According to T S Eliot’s widow Valerie, her husband was once told by a London taxi driver: ‘Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him: “Well, Lord Russell, what’s it all about?”, and, do you know, he couldn’t tell me’. The anecdote, which is paid tribute to in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), illustrates how the philosopher became, for many, one of the few men who seemed to know everything.
In 1920, Russell travelled to Russia as part of a ‘fact-finding’ trade delegation. Russell was a leading pacifist and socialist, but he found little to praise in the communist experiment taking place in Russia. He met a ‘heartbroken’ Gorky (see 1906: Mark Twain meets Maxim Gorky and talk of making Russia free), who was backing the Bolsheviks because he feared what might replace them; he begged Russell to keep in mind while making his judgment, ‘always to emphasize what Russia has suffered’.
Russell also met Lenin. In his autobiography, Russell records that he found Lenin ‘disappointing’ and glimpsed an ‘impish cruelty’ in the man. Later, he was to go further and told Alistair Cooke that he believed that Lenin was the most evil man he ever met: ‘He had steady black eyes that never flickered. I hoped to make them flicker at one point by asking him why it was thought necessary to murder hundreds of thousands of kulaks. He quite calmly ignored the word “murder”. He smiled and said they were a nuisance that stood in the way of his agricultural plans’ (Six Men, 1977).
Many other socialists came to Soviet Russia from the 1920s to the early 1980s, prepared to see a workers’ paradise and often came away convinced they had found it. Russell described such views as a ‘tragic delusion’, and set out his comments in The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1921). It is typical of Russell’s intellectual honesty that he knew the book would be welcomed by his political opponents in Britain, and would cause offence to fellow socialists, but published it anyway. Lenin’s new Russia was not a paradise, but a new variety of hell. Said Russell: ‘the time I spent in Russia was one of increasing nightmare, Cruelty, poverty, suspicion, persecution, formed the very air we breathed. There was a hypocritical pretence of equality, and everybody was called ‘tovarisch’, but as Russell pointed out, ‘comrade’ meant one thing when addressed to a peasant, another when addressed to Lenin.
What Happened Next
Other British socialists visited Lenin, including H G Wells, who described Lenin as a man who laughed a lot, but whose laugh was ‘grim’. Russia was a despotic regime, concluded Wells. Trotsky described Wells as ‘condescending’ and (the inevitable insult) ‘bourgeois’, but Wells and Russell are still read, and the USSR has long gone. See 1918: Fanny Kaplan shoots Lenin.