U.S.S.R.
I Write as I Please. By Walter Duranty. (Hamish Hamilton,
' 10s. ad.)
Ttni: authors arc the English correspondent of an American paper, an American correspondent and an American professor. The subject is the Soviet Union tempered, in Mr. Duranty's case, by a good many personal digressions. -Mr. Duranty has been writing news and articles from Moscow for the New York Times, with a few short intervals, for almost fifteen years. Some of his articles were collected and published in a volume a couple of years ago. This time, as the title indicates, Mr. Duranty's business is not reporting, but reminiscence and anecdote.
Mr. Duranty first went to Soviet Russia in 1921, at the height of the great famine. He went with most of the usual anti-Bolshevik prejudices current at that time in Western Europe and America. But he remained to become the most sympathetic (except for one or two professed 'Communists) of all the foreign correspondents in Moscow, and eventually, in the eyes of the Soviet authorities, a sort of recognised interpreter of the Soviet point of view to the Anglei-Stixon world. Meanwhile, he was writing, for one of the leading newspapers of a country whose people, as a prominent American politician assured him in the spring of 1932, " will never stand for diplomatic relations with a Government of
atheists and unbelievers." The incongruity of the position Must often have been embarrassing. Mr. Duranty stuck to his guns ; and the New York Times, to its infinite credit, did not let him down. But there are several passages in as .1 Please in which the writer seems to be replying (though lie nowhere explicitly says so) to criticisms of leis pro-Soviet attitude.
The reply is of two kinds. In the first place, Mr. Duranty went to Soviet Russia with many nominal susceptibilities blunted by fOur years of the western front and two of guerilla warfare round the shores of the Baltic. Nobody who had been through those experiences could be readily shocked by the • filth, the brutality, the callousness about human life aid'; suffering which were characteristic and conspicuous features of the Soviet regime. It did not seem to Mr. Duranty to be his job in Soviet Russia, any more than it was the job of a war '- correspondent at the front, to dwell on the " casualties*" as if they were the most important factor in the situation. " I'm a reporter, not a humanitarian. . . . You may cal that special pleading or call me callous, and perhaps it is t rue, but you can't blame me for it ; you must blame the War, because that is where my mental skin got thickened."
• Mr. Duranty's second line of self-vindication is that it is only by thinking in the same terms as people that you can ever. really understand them. He had to put on a sort of extra' Bolshevik skin before he was able to see what the Party was, doing and where it was likely to:get to next. He claims to have foreseen and predicted many of the important develop- ments of the years 19'28-193'2 ; and, when they occurred, he hailed them with a sort of proprietary interest which enhanced the impression of his sympathy with them. He certainly takes the " Party line " in the great duel between Stalin and Trotsky with a heartiness and lack of reserve rare among foreign observers:who are not hide-bound Communists.
But all this may give a slightly distorted impressioO. Mr. Duranty, for all his sympathy, is a keen critic. He con- tinually recurs to the Russian talent for dramatisation and Ian • its counterpart, the Russian inability to draw a hard and fa4 • line between" romance and reality. He thinks that every tourist to Russia should be compelled to read' in advance the famous story of the. Potemkin villages ; for the same systeni of make-believe is continually practised by the Soviet authorities on the innocent traveller. Mr. Duranty is far too hard-boiled to shut his eyes to the immense sufferings of the peasant, of the kaiak, and of the dispossessed classes. He doe not mitigate the extent of the " terror." But he thinks that,. these things- on the whole weigh less in the balance, just as the' losses in the War weighed less, than the success of the enter prise to which the. sacrifices are made.
Modern Moscow is in its way just as reachable as IVrite as 1 , Please. But where Mr. Duranty is brilliant, Mr. Lyons is too often merely slick. He reflects only in the photographic sense. He introduces us to. a large and varied picture-gallery of contemporary Moscow. But the pictures have to make up in colour what they lack in depth. Mr. H. G. Wells is reported to have described the book as " one of the most vivid and. convincing pictures of the new Russia which I have ever encountered." But Mr. Wells's own interest in Soviet Russia* has always been anecdotic rather than profound ; and this is the precise quality which distinguishes Mr. Lyons. It should be added that the book contains the completest collection of • Soviet jokes which has yet appeared in print--at any rate, outside Russia.
Mr. Maxwell's The Soviet Stale possesses all the opposite vir- tues to those of Modern Moscow. Unlike Mr. Duranty and Mr.. Lyons, he does not eater for the casual reader, but writes *- those who know something and want to know more. The Soviet State describes in detail and with painstaking accuracy the whole Soviet machinery of government, both central and municipal, treating such matters as the electoral law, the administration of justice, organisation of the police, control of the Press and the theatre, and so forth. Mr. Maxwell admittedly excludes from his examination the question how the system works in practice, while allowing that the diver-„ gence between the legal and the actual position is often wide. It is a pity he did not maintain the same reserve in the intro; ductbiry Chapter ; for the statement that, under the Tsarist regime, "the nagaika, knout, machine-guns, repression and virtual political slavery were the portion of the people " is an exaggeration unworthy of an otherwise balanced and
Previous page
