Emigre's elegy

TABLE TALK PENIS BROGAN

For people of my age, in the 'sere and yellow leaf,' obituaries acquire a morbid fascination. It was with a shock that I noticed the other day the death of a very old friend, Alec Werth. He turned up in Glasgow about 1919 and had a brilliant academic career at the University. He not only got a first in modern languages, but, as The Times obituary did not note, he got a first in economics which proved extremely valuable to him. He also began his career as a journalist on the University magazine. His reason for coming to Glasgow, as a refugee from the Bolshevik Revolution, was accidental. One of his teachers at the Lutheran Gymnasium in Petrograd had been Hugh Brennan who was appointed head of the Russian department of the University of Glasgow when the first Lord Weir established the subject there. Werth belonged to a great Petrograd Jewisit family, and his father had been Witte's banker. There were lots of eccentric people in Glasgow University after the First War, but few had had so romantic a career as young Alec Werth. The Bolsheviks took over in November 1917, and one of the first people they hunted for was Alec Werth's father. He disappeared and has never been seen since. Young Alec was arrested as a hostage; he is the only ex-prisoner of Saint Peter and Saint Paul that I have ever known well. His maternal uncle appealed to the first head of the Cheka, who was not a Bolshevik but an old Social Revolutionary, pointing out that his nephew didn't know where his father was, and that using hostages like this was just the kind of Tsarist abomination both had fought against. Alec got out of Peter and Paul, and he also got out of Bolshevik Russia. He left Petrograd for Moscow and, by ways about which he was never very explicit, he reached Kiev, then under German and Ukrainian con- trol.

With great foresight, he had taken away with him about 100,000 roubles, and in Kiev he was able to buy Bank of England notes for quite a large sum as both the Germans and the Ukrainians were convinced that victory was imminent and that the old order in some form or other would come back to power and would make roubles valuable. So among the exiles, Alec Werth was financially well off, which allowed him to pick and choose among jobs— and to avoid too deep a commitment to any of the numerous exile bodies.

I first got to know Alec Werth well not in Glasgow, but in London, where we lived within a few doors of each other and became close friends. It was in Belgrave Road that I learned the most dramatic revelations of his past. He had just received a letter from Berlin from a very eminent exile who had been a leading figure in the early days of the Bolshevik govern- ment, enclosing a section of his memoirs, and suggesting that Alec might like to translate them into English. For Alec had begun to translate, and had a great success with his trans- lation of the Diary of a Communist School Boy. The letter from Berlin said, 'You will not . know who I am, but here are my memoirs. I was the first head of the Cheka."I remember ' - you well,' replied Alec; 'I was one of your first prisoners.'

At this time, Alec was hostile to Bolshevism. He was also very ironical about the naïveté and illiteracy of many of the English admirers of the October Revolution. But whether be- cause of lack of ideological passion or an , above-the-battle doctrinal position or per- manent nostalgia for Russia, he never became an anti-Bolshevik warrior. He had friends in all Russian camps, as became very evident when I used to live with him in Paris, where he had gone as the correspondent of the Glasgow Herald. We lived in a rather shabby hotel on the Avenue Daumesnil and there was a series of very odd visitors to his shabby room. One day as I climbed the stairs, I met someone coming down. When I got in Alec asked me, `Do you know who that man was going down- stairs?' I said, 'No.' That is the commander of the Imperial Russian cavalry in France. He had come to borrow 500 francs.'

It was in Paris that Alec found himself as a correspondent, but he found himself in other ways, for he was one of the chief (anonymous) authors of a book published by an eminent American professor on French public finance about which Alec acquired a great deal of dis- cerning knowledge. His description of the state of French public accounting was highly comic if one was not a Frenchman. When he suc- ceeded Robert Dell as Manchester Guardian correspondent, he already had the great advan- tage of knowing a lot about the French economy. But his real asset was a genuine, almost passionate but unideological interest in French politics. He liked politicians, or most of them. He never allowed his genuinely left- wing sympathy to interfere with his judgment of personalities. Thus, on the whole, like a good many other people, be rather liked and admired Pierre Laval. He could appreciate the egotism of Joseph Caillaux and could parody him very well. He was very good at parodying Ramsay MacDonald: here his Glasgow education helped. He used to tell a story of being by accident in the next room at Stresa in the same hotel as Ramsay MacDonald and hearing the great man walk up and down the terrace saying to himself, 'The day belongs to the worrld, but the morning belongs to me.' This reminded both of us of Will Fyfe's famous 'I belang to Glesca'; but it also sounded like Ramsay MacDonald.

There were, however, some drawbacks to Alec's lack of ideological bias and his senti- mentality about the left. Nobody, probably, in the Paris Anglo-American press corps was better qualified to understand (if it could be understood) and to criticise the economic schemes of the Front Populaire. Alec knew that only Georges Boris among the people round Blum had any economic ideas at all, and

- I used to reproach Alec with putting optimistic stories about the French economy in the Man- chester Guardian which he must have known were basically nonsense. He followed his heart rather than his head. But no one knew the politics and the politicians of the Third Republic better than he did, as was revealed in the series of books he compiled.

The end of the Third Republic was a disaster for Werth. He was at a loose end and jumped at the chance of going to Moscow for the Sunday Times. It was probably a mistake. He _became, naturally enough, a very patriotic Russian, and was especially moved by the defence of his native city, for, like all children

• V Peter the Great's capital, he basically des- pised Moscow. But he himself told me that the fact he was a Russian by origin and spoke the language perfectly handicapped him, for the Bolshevik government knew that a great deal of the nonsense that could be swallowed by others could not be swallowed by him, and it was very easy to be lazy in Moscow and just hash up the optimistic communiqués, highly mendacious, issued by the Soviet government. This led to a habit of suppressio yeti which landed him in a series of uncomfortable con- troversies out of which he did not come very well. (There was one with Robert Conquest a few months ago which was distressing to all Alec's old friends.) Then he came back to Paris under the impres- sion that he could get back his Paris job, which the Guardian wisely gave to Darsie Gillie. The Fourth Republic was a new world for Alec. He had not been able to keep in touch from Moscow with the movements in France or the French emigration. He had been a great figure before 1940; he was a forgotten figure now, as ill at ease as some of the old Radical politicians he had laughed at in his affectionate manner. In a way, the Fifth Republic suited him better because he had not been involved in the anti- Gaullist polemics of the Fourth. But I think Alec's real trouble was that he was an exile, he was an émigré and felt it. He used to tell a story that I think be knew was as much a story about himself as about the mythical hero of the anecdote. A citizen of Leningrad had to fill up a census form.

'Where were you born?'

'Petersburg.

'Where were you educated?'

'Petrograd.'

'Where do you live?'

'Leningrad.'

'Where do you wish to live?'

'Petersburg.'