‘L’EUROPE EST FINIE’, the little attendant had said when we crossed the Polish frontier into Russia; and so, it seemed, was June. Grey skies and a cold wind did nothing to enhance the attractions of Moscow.
Moscow is a depressing place. To me its atmosphere is somehow suggestive of servants’ bedrooms. The analogy, however, is not one which I am qualified to pursue.
Public opinion in England is sharply divided on the subject of Russia. On the one hand you have the crusty majority, who believe it to be a hell on earth; on the other you have the half-baked minority who believe it to be a terrestrial paradise in the making. Both cling to their opinions with the tenacity, respectively, of the die-hard and the fanatic. Both are hopelessly wrong.
And who shall blame them? You cannot give a just verdict without considering all the evidence; and in Great Britain, unfortunately, there is only a tithe of evidence to hand. Our leading newspaper1 continues to report the affairs of the largest country in the world through a correspondent posted outside its frontiers, so that its Russian news has much the same degree of interest and reliability as would distinguish a running commentary on a prize-fight at the Albert Hall if it were broadcast from the steps of the Albert Memorial. America, however (sometimes) misty with sentiment in her eyes, gets a fuller and less distorted picture of Russia than we do, because American newspapers print more and better Russian news than ours; it may be that their attitude would be less commendably detached if the Pacific Ocean were not so conveniently wide, but at least they have not made themselves ridiculous by first prejudging, and then to all intents and purposes ignoring, a political, cultural, and economic experiment launched on an unprecedented scale.
In England authorities on Russia are about as numerous as authorities on Mars, and the knowledge of the former is about as exact and as comprehensive as the knowledge of the latter. Funnily enough, it is much the same in Russia. Outside the Kremlin, where a handful of men, presumably able and partly Jewish, control (on paper) the destinies of the far-flung Soviet Republics, hardly anyone in Russia knows what is going on there, or why. They know, of course, what is supposed to be going on there. Education and propaganda – in Russia, as elsewhere, the two are becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate – are at their disposal in large quantities; they are stuffed with information, but starved of the truth. They can study history, but only history as Lenin would have liked it to have happened. They can learn about the present, but only as much about it as Stalin thinks advisable. Their home news, as a matter of fact, is concerned almost as much with the future as with the present; their newspapers announce ten projects to every one achievement. It is remarkable what a great deal is perpetually on the point of being done in Russia.
I have no wish to mock the Five Year Plan, or any of its progeny. All human endeavour is in some degree laughable, and the most gallant enterprises are often also, in their inception, the most comic. To the hasty and hot-blooded critics of Soviet Russia – to that monstrous regiment of clubmen for whom all Muscovy is peopled by a race of bullies (whom they call ‘Bolos’) equipped by Mr. Punch’s cartoonist with knouts and bombs – I would recommend a ‘Let the dog see the rabbit’ attitude as being both wise and fair. To the Russians I would suggest that it is about time they produced the rabbit.
No one can travel, however perfunctorily, in Russia without appreciating the magnitude of the task she has taken on. That portentous experiment is not, as is widely supposed, primarily political and economic; it is primarily psychological. Here you have a people almost none of whose national characteristics can be held likely to contribute in any way towards the success of a project like the Five Year Plan. Most of them are by nature inefficient, irresponsible, and feckless. The enormous practical difficulties involved in rationalizing and industrializing Russia – the backwardness of the people, the country’s lack of communications and capital – are minor obstacles compared with the fundamental components of the national character and outlook. Can the Russian peasant be galvanized into something approaching robot-hood? Can he, on the crest of a wave of enthusiasm or at the point of a G.P.U. pistol, slough off his native apathy, his charming but hopeless inconsequence, and turn go-getter?
It appears that, for a time and partially, he can. Prusso-American ideals of drive and efficiency have proved infectious. Progress has been made. A nation proverbially composed of dreamers has shown itself capable of toeing the line, biting the bullet, and punching the clock. Too often, alas, it has been the wrong line, the wrong bullet, the wrong clock. But the intention behind the gesture was sound, even if the gesture went astray.
Will the gesture survive as a habit? Will the Russians transform themselves into robots? The visitor to Moscow wonders. But he wonders less and less. The bath in his hotel is out of commission. The lavatory is under repair. The lift does not work. The service is awful. The telephone exchange is impossible. Only one match in three strikes. …
Eventually he stops wondering altogether.
I regret to say that I am extremely bad at sight-seeing. My regret, I would add, is sincere. This is not often the case.
To glory in – even to admit – a proficiency at sightseeing is, to-day, to court the charge not so much of eccentricity as of affectation. In a world which is being sucked inexorably into the maelstrom of standardization – in a concentric labyrinth of which all the paths are beaten – the sophisticated traveller is at pains to parade his independence of the herd. ‘Of course,’ he says, in a deprecating tone which underlines his latent arrogance, ‘it’s very obscure – it’s not at all the sort of place that foreigners go to’, or ‘I’m afraid we didn’t do any of the right things; we just poked about on our own, in the native quarter. It’s so much less tiring …’ In his feverish anxiety to be different, he eschews the temples and the tombs, the cathedrals and the palaces – all the honourable and enduring landmarks for which the place is justly famous. He would not be seen dead on the Bridge of Sighs; to gaze on the Pyramids seems to him as unpardonable as to blow on his tea.
But I am not like him. I have an honest, conscientious desire to do those right things; right up to the moment of my departure I go on fully intending to do them. But I am lazy – lazy, and also wholly lacking in either an historical sense or the ability to appreciate architecture. The eyes of Boswell, that man of feeling, once filled with tears of spontaneous emotion at the mere mention of the Great Wall of China. I am not like that. The sight of any edifice, however imposing, however drenched (as they say in Stratford-on-Avon) with historical associations, merely embarrasses me. It stimulates my powers of self-criticism. Why does that even flow of dates and names which the guide is reeling off mean nothing at all to me? How comes it that I am still, after all these years, unable to distinguish with certainty between an ogive and a reredos? And who the hell was Henry the Fowler?
I gape dutifully, but without pleasure, without profit.
So in Moscow, though I stayed there four days, or nearly twice the length of time considered necessary by those intending to write a book on Modern Russia, I saw none of the things that I should have seen. I can only tell you what Moscow looks like to the uninitiated.
The reality falls midway between the pictures drawn by the Morning Post on the one hand and the Intourist travel agency on the other. Moscow is a drab, but not a desolate city. At first you are surprised by its ramshackle and untidy air; then you realize that this is a symptom not so much of decay as of reconstruction. A great many buildings are half pulled down, a great many others half put up. Of the completed new ones there are probably fewer than you had supposed. Those futuristic, those tortuously embattled blocks of flats which photograph so well, are rare exceptions to an architecturally unimpressive rule. The streets are dull and forbidding, and their surfaces are bad. There is an atmosphere of rather ill-co-ordinated and precarious improvisation, such as pervades the wings of a theatre.
The people you will find oddly colourless and oddly likeable. Their curiosities are limited by their fatalism, and the stranger discovers with gratitude that he is not stared at. That agonizing sense of singularity which afflicts (for instance) the Englishman who carries gloves and a rolled-up umbrella through the streets of New York does not attend his wanderings in Moscow. He is far better dressed than anyone he meets; he is clearly that rarity, a bourgeois. But nobody takes much notice of him; he is not made to feel a freak and an intruder.
The people of Moscow are neither well nor picturesquely dressed. Apart from the blouse, which is quite often worn by the men, their clothes are conventionally, though ineptly, cut in the standard European style. In the centre of the town at any rate, there are no rags, no bare feet, no human skeletons. The streets are perpetually crowded, but the crowd is nondescript and unexciting. It drifts, chattering in a subdued way, and forms readily into patient queues at the tram-halts and outside the co-operative stores. In its eyes you can read no very explicit hope, and only occasionally despair. It is a phlegmatic, philosophical crowd. No doubt it needs to be.
One of the most curious things about modern Russia is the startling and universal ugliness of the women. Bolshevism appears to be incompatible with beauty. Across the frontier you will find the night-clubs of Harbin and Shanghai packed with the most ravishing creatures, all Russian, and mostly (by their own account) Romanoff. But in Moscow you search for a pretty, for even a passable face in vain. It is impossible not to admire the sagacity of their rulers, who have decreed that among Soviet citizens the married state is not to be looked on as a permanence. I do not see how it could be.
Even in the theatres you will draw blank. The Russian actress takes her art seriously. Years of intensive training are considered necessary to qualify her for a leading role, and our ingénues, who are in electric lights before they are out of their teens, have no counterpart in Russia. Moscow salutes no stars under the age of thirty; most of them are much more.
There is another curious thing about Soviet Russia, and that is how bad she is at window-dressing. I use the words figuratively, for the fault goes deeper than the Moscow shop windows.
One has always imagined that the Russians, though never much good at putting things through, always had a talent for carrying things off. A talent for carrying things off implies a capacity for making a good impression on the superficial observer, and that capacity underlies the great and increasingly important art of salesmanship. Now the rulers of Russia to-day – the men of real power – have almost all got Jewish blood in them, and who make good salesmen if it is not the Jews? It is, I repeat, a curious thing that the Russians should be so bad at window-dressing.
For they are bad. It requires an effort to look into the Moscow shop-windows. Those piles of wooden cheeses, that dummy ham, the cake on which the icing is enamel – surely they might be displayed to better advantage round the inevitable bust of Lenin? Surely that imposing frontage of plate glass, disfigured though it is by a long crack clumsily patched with plaster, need not reveal an array of goods quite so fly-blown, quite so unprepossessing? …
Across the street a big new building is nearing completion. Above its roof a huge red banner floats proudly on the breeze: or did so float a month ago, when they first hoisted it. Alas, it was made of inferior material; the winds have eroded the stuff, and the flag is now a shoddy and a listless fringe upon the naked pole. One more gesture has missed fire. …
The Kremlin, castellated and cupolaed with dentifricial abandon, has the splendid, compelling assurance of a strong place which is also a beautiful one. From the river bank opposite one admires its crouching outlines unreservedly. But why, oh why, does the clock which crowns a central tower announce the time as 12.15 when it is really half-past five? Why do they never carry things off?
I do not know the answer to that question.
1Its policy, I should add, is in part dictated by the attitude of the Soviet authorities, who, though not hostile, are high-handed.