Liam O'Flaherty: I Went to Russia

‘You are romantic. They are too cute for that. They have more subtle methods of destroying Europe than by military conquest. They are first going to destroy the world markets. This autumn they are going to attack the wheat market by dumping. You watch.’

‘But it will inevitably result in war. Europe is not going to allow them to destroy their markets by dumping. They’ll strike back. If the government is pacifist, then Napoleonism will arise.’

‘That is possible,’ said Duranty. ‘As I said before everything is possible. But in any case it’s not a matter of years but of generations. It will take decades to make the Russian machine efficient. And the struggle is not going to be between Russia and Europe but between Russia and America. Europe is going to be squeezed out of existence by these enormous pincers.’

‘Oh! Well!’ I said. ‘The only thing for a decadent European like myself is to retire and leave them to it. I am convinced that we Europeans have nothing to gain from either Russia or America. We have stabilised our cultures and our civilisations. We can gain nothing by giving them violent shocks. We should hasten our demise. I am still convinced that there is nothing here which gives me as much satisfaction as things to be found in Ireland, England and France.’

‘Ah! France,’ said Duranty. ‘There is civilisation, conversation, food, drink, intelligence, wit . . . marvellous country.’

‘I don’t like French racing,’ I said.

‘Why?’ said Duranty aggressively.

Thereupon we forgot about Bolshevism, Russia and the effort to improve the world by means of a new religion, and we entered into a long, enthusiastic conversation about horse racing, becoming for the first time really interested.

Indeed as I came away from Duranty’s house I felt convinced that religion, be it Bolshevism or Christianity, Mormonism, or Mahomedanism, is the least important thing in life for a normal person. I decided to return at once to Western Europe where life is so pleasant owing to the death of God.

And then, as I crossed the border into Poland, going down into Europe, I felt a sense of depression and of loneliness. I felt that I was leaving the battlefield, where honour might be won, where I could at least die in the effort to achieve a higher dignity for man, and that I was sneaking back behind the lines, to eat and drink in comfort and degeneration. Nearly all those in the train with me were bourgeois foreigners and I grew disgusted at the swinish way they fell upon the rich feast spread before them by the Poles for purposes of propaganda. I was disgusted by the comic opera Poles, all dressed in gaudy uniforms, for which they had probably not paid the French. The ruling Poles in glittering uniforms and the wretched peasant Poles crawling about the fields, in rags and bare feet. I missed the simple poverty of Soviet Russia, the eagerness, the shouting, the earnestness, the intense, almost maniacal vitality of those fanatics who were trying to build a new world. My irritation with their fanaticism vanished, when I was confronted with European hypocrisy, stupidity and cruelty. The farther I got from Soviet Russia the more my admiration for the Bolsheviks increased. Yet I did not want to go back. I was deliberately flying from the battlefield, unashamed and revelling in my cowardice like another Horace.

Even when I reached Berlin, that vulgar caravanserai of beerhouses and brothels, I still did not want to return to militant, covenanting Moscow; for there was sober, half-starved effort to achieve the almost impossible, while here was rich, juicy sausage, paganism and easy living for the cunning. Yet I despised Berlin after Moscow. It seemed a sweltering, senseless, uncultured human warren, without a future, without sane ambition. Paris looked even worse, a still more shameless brothel, where a human soul was almost as cheap as a beefsteak. Here a terrible melancholy settled on me. I felt indeed lost, an outcast from both camps, too old and too degenerate to belong to the Bolshevist religion, too intelligent to worship the degraded wreck of what was once European civilisation.

But when I reached London, a delicious sense of the futility of human effort drowned my melancholy. This city represented the culmination of an imperial effort greater than that of the Romans, if not in military conquest, at least by the diversity of its achievements. Yet it was now halted, stagnant, beginning to rot at the core and to wither at the extremities, using all its ancient skill to maintain its power. So does everything come to an end. So will the Leninist movement come to an end and give way to another. The star of human genius is not fixed.