Seeing the future fail to work
Richard 011ard
INSIDE STALIN'S RUSSIA: THE DIARIES OF READER BULLARD, 1930-1934 edited by Julian and Margaret Bullard Day Books, £19.50, pp. 310 It is early to start picking the Book of the Year but this should be a strong Contender. It fulfils the highest criteria of a diary in that great and even terrifying perceptions are conveyed on the same level as immediate reactions to everyday life, and both are rendered in admirably forceful and clear English which expresses to perfection the personality of the writer. There is not a note of affectation, not a whiff of bogosity, from the first page to the last.
Reader Bullard, the rising man of the Levant consular service, was appointed Consul in Moscow, a post soon relocated to Leningrad, in 1930 and remained there for nearly four years. It was the grim period when the relative abundance of the NEP had been succeeded by the first of Stalin's Five Year Plans with their attendant mis- ery and inhumanity. Millions died of star- vation, millions were deported to forced labour of the utmost brutality, and the threat of the Ogpu (later renamed the NKVO) coloured every relationship, even every conversation.
Bullard brought no anti-Soviet prejudice with him. The son of a London docker, he had come up the hard way and his first political attitudes were, in his own words, those of 'a socialist and a rebel'. Dining with R. H. Tawney and his wife in Moscow `we all agreed that the boarding public- school was on the whole a curse. I suggest- ed that only the reduction of big incomes would bring about their abolition and Tawney agreed.'
Yet, unlike his bien-pensant ambassador, Bullard had rumbled the cruelty, the ruth- less amorality of the regime within a month of his arrival. Even then he was never unjust to it. 'Nothing I hear about the old regime in Russia leads me to think it was any better than this,' he wrote after two years' experience. This makes this heart- breaking chronicle of harmless, affection- `Whose turn is it to floss them?' ate, useful lives destroyed at the caprice of tyranny all the more telling. Bullard emphasises to his superiors that, unbear- able as conditions are, he sees no alterna- tive and believes that centuries of serfdom have left the Russians ready to accept any- thing.
What makes his diary so absorbing is its range and its particularity. Everyone is identified and, in a few strokes, sharply delineated. The hopelessness and misery, though universal, are not uniform. Each situation comes before us in all its pathos and all its individuality. Heroism and comedy are by no means absent. The irruptions of Lady Muriel Paget, a sort of aristocratic Widow Twankey, into the fragile arrangements painfully set up to relieve the Distressed British Subjects who occupy so much of the Consul's efforts are vividly recorded. Her wonderfully coura- geous and intelligent assistant Miss Daunt retrieves every disaster and, astonishingly, commands, by sheer courage and integrity, the liking and respect of the local Ogpu chief, Kulagin. Bullard reports a fascinating conversation between Kulagin and his own ambassador, ending with a characteristical- ly crisp judgment of his chief:
I liked the ambassador better than I had before. He talks far too much, but he talks much better than he writes, and he struck me as more sincere than I had believed him to be.
All good diaries are spiced by faits divers. Joy Street, a play purporting to describe English life, sounds hilarious. A boy deliv- ering washing is knocked down by a car and discharged for soiling the laundry, which includes Lady Salisbury's lace knick- ers. Progressive thinkers may be shocked that Little Black Sambo was presented in a Soviet puppet theatre.
Not the least interesting passages are those which reveal the reactions of English visitors and newspapermen. The frivolous intellectual dishonesty of Shaw is particu- larly disgusting. Well-meaning, conscien- tious sympathisers like the Webbs were easily gulled, but there is a redeeming story of Beatrice, after reading one of Malcolm Muggeridge's letters from Moscow, walking up and down the room wringing her hands and saying, 'Old people become set in their opinions and perhaps I was deceived.' She was deceived,' comments the diarist tersely.
The quality of Bullard's despatches, some of which are quoted, was recognised in enthusiastic terms by the foreign secre- tary and by Sir Robert Vansittart, then head of the Foreign Office. It seems odd that they could find no higher promotion for so outstanding a diplomat than the consulship at Rabat.
The editing, by the diarist's son and daughter-in-law, is exemplary in its succinct erudition. The publishers, hitherto unknown to this reviewer, are to be con- gratulated on the design and production of a handsome book beautifully and accurate- ly printed.
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