BOOKS OF THE DAY
Assignment in Utopia (Prof. E. H. Carr) ..
New Writing (Edward Sackville-West) ..
England Expects Every American To Do His Duty (Sir Frederick Whyte) .. . • • • • • The Last of the Ebb (Prof. Bonamy Dobree) .. • • 22 23 24
24
A Surgeon's Case-Book (H. H. Bashford) Victorian Street Ballads (John Hayward)..
Fiction (Forrest Reid) .. Current Literature .. .. Reference Books for 1938 .. 26 26 28 30 30
RETREAT FROM UTOPIA
By E. H. CARR
Assignment in Utopia, true to the now accepted tradition, blends personal autobiography with journalistic experiences. But the autobiography is not here an intrusion ; it is an integral part of the picture. Mr. Eugene Lyons was an immigrant to the United States in early childhood—too early to retain any memories of his native town of Minsk or of the Russian language. Growing up an East-Side New Yorker, conscious that he him- self was only half initiated into the mystery of American civilisa- tion, and his parents not at all (he recalls that it seemed odd to meet a boy whose father had played American games), he revolted with the ardour of youth against the ugly oppression of his surroundings, swelled with pride at the Russian Revolu- tion, and raged with hatred at the anti-Communist frenzy of frightened American capitalists in the first years after the War. He took up the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti, becoming a sort of Press agent for the defence, and eventually writing the standard work on the case. He visited Italy on the eve of Fascism, being naively convinced that the next Communist victory was due to occur there. For five years he worked for the Soviet Press Agency in New York, editing a propaganda periodical known as Soviet Russia Pictorial. Then, on the last day of the year 1927, he sailed for Moscow as correspondent of the United Press.
Seldom can a more enthusiastic and more naive Communist or near-Communist than Mr. Lyons have landed in the capital of the Soviet Union as a foreign correspondent. He remained there for six years, punctuated only by one short visit to the United States and two or three trips to Berlin. At the end of this time, his enthusiasm worn away by contact with the hard realities of Soviet life and by the inevitable friction of the foreign journalist with the Soviet censorship authorities, he returned to the United States a bewildered man, uncertain whether loyalty to his old ideals commanded, or forbade, him to tell the truth about this once glorious attempt to trans- late these ideals into practice. Two years in America, during which " I took an almost sensuous pleasure from watching and taking part in democratic processes," answered the question; and. this book is the result. It is characteristic that one of the bitterest exposures yet penned of the Soviet regime should be the work not of a hard-boiled capitalist, but of a disillu- sioned enthusiast.
Assignment in Utopia is, then, not so much a study of Soviet Russia during the critical years from 1928 to 1934 as the record of a conversion. It is written with passion from first page to last, and the mood of the close casts its shadows back on the beginnings. But even from the standpoint of history, this record is far from negligible. Mr. Lyons arrived in Moscow when the New Economic Policy was at its last gasp. Trotsky had just been expelled from the Party and banished to Central Asia. The extent and ruthlessness of Stalin's ascendancy were not yet realised. It was not until October of that year that the first Five-Year Plan was launched ; and this, too, did not at once develop its full significance. Except for the Shakhty Trial, the first of those stage-trials which have ever since remained an intermittent feature of Soviet political life, the summer of 1928 was relatively pleasant and uneventful. Mr. Lyons still accepted the May-Day Parade, with its carefully marshalled annio; of demonstrators and carefully rehearsed slogans, at its face value as a spontaneous ebullition of mass emotion.
By the next year the change-over—the " great break," as Stalin once called it—was in full swing. Private trade was swept away as if by silent magic. "Soon there was not a single private name inscribed on any shop. Ivanovs and Abramoviches gave way to Mosselproms ' and Mostorgs.' " World revolution was put into cold storage. Comintern was quarantined, Assignment in Utopia. By Eugene Lyons. (Harrap. z5s.)
meaning that foreign diplomats, journalists, business men and tourists in Moscow were cut off from all access to the head- quarters of the Communist International—a ban which is still maintained. The minor " Trotskyists " were removed from their posts and banished to the provinces ; for the penalty for " Trotskyism " at this time was still exile, not the firing-party. Then came the drive against the kulaks, culminating in the collectivisation decrees of 1932, and the famine of the following winter and spring. By the time Mr. Lyons left Moscow early in 1934, the work of " building socialism in a single country " was complete. Except for a few foreigners, hardly anybody thought it necessary to enquire what kind of socialism had been built or at what cost. At an early stage of his sojourn in the Soviet Union, Mr. Lyons had had occasion to remark that " it is not pleasant to watch men driven like sheep, even if they are being driven to. heaven." Before the end, he became quite clear that the destination, whatever it was, bore little resemblance to heaven.
In a few passages, Mr. Lyons tries to convey " the teeming contrasts of enlightened social experiment in a milieu of bar- barous cruelty : children cared for in creches, and children turned into homeless savages by the liquidation of their parents ; people taught to read and write, while scientists and professors were sent to Siberia for failure to toe the Marxist line in biology or mathematics ; new workers' clubs and new prisons under construction at the same time." But he finds, in truth, little in Soviet achievements to mitigate his burning indignation. He is particularly severe on the pane- gyrics of Soviet education by " Professor Dewey and Professor Counts and a bevy of sub-Deweys and sub-Counts " ; for he had himself to face the problem of getting a daughter educated in Moscow. Even the " few model schools " failed to live up to the reputation given them by these " well-meaning modern educators " who, when Mr. Lyons came to investigate, had somehow " failed to look at the toilet, missed the fact that the school had been closed half of the term because of epidemic diseases, and forgotten to note that one teacher, badly in need of schooling herself, must supervise sixty or seventy under-nourished and excessively mischievous little pupils." The " ever-lengthening line of self-deluded out- siders," mostly his own compatriots, was one of the sorest trials Mr. Lyons had to face in Moscow ; and he has several good stories of them, varying from the ludicrous (the American magnate who, in a public speech, declared his conviction that " with God's help, you will bring your wonderful Five- Year Plan to success ") to the macabre (Mr. Bernard Shaw telling his strictly rationed audience with a guffaw how he had thrown out of the train window before reaching the frontier the unnecessary supplies of food which kind friends had provided for him).
But if it is not possible to treat Assignment in Utopia as a history of the Soviet regime at this turning-point of its existence, Mr. Lyons has many illuminating sidelights and apposite reflections to offer. There is the story (which was well known at the time, but may not have appeared in print before) of the great negro film depicting the sufferings of the negro race which was being " shot " in Moscow at the very time when M. Litvinov was about to sail for New York to receive the recognition of the United States GoVernment, and which had to be hurriedly called off. There is the more gruesome account of the way in which foreign correspondents, faced with the necessity of keeping their jobs, were induced to soft-pedal the news of the famine of 1933. And Mr. Lyons propounds the ingenious, though highly speculative, theory of Comintern's responsibility for the Nazi revolution, the German Left having been fatally weakened by the compulsion placed on the German Communist Party to toe a Russian, not a German, line.
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