All About Russia

A History of Bolshevism. By Arthur Rosenberg. Translated

Hopkinson. 78. 6d.)

" No mortal man," runs a boastful Russian proverb quoted by Mr. Duranty, " can measure mighty Russia with the compass of his tiny brain." The books whose titles stand at the head of this column are all about Russia. But there is no clashing ; and they are so diverse that they have nothing in common but their theme. Here are current

politics, the autobiography of an emigre, tourism, a tale of adventure and, rightly occupying the first place, a most

scholarly work on the theory of Bolshevism.

Professor Rosenberg's History of Bolshevism forms an excellent background to Russia Reported, which contains a carefully chosen collection of articles written by Mr. Duranty from Moscow, between 1921 and 1933, for his paper the New York Times. The salient feature of these years has been the evolution of the Soviet regime from the " slogan " of world- revolution to that of " Socialism in a single State "—in other words the substitution for internationalism of a new Russian nationalism. There has been, as Mr. Duranty gently puts it, "a curve of progress from alien Marxism, through semi-alien, semi- Russian Leninism, towards something " which it is convenient to label " Russian Stalinism."

Everybody knows, in a general way, that there has been a change. But most people in Western Europe, or at any rate in this country, are apt to put it down to pure opportunism, and to regard the disputes between Lenin and Zinoviev, or between Stalin and the Right (Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky) and Left (Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev) oppo- sitions, as nothing more than symptoms of a personal struggle for power. A History of Bolshevism provides the necessary corrective to this view. Theory dominates Russian politics to an extent almost incomprehensible to the ordinary, practical Englishman ; and Professor Rosenberg analyses, with skill and knowledge, the theoretical foundations of 'the struggles of the past seventeen years. They revolve, of course, round the interpretation of Marxism ; and you

can no more understand them without. some knowledge of Marx than you can understand mediaeval history without some acquaintance with the main tenets of Christianity. In Marx's view, the directing force in the coming revolution was to be the " class-conscious proletariat ; and since, in the middle of last century, the " class-conscious proletariat " represented but a tiny fraction of the whole working class, the direction of affairs must rest with this tiny fraction,

schooled and guided by bourgeois converts such as Marx and Engels themselves.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, this form of Marxism had begun in Western Europe to look rather obsolete. The proletariat as a- whole, or large sections of it, had become class-conscious, and showed signs of being both capable and desirous of making their own revolution by their own methods. In Russia alone, conditions still prevailed comparable to those existing in Western Europe when Marx wrote ; and here, and here alone, " pnre " Marxism was not an anachronism. The Bolshevik section of the Russian Social Democratic party, which came into being in 1903, was founded on the " pure " Marxist con- ception of a restricted party of fighting communists with severe entrance tests. The Mensheviks, including Trotsky, wanted a party embracing the whole proletariat ; and this fundamental difference remained even when Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and became Lenin's principal lieutenant in 1917. But if Lenin was in this respect less tolerant and less " democratic " (the word is not strictly appropriate)

than Trotsky, in another respect he was more so. The Bolsheviks, avoiding identification (except in name) with the proletariat, were able to hold the balance between proletarian and agricultural interests, and to become a party with a specifically Russian policy. Trotsky, a fanatical proletarian and townsman, could never • win through in a country where so much depended on the peasant. The holding of the balance between town and country has been

a fundamental issue for every Russian statesman since 1917, and it plays a correspondingly important part in the writings of Soviet theorists.

But if anyone, after reading Professor Rosenberg, is tempted to believe that everything is theory in modern

Russia, he can return to Russia Reported as a counter- corrective. In England a hundred years ago, ninety-nine

people out of a hundred were orthodox Christians ; but this did not mean they were primarily interested in theology. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred in Russia today are orthodox Marxists. But this does not mean that they are all preoccupied with the correct interpretation of Marxism. There is a strongly practical tinge about the idealism of the Russian Man in the street.- . •

" Instead of hyperbolical phrases about ' lands for heroes to live in ' [writes Mr. Duranty], the Russian thinks of making a country like America, where a poor man can own his automobile and readily enjoy a private bath . . . and hopes, with a great and, in the present circumstances, rather pathetic hope, that one fine day he will be able to live in the way he believes the average American lives now."

Mr. Duranty in these articles spread over twelve years gives us not the big developments, but the Russian scene from day to day. He is honest enough to reprint even his mistakes. There is for instance an article entitled " The Establishment of Civil Liberty " which, written in 1922, hails the abolition of the Cheka and the creation of a new organ, strangely called the G.P.U., from which " no one who behaves himself has any more to fear . . . than the average American citizen has from the Department of Justice." This article reads grimly at a moment when there is once more talk of " establishing civil liberty " by the abolition of the G.P.U., and the foundation of yet another organ of enlightened justice.

Compared with these two, the remaining three books on our list touch only fringes of the subject. The author of Russian See-Saw was barely ten when the Soviet revolution broke out. His father, a naval officer, was murdered by a mutinous crew ; his mother died. He himself seems to have been saved by the son of his old nurse, now an influential communist. He became a Komsomol, served for several years on Soviet ships, worked for the British Secret Service, and finally escaped to England to join the ranks of casual labour. This, you feel, is how the Revolution and its sequel must have looked to a boy in his early 'teens—sometimes exciting, more often boring, always purposeless. Some of the incidents lack verisimilitude. Even in 1921 " a drunken sailor " would not have been allowed to navigate a ship in the Kiel Canal and run her aground.

Its concentrated hardness and bitterness make Russian See-Saw difficult reading. Moscow Excursion 'suffers from the opposite extreme of flippancy. The older generation of Intourist trippers to Russia—those of the late 'twenties and earlier 'thirties—carried round their notebooks with them, passionately admiring or earnestly critical. Nowadays we have said good-bye to all that. We submit with a jaded air to be shown the advertised sights, discounting it all in advance, poking mild fun at the guides for telling us thoae hoary tales and at ourselves for taking the trouble to listen to them. The anonymous author of Moscow Excursion plies a pretty pen ; and the letters, which were (one gathers) the origin of this book, must have given great pleasure to their recipients.

Lastly, Goodbye Russia is the story of the devoted com- mander of a British transport, which was engaged during the greater part of 1920- in evacuating White refugees from SOuth itu:s'sia after the Denikin and Wrangle debdcles. The title has a wider implication thin the author intended ; for the World whose victims' and survivors' he helped to rescue now seems as far away as the age of crinolines of the Crimean War. The reader who strays from Professor Rosenherg and Mr. Duranty to Captain Cameron's artless pages will find it difficult to believe that he is still dealing with con- temporary or almOst contemporary history. Mr. Masefield contributes a preface, which may be regarded as a well- deserved tribute to the author's courage and resourceffilness. Joust HALLETr.