Russia—Then and Now
Rural Russia Under the Old Regime. By Geroid Tanquary Robinson. (Allen and Unwin. its.) Low's Russian Sketchbook. Drawings by Low. Text by Kingsley Martin. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.) ME peasant has always been the crux of Russian history. But he has always been—to change the metaphor—a static; not a dynamic force. It was the merchants who founded Kiev on the great waterway from north to south. It was Ivan the Terrible with his feudal nobility who consolidated the Muscovite Empire. It was Peter the Great who brought Russia into modem' history. It was the middle-class intelli- gentsia who preached revolution in the nineteenth century, and the proletariat who made it in the twentieth, To-day
every 25,000 urban votes—and every;125,000 country voters-. return a delegate to the SoViet ParliaMent ; the mathematical equation " one townsman equals five peasapts," hai received official sanction. Yet the peasant is the key to the situation. The question to-day, as it was in the days of Stenka Razin and of Pugachev, as it was in 1917 and in 1921 and in 1929, is : " How much will he stand ? " Mr. Robinson's idea of writing Russian from the standpoint of the countryside was an excellent one ; and Rural Russia Under the Old Regime is a most useful piece of research. It is intended, perhaps, for the student rather than for the general reader. But it is none the less living history, not a dry collection of material ; and for anyone with some initial knowledge of Russian history it is thoroughly readable. The present volume deals with the peasant down to- 1914. We shall await with interest the further volume which will depict the peasant under the revolution- " Studying Bolshevism," remarks Prince Sapieha in his introduction to Russian Minds in Fetters, "we must not forget that our mind also is in fetters. Ours are the golden bonds of Christian morality. . . These standards are apt to blur our judgement on Bolshevism because, dealing with Russia, we must use another code or run the risk of being partial." The author, a Polish journalist, describes himself as •' emotionally bound to the monarchical idea," and leaves us in no doubt about the particular fetters which his mind prefers. But extremes meet ; and an honest intelligent ultramontane may well be a fairer critic of Bolshevism than a liberal and a democrat. lie has at any rate no illusions about the abstract value of liberty. His hostility is directed against the fundamentals of Bolshevism, Jot against the incidentals, against theories, not methods. It is patent and can easily be discounted. On all questions of fact, M. Mackiewicz, unlike nearly every other anti-Bolshevik writer, not only aims at but achieves impartiality. There are points on which he is not unwilling to hold up Bolshevism to the approval of western civilization. Far from being the sink of erotic indulgence which has been depicted by some of its opponents, Soviet Russia appears to M. Mackiewicz as the home of an almost Victorian puritanism. The theatre, the newspaper, literature, the dance, fashions in dress—all are entirely free from the obsession of " sex-appeal " which besets these manifestations of social life in Western Europe, and which honestly shocks the Soviet visitor to the West. " Just as the ancient world connected riches with moral corruption," writes M. Mackiewicz, " so to-day the apostles of Bolshevism attack bourgeois civilization by means of pictures of its sexual libertinage." And he quotes a dictum. of Lunacharsky " These people have had their souls torn out. . . . The fox-trot has burrowed into their nerves and muscles." When M. Mackiewicz was asked what he liked best about Soviet Russia, he replied : " The fact that you all talk about work."
In the midst of his Russian tour, M. Mackiewicz met by accident on a railway journey a man who claimed to have been present at the murder of the Imperial Family. The story as told to him by this man rings true, and contradicts several already dubious features of the account given by M. Sokolov, who investigated the matter after the capture of Ekaterinburg by Kolchak. It disposes of the alleged mission of a German agent, who is supposed to have offered to save the Tsar it he would promise to sign the Brest-Litovsk treaty ; and it denies the Sokolov thesis that most of the assassins were Letts or other non-Russians. The new version also confirms what has always been stated by the Soviet authorities, that the killing was not done on orders from Moscow, but as the result of a local panic and misunderstanding. The full facts may one day emerge from the Soviet archives. In the meanwhile, this story may be taken, with all reserves, as a step nearer to the- truth.
The transition from grave to gay is made with Low's Russian Sketchbook. Low and Mr. Kingsley Martin took a busmen's holiday in Soviet Russia ; and this is the always entertaining and sometimes illuminating result. It is at any rate amusing to watch Low discovering new worlds to caricature (though we have looked in vain for one of Stalin in a boiled shirt), and Mr. Kingsley Martin hankering after a State-controlled Press which can afford to instruct its readers in politics and economies, -instead of regaling, them with crime and sex,
Low's Russian Sketchbook will serve as Reading Without Tears to those who want to learn the " truth about Russia." Lastly, there is Red Russia Arms, a useful summary of the preparations and equipment of the Soviet fighting forces, marred here and there by undue anxiety to make our flesh creep, but in the main reliable and objective.
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