I WAS READING the other day a report, published In
the Paris paper L'Express, of a speech made at a Moscow Writers' Conference by the author Paustovsky. He describes a trip taken to the West in a Soviet ship by two groups : writers, intellec- tuals and workers in the second and third class, and Vice-Ministers and very high functionaries in the first. The latter, gross, selfish, crassly uncul- tured, bullied the intellectuals and indulged in 'anti-Semitic progrom-makers' talk.' One of them asked if Michelangelo's Last Judgement was the judgement of Mussolini : another demanded, before the Acropolis, 'How could the proletariat have allowed it to be built?' Paustovsky calls them 'a new caste of petty bourgeois . . . profit- eers, bootlickers and traitors,' who 'speak in the name of the people which in fact they hate and despise.' He accuses them and their like of murdering such people as Meyerhold and Babel. The Soviet press only made the briefest reference to Paustovsky's speech : but then it too is run by hard-faced men who have done well out of the revolution.
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