Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

And so it went on. ‘ “ Vous me caressez avec des instruments d’acier! ” he said as I measured him with the callipers.’ 59At the start of the next sitting, on a cold evening, he ‘kissed my frozen hands and placed two chairs for me by the fire, one for me and one for my feet’. 60When she asked him to loosen his collar, he ‘unbuttoned his tunic and the shirt underneath, and laid bare his neck and chest.’ 61

Despite rarely offering a smile, he flirted with her more and more: ‘Even when your teeth are clenched and you are fighting with your work, vous êtes encore femme. ’ 62She replied: ‘I had expected you to be most unamiable, and I am surprised to find you otherwise. I wonder how I will describe you to people in England who think you are a monster.’ He said: ‘Tell them… tell them that “ lorsque Trotzki embrasse , il ne mord pas! ” ’ But he added: ‘Much as I like you and admire you as a woman, I assure you that if I knew you were an enemy, or a danger to our revolutionary cause, I would not hesitate to shoot you down with my own hand.’ Sheridan ‘found this vaunted ruthlessness most attractive’. 63When she showed him pictures of her work, he expressed admiration for her bust of Asquith: ‘You have given me an idea — if Asquith comes back into office soon (there is a rumour that he might bring in a coalition with labour and recognise Russia) I will hold you as a hostage until England makes peace with us.’ Sheridan responded that her cousin Winston was more likely to form any new government; she also told him: ‘But if you said you would shoot me, Winston would only say “shoot”… Winston is the only man in England who is made of the stuff that the Bolsheviks are made of. He has fight, force, and fanaticism.’ 64

Clare Sheridan attracted a lot of attention on her return to Britain, when she published the first of several memoirs of her time in Russia, and during her subsequent book tour of the USA; but she was not taken very seriously, except by the Hands Off Russia people. 65This was partly her own fault; she had always claimed to be apolitical. But what did irk her was the icy attitude of Cousin Winston, who refused to speak to her. She called him heartless and disloyal, saying that she had been on the same kind of adventure he would have once undertaken. Churchill assured her of his friendship but still reproved her for her dalliance with ‘these fiends in human form’. 66This was conciliatory enough for her to ask him to put in a good word for her to become the UK ambassador to Moscow — she reminded him that he had once said he would vote for her if ever she stood for parliament. 67Nothing, of course, came of this overture.

Whereas Sheridan’s gushing recollections had little impact, the report of the Labour delegation received attentive scrutiny in both Britain and America. But being the product of collective authorship, it was somewhat insipid; and being focused on economic and social policies, it touched on communist politics only indirectly:

Whether, under such conditions, Russia could be governed in a different way — whether, in particular, the ordinary processes of democracy could be expected to work — is a question on which we do not feel ourselves competent to pronounce. All we know is that no practical alternative, except a virtual return to autocracy, has been suggested to us; that a ‘strong’ Government is the only type of Government which Russia has yet known; that the opponents of the Soviet Government when they were in power in 1917, exercised repression against the Communists. 68

Apparently democracy and civic freedoms were all right for the British but not necessarily appropriate for Russians. And the report ended with the comment: ‘We cannot forget that the responsibility for these conditions resulting from foreign interference rests not upon the revolutionaries of Russia, but upon the Capitalist Governments of other countries, including our own.’ 69

The individual accounts by visitors were much less bland. H. G. Wells wrote up his thoughts in Russia in the Shadows : ‘Ruin: that is the primary Russian fact at the present time.’ 70He did not attempt an analysis of Bolshevism, and he could not resist a satirical aside:

A gnawing desire drew up on me to see Karl Marx shaved. Some day, if I am spared, I will take up shears and a razor against Das Kapital ; I will write The Shaving of Karl Marx .

But Marx is for the Marxists merely an image and a symbol, and it is with Marxists that we now are dealing. 71

Yet Wells also insisted that the communist order had more support in Russia than any of its Russian opponents, either on Russia’s soil or abroad, were ever likely to gather. 72 The Times gave his account a backhanded compliment:

The merit — and it is a real merit — of Mr H. G. Wells’s book on Bolshevist Russia is that it tells us nothing new, either about Russia or about himself. It adds the evidence of one more sympathiser with communist ideals to the testimony of so many other witnesses with similar leanings on the utter and dismal breakdown of the Bolshevist system. 73

Wells had gone out to Russia with a favourable opinion of communism; his disillusionment carried weight.

Bertrand Russell’s book The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism described a similar reaction: ‘I went to Russia a communist, but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.’ 74Russell had done his homework and peppered his conversation with Lenin with awkward questions. He interpreted Bolshevism as a secular religion. About Lenin he reported:

I think if I had met him without knowing who he was, I should not have guessed that he was a great man; he struck me as too opinionated and narrowly orthodox. His strength comes, I imagine, from his honesty, courage, and unwavering faith — religious faith in the Marxian gospel, which takes the place of the Christian martyr’s hopes of Paradise, except that it is less egotistical. He has as little love of liberty as the Christians who suffered under Diocletian, and retaliated when they acquired power. Perhaps love of liberty is incompatible with wholehearted belief in a panacea for all human ills. If so, I cannot but rejoice in the sceptical temper of the Western world. 75

Russell refused to exercise any toleration of intolerance. He also turned on the Western socialists who suppressed mention of what they saw with their own eyes on trips to Moscow. Communist harshness, he argued, could not be explained away by the military intervention of Britain and France. Although war and blockade had undoubtedly made things worse, the fundamental cause lay in the doctrines of the Bolshevik leaders.

Nonetheless Russell’s hostile testimony was inconsistent with some of his private comments. He wrote to his friend Ottoline Morrell from Stockholm:

I was stifled and oppressed by the weight of the machine as by a cope of lead. Yet I think it the right government for Russia at this moment. If you ask yourself how Dostoevsky’s characters should be governed, you will understand. Yet it is terrible. They are a nation of artists, down to the simplest peasant; the aim of the Bolsheviks is to make them industrial and as Yankee as possible. Imagine yourself governed by a mixture of Sidney Webb and [British Ambassador to Washington] Rufus Isaacs, and you will have a picture of modern Russia. 76

Whereas The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism was a work of lasting value, Russell was tempted into silliness when corresponding with his clever London friends; and his prescription for the ‘nation of artists’ was condescending at best, callous at worst. His mistress Dora Black, soon to be his second wife, was even sillier. She had always given intellectual approval to the Soviet order and did not modify her ideas when she subsequently made her own trip to Russia — Russell had refused to take her with him. Black enjoyed shocking him by saying that ‘she liked Russia just about as much as [he] had hated it’. She scoffed at his opinions as ‘bourgeois and senile and sentimental’. 77