A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IN the current issue of the Anglo-Soviet Journal thirteen members of two ' cultural delegations' who visited the USSR last autumn record their impressions of what they W. Their prose has that starry-eyed quality in which the activi- ties of Boy Scouts are chronicled in parish magazines. Only two of them, in the course of their extensive travels, found anything to criticize. Mr. W. M. Hyman thought sanitary conditions pretty appalling "; but he softened this blow with the prefatory statement that " there is so much to thrill the Socialist that some things are difficult to fathom " and followed it up by expressing his confidence that in three ,pr four years he will see " vast improved changes." I deduce that this was his first visit to Russia. Mr. C. C. Handyside got on to thinner Ice by saying that in the Russian building industry " the standard of craftmanship is very low indeed." This, at a Suess, was why his contribution, alone of the thirteen, had to have a note prefixed to it beginning, " The author wishes to explain ..." and concluding, " The time available for studying Present-daybuildings was, therefore, too little for him to do more than get general impressions, based on quick glimpses of a number of buildings and visits to a few building sites." have long been fascinated by the special, rather oily brand of hyperbole which Russia evokes from her less discriminating ,ritish admirers (it is well epitomised by Mr. V. Gordon Lhilde's statement that " Even the popular Russian song, It's dflwfully. Jolly in Tadzhikistan, is thoroughly Asiatic in. feeling "); but I sometimes wonder what good the members 0,1 this mutual admiration society imagine they are doing to the cause of Anglo-Soviet understanding (or indeed to any other cause) by writing their bread-and-butter letters to Utopia in Stich naive and such fulsome terms.
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