BOOKS.
MR WELLS'S VISIT TO RUSSIA.*
WErrs's account of the crash—his favourite word—of Russia under Bolshevism does not differ materially from the grim descriptions which we have already had from those other Socialists, Mr. Bertrand Russell, Mrs. Philip Snowden, and Dr. Haden Guest. Mr. Wells spent fifteen days in Russia, having gone there at the invitation of M. Kameneff. He expected to be hoodwinked and dry-nursed to some extent, and now and again he was not disappointed ; but, being on the alert, he managed to see things which his hosts may not have wished him to see. Unfortunately, fifteen days is a short time in Which to explore the extent of the Russian crash ; but in any case attempts at hoodwinking would have been useless, for, as Mr. Wells says, " the hard and terrible realities of the situation in Russia cannot be camouflaged." He went first to Petrograd, and he remarks that he had never quite appreciated before how much the vitality of a city depends upon its shops. Obliterate the shops from the main streets and a city at once takes on the appearance of death. Petrograd was indeed a dead city as Mr. Wells saw it. Only about six shops were open in the whole place. It was not a case of the shops having their blinds neatly drawn and sleeping the decorous sleep of London shops on a Sunday ; they had an utterly wretched and abandoned look—the windows were cracked, broken or boarded up, the fixtures had gathered two years' dust. " They will never open again." The population of Petrograd has fallen from 1,200,000 before 1919 to a little over 700,000, and it is still falling. The death-rate is over 81 per thousand ; formerly it was high among European cities at 22. Every one in the streets seemed to be carrying a bundle. These bundles were either the rations of food doled out by the Soviet organization or the results of illicit trade. Mr. Wells may well say that the shops will never open again. People dare not trade successfully—whereby, though enriching themselves, they might benefit thousands—because they would be liable to execution as profiteers.
Turning from the town to the country, Mr. Wells noticed that the peasants were well off, and he thinks it possible that they are even better off than they ever were before. So it frequently happens in national collapses. In highly organized countries famine is chiefly if not entirely a thing of the towns; any man who has a patch of ground in the country can grow something which is enough to keep body and soul together. But when the Government has crashed transport breaks down and the supplies of the artificially-fed populations of the towns cease. In Russia practically nothing new has been produced to replace the scarcity caused by the war and the revolution. Who is to bear the blame ? Mr. Wells assigns it to " the Imperialism of Europe," the results of which the Bolsheviks have inherited. Those may believe it who can. Personally, we do not believe it. The old rdgirae was in many respects corrupt and inefficient, but it does not account for a tithe of the agony through which Russia is passing now. After all, a considerable time has passed since the revolution began. Russia is a country of vast resources, and the Russian intellect at the top is of a high order. We are sure that if Englishmen, even under the paralyzing hand of Bolshevism, had had the same length of time to save themselves from starvation and to reconstruct something out of the ruins of revolution, they would now be in a very different state from that which we • Russia Os the Shadows. By H.Q. Well.. London Hodder and Stoughton. uot.1
see in Russia. The truth is that the Russian intellect has produced none of the fruits of practical common-sense. The Bolsheviks and many of their friends ascribe all their troubles to the blockade—even when Mr. Wells's time-table was hope- lessly mismanaged for him by Russians they blamed the blockade !—but if Russia were properly ruled she could snap her fingers at the blockade. It may deprive her of many of the amenities and elegancies of life, but there need be no famine, no utter failure to organize the transport of food into the city. One can imagine the withering contempt which Mr. Wells would pour upon his own countrymen if they failed in the same circumstances in which Russians are failing now. We do not think that he would find excuses ; but he has found an all-embracing excuse for the Bolsheviks. How to reconcile Mr. Wells's cleverness with his astonishingly unconvincing judgments is one of the literary puzzles of to-day.
Nevertheless, although Mr. Wells finds excuses he does not attempt to minimize the character of the crash. One might almost say that he takes a kind of malicious glee in rubbing it in. For he was intensely bored and irritated by the perpetual preaching of the doctrines of Marx and by the inevitable recurrence of portraits and busts of that disastrous economic hero. Let us quote a delightfully witty and sardonic passage in which Mr. Wells discharges his thoughts about Marx :-
" It will be best if I write about Marx without any hypo- critical deference. I have always regarded him as a Bore of the extremeet sort. His vast unfinished work, Das Ifapital, a cadence of wearisome volumes about such phantom unrealities as the bourgeoisie and the proietariat, a book for ever maundering away into tedious secondary discussions, impresses me as a monument of pretentious pedantry. But before I went to Russia on this last occasion I had no active hostility to Marx. I avoided his works, and when I encountered Marxists I disposed of them by asking them to tell me exactly what people con- stituted the proletariat. None of them knew. No Marxist knows. In Gorki's flat I listened with attention while Bokaiev discussed with Shalyapin the fine question of whether in Russia there wan a proletariat at all, distinguishable from the peasants. As Bokaiev has been head of the Extraordinary Commission of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Petersburg, it was interesting to note the fine difficulties of the argument. The ' proletarian ' in the Marxist jargon is like the producer' in the jargon of some political economists, who is supposed to he a creature absolutely distinct and different from the consumer.' So the proletarian is a figure put into flat opposi- tion to something called capital. I find in large type outside the current number of the Plebs, ' The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.' Apply this to a works foreman who is being taken in a train by en engine-driver to see how the house he is having built for him by a building society is getting on. To which of these immiscibles does he belong, employer or employed t The stuff is sheer nonsense. In Russia I must confess my trassive objection to Marx has changed to a very active hostility. Wherever we went we encountered busts, portraits, and statues of Marx. About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast solemn woolly uneventful beard that must have made all normal exercise impossible. It is not the sort of board that happens to a man, It is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world.. It is exactly like Due Kapital in its inane abundance, and the human part of the face looks over it owlishly as if it looked to see how the growth impressed mankind. I found the omnipresent images of that beard more and more irritating. A gnawing desire grew upon me to see Karl Marx shaved."
Mr. Wells had perhaps more sympathy for men of letters, artiste, and men of science than for anybody else. It is s haunting picture he draws of the best intellects in Russia main fully carrying on their work though pinched for want of food and chilled to the bone for want of fuel. He reflects that science, art, and literature aro hot-house plants demanding
warmth and respect and service. One can imagine how thought
along these lines might develop, if not to-day then to-morrow, till our Socialistic thinkers had brought the wheel full circle
and justified the existence of non-honey-making bees in the human hive—till, in fine, they bad set up once more a privileged or aristocratic class. It might happen. Clio would be neither shocked nor surprised. There is a touching simplicity in Mr. Wells's account of his visit to Glazounov, the well-known musician :— ' He used to be a big florid man, but now he is pallid and mush fallen away, so that his clothes hang loosely on him. He came and talked of his friends Sir Hubert Parry and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. He told ma be still composed, but that his stock of muslo paper was almost exhausted. ' Then there will be no more.' I said there would be much more, and that, soon. He doubted it. He spoke of London and Oxford i I could see that he was consumed by an almost intolerable longing for some great city full of life, a city with abunclairo, with pleasant crowds, a city that would give him stirring audiences in warm, brightly-lit places. While I was there, I was a sort of living token to him that such things could still be. He turned his back on the window which gave on the cold grey Neva, deserted in the twilight, and the low lines of the fortress prison of St. Peter and St. Paul. ' In England them will be no revolution—no ? I had many friends in England— many good friends in England. . . .'" Mr. Wells found more life in Moscow than in Petrograd. He visited Lenin and discovered at once, so he tells us, that Lenin was " not the doctrinaire. Marxist " he had expected to meet. The conversation did not really yield very much, as neither gave satisfactory answers to the questions of the other. Mr. Wells wanted to know what kind of State Lenin was really trying to create in Russia, and Lenin wanted to know why people like Mr. Wells did not work for the Social Revolution and destroy capitalism and establish Communism in Great Britain. Mr. Wells's most important statement is that it was perfectly clear to him that Lenin does not regard the Russian revolution as anything more than "the inaugura- tion of an age of limitless experiment." Mr. Wells accepts that as his basic fact when he looks into the future. The Bolsheviks, he says confidently, cannot be replaced because there is no alternative. They are as firmly established as any other Government. But Bolshevism will not remain Bolshevism. The " method after method " which Lenin confessed would probably be necessary will be tried till some- thing more workable than Bolshevism emerges. The most sardonic and most significant of all Lenin's statements was made when Mr. Wells pointed out the difficulty of great develop- ments while the peasantry—nearly ninety per cent. of Russians —in its present anti-Communistic state of mind was still rooted to the soil. Lenin retorted that agricultural production on a large scale was being undertaken by Government " workers " —in other words, by men of the towns. "That," he said, " can spread. It can be extended first to one province, then another. The peasants in the other provinces, selfish and illiterate, will not know what is happening until their turn comes."
There is a very amusing passage in which Mr. Wells describes one of the attempts to hoodwink him. He went by arrange. ment to a school, and the following extract describes what happened :-
" The special guide who was with us than began to question
these children upon the subject of English literature and the writers they liked moat. One name dominated all others. My own. Such eompaiitively trivial figures as Milton, Dickens, Shakespeare ran about intermittently between the feet of that literary colossus. Being questioned further, these children produced the titles of perhaps a dozen of my books. I said I was completely s ,tisfied by what I had seen and heard, that I wanted to see nothing more—for indeed what more could I possibly require 1—and I left that school smiling with difficulty and thoroughly moss with my guides."
We have not space to quote Mr. Wells's account of the Petrograd Soviet at work. It was more like a Labour mass meeting than anything that could be recognized as a legislature, Mr. Wells was asked to speak, which he did candidly enough, saying that he did not believe in Communism, though probably he refrained from expressing his precise feelings about Marx and his beard. The meeting ended up with a cinema display. A white sheet was lowered behind the president's seat, and the legislators watched a film of the Baku Conference, at which Marxian principles and a hatred of Great Britain had been adopted as a working policy. Surely all the oil of Baku will be needed for pouring on the troubled waters of those bamboozled Tartars and Armenians.
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