ANOTHER VOICE
The Bernard Shaw syndrome that the East does not need
CHARLES MOORE
arold Nicolson worked under General Smuts at the Versailles peace conference, trying to sort out the ruins of old empires and the borders of new na- tions. In April 1919 they visited Budapest to see Bela Kun, leader of the short-lived Bolshevik revolution there, which the allies were blockading. The delegation was ushered into the Hungaria Hotel. Nicolson described the scene in his diary:
The foyer of the hotel is full of people having lemonade and coffee at little tables. An orchestra plays Hungarian tunes. It has all been arranged to show us that even under Bolshevism Buda Pesth remains the gayest city in Central Europe . . . It is some time before I realise what is wrong . . . it sudden- ly dawns upon me that each single table is absolutely silent . . . If one looks up sudden- ly one catches countless frightened eyes, and at the back of those eyes a mutely passionate appeal. Then the eyes flick away towards the lemonade, and this ghastly silence continues under the wail of the violins and under the gaze of sentries guarding every exit. It is quite clear that all these huddled silent people have been let out of prison for the afternoon in order to fill the foyer of the Hungaria.
I was reminded of his description in Vilnius last week, because the character of the Lithuanian revolution is exactly the opposite. Kun was the agent of a foreign power (`. . . he leaves us — saying he must consult his Cabinet. That means he must consult Moscow.') His revolution was un- popular and could only survive if he could persuade the outside world to back it.
The Lithuanian President, Vytautas Landsbergis, is the agent of his own people, by whom he is elected, and his revolution is so unquestionably popular that there is no need to trouble to put on a show for foreigners. It mattered to him that the world recognised the independ- ence of the Baltic states: new recognitions — Malta, San Marino, Australia, whatever — were promulgated daily in the Parlia- ment building. But no effort was made to impress, cajole, bamboozle, or flatter. Lithuanian independence, proclaimed last year, became a fact with the failure of the coup in Moscow, Mr Landsbergis could be confident that the recognition of the fact would only be a matter of time.
I attended the first diplomatic reception given in the new nation. It was the hosts, the Swedes, making up hastily for years of neglect, who were trying to convince. The Lithuanians seemed neither grovellingly grateful nor unpleasingly arrogant. They simply accepted the hospitality as their due. 'Take us as you find us,' they seemed to be saying, 'though of course we are glad that you have found us at last.' They took positive pleasure, too, in their amateurish- ness — that the President is a professor of music, the Minister of Communications is an electrical engineer, and the army is a shambles. 'The greatness of a nation,' Mr Landsbergis told me with pride, 'does. not lie in its possession of nuclear weapons.' This lack of propaganda and contrivance contrived, of course, to be the best possible propaganda. I was overwhelmingly im- pressed by the calm resolution, by witnes- sing a David who had somehow managed to frighten Goliath away without even having to use his sling. But what I was conscious of, and felt guilty about, was a tendency inherent in my favourable reaction, to romanticise everything. To be a foreign visitor, espe- cially a foreign visitor on hard currency expenses, is to have the heady feeling of privileged access to a great drama. To an anti-communist and enthusiast for Euro- pean Christian civilisation, the persecu- tions and liberations of Eastern Europe have turned those countries and their people into archetypes. The drama clears away the clutter and complication and boredom of life in the West, and presents things starkly. I visited a peasant woman in a tiny village with wooden houses and no running water, about 50 miles from Vilnius. She had lived alone since her husband froze to death in the forests while drunk three years ago, and his corpse was eaten by wolves. At the end of the war, her elder sister escaped while being forced to lead Soviet troops to the lair of Lithuanian resisters. She found her way home and her father dug a pit for her to hide in under their house. The Soviet authorities did not find the elder sister, but deported her father and brother to Siberia. The girl lived on in the pit for five years and went mad. Her hiding place was betrayed and she was taken to a mental home where she died in 1956.
Standing before me with her headscarf and heavy boots and check dress, railing against the collective farm in whose settle- ment she had refused to go and live, and becoming tearful with joy when she talked about the new freedom of her country, that girl's sister embodied that country's strug- gle and its independence. Or so I felt.
On another occasion in the week, I met a 24-year-old priest, the son of a blacksmith, who had never left his country and looked with scorn at the suggestion that he should go to Rome to study. He had resisted Communists, he said, but what he needed to do now was work with the poor of the streets, especially the young, the people he called 'the heavy metal and the satanists', who were much more threatened by the West which they found alluring, than by the communism which they had always despised. Another embodiment of a national spirit. Or so I felt. Again, I met a philosopher, a fiercely zealous believer in the free market who had translated Hayek into Lithuanian and despised what he considered the sub-socialism of the new government. He spent the first 13 years of his life with his parents in Siberian exile, and had been a strict Communist until his teens. Am embodiment of the spirit of intellectual enquiry. Or so I felt.
In some ways, it is a good thing to be quickened by such feelings, to have one's ideas made flesh, but it is dangerous. It is not completely different from the attitude of the George Bernard Shaws and Webbs and the Red Deans who discerned in their tours round Stalin's tyranny a New Soviet Civilisation. They wanted beliefs drama- tised, the life of ideas actually lived out by real people, and they wanted it so badly that they were indifferent to how those real people were living. Their high seriousness about what they thought was right in principle made them frivolously careless of what was wrong in practice.
If we anti-Communists behave like Webbs in reverse we shall deserve compa- rable obloquy. What is coming in Eastern Europe and now the Baltics and perhaps the rest of the Soviet Union is not so much a great new dawn (though it does feel rather blissful to be alive in it) but a return to reality after a prolonged and horribly destructive laboratory experiment with hu- man society.
So it is not very helpful to write sub- Byronic panegyrics to the victims of the experiment. Better to recognise that their emergent nations are deeply wounded civilisations, and do what we practically can to help.
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