1
Living in Moscow and listening always to statements of doctrine and policy, you forget that Moscow is the centre of a country stretching over a sixth of the world’s surface and that the lives of a hundred and sixty million people, mostly peasants, are profoundly affected by discussions and resolutions that seem, when you hear or read of them in the press, as abstract as the proceedings of a provincial debating society. ‘We must collectivise agriculture’, or ‘We must root out kulaks’ (the rich peasants). How simple it sounds! How logical! But what is going on in the remote villages, in the small households of the peasants? What does this collectivisation of agriculture mean in practice in the lives of the peasantry? What results have the new ‘drive’ produced? What truth, if any, is there in the gloomy reports that have been reaching Moscow? That is what I wanted to find out. I set out to discover it in the North Caucasus and the Ukraine.
If you fall asleep in Moscow and then wake up and, looking out of a railway carriage window, find yourself in the Ukraine you suddenly feel gay and light-hearted. There are great sweeps of country, and you realise that Moscow is sombre and shut-in. Now you breathe again; now you see a horizon. Only, the way to go over the glistening snow would be not in an overheated railway compartment, with a gramophone playing stale jazz music, but in a sledge drawn by swift horses with silver bells round their necks and with the cold wind against your face.
A little market town in the Kuban district of the North Caucasus suggested a military occupation; worse, active war. There were soldiers everywhere, - Mongols with leaden faces and slit eyes; others obviously peasants, rough but not brutal; occasional officers, dapper, often Jews; all differing noticeably from the civilian population in one respect -they were all well fed and the civilian population were obviously starving. I mean starving in its absolute sense; not undernourished as for instance most Oriental peasants are undernourished or some unemployed workers in Europe, but having had for weeks next to nothing to eat. Later I found out there had been no bread at all in the place for three months, and such food as there was I saw for myself in the market. The only edible thing there of the lowest European standards was chicken - about five chickens, fifteen roubles each. No one was buying. Where could a peasant get fifteen roubles? For the most part, chickens - the few that remain - are sold at the railway stations to passengers on their way to the mountains in the South for a holiday or for a rest cure in a sanatorium.
The rest of the food offered for sale was revolting and would be thought unfit in the ordinary way to be offered even to animals. There was sausage at fifteen roubles the kilo; there was black cooked meat which worked out I calculated at a rouble for three bites; there were miserable fragments of cheese and some cooked potatoes, half rotten. A crowd wandered backwards and forwards eyeing these things wistfully, too poor to buy. The few who bought gobbled their purchases ravenously then and there.
‘How are things with you?’ I asked one man. He looked round anxiously to see that no soldiers were about. ‘We have nothing, absolutely nothing. They have taken everything away’, he said, and hurried on. This was what I heard again and again and again. ’We have nothing. They have taken everything away’ .It was quite true. They had nothing. It was also true that everything had been taken away .The famine is an organised one. Some of the food that has been taken away from them - and the peasants know this quite well - is still being exported to foreign countries.
It is impossible adequately to describe the melancholy atmosphere of this little market town; how derelict it was; the sense of hopelessness pervading the place, and this was not just because the population was, as it were, torn up by the roots. The class war has been waged vigorously in the North Caucasus, and the proletariat, represented by the G.P.U. (State Political Police) and the military, has utterly routed its enemies amongst the peasantry who tried to hide a little of their produce to feed themselves through the winter. Despite hostile elements, however, the North Caucasus distinguished itself by being 90 per cent collectivised, and then this year by fulfilling its grain delivery plan. As a result, this double effort has turned it into something like a wilderness - fields choked with weeds, cattle dead, people starving and dispirited, no horses for ploughing or transport, not even adequate supplies of seed for the spring sowing. The worst of the class war is that it never stops. First individual kulaks shot and exiled; then groups of peasants; then whole villages. I walked from street to street watching the faces of people, looking at empty shops. Even here a Torgsin shop; good food offered for gold; useful for locating any private hoards that organised extortion had failed to detect.
The little villages round-about were even more depressing than the market town. Often they seemed quite deserted. Only smoke coming from some of the chimneys told they were populated. In one of the larger villages I counted only five people in the street, and there was a soldier riding up and down on - a rare sight now in the North Caucasus - a fine horse. It is literally true that whole villages have been exiled. In some cases demobilised soldiers have been moved in to the places of the exiles; in some cases the houses are just left empty. I saw myself a group of some twenty peasants being marched off under escort. This is so common a sight it no longer even arouses curiosity. Everywhere I heard that the winter sowing had been miserably done, and that in any case the land was too weed-ridden to yield even a moderate crop. Though it was winter, in some places weeds still stood - taller than wheat and growing thickly. There were no cattle to be seen, and I was assured that in that part of the North Caucasus at least, there were none at all. They had been killed and eaten or died of starvation.
Occasionally along the road I met with little groups of peasants with rifles slung over their shoulders; men in fur caps, rough looking; a kind of armed militia that has also been mobilised on the kulak front. I wanted to find out about future prospects; whether the change from forced grain collections to a more moderately assessed tax-in-kind was going to make things better; what chances there were even now of retrieving the blunders of the last two years. It is difficult, however, to get people who are starving and who know that whatever happens, they must go on starving for at least three more months, and probably five, to talk about or take any great interest in the future. To them the question of bread, of how to get the food to keep just alive today and tomorrow, transcends all others. Starving people are not in a general way loquacious, particularly when to talk may be to qualify as a kulak and so for exile or worse. I was shown a piece of bread from Stavropol. It was made, I was told, of weeds and straw and a little millet. It seemed inconceivable that anyone could eat such bread; actually in the circumstances a rare delicacy.
The peasants in this region had to provide exports to pay for the Five-Year Plan; they had to be - to use an expression of Stalin’s in a lecture on the peasant question - ‘reserves of the proletariat’; and the ‘reserves’ had to be mobilised, made accessible - that is collectivised. It was not difficult for the Soviet Government to make collectivisation, in the quantitative sense, an enormous success - so enormous that even the Communist Party grew a little anxious and Stalin issued a public warning against ‘business from success’. In the event about 60 per cent of the peasantry and 80 per cent of the land were brought into collective farms; Communists with impeccable ideology were installed as directors of them; agronomes were to provide expert advice, tractors to replace horses, elevators to replace barns, and the practice of America combined with the theory of Marxism was to transform agriculture into a kind of gigantic factory staffed by an ardently class-conscious proletariat.
As things turned out the Communist directors were sometimes incompetent or corrupt; the agronomes, despite their scientific training, were in many cases a failure in dealing with the actual problems connected with producing food; horses died off for lack of fodder much faster than tractors were manufactured, and the tractors were mishandled and broken; the attitude of the peasants varied from actual sabotage or passive resistance to mere apathy, and was generally, to say the least, unhelpful; altogether in the qualitative sense, collectivisation was a failure. The immediate result was, of course, a falling off in the yield of agriculture as a whole. Last year this falling off became acute. None the less the Government quota had to be collected. To feed the cities and to provide even very much reduced food exports it was necessary for the Government’s agents to go over the country and take everything, or nearly everything, that was edible .At the same time, because the policy could not be wrong and therefore individuals and classes had to be at fault, there took place a new outburst of repression, directed this time not only against the kulaks but against every kind of peasant suspected of opposing the Government’s policy; against a good number of directors and the unfortunate agronomes. Shebboldaev, party secretary for the North Caucasus, said in a speech delivered at Rostov on November 12:
‘But, you may urge, is it not true that we have deported kulaks and counter-revolutionary elements before? We did deport them, and in sufficiently large numbers. But at the present moment, when what remains of the kulaks are trying to organise sabotage, every slacker must be deported. That is true justice. You may say that before, we exiled individual kulaks, and that now it concerns whole stanitzas (villages) and whole collective farms. If these are enemies they must be treated as kulaks. . .The general line of our party is to fight dishonesty by means of the extreme penalty, because this is the only defence we have against the destruction of our socialist economy’.
It is this ‘true justice’ that has helped greatly to reduce the North Caucasus to its present condition.
***
My train reached Rostov-on-Don -a fairly large town, capital of the North Caucasus - in the early morning before it was even light. I had been travelling ‘hard’ and trying to find out from some of the peasants in a crowded compartment where they were going and why. Many appeared to have no particular object in view; just a vague hope that things might be better somewhere else. In Russia, as in most other parts of the world, there is much aimless movement just now from one place to another. One peasant however had a specific object; he wanted to join the army because, he said, one was fed in the army. On the platform a group of peasants were standing in military formation; five soldiers armed with rifles guarded them. They were men and women, each carrying a bundle. Somehow, lining them up in military formation made the thing grotesque - wretched looking peasants, half-starved, tattered clothes, frightened faces, standing to attention. These may be kulaks, I thought, but they have made a mighty poor thing of exploiting their fellows. I hung about looking on curiously, wanting to ask where they were to be sent - to the North to cut timber, somewhere else to dig canals - until one of the guards told me sharply to take myself off.
In Rostov I had a letter of introduction, which I presented, and found myself in a large car with a guide. ‘There we’re building new Government offices, eight stories high; there a new theatre and opera house to seat 3,000,with living quarters behind for the actors; a new factory that three years ago didn’t exist, blocks of flats for the workers, the latest machinery and sanitation’ .I began to forget the group of peasants being lined up in military formation on a cold railway platform in the very early morning. Showmanship - most characteristic product of the age - worked its magic.’Have you got bread here in Rostov?’I asked weakly.’Bread? Of course we’ve got bread; as much as we can eat’. It was not true but they had a certain amount of bread. One might go all over Russia like this, I thought - on a wave of showmanship. It explained something that has so often puzzled me.
How is it that so many obvious and fundamental facts about Russia are not noticed even by serious and intelligent visitors? Take, for instance, the most obvious and fundamental fact of all.There is not 5 per cent of the population whose standard of life is equal to or nearly equal to, that of the unemployed in England who are on the lowest scales of relief. I make this statement advisedly, having checked it on the basis of the family budgets in Mr. Fenner Brockway’s recent book Hungry England, which certainly did not err on the side of being too optimistic.
In the evening I joined a crowd in a street. It was drifting up and down while a policeman was blowing his whistle; dispersing just where he was and re-forming again behind him. Some of the people in the crowd were holding fragments of food, inconsiderable fragments that in the ordinary way a housewife would throw away or give to the cat. Others were examining these fragments of food. Every now and then an exchange took place. Often, as in the little market town, what was bought was at once consumed. I turned into a nearby church. It was crowded. A service was proceeding; priests investments and with long hair were chanting prayers, little candle flames lighting the darkness, incense rising. How to understand? How to form an opinion? What did it mean? What was the significance? The voices of the priests were dim, like echoes, and the congregation curiously quiet, curiously still.
I dined with a number of Communists. They were so friendly and sincere. ‘About this peasant business?’ I asked. They smiled, having an answer ready. ‘As the factories were in 1920 so now the farms. We’ve built up heavy industry; the next task is agriculture. Fifteen collective farm workers have gone to Moscow to a conference. Comrade Stalin will address them. This year we will plant so many hectares, which will produce so many pounds of grain. Then next year...’
‘Are you quite sure’, I wanted to ask, ‘that the parallel is correct - factories and land? Isn’t agriculture somehow more sensitive, lending itself less to statistical treatment? Will people torn up by the roots make things grow, even if you drive them into the fields at the end of a rifle?’ It is, however, as impossible to argue against a General Idea as against an algebraic formula.
The Ukraine is more a separate country than the North Caucasus. It has a language of its own and an art of its own; southern rather than eastern, with white, good houses and easy-going people. Even now you can see it has been used to abundance. There is nothing pinchbeck about the place; only as in the North Caucasus, the population is starving. ’Hunger’ was the word I heard most. Peasants begged a lift on the train from one station to another, sometimes their bodies swollen up - a disagreeable sight - from lack of food. There were fewer signs of military terrorism than in the North Caucasus, though I saw another party of, presumably, kulaks being marched away under an armed guard at Dnipropetrovsk; the little towns and villages seemed just numb and the people in too desperate a condition to even actively resent what had happened.
Otherwise it was the same story -cattle and horses dead; fields neglected, meagre harvests despite moderately good climatic conditions; all the grain that was produced taken by the Government; no bread at all, no bread anywhere, nothing much else either; despair and bewilderment. The Ukraine was before the Revolution one of the world’s largest wheat producing areas, and even Communists admit that its population, including the poor peasants, enjoyed a tolerably comfortable standard of life; now it would be necessary to go to Arabia to find cultivators in more wretched circumstances. Here too, there are new factories, a huge new power station at Dnieprostroi, a huge new square at Kharkov with huge Government buildings - and food being exported from Odessa.
In a village about 25 kilometres from Kyiv (old capital of the Ukraine - enchanting town - now Kharkov is the capital) I visited a collective farm worker or kolhoznik. His wife was in the outer room of their cottage sifting millet. There were also three chickens in the outer room, and on the wall two icons, a bouquet made of coloured paper and a wedding group, very gay.
‘How are things?’ I asked.
‘Bad’, she answered.
‘Why?’
‘Only potatoes and millet to eat since August’.
‘No bread or meat?’
‘None’.
‘Were things better before you joined the collective farm?’
‘Much better’.
‘Why did you join, then?’
‘Oh, I don’t know’.
She opened a door leading to an inner room to call her husband. He was lying on the stove, but got up when she called and came in to us carrying one child and with another following him. Both children were obviously undernourished. I told the man that I was interested in collective farms, and he was ready to talk. ’I was a poor peasant’ ,he said, ’with a hectare and a half of land. I thought that things would be better for me on the collective farm’.
‘Well, were they?’
He laughed, ’Not at all; much worse’.
‘Worse than before the Revolution?’
He laughed again. ‘Much, much worse. Before the Revolution we had a cow and something to feed it with; plenty of bread, meat sometimes. Now nothing but potatoes and millet’.
‘What’s happened, then? Why is there no bread in the Ukraine?’
‘Bad organisation. They send people from Moscow who know nothing; ordered us here to grow vegetables instead of wheat. We didn’t know how to grow vegetables and they couldn’t show us. Then we were told that we must put our cows all together and there’d be plenty of milk for our children, but the expert who advised this forgot to provide a cow shed, so we had to put our cows in the sheds of the rich peasants, who, of course, let them starve’.
‘I thought you’d got rid of all the rich peasants?’
‘We did but their agents remain’.
‘What about the winter sowing?’
‘Very bad’.
‘Why?’
‘Again bad organisation. People lost heart and stopped working. Weeds everywhere, and, with the cattle dead, no manure; no horses to transport fertiliser, even if it was available’. He hushed his voice, ‘There are enemies even on the Council of the collective farm. Now, they wouldn’t elect me to the Council’.
‘Some grain must have been produced. What happened to it?’
‘All taken by the Government’.
‘It’ll be better in that respect this year. You’ll only have to pay tax-in-kind - so much per hectare - and not deliver a quota for the whole district. When you’ve paid the tax-in-kind you’ll have about two-thirds of the crop left to yourselves’.
‘If we get as big a crop as they estimate. But we shan’t - not with the land in such a bad condition and with no horses. They’ll take everything again’.
He showed me his time-book. His pay was seventy-five kopeks a day. At open market prices seventy-five kopeks would buy half a slice of bread. He said that for the most part he spent the money on fuel. Sometimes he bought a little tobacco. Nothing else. No clothes, of course, or boots, or anything like that.
‘What about the future?’ I asked. He put on a characteristic peasant look; half resignation and half cunning.
‘We shall see’.
***
When I got back to Moscow I found that Stalin had delivered himself of this opinion to a conference of collective farm shock-brigade workers:
‘By developing collective farming we succeeded in drawing this entire mass of poor peasants into collective farms, in giving them security and raising them to the level of middle peasants . . . what does this mean? It means that no less than 30,000,000 of the peasant population have been saved from poverty and from kulak slavery, and converted, thanks to collective farms, into people assured of a livelihood. This is a great achievement, comrades. This is an achievement such as the world has never known and such as not a single State in the world has ever before secured’.
All the available evidence goes to show that conditions in the Upper, Middle and Lower Volga districts are as bad as in the North Caucasus and the Ukraine; in Western Siberia they are little, if at all, better. No one knows what supplies of grain the Government has at its disposal, but as I have already pointed out, the food situation cannot improve before the summer and is likely to deteriorate. The spring sowing will be a critical time; all the resources of the Government and the Communist Party are to be used to make it a success. Already intensive propaganda is being carried on, and ‘political departments’, manned chiefly by the military and the G.P.U., have been brought into existence in all parts of the country. These will be responsible for executing the Government’s policy and, of course, vigorously carrying on the class war.
Even so, will it suffice? Will it suffice, even assuming the best possible conditions - good weather, the peasants propagandised, cajoled and coerced into working well, sufficient tractors repaired and properly handled to make good to some extent the lost horses, everyone, including town populations, mobilised for clearing weeds, enough seed made available and so on? As one says complacently of so much else in Russia, it will be an interesting experiment - interesting, that is, for the onlooker; for the actual participators often more disagreeable than interesting. In any case, it is certainly true that, unless the decay of agriculture that began when the collectivisation policy was first started and that has gone on at an increasing rate ever since, is stopped; unless, that is to say, the Government is able to produce a better crop this year than last, there will be famine not merely in certain districts but throughout the country.
It was strange in a way to return to Moscow, where the General Idea reigns supreme and where you have no alternative but to take it for granted. There can seldom have been in the history of the world a more curious tyranny than the Soviet regime - not just personal, based on an individual’s or a group of individuals’ appetite for absolute power; not an autocracy like, for instance, the British Raj in India, based on expediency, on there being no other way of dealing with a particularly confused set of social circumstances; but a tyranny that developed inevitably out of a General Idea and that can, by its very nature, only become more and more absolute. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat has come to mean the Dictatorship of the Communist Party; and the Dictatorship of the Communist Party has come to mean the Dictatorship of the Polit-Bureau; and the Dictatorship of the Polit-Bureau has come to mean the Dictatorship of Stalin; the Dictatorship of Stalin has come to mean the Dictatorship of the General Idea with which he is obsessed. If the General Idea is fulfilled it can only be by bringing into existence a slave State.
The tendency in Russia is towards a slave State. First the old aristocracy and bourgeoisie were enslaved. Who cared about that? They had their day, abused their privileges, and it was fitting that they should cut timber and dig canals for the proletariat they had tyrannised. But when the old aristocracy and bourgeoisie had been enslaved the General Idea was as far from fulfilment as ever. It can only be fulfilled when it dominates the lives of the whole population. And since the vast majority of men resist such a domination they must be forced to submit. Fear forces them -fear of losing their bread rations; fear of being driven from where they live; fear of being informed against to the police. The present battle is between the General Idea and the peasants.
I arrived back in Moscow to find the newspapers full of reports of speeches by various members of the Government about the agricultural situation that had been delivered to a Conference of the Collective Farm Shock-Brigade Workers. It is impossible, through the censorship, to comment on these speeches, which bear no relation at all to the realities of the situation. To say that there is famine in some of the most fertile parts of Russia is to say much less than the truth; there is not only famine but - in the case of the North Caucasus at least - a state of war, a military occupation. In both the Ukraine and the North Caucasus the grain collection has been carried out with such thoroughness and brutality that the peasants are now quite without bread. Thousands of them have been exiled; in certain cases whole villages have been sent to the North for forced labour; even now it is a common sight to see parties of wretched men and women, labelled kulaks, being marched away under an armed guard.
The fields are neglected and full of weeds; no cattle are to be seen anywhere, and few horses; only the military and the GPU are well fed, the rest of the population obviously starving, obviously terrorised. There is no hope - at least until the summer - of conditions improving. In fact they must get worse. The winter sowing has been neglected. Only a small area has been sown at all, and that badly.The general condition of the land and the lack of transport make it unlikely, whatever efforts the government may make, that the spring sowing will be much better.
At the conference there were violent outbursts against the kulaks. Where failure existed they were responsible; they had falsified the accounts, hidden grain, broken machines, organised sabotage and passive resistance against the Government. But for them the peasants would have faithfully yielded up all they had produced and then have waited patiently through the winter, with little or nothing to eat, to do the same things again this year. Our new slogan, Stalin said, must be to make every collective farm worker well-to-do. It is an admirable slogan; to judge, however, by the facts of the case, the Government’s slogan would seem to have been hitherto to take from every collective farm worker everything he had - even the minimum amount of food required for his own and his family’s consumption.
In any case, the Government’s policy is based not on persuasion or concession but on force. ‘Political departments’, manned chiefly by GPU. and military, have been set up all over the country, and these will be responsible for raising and collecting a harvest. They will drive the peasants into the fields; they will make them work; they will collect most of what they produce. If necessary they will mobilise town populations for work on the land, as by a decree published in an Archangel newspaper, the whole population in that district was mobilised to cut timber because the export quota was unfulfilled. The spring sowing will be carried out, if at all, as a result of coercion. The Government realises at last how serious the situation is, and, to deal with it, employs its familiar tactics -speeches, slogans, enthusiastic conferences in Moscow; in the villages, ruthless, organised force.
2
Marxism is the most urban religion that has ever existed. It was born in underground printing presses, in squalid London lodgings, in dingy cafés and third-rate hotels; its prophets were wanderers from one European capital to another whose dreams, like themselves, were rootless, took no account of earth or of things growing or of allegiances; not having any contact with civilisation, hating civilisation, they saw the future as do some capitalists - their prototypes - in terms of machines and papers and columns of grey, regimented men and women who shout obedient slogans and build mechanically a hideous paradise.
What the Bolsheviks have done in the towns of Russia is nothing; a kind of inverted American boom; a kind of morbid equivalent of the general post-war economic extravagance; a thing that might pass and be quickly forgotten. The particular horror of their rule is what they have done in the villages. This, I am convinced, is one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened.
If you go now to the Ukraine or the North Caucasus, exceedingly beautiful countries and formerly amongst the most fertile in the world, you will find them like a desert; fields choked with weeds and neglected; no livestock or horses; villages seeming to be deserted, sometimes actually deserted; peasants famished, often their bodies swollen, unutterably wretched. You will discover, if you question them, that they have had no bread at all for three months past; only potatoes and some millet, and that now they are counting their potatoes one by one because they know nothing else will be available to eat until the summer, if then. They will tell you that many have already died of famine, and that many are dying every day; that thousands have been shot by the government and hundreds of thousands exiled; that it is a crime, punishable by the death sentence without trial, for them to have grain in their houses.
They will only tell you these things, however, if no soldier or stranger is within sight. At the sight of a uniform or of someone properly fed, whom they assume, because of that fact, to be a Communist or a Government official, they change their tone and assure you that they have everything in the way of food and clothing that the heart of man can desire, and that they love the dictatorship of the proletariat, and recognise thankfully the blessings it has brought to them. Strange as it may seem, a certain number of these poor wretches are from time to time made to speak in this strain to parties of tourists. I found that the name of Bernard Shaw was known to them. They spoke of him privately in the same tone, and spitting as venomously, as when they spoke of Stalin.
I saw these conditions for myself in the North Caucasus and the Ukraine, and heard from many sources, some Russian, some foreign, and some even Communist, that similar conditions prevailed in all the agricultural districts of Russia. This is unquestionably the case. It is impossible to describe the horror of it. I saw in India villages devastated by cholera. It was terrible. They were dead villages. Yet plagues pass, and I knew that the villages would fill again with living people. I saw in Belgium villages devastated by war. They, too, were dead villages. Yet even the war had ended, and I knew that the villages would fill again with living people. Villages devastated by the Bolsheviks were terrible beyond words because there seemed no end. It was as though a blight had settled on the country. It was a though nothing would ever grow there again. It was as though the peasants, their lives torn up by the roots, were ghosts haunting a place where they had once lived and been happy.
Why should it ever stop? I asked myself - soldiers, impersonal, some of them Mongols with leaden faces and slit eyes; members of the GPU, dapper, well-fed, often Jews, carrying out the orders of the dictatorship of the proletariat, destroying more surely than barbarians (who come with sword and fire, things relatively clean) the life, the soul of a country. Why should it ever stop until there is no class-enemy left to destroy
-that is, no-one left; and no grain left to collect because none planted? Thinking it over afterwards ,I came to the conclusion that the thing could only be explained on the supposition that the dictatorship of the proletariat hated Russia and was determined to destroy Russia even though thereby it also destroyed itself.
From the beginning, the Bolsheviks have regarded the peasants as so much raw material for carrying out their plans. They gave them the land in order to get power, and, having got power, took the land away from them. After the famine of 1921; after the Kronstadt revolt, when those whom Trot-sky had called ‘the pride and the glory of the Revolution’ demanded, amongst other things, free elections and a secret ballot; liberty of speech and of the Press for workers and peasants; the right to organise Trade Unions; equal rations for all who worked; and when they were, in consequence, shot down in hundreds by Trotsky’s orders, and then handed over to the GPU, that had run away when the revolt started, for an orgy of sadistic revenge - after all this, the peasants were given the right to trade freely with their produce. As soon, however, as they began to grow prosperous again, the promises that had been made to them were broken. Those peasants who, because they were more industrious or more unscrupulous or more intelligent than their fellows, had prospered, were treated as dangerous criminals; the New Economic Policy, like the Torgsin shops, was a means of locating thrift and wealth in order to destroy the one and steal the other.
Collectivisation and de-kulakisation followed. The peasants were driven, mostly at the end of a rifle, into collective farms, which, being incompetently and often corruptly directed by picked Communists, have failed to produce enough food to feed the town populations, let alone provide exports to pay for Socialist construction. Last autumn and winter the Government’s agents went over the country like a swarm of locusts taking everything edible, and leaving behind them a desert. The dictatorship of the proletariat has entrusted the task of making this desert fruitful again to its ‘flaming sword,’ the GPU which, under the name of ‘political departments’ established in every machine-tractor-station and State farm - that is, everywhere - will attempt to produce crops by the same methods as those by which timber has been produced for export.
To all intents and purposes the whole peasantry has been arrested and sentenced to forced labour. The proletariat’s ‘flaming sword’ is at its best in dealing with helpless, unorganised, starved people; even so, a hundred million peasants may well prove unmanageable. If not, if, under the patronage of ‘political departments,’ the fields bear abundantly, then a new and most hideous kind of slavery will have to be reckoned with, a slavery different from, and more awful than, any hitherto known in the world.
***
In the centre of Moscow and opposite the Foreign Office, which is in every sense of the word a sort of annex to it, stands the headquarters of the GPU -a solid building; the best designed and most substantially built in Russia since the Revolution; equipped with offices, a prison, a slaughterhouse, an excellently stocked restaurant and multiple store reserved exclusively for its personnel. Altogether a comfortable, attractive place, always busy, always with people passing in and out, mostly men in uniform, very smart, very important looking, very contemptuous in their manner towards what Trotsky speaks of so often and so affectionately in his ‘History of the Russian Revolution’ as the ‘broad’ or ‘toiling’ masses. It need scarcely be said that this building is not one which tourists are shown over when they visit Moscow.
The GPU embodies all the fear, all the distrust, all the passion to be revenged on society, all the hatred of civilisation and of human happiness that lives in the soul of Bolshevism. It is the soul of Bolshevism; and as time goes on, as the trivial hypocrisies in which Bolshevism has dressed itself - in order to deceive and flatter and use for its purposes the frustrated intellectuals of civilised Europe and uncivilised America -tend to get thrown aside, it emerges as the ultimate authority in Russia, the very dictatorship of the proletariat.
No one who has not seen it for himself can understand the terror that this organisation inspires, not merely in avowed enemies of the Soviet régime - ex-bourgeoisie, priests, people who were for any reason privileged under the old social order - but in the whole population. It is not so much that they dread what the GPU may do to them, though it can do anything without anyone, even their nearest relatives, knowing; they dread the thing itself, because of its nature, because it is utterly evil, because it is morbid, because it belongs to those fearful distortions and perversions that exist in all human beings, but that, in a civilised society, emerge only occasionally in some criminal or madman.
I often used to think, when I was in Russia, that the general attitude towards the GPU must be like the general attitude in the Middle Ages towards the Powers of Darkness - quite irrational; quite unrelated to knowledge or experience of its manner of working; yet somehow understandable, somehow in keeping with the facts of the case. There is, mixed up with it all, a kind of mysticism. I turned up once in a back number of ‘Pravda’ an obituary notice of Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka and first head of the GPU, written by his successor. It described Dzerzhinsky as a saint, an ascetic, a man who rose above petty bourgeois emotions like pity, or a respect for justice or for human life; a man of infinite industry; a rare spirit whose revolutionary passion was unearthly and uncontaminated. The very prose of the obituary notice was lyrical. It had a rhythm like a religious chant. I thought, and still think, that I had found in it the quintessence of revolution; and I hated this quintessence because it was a denial of everything that has been gained in the slow, painful progress of civilisation; because it was beastly, because it idealised and spiritualised evil; because it glorified destruction and death; and, going beneath the animal, beneath hate, beneath lust, beneath every kind of appetite, founded itself on impulses which, though they have in the past sometimes been organised into abominable, underground cults, have never before held sway over a hundred and sixty million people inhabiting a sixth of the world’s surface.
This is the Terror .The people who execute it are naturally not normal. Most of them are not Russians. I counted in the Presiduum of the GPU only two unquestionably Russian names. The present acting head is a Polish Jew. A good number of the underlings are also Jews, with a fair sprinkling of Letts and Poles. The ‘flaming sword of the proletariat’ has been forged in ghettoes and wherever are collected men with a grudge against their fellows and against society; and the population of Russia lives, terrified, under its shadow. It is a product of pogroms, and is itself the greatest pogrom of history. To attempt to make its acts or its procedure conform with a civilised judicial system, as did certain politicians and newspapers in connection with the recent Metropolitan-Vickers affair - to judge them on that basis is like trying to read military strategy into the frenzied movements of a frightened tiger, or, better, to extract enlightened moral principles from the ravings of a diseased mind.
The theory of the class war has provided the GPU with an instrument after its own heart, the class enemy is anyone, and it is the business of the GPU to destroy the class enemy. Since the class war cannot end until the dictatorship of the proletariat has ‘liquidated’ itself - that is, never - it offers the GPU a prospect of unending activity. Priests and relics of the old Tsarist bourgeoisie, even kulaks, have become vieux jeu when the whole peasantry is available, and when, thanks to the passport system, the town populations have been delivered into its hands.
The GPU is responsible for defining class enemies, for sentencing them, and for executing the sentence .It decides that a Ukrainian peasant who has hidden a few poods of grain in his house to feed himself and his family through the winter when everything else has been requisitioned by the Government, is a class enemy, and, accordingly, either shoots or exiles him. It has spies everywhere, listening, watching; every so often it unearths or invents - scarcely, I believe, itself knowing which - a counter-revolutionary plot, and, by torture and threats and bribery, gathers the material for a spectacular State trial. Like some criminals ,it has a morbid appetite for publicity, and loves to figure on the front page in foreign newspapers; like all diseased minds, it is morbidly curious about everyone and everything, and makes a speciality of using for its purposes facts about the private lives of people who have fallen into its hands or whom it wishes for any reason to terrorise. The weak are its particular prey; and it is able, even without violence, even without their knowing how it has happened, to reduce them to a condition in which they will confess anything, promise anything.
Bolsheviks justify the class war on the ground that it is necessary in order to achieve a state of classlessness. Actually, however, its directors have evolved into a ruling class more privileged and more powerful than any other in the world; a ruling class that has power of life and death over the whole population, that is utterly irresponsible in the exercise of its privileges, that is beyond criticism because to criticise it is to criticise the dictatorship of the proletariat, which means to be guilty of treason against the Soviet State and to qualify for the death sentence. While social inequalities are being ruthlessly smoothed out at one end of society, new and more arbitrary and more pronounced inequalities are coming into existence at the other. Each layer of class enemies that is destroyed reveals another whose destruction is necessary.
This is worse than civil war. It is a people making war on itself. It is war by the proletariat for the proletariat on the proletariat. It is the dictatorship of the proletariat blockading the dictatorship of the proletariat. In consequence of this class war, Russia has become a battlefield and the Russians a subject people. As the productivity of these subject people and of this battlefield becomes more and more inadequate, the Soviet Government calls for more and more frenzied activity on the ‘class war front’ - a vicious circle which seems to bear out Danton’s gloomy prophecy - made when, having sent many to the guillotine, he realised that he would shortly find his way there himself - that revolutions, after they have consumed everyone else, at last consume themselves.
3
The Kingdom of Heaven on Earth has haunted this Generation, as the Evangelical’s Hell haunted our fathers, but much more disastrously, since eternal torment at least pre-supposes eternal life – that is, Eternity and sin – that is, imperfection; whereas the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth is all pretence, a denial of the very nature of life. If an epitaph were required for this sad and terrible time, it might well be found in ‘The Kingdom of Heaven on Earth’.
The basic error is to suppose that under any circumstances there might be a perfect State, since the very existence of a State at all is a symptom of imperfection; or, under any circumstances a perfect law, since Law exists only because Man is imperfect, sinful, because of the Fall. Heaven and Hell are conceivable, but the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth is inconceivable. Otherwise, it would have come to pass long ago, and there have been no occasion for Satan to tempt Christ by showing him the Kingdoms of the Earth or for Christ to reject them. Otherwise, Christ would have lived instead of dying, and the long, troubled history of mankind be shorn of its horror and its glory.
What does it mean, a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth? It means that it would be possible so to arrange matters that there would be no injustice, no exploitation, no conflict, no having of our reward according as we pursue power or lust or love; it means that Man, imperfect Man, could create a perfect environment, and therefore that there is nothing in the universe greater than Man, no God, and nothing in living on this earth for a few years except living on this earth for a few years; it means that religion, art, all the obscure longings which from age to age, from civilization to civilization, have led individuals to reach beyond the bounds of Flesh and Time, have been a vain delusion.
That is Hell if you like, the materialist’s hell or doom, the most frightful which has ever been envisaged. It would be a fascinating, though sombre, pursuit to trace this idea from its origins, and through all its manifold phases – whether in terms of scientific marvels like those HG Wells envisaged, or of social felicity such as the Fabians and Marxists and all their many affiliates have long proclaimed, or of mere asinine sensual well-being such as Walt Whitman, DH Lawrence and others pointed to as the fulfilment of life. Materialism is the soil in which it has grown; first a little, tender shoot - education which was to perfect the mind, science which was to perfect the body and its circumstances, original goodness in these favourable conditions blossoming,and everyone healthy, wealthy and wise for ever and ever.
The little, tender shoot did not fulfil its promise, but ripened into an alarming crop. Many became literate, yes; but what did they read? Wealth accumulated, yes; but how was it spent and how distributed? Original goodness blossomed, yes; but its manifestations were indistinguishable from the manifestations of original sin, except that they were unbridled, unashamed, arrogant. The confidently announced Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, in fact, failed to put in an appearance. Instead, there was the most ferocious war in history; poverty and misery and suffering without end.
What was now to be done? God and the Kingdom of Heaven Within had been abolished to prepare for the coming of a Kingdom of Heaven Without, which had not materialised; but something still remained -hatred, greed, fear, all the terrible passions which flesh is heir to. These remained, and might be mobilised, first to achieve power, then, having achieved it, as an instrument of Terror. Preach hatred, not just for the purpose of waging a war, but as an everlasting gospel, a means of bringing to pass the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth!
Insist, that instead of it being possible for the strong and the weak, the wise and the foolish, the crippled and the wholeof-limb, the sick and the healthy, to live peaceably together because they are brothers, having one father, God, the only possibility is for the strong utterly to destroy the weak - one class, the proletariat, destroying all others; one race, the German, triumphing over all others. Call the result, whatever it may be, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth; lie and lie and lie to persuade that it really is so and whoever refuses at any rate to pretend to be convinced, kill.
4
Terrorism has been an invariable accompaniment of Nazi rule, whether in Germany or in those territories which have been, by subterfuge or force of arms, brought under German domination .As its name implies, it is the promotion of a state of blind unreasoning fear.
The basis of all civilization is the codification of law; the community’s moral sense finds expression in laws, and though their observance is based in the last resort on fear of the consequences of contravening them, such fear, being dependent on a known contingency, is inoffensive, mild, with no nightmarish quality in it.
Terrorism, the negation of law, aims at creating an enduring state of fear, not of particular consequences of particular acts, but nameless, like a child’s fear in the dark. Only by means of terrorism was it possible for Nazi rule to be established. Law implies the application of reason to human affairs, to judicial settlement of disputes, the possibility of different point of view whose validity must be carefully weighed. Such conceptions are abhorrent to those whose leader has laid down the principle that truth must not be investigated objectively, but only its favourable aspects presented. Law had to be destroyed and replaced by terrorism.
Where law reigns, a knock at the front door at night will not unduly disturb those within; if they are law-abiding, they need not dread police visitations, and they have sufficient confidence in the establishment of public order to be unafraid of private molestation.
When terrorism reigns, any household, however blameless, will be thrown into a state of perturbation by an unknown visitor who comes at night. That their consciences are clear provides no guarantee that they may not have deserved punishment, others as innocent as themselves, they know, have been taken away, and it may now be their turn. In such circumstances, the authorities are more like tribal Gods, unaccountable in their rage, requiring to be propitiated, than an expression of the general will to be orderly and secure.
It is difficult for those who have grown up in an orderly society whose structure they take for granted, to imagine themselves subjected to terrorism. The edifice of a law seems so firmly constructed, their individual rights so securely established, that they cannot envisage a state of lawlessness in which there are no individual rights whatsoever, and the whole population is reduced to a condition of servitude.
So ordinary Germans felt before 1933. Even Hitler then protested his respect for constitutional procedure, and a Nazi dictatorship seemed inconceivable. When Hitler actually became Chancellor, still it was thought, within Germany and without, that Civil Law, institutions like the Supreme Court, the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches, were beyond his reach.
This was to leave terrorism out of account .Almost Hitler’s first act as head of State was to institute the Gestapo, the secret police, on the pattern of the Soviet Ogpu. By means of the Gestapo, it was possible to frighten everyone, and to make them, being frightened, subservient. Unorthodoxy, that is, not being an ostentatiously zealous National Socialist, became a crime deserving of punishment; and the said Gestapo was responsible for arresting whoever was ,or might be, guilty of this crime, sentencing him and executing the sentence.
In effect, the whole population was delivered into the Gestapo’s hands. Against anyone a criminal charge might plausibly be preferred, since anyone was liable to have expressed or thought some opinion critical of the Government. Safety, if at all attainable, lay in expressing no opinions at all, in not even thinking just echoing officially provided slogans loudly and earnestly. It was as though the whole population had been arrested and provisionally released, instead of, as where there is a law, arrests being provisional until guilt has been proved. Everyone was in the position of prisoners on remand, and liable at any moment to be brought for trial on an unspecified charge.
Is it wonderful, then, that they were meek and servile? A conversation casually entered into might betray some trifling unorthodoxy, and mean being swallowed up in a concentration camp; professional advancement, livelihood, depended on not being suspected of anti-Nazi sentiments, and personalities, of family and of friendship, provided a means of oppression. The duty of spying on one another was assiduously preached, and the child who reported his father’s lack of zeal was held up to admiration. Laughter was highly dangerous, a neglected or carelessly muttered ‘Heil Hitler’ was a serious misdemeanour.
By such means it is possible for an unscrupulous and ruthless minority to impose its dictatorship on the majority; to make them obedient, apparently amenable to any policy, however violent and inconsistent, and to inculcate them with any doctrine, however unreasonable and absurd. Unity of purpose is achieved, but by imposition from without, not by conviction from within. It is the unity of the chain-gang. In the process of achieving this chain-gang unity, whatever differentiates a civilised community from its jungle origins is lost.
There can be no trust between man and man when all are in duty bound to act as informers; there can be no intellectual or moral integrity when opinions are dictated and any deviation from them punished; there can be no learning or art, no pursuit of truth at all, when the free exercise of curiosity and speculation is made a crime. Human life, so confined, is something very paltry, lacking in dignity, insignificant. Whatever is fine and permanent in human achievement has been realised through individuals courageously facing the circumstances of their being; and a society is civilised to the extent to which it makes this possible. Terrorism, which aims at putting out the spiritual light, is the antithesis of civilisation.
The atmosphere it creates is one of omnipresent fear; the personnel it relies on must inevitably be the most cruel and odious members of the community, since only those will undertake the task of deliberately, systematically, terrifying their fellows. Himmler, head of the Gestapo, has become this type of terrorist, moving secretly and acting suddenly, always dreaded. When new territory is occupied, he is the first to arrive on the scene and with his arrival, the reign of terrorism begins, another devastated area is created.
All who have ever given evidence of a capacity for independent thought must flee or hide themselves; what was formerly considered virtue becomes vice, and things which were abhorrent, are exalted. As punishment for no evident reason is more productive of fear than punishment for a stated cause, the terrorist gives no explanation of his seizures. Laws, even when they are unjust, are at least formulated, and immunity may be achieved by observing them; without formulated laws, there can be no immunity for anyone. The machinery for enforcing the observance of laws exists, but the laws which are to be enforced, are not defined. Coercion is unaccountable, and therefore universally and constantly dreaded.
This is Tyranny in its most extreme form. Even absolute monarchs were held accountable to God, but terrorism requires no earthly or heavenly sanction. It is power, naked and unbridled; relentless as a forest fire, which as it sweeps along, destroys everything and everyone.
5
On a bright September Sunday, when the church congregations at morning service had barely emerged, in accents of quavering ferocity Mr. Neville Chamberlain announced that another war had begun. Almost immediately afterwards the sirens sounded, and into the blue sky, with one accord, rose the captive balloons. It seemed that the moment of ecstatic destruction had come. The prophecy was to be fulfilled, a great bonfire to be made. Civilization was to be destroyed; a dreaded, but still longed-for, calamity was about to come to pass. All the despair, all the bewilderment, all the unreal hopes and unmeant resolution of years were to find now an ultimate fulfilment in death and destruction raining from the skies. There was a pause, like the period of stillness before a tropical storm breaks; the little silence, which precedes, alike, the ecstasy of life and of death. Everyone waited - and nothing happened.
Every circumstance of war existed, except war. Forces had been mobilised, air-raid precautions organised, black-out imposed, hospital beds cleared, even cardboard coffins prepared for the dead. Well-meaning ladies presented themselves to organise canteens, including some, now ancient, associated with similar enterprises in the past;in the War Office there was a frenzy of activity, and at recruiting offices queues formed. About the dark streets traffic moved cautiously; theatres, cinemas, and other places of amusement closed their doors, and from Broadcasting House came an incessant stream of news, exhortations and solemnity. In the lately completed London University building in Bloomsbury, a vast, miscellaneous company assembled with the general object of informing and enlightening.
With great secrecy, and ancient and largely obsolete equipment, a British Expeditionary Force was assembled to proceed to France. It duly proceeded there, without, as was proudly claimed, the loss of a single life. Like a revived performance after a long interval of a once successful play, properties, costumes, make-up, were brought out of the boxes in which they had been stored away, and lines learnt long ago remembered and spoken again. If the production proceeded somewhat haltingly and laboriously, it still proceeded - leading lady no longer youthful, haggard in the limelight, and the chorus as they kicked their legs in the air less nimble than when the show was first put on a quarter of a century before. Though, however, the actors still could be made up to give a plausible representation of their former roles, still could speak their lines with some conviction, the attention of the audience showed signs of wandering. Somehow, something was wrong. There was a lack of relation between what was being said and done and what was happening - or rather not happening. Breeches and polished boots which made their way at lunchtime from the War Office to clubs in Pall Mall, belonged to another setting; their wearers accoutred for some other war - lean and somewhat woeful faces, occasionally with monocles, surveying a scene which they found puzzling [yet] scarcely knew why. Mahogany naval visages likewise seemingly bewildered; and characters emerging from the Treasury, umbrella on arm, somehow lost looking, as they gazed down Whitehall at Big Ben, and up at Nelson’s column; seemingly relieved to find these two familiar landmarks still extant. Everything was proceeding according to plan, and yet a doubt obstinately remained.
The absence of action evoked in some breasts the hope that the war, which never was to happen, and ostensibly had happened, might, after all, never happen. It seemed so extraordinary, when such sudden devastation had been prophesied, that, in fact, there should be neither death nor destruction; a state of war but no warfare. Perhaps even now, despite all that had been said and done, it was only a crisis, like other past crises, and would pass. Perhaps, as before, there would be negotiations, moments of tension, and then order-papers waved in Parliament; late editions spreading the good news - another and a greater Munich. A few desultory bursts of artillery fire on the Western Front, an exchange of decorations by Allied commanders, other such harmless undertakings -all this amounted to very little more than, in an attempt at seduction, an arm thrown round the back of a chair which might have rested there naturally; no more than a shifting of position, which could be due to mere restlessness. Surely with so tame a beginning, many secretly felt, the immense catastrophe about which so many warnings had been delivered might yet be averted.
Buildings were still securely standing, traffic still circulated, restaurants still served meals, and money still bought what shops still offered for sale. There might, as far as could be seen, have been no declaration of war, no abortive air-raid warning, no ecstatic expectation that the hour of doom had come. In Downing Street, still Prime Minister, sat Mr. Chamberlain, who had brought back peace with honour so short a time before; in Westminster still deliberated the same Parliament which had risen almost as one man to signalise their joy in the Munich Agreement. Where an end had been expected, there was not even a beginning. There was nothing. Everything was as it had always been - or so it seemed.
This reluctance of the war to come to pass, although officially it was being waged, caused some irritation, particularly in the United States. Senator Borah spoke contemptuously of a ‘phoney war’, and the phrase took on. American newspaper correspondents who had come to Europe in the full expectation of being able to cover themselves with glory by their descriptions of the bloody struggle which had been engaged, were disappointed and indignant when they found there was nothing to describe. They and their European colleagues, if no one else, found the phoney war dispiriting. They had the greatest difficulty in procuring any material at all for their despatches, and fell back on describing the boredom of their own lives at GHQ. With great difficulty they managed to make something out of conducted tours of an inactive front, and of visits to a Maginot Line, splendidly equipped with lifts, running water, cinemas, and even bordellos. The French Army, they reported, was in magnificent heart, and being provided with no less than a litre of red wine per day; British troops were displaying all their usual humorous gallantry and endurance, and the standard examples were given of cockney and other humour - ‘‘Arf a mo’ ‘Itler,’ Bruce Bairnsfather’s Old Bill called back to active service along with other of his contemporaries, high and low, including Ian Hay, who presided over the Public Relations branch of the War Office, the First Hundred Thousand in this war being in words, not men.
It was not only in Senator Borah’s heart, however, that a doubt existed. Others, who could not, or would not, put their doubts into words, felt a similar uneasiness. The appearance of things bore no relation to what was really happening - like an old love affair after an interval of twenty years or so; the same endearments used, the same restaurant visited, the same wine drunk, and then, in a sudden ghastly glare of light, the realisation that faces had become gaunt and haggard, flesh withered, hair grizzled, and desire all spent.
Those set in authority over us achieve such a position by virtue of a certain aptness, or suitability, in them, however little they may seem to deserve their eminence, or however large a part chicanery or violence may have seemed to play in its attainment. The most absolute dictator and the most democratically elected prime minister or president alike exercise power over their fellows in the last resort only because they represent them - collective emotions and fears stirring in their individual breasts, collective words spoken by their individual mouths. A Laval or a Hitler or a Roosevelt, a Mr. Attlee even, all, to a greater or smaller extent, satisfy this condition. Chance may wash them into eminence, but their fitness to be eminent at a particular time and in particular circumstances keeps them there.
Out of the collectivity crystallizes, by whatever procedure, its master or masters. This crystallization may be achieved by means of violence, or trickery, or even mere bribery, but it can only survive for any length of time in so far as there is a valid relation between the leaders and the led. Authority rises from below, however circumlocutory the route. There is no such thing as ‘irresponsible authority’, except briefly. Chinless, impotent Maharajah may stay put on his throne for a year or so; much married, distracted heiress may continue for a little while to command obedience, but in the long run both are alike doomed because the current which must flow between those who exert power and those upon whom it is exerted has been short circuited.
Thus, from the led the leaders may be deduced, and vice versa. In England there was Neville Chamberlain, former sisal grower and mayor of Birmingham, whose moment of glory had come when he returned from Munich bearing Hitler’s promissory note of peace with honour to the great and noisy delight of his assembled countrymen. Since that triumphant occasion his fortunes had steadily and badly declined. From peace with honour he had been irresistibly projected into war with dishonour. His naive trust in the word of dictators had turned into senile fury at their perfidy. Like Lear, he declaimed in quavering accents his determination to make them rue their bad faith - he would do such things, what they were yet he knew not. Into the future he could not see, but out of the past, to stiffen his dwindling authority, he garnered the solid shape of Mr. Churchill to be his First Lord of the Admiralty.
Mr. Churchill belonged to an earlier mould. The nineteenth century had been skipped altogether in his makeup. He derived from an earlier form of society altogether. Perhaps because of his American ancestry, he was able to dress up, behave, speak, and, it may be, even to feel as though no Gladstone or Disraeli, not to mention Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Baldwin or Ramsay MacDonald, had interposed themselves between himself and Chatham. Like one of those stage coaches brought out to celebrate a Dickens anniversary, with horns blowing and horses careering along the motorized Strand, this remarkable man, in the mood of his ancestor Marlborough and the diction of Macaulay, made ready to save his country from disaster. The massive strength of the nineteenth century was reduced to only a poor whimper of fatuous gullibility and benevolence, but, by a curious chance, an earlier England, seemingly long passed away, suddenly and surprisingly manifested itself with quite remarkable effect, if in a somewhat vulgarised or Hollywood version.
If Mr. Churchill, as First Lord, brought Mr. Chamberlain’s Cabinet a sorely needed touch of colour, Mr. Anthony Eden endowed it with whatever remained of the credit which had accrued to him as a Conservative Foreign Minister who had resigned, rather than continue to countenance, a policy of appeasing the axis. The bloom of those days when he first declaimed so earnestly in favour of peace at Geneva and West-minster was somewhat faded; those journeyings from capital to capital in the same pursuit, when, with finger tips pressed together, he listened attentively to what Stalin or Tatarescu or Goering had to say, seemed now a remote, and perhaps unsubstantial, enterprise. Even so, his presence in the Cabinet added to its repute, and created the feeling that youth was being given a chance. Age could not wither him, nor custom stale his infinite banality.
The others were all familiar faces - Sir Kingsley Wood, Mr Hore-Belisha, M. Walter Elliot, Sir John Simon. They were still theoretically a National Government, first assembled under the auspices of Ramsay MacDonald to execute a doctor’s mandate, and now retaining faint vestigial remains, in Mr Harold Nicolson and others, of National Labour, and of several Liberal varieties, ever ready to sink party differences and take office. Between the wars, with only brief interruptions, they had governed, but their reign was drawing to its close, and most of them would soon be little heard of except to be denounced as Guilty Men. The impression they made as they directed what came to be known, somewhat inaptly, as the war effort, was rather of weariness or decrepitude than guilt. A quality of twilight was in their faces and voices as they appealed to their countrymen to ‘Save for the Brave,’ not adding, however, that none but the brave deserved to save; as they assembled together or dispersed, making speeches, thumbing through documents, taking their places in Parliament, in the Carlton Club; spreading out their already abbreviated Times or Daily Telegraph in the morning, and somnolently listening to the nine o’clock news at night.
In France there was no such figure as Mr Churchill to turn to. Instead, an aged Marshal was preparing to surrender, and the last poor pillars of the Third Republic, shaking and tottering, would provide no impediment. Daladier, Reynaud, Leon Blum, Chautemps, Flandin and others, who for a quarter of a century past had been in and out of Ministries, felt their power ebbing away. Photographed in groups with various combinations and permutations, delivering orations, saving the franc only to lose it again, Right, Left and Centre - now it seemed they had little or nothing to offer, or even to suggest. Even more than their prototypes across the Channel, they had become quite irrelevant. Other forces were shaping which would sweep them relentlessly aside.
Already the most hopeful direction in which to look was westward - old dry parent trunk hoping for sap to drain back into its parched tissue from distant shoots still apparently green and alive. Such hopes were not in vain. In the White House president Roosevelt, preparing to win his third presidential election on a promise to keep America out of the war, was also, at the same time, preparing to take her in fine style into it. His extraordinary political knockabout performance had now gone on for eight years, and his position seemed stronger than ever. Seldom, if ever, has such sustained political agility been seen. His followers and his associates might change, sometimes with startling suddenness, but he went marching on.
Since his death, attempts have been made to deduce a consistent pattern out of his conduct of American affairs, to trace through them some consistent purpose which was being pursued; but the more his career is examined, the more inconsequential and, at the same time, fabulous, does it appear. He played by ear rather than following any score of his own or another’s composition; he improvised, he smiled - he and his consort ever, ever smiling. Having got into the White House, there he triumphantly remained, to the almost apoplectic rage of his opponents, and the delight of his varied supporters, all of whom were persuaded to believe that he was deeply concerned with their particular interests - Southern Democrats convinced that though he might for political reasons pay lip service to ideas like racial equality, White supremacy was safe in his hands (as, indeed, it was);Left Wing intellectuals equally convinced that though he might, for political reasons, associate with reactionary Southern Democrats, his heart was on the Left, and all his endeavours directed towards improving the circumstances of what he called, in the jargon his regime brought into current usage, the ‘under privileged;’ farmers, trade unionists, cranks of every sort and description, all likewise convinced that in Roosevelt they had a faithful friend and champion.
If the Western democracies were looking westwards, he was looking eastwards, knowing that there he, too, had a role to play, and that a major one. Already he had issued appeals to all the Governments of all the world, and would be frequently addressing this large, but nebulous, clientele, later expanded into all the people everywhere. Mr Sumner Welles and other emissaries had made the rounds from capital to capital, voluminously reporting, but leaving little trace behind of their wanderings; and an intimate correspondence had begun between the President and Mr Churchill in the guise of a ‘Naval Person.’ In his wheel chair, cigarette in long holder tilted into the air, heavy metal braces which, in his last public utterance, he for the first time complained were heavy to carry around with him - thus accoutred, Roosevelt, too, was anxious and ready to enter the fray.
On the other side were the dictators - the Axis or anti-Comintern contingent, which had acquired, as a temporary associate, the Comintern. Hitler and Mussolini were then seemingly at the top of their bent. The Führer’s somnambulistic course had almost reached its stupendous climax. Now, when its ignominious end is known, it is difficult to remember the days of his glory. Yet how tremendous they were! What a concentration of purpose his single purpose generated - outward and visible in those howls of animal approval which punctuated his speeches, and became a familiar, if horrifying, sound even in English ears. His phosphorescent personality, physically so horrifying, yet succeeded in imposing itself on the German people, and in producing a kind of fascination, or, at any rate, obsession, elsewhere. Afterwards, notably at Nuremberg, his associates tried to show that their acceptance of his will’s finality was hesitant, or positively reluctant. Their excuses, however, were unconvincing even to themselves. They followed him with blind confidence. He was their Pied Piper, whose words lured them on. If the end was destruction, his as well as theirs, their faith never faltered. In his star they could not but believe. Everything seemed to be working in his favour; and perhaps even the destructive end was what, in their hearts, they longed for - a stupendous bonfire of themselves and their world, a collective act of suttee or self-immolation whose like had never before been seen.
The junior partner, Mussolini, was now set on the same course, though after doubts and hesitations, which still occasionally recurred. Like Lancelot Gobbo, there was a fiend who said ‘On!’ and an inner voice which urged him ‘Back!’ On the whole, the fiend had it, though the final step had still to be taken. The Duce hesitated on the brink of war, anxious to plunge in, but fearful that the water might be chilly, occasionally inserting a toe to test its temperature, taking up a position on the diving board for a decisive plunge, and then deciding still to wait a little longer. If only his Italians had been Germans! - but they remained irretrievably Italian even when he made them goose-step, and actually toyed with the idea of planting forests in the north of Italy in the expectation that, by thus altering geographical conditions, he might produce a more warlike people suitable to execute his purposes. On the one hand he saw a prospect of illimitable loot; and on the other, some native prudence, which had survived his later megalomania made him hesitate.
He lived in a state of perpetual irresolution, of irritation with himself and with everyone else -particularly with his minute King,Victor Emmanuel, whom he had kept on the throne of Italy, and from whom he received constant little pricks and annoyances. He wanted to be absolutely sure that victory would come to him without the necessity of winning it on the field of battle. His envy and dislike of Hitler warred with his conviction that the Führer’s star would never wane. Like Macbeth, he continually assured himself that Burnham Wood could never walk to Dunsinane - and yet it might; no man of woman born could interrupt the Führer’s triumphant course - and yet who knew if there might not be one, like Macduff, from his mother’s womb untimely ripped? For Mussolini, these were uneasy months, full of hesitation, changes of mood, stomach disorders, and the exhausting blisses of a youthful mistress.
Far away in the Kremlin, inscrutable and watchful, Hitler’s latest colleague, Stalin, took quiet advantage of opportunities as they presented themselves. To the Duce’s annoyance, he had pulled in quicker and bigger dividends than the earlier members of the Axis firm. By his sudden reversal of policy he had been able to gather up half Poland and the Baltic States, and, though he found himself for the time being engaged in an unexpectedly stubborn conflict with Finland, might be expected to make other gains before very long. From remote Georgia he had obscurely appeared as one of Lenin’s minor lieutenants, and since that time, with ruthless and patient persistence, he had become, in himself, the dictatorship of the proletariat by the simple expedient of eliminating all other actual and potential claimants to that important position.
For the moment, relations between Berlin and Moscow seemed most harmonious. Friendly and congratulatory messages were exchanged, and the German Foreign Minister, von Ribbentrop, could wear on his breast the Order of Lenin designed to honour the greatest heroes in the struggle for world proletarian revolution. War supplies, which had been promised in the Russo-German Agreement of August 1939, were being punctually delivered, and other conversations were pending designed to extend the basis of collaboration in return for further participation in Hitler’s bounty. Aryan superman and proletarian dictatorship seemed to have joined forces, and to represent a mighty combination, capable of dividing the world between them.
6
April 21, 1946.
New York
Dearest Kit, I’m leaving New York for Washington tomorrow, and send you a note before I go. Wandering about a town with nothing much to do is a rather melancholy occupation. This is what I’ve been doing over Easter. Yesterday, Easter Sunday, there was a huge fashion parade in Fifth Avenue - masses of well-dressed and well-fed people aimlessly drifting to and fro in bright sunshine. After all the desolation of Europe, it was in a way impressive, and yet I don’t know. I didn’t envy them particularly, or feel any greater confidence in their future than in that of their shabby, hungry equivalents in Paris or London. The skull beneath the flesh I always seem to see. Perhaps morbidly, and have too keen a nose for mortality.
April 24, 1946.
Washington
I was delighted and relieved to find here a batch of letters from you and the children and to know that all was well. Hughie quoted to me some lines of verse last time I saw him which finished up, ‘For terrible is earth.’ I’ve said this line over and over to myself - terrible when one’s alone, especially after a certain age. There’s so little one wants now, and that little so precious in consequence; just to be with the faces one knows and cares for, and to hear unfamiliar voices; no more. I have an awful feeling when I wake up in the night that I made one of the great mistakes of my life when I didn’t just settle down and write on leaving the army. However, I didn’t, and no doubt it’ll turn out for the best. Certainly, if writing ‘The Forties’ is to be considered worth doing, I couldn’t have chosen a better method of equipping myself for it.
29 April, 1946.
Washington
I’m staying for the time being in a faded antique flat in the house of an aged Frenchwoman. There’s no cuppa on the premises, so I have to get up and go out to a drug store for my morning coffee. Everyone does this, seated on tall stools at a counter. Then I acquire two enormous newspapers through whose stagnant columns I swim lazily for an hour or so. After that there are press conferences, visits to the Senate, etc etc.
How unutterably contemptible is power and all its uses. I’ve seen so much of it, too much. How loathsome are legislative assemblies and political gatherings of all sorts and descriptions. Strident men getting up and asserting their opinions, straining to establish their authority. I can’t imagine myself going on doing this - I mean to the extent of conveying their importance, an instrument in their struggle for power. As far as I’m concerned, let them keep their power and good luck to them. I don’t want any of it. I need scarcely say that I haven’t done any writing to speak of, and wonder now if I ever shall.
May 21, 1946.
Washington
I’ve just emerged from one of the longest and most unrelieved fits of melancholia I’ve ever experienced in which dark thoughts or devils quite possessed me. Perhaps it was a change of life or something. It went on all through the journey and in New York and here - a sense of such desolation that the very air I breathed seemed full of corruption. I’ve only just now begun to work at all, and though I wouldn’t say I was even now particularly cheerful I can get along. Journalism is a loathsome occupation but I suppose I deserve it.There’s a wonderful passage in Coleridge, which seems to me the cri du coeur of all journalists in which he says that like an ostrich he’s planted too many eggs in the hot sand of the desert of this world.
May 28, 1946.
Washington
I’ve taken over in the office here. It’s a bit heavy going to begin with but I suppose one’ll get used to it in time. I really think that this job will just about cure me of what Hughie calls my realpolitik. On Saturday I went to a joint session of the Congress and Truman came in and there was a lot of excitement. Poor little man - he seemed very lost. How absurd a thing is power, especially when combined with insignificance. At least it’s more pitiable in such circumstances. I suppose ceremonial and all that has to be invented to help it out. King George VI is a more satisfactory proposition than President Truman. I’m haunted by the idea of not getting any of my own work done, by those terrible Ciano sheets, by this sense of time slipping past. And yet I don’t know that it matters much. It’s only one’s egotism which makes one think it matters. My morning cuppa has at last been organised (made by myself which I really prefer) and I’ve found a swimming pool in a club here so get my favourite exercise, and altogether it’s not so bad except that I’m so unutterably sick of newspapers and find America a lonely desolate sort of place.
16 June, 1946.
Washington
The weeks pass by quickly now. I’ve got into a routine, my usual - up at seven and make the cuppa and potter around in a dressing gown; then newspapers and picking over the dung-heap of this world’s affairs for my little necessary morsels; then my own little shovelful or two into the heap; then the evening and a stroll; then a glass or two and some talk if any available. I do actually now occasionally write a little on my own. A routine is essential when one becomes older, a framework or scaffolding to hold up one’s tottering life.
America as I’m sure you’ll find, is a place about which one has highly varied feelings. One doesn’t acquire a settled relationship with the place. Sometimes it seems utterly abhorrent and at other times oddly sympathetic, I suppose according to one’s own mood.
September 2, 1946.
Washington
How infinitely melancholy the affairs of the world are just now. I can’t tell you with what weariness I approach the task of having my little daily say about them from here. Then every now and again, perhaps walking in the morning, I suddenly forget all about them and feel briefly the mystery of things and am suddenly serene.
August 20, 1947.
Washington
The Regents Park flat sounds absolutely wonderful and in the circumstances I’d personally make any financial sacrifice to get somewhere more or less agreeable to live. It seems to me that’s the thing to go for. Present intentions are that I should leave for Tokyo at the end of September and be back in London late November. Then I shall never go on any more travels unless we decide to emigrate all together to give the boys a better chance elsewhere. As it’s turned out I’ve scarcely been able to go to New York at all. I only spent one rather ghastly weekend there with the Broughs who now live in a remote suburb with a car and a flavour of death.
November 15, 1947
Los Angeles
On Monday I go to Seattle and early Tuesday fly to Tokyo via Alaska. You may be sure I shan’t linger unnecessarily on the way. I feel as though the day I walk into 5 Cambridge Gate and am home at last with us all under one roof will be the happiest day of all my life. This place, Los Angeles, is ugly and rather ludicrous but I’m quite glad to have seen it. The drive across has made me feel well after being rather run down at the end of my time in Washington and I feel full of ideas about writing and everything else.
My darling, although actually I’ll be further away in Tokyo than in Washington I feel nearer every day because I’m on my way back.
All my love as always,
Malcolm
7
Mr. Adolphe Menjou the other day expressed astonishment that so many rich men should be Communists or fellow travellers. It seemed to him an extraordinary circumstance that a millionaire should embrace a creed which, if it succeeded, could not but deprive him of the advantages of his wealth. As a matter of fact, so complex a thing is human nature, there are plenty of precedents for such apparent illogicality. For instance, Talleyrand, an aristocrat and a bishop, associated himself with an anti-clerical revolutionary movement, and Nietzsche, prophet of the Aryan superman, personally disliked Germans, and spent most of his life outside Germany, dying at last in a lunatic asylum. There have been Jewish anti-Semites, and male feminists, and brewers who were total abolitionists. The fact is that human behaviour cannot be comprehended in the concept of enlightened self-interest.
Men are as liable to pursue their own ruin as their own advantage. In Hitler’s day Nazi processions sometimes included a little melancholy contingent of opponents or victims of the regime displaying the slogan ‘Down with us!’ Those who marched behind this sad placard were Nazi fellow-travellers. Their slogan defines both the mood and the destination of all fellow-travelling.
If, however, it has often been the case that human beings have passionately advocated causes which cannot but encompass their own ultimate destruction, an historian in the future, trying to piece together the pattern of this strange time will surely still be interested and puzzled by the motivation of contemporary fellow-travellers. These millionaires, he will ask himself, who identified themselves with forces unmistakeably destructive of their wealth; these pious clergymen who lent themselves to propaganda which made a mockery of the faith they professed; these admirable scholars who contentedly swallowed the most monstrous perversions of historical scholarship - what exactly were they after?
In retrospect, the spectacle of professed democrats exulting over the multiplication of Police States, and of internationalists applauding each new triumph of Slav nationalism, will inevitably seem rather extraordinary. However inured to the vagaries of human nature, eyebrows are likely still to be raised at the record of earnest progressives railing against any infringement of civil liberties at home and rejoicing over the arbitrary judgments of People’s Courts abroad; over gentle humanitarians who find the death penalty imposed for crimes of violence brutal and unnecessary, but who so readily overlook brutality and coercion on a vast scale when it is sponsored by the Kremlin.
Seeking enlightenment, our historian may well turn to the vast and often turgid literature of Soviet adulation. If so, he is unlikely to derive much benefit therefrom. Turning over the pages of, for instance, the Webbs’ ‘Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation’, or of The Dean of Canterbury’s ‘The Socialist Sixth of the World’, would but add to his bewilderment. Did not the Webbs, he would ask himself, devote much of their life and endeavours to improving social conditions? How, then, were they able to tolerate the admitted fact of large numbers of Russian citizens in forced labour camps? Were they not earnest believers in democratic institutions? How, then, when they prided themselves on their exactness and moderation, could they have reached the asinine conclusion that ‘the USSR is the most inclusive and equalised democracy in the world’? Was not the phrase ‘inevitability of gradualness’ actually coined by the Webbs? How, then, did they come so to admire the Kremlin’s most ungradual procedure? Was not the Dean of Canterbury a strong advocate of humane practices? How, then, did he so readily turn a blind eye on the activities of the Russian political police, and so readily accept the results of obviously fraudulent elections in Russia and Russia’s satellite states?
Such questions would scarcely be elucidated by a study of the authorised Communist scriptures. These are full of exhortations to violence and conflict. There is little gradualness to be found in them. They bear about as close a relation to the Thirty-nine Articles as Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ does to the Sermon on the Mount. Between the Lubianka prison and a Fabian Summer School there is set a chasm which would seem impassable, except that ideological athletes like Mr Bernard Shaw have been able to leap nimbly across it.
Again, the Communist Party Line has undergone drastic fluctuations which, our historian will conclude, might have been expected to detach from it all but its most tenacious adherents. How, for instance, he will wonder, was it possible for those who participated in the adulations of the early heroes of the Revolution so readily to accept their downfall, and to believe them to have been guilty from the beginning of ideological heresy and acts of treachery of the most heinous kind? In that remarkable period between September, 1939, and June, 1941, when Ribbentrop received the Order of Lenin, and Molotov was an honoured guest in Berlin, and Stalin and Hitler exchanged cordial and congratulatory messages, did doubts arise in the Canterbury Deanery? Did that forward looking couple, the Webbs, begin to wonder if, after all, the Fabian rainbow ended at the Kremlin?
Not at all. The Webbs were silent, and the Dean had ‘the highest authority for stating that there had been no conversations between Russia and Germany before August,1939’,and that the conversations, when they took place, ‘contained no plan for partitioning Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union’. Bombs dropped on Helsinki did not apparently shake the faith of the pacifist Friends of the Soviet Union that the cause of peace was safe in Stalin’s hands, any more than a vast sharing out of spoils with Nazi Germany appeared to diminish the conviction that the only faithful adherents of the anti-Fascist cause were the rulers of Russia.
Our historian is likely, indeed, to be unable to withhold a certain admiration from a faith so touchingly persistent. Cherished revolutionary leaders might be trampled in the dust and disclosed as enemies of the Soviet Fatherland; the Party Line might change with startling suddenness, holding up to obloquy what had been venerated and vice-versa; but in Senior Common Rooms, in the columns of progressive weeklies, in remote Passfield Corner and in the venerable Canterbury Deanery, the stock of the Russians continues to rise. Inconsistency could not tarnish their reputation. Neither immoderate demands for reparations nor the irresponsible exercise of the veto at Lake Success could wean from them the allegiance of those accustomed to be foremost in insisting that reparations were an imperialistic device and the undue influence of the Great Powers an abomination.
Finding in this line of inquiry no solution to his dilemma, out historian might well turn from the general to the particular. If fellow-travelling made no sense in terms of policy, it might be comprehensible in terms of individual psychology. What, he might ask himself, was it in the character of fellow-travellers which made them persist in a point of view alien to their own professed principles and inimical to their own interests? Why, when they were confronted with the spectacle of the liquidation of their like elsewhere, did they persist in inviting the same fate? If the concentration camps in Eastern Germany and other areas under Russian occupation or influence were full of social democrats and pacifists and intellectuals, did it not occur to them that the coming to pass of what they so ardently advocated would make them also inmates?
Did the execution of a Liberal like Petkov, the flight of a Socialist like Mikolajczyk, have no moral for them? Meditating upon this, our historian might recall an apposite thought of Taine’s relating to sympathisers with the French Revolution, some of whom, interestingly enough, remained faithful even after Napoleon had taken over. Nothing is more dangerous, the French historian wrote, than a general idea in a narrow mind. It ferments there like yeast, coming in time to dominate all the mental activity of the individual concerned until, in the most literal sense, he is ‘possessed’.
The fellow-traveller today is in a like case. He has ceased to be able to relate his obsession either to his own interests, or to any coherent system of thought. Reason and self-preservation, those two essential ingredients in a civilised existence, have ceased to be applicable. He is, as Taine puts it, ’possessed’. Argument does not impinge upon him, and the normal restraints of prudence are not operative. He is ready, even eager, to eat yesterday’s words, and to denounce yesterday’s hero. He derives no moral from the melancholy fate of others who, for instance, in Czechoslovakia, have taken the same position as he has. Not even Tito’s sudden fall from favour abates his zeal. The only hope for him is exorcism, so that the Gadarene swine may hurl themselves to destruction in his place.