs of police, & finding their species as extinct as the buffalo, may try his hand on Stalin.’

  Elsewhere he could not suppress the impulse to denounce a group of prettily dressed children singing about the glories of life in a farming commune as ‘a parcel of insufferable little Marxian prigs’; or, after Nancy Astor had been heckled, resist exclaiming, ‘the more I see of the proletarians the more I thank God I am not one’; or avoid calling for a ‘Five-Year Aesthetic Plan’ to remedy Moscow’s shabbiness. To one questioner who presumed too far on his sentimental loyalty to the Soviet people he objected, ‘I reserve the right to criticize every people – including the Russians.’ He was also to qualify his statement on compulsory labour by recommending a four-hour working day, and he inscribed the visitors’ book at an electrical plant that was completing its five-year plan ahead of schedule with the words: ‘My father drank too much. I have worked too much. Comrades push the 5 years Plan through in 3 years, and then TAKE IT EASY.’

  Nancy Astor was soon causing Lunacharsky unusual problems too. ‘Lady Astor is positively flirting with me,’ he noted in his diary. ‘Preaching Christian Science at me. Very odd.’ Her outspoken announcements – ‘I am a Conservative. I am a Capitalist. I am opposed to Communism. I think you are all terrible’ – were greeted with acclaim owing to the kindly mistranslations of the interpreter.

  Moscow struck Shaw as a ‘domestic sort of city... frightfully overcrowded and under-trammed’ and he was glad to travel north to Leningrad. Soviet newsreels recorded a vast and welcoming crowd as the Red Arrow pulled into Moscovskiy Station on the morning of 24 July – not sports fans this time, but airship enthusiasts eager to see the Graf Zeppelin on its way to the Arctic Circle.

  Shaw’s first impression of Leningrad (or St Petersburg, as the communist leaders absent-mindedly called it) was that it looked ‘as if it had been built by Mansard to the order of Louis XIV and laid out by Hau
ssmann for greater convenience in shooting down insurgent mobs’. He was lodged in a ‘grand-ducal apartment’ at the Hotel de l’Europe and over the next forty-eight hours conducted through an intense programme of ceremonies and receptions of the kind he had asked to be spared. He also saw excerpts from Soviet films (including ‘one of the very best films in existence’, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin) and thought them all superior to Hollywood’s ‘sexual exploitations’.

  At a home for retired people he met Stanislavsky, former director of the Moscow Arts Theatre; relaxed and animated, they chatted about Granville-Barker and were photographed over a glass of milk. He also met Gorki at his dacha outside Moscow. Shaw was fond of Gorki who was then ill, describing him as a sensitive ‘hater of cruelty and injustice, the discoverer of touching virtues in the most impossible people’, and adding: ‘to him the revolution has not brought the millennium, though he can forgive it as he can forgive worse things.’ Another ‘angel of the revolution’ who had not been made happy by Stalin’s Russia was Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow. After protracted difficulties, Shaw was taken to her shooting lodge for tea. He admired her ‘beautiful ugliness’ and described her as ‘a woman to be adored by children’. The story had reached him that ‘she had given the Soviet a piece of her mind so roundly that Stalin had threatened that if she did it again he would appoint another widow for Lenin’.

  G.B.S. had little problem in accounting for such people’s difficulties in the USSR. ‘They would be unhappy in the Garden of Eden because the cats played cruelly with the mice before devouring them.’ Only the determination of his official hosts to honour and impress him seemed likely to cloud his optimism. The endless greetings by audiences that ‘had been instructed to receive me with tumultuous applause’, the tedium of ‘faked meals’ held up by long toasts and forced orations ‘washed the virtue out of me’. ‘I was exploited to the last inch,’ he complained. Worst of all was the special treat that had been prepared for his seventy-fifth birthday: a horse race entitled ‘The Bernard Shaw Handicap’ at a racetrack outside Moscow. ‘I suppose there will be only one horse in the race,’ he remarked, ‘since there is no competition in a Socialist state.’ Sitting in the sunlight in his grandstand box he fell quietly asleep, his chin on his chest, while the horses thundered past.