Before the Bolsheviks
ussia in Retrospect : The Memoirs of Baron N. Wrangel. Translated by Brian and Beatrix Lunn. (Benn. 15s.) ERE is a book which helps to make Russia intelligible- eaven knows how rare that is. An old gentleman, turned seventy, driven by revolution out of his own country, tens the tedium of hii exile with recalling the long past d the successive shifts of balance which culminated in the I upheaval. He tells his story all in one jet ; he tells with the tact of a born raconteur who has learnt to eschew earisome details ; but he tells it also with an understanding rt, and a lovable nature makes itself felt all through.
Baron Wrangel was born in 1847, of a wealthy aristocratic lily, while such families still owned serfs. His childhood was therless, and unhappy, and one of the characteristic Rs that he tells us is how he tried to commit suicide.
e are used to think this a phenomenon of Russia since the elution ; but has it not always been common in that adjusted people—or at least in certain classes of those .ntals whom Peter the Great tried to turn into Europeans. ut, says Baron Wrangel :— Only the upper classes left the ways which had hitherto been ose of the whole nation. The people remained where they were a gulf was formed between the upper and lower class which thing has succeeded in bridging since. The comedy was performed . by lords dressed up as Dutchmen by Peter, as painted rquises and free-thinkers by the Empresses, and as German porals by Paul, Alexinder I. and Nicholas I. The people . stayed outside the theatre."
Then came emancipation of the serfs under Alexander II, d Russia began to have a middle-class. It called itself the telligentsia. From 1860 to 1864 Baion Wrangel was out Russia getting his education in Switzerland—where he tnet ny Russians—revolutionaries. Vivid pictures of them recall rgenev's novels. Bakunin was one, and tried to get young rangel of seventeen to smuggle contraband pamphlets ; ut one of the crew, more decent, stopped the transaction. nether lad in the same case was caught with the contraband d went to Siberia. Still more vivid is the picture of the aged Russia to which the youth came back in 1864. In 8 View both lords and serfs were demoralized ; neither class w how to adapt themselves to even the beginnings of moeracy. The intelligentsia made confusion worse by mantling the complete logical expression of freedom, stead of letting things grow. They would not work with dual progress ; nothing seemed worth while but revolution. So the history is traced, by episodes that are flashlights.
e see the swindlers, the charlatans ; we see the beginnifigs the Russo-Japanese War, we read an incisive study of neopatkin, the useful subordinate tragically unfit to corn- nd in chief. We see the incipient revolution which led to first Duma, and we see the first Duma, a motley muster. nd in the end we see the trash of absolutism. Baron rangers attitude is sufficiently indicated by his pride in e fact that his son led an anti-Bolshevik army. single instance must suffice to illustrate this book. In
e Baron's childhood, an old aunt was kind to the hildren Our great delight was to ask her the time. The answer was %it:ariably the same. Thank God, I have never 'been eompelled int that. For such things I have my women.' And she would 6 ot her maid. Tell me what time it is by thisWatoh '- 17 -
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