UNDERSTANDING RUSSIA

By SIR BERNARD PARES

11 HE publication of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty was sure to be greeted with intense satisfaction. This is what has been eagerly asked for at innumerable public meetings which I have attended in every part of the kingdom, by platforms representative of every shade of political opinion, from Conservative to Communist, and often enough the most eloquent expression of our tribute to Russia's tontribution in the war has come from the Conservative. This has nothing to do with any political theory. It is the grateful recognition of the immense burden shouldered by a great and gallant people in our common struggle against the forces of evil, together with the earnest wish that after the war there should be a continuation of this close friendship, without which no lasting peace in Europe is possible.

This war is a war of peoples, and they sweep aside all that inter- feres with their security. In 1935 Mr. Eden said in Moscow that he could not see any conflict of interests which need divide us. Once in the past we have fought Russia—in the Crimean War. It was a war fought with great chivalry, but it was from start to finish a war of muddles, and it did no good to either side, except that by implication it led straight to the emancipation of the serfs in Russia. On the other hand, this is the fifth time that the two countries have found themselves side by side in a struggle against a world' aggression.

It is well also to emphasise the importance of the accompanying engagements of common effort and of support in supply. Twice, with a capricious or emotional Tsar, we lost the alliance because our help came too late ; and even in the last war the munitions that flowed from the chivalrous crusade of Mr. Lloyd George reached Russia, as I know too well at first hand, only when the Russian regular army had been pounded to pieces, and was no longer there to use them.

So obvious is the strong identity of interests between the two countries that ever since the unification of Germany in 1871 it has been the settled policy, not only of her government, but of her Press, and even of her scholars, to keep Britain and Russia in perpetual misunderstanding with each other. Throughout my forty- odd years of study of Anglo-Russian relations, without any animosity against the German people, I have always had to recog- nise that we had this set purpose against us, which is the reason why I have always tried to direct our attention to the cardinal importance of the study of Russia : we must see Russia for our- selves, without the intervention of this most untrustworthy tutor. Anglo-Russian misunderstanding was the object of Bismarck, of the Emperor Wilhelm II, and, more emphatically than with either, of dolf Hitler. He deluded simple souls here by always holding in front of us the picture of a Russia unchanged since that poignant moment when, in the passions and sufferings of the last world War, a dead government was removed from the body of a live People. Those who listened to him could not see that, nationally, they were simply playing into his hands.

Those who would see the true picture should read with care that uite admirable book (reviewed in last week's Spectator), the record Mr. Joseph E. Davies, American Ambassador in Moscow from 936 to 1938. It is a picture of neither the heaven nor the hell hich Russia has been, represented to us to be, but of fallible uman beings, ready to learn from their mistakes, amidst enormous culties, and without any former precedents or experience, trying build up in one of the most backward countries in Europe a new uman society in which the chief consideration of the State goes to

those who had so far received so little of •it in the past, but were at the same time the great mass of the population.

. It is most essential of all that for the first time we should under- stand what followed immediately-in Moscow on the peaceful end of our own General Strike of 1926, which entirely failed to disrupt

our unity here. This was an outcome which Radek, as a world revolutionary, compared at the time in Pravda to the effects of a

bomb for the internationalist leaders of Russia in that period. There followed at once a bitterly fierce duel between two men who were political opposites, Trotsky and Stalin. The first had lived most of his life outside Russia, engaged in building a school of world conspiracy. The other had stayed at home and fought the Tsar on his own ground, and was cut to replace the old broken- down system with a new construction in Russia itself. Stalin was and is a home statesman, who will go down to history as the transformer of Russia. It is he who has armed his country against

foreign aggression—a task in which Trotsky did everything to ob- struct him. He sought peace because his tender young plant was bound to suffer in any new convulsion, and he offered his co-opera- tion to those who were as much interested in peace as himself.1 Now he has had a terrible setback, and the work of regaining the

ground lost is enough to take up the rest of his life. It is, un- doubtedly, to this task that he desires to return.

The blankness of our misunderstanding of all this is one of our troubles even at the present time. Trotskyites, conscious or uncon- scious, are ready enough to cash in on the credit of Stalin, as brought home to us by the magnificent resistance of his people on the battlefield. They would like to assure us, just as Hitler has done, that friendship with Russia means world-revolution here on the model of 1917-21. We have to remind them of their heavy defeat and their exclusion from Russia—that it was precisely they who were the victims of those drastic purges which we now find it more easy to understand.

The engagement into which Britain and Russia have now entered should be the answer to the doubts of some of us as to Russia's attitude to the rights of smaller nationalities after the war. The question is more complex than some realise, and claims under- standing. Very much as in the British Empire, there are 18o-odd lesser nationalities in Russia. Stalin belongs to one of these, the Georgian, and his first official post was as Commissary for the rights of all of them. He himself was the drafter of the new federal constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which guarantees those rights. He has discriminated carefully between the federal functions and those of the constituent units, leaving to these last a greater measure of responsibility than that of an individual State in America.

On the other hand, some of these units passed out of Russia in the complete social breakdown which followed the abdication of the Tsar, when she lost nearly everything that she had conquered since Peter the Great ; and these particular units—the only ones that have engaged our close attention—are precisely those which lie between Russia and Germany, and could not be expected to defend themselves alone against either. In time of war they were bound to be a glacis, falling inevitably to the one or to the other. Some of them, Estonia and Latvia, had never been on the map of Europe as national States, until the breakdown of Russia and her absence from the Peace Settlement made their independence possible in 1918. Poland, on the other hand, had already been lost to Russia in the war, and no sensible Russian would wish to revive the old position in which a partitioned Poland was a running sore on the frontier of each of the three great pre-war empires of Eastern, Europe and a constant encouragement to future wars.

I think we must bring ourselves to recognise as soon as possible that the situation of 1919 could only be temporary, that both the German and Russian peoples were bound to revive, and to renew their old rivalry, that the authority of Britain and France, which for the time seemed to extend to the frontiers of Russia, was no last- • ing safeguard to these smaller units, and that to attempt to link them together by paper agreements under our leadership could not alone provide a solid barrier to future German aggression. The result of some twenty years of diplomacy on these lines ended by our having to defend our own shores in 1940 with hardly a single ally in the field. If all this is realised, I see no insuperable obstacle to a lasting peace in the future. A subject Poland, or—still more unthinkably, a subject Czechoslovakia under Russian rule, —could offer no possible security to Russia, and could only be an encouragement to a new German aggression. Even the neighbour- hood of an independent Finland can be tolerable enough to Russia if she is so well grounded in the friendship of Britain and America as to be able to feel sure that Finland will not again become a springboard for German aggression on Leningrad. On the other hand, the smaller peoples, more than any others, can only find a lasting security in that joint guarantee which is the object of the present Anglo-Soviet agreement.