BOOKS OF THE DAY
Life in Russia
Military Attache in Moscow. By Major-General Richard Hilton, (Hollis and Carter. los. 6d.) The People of Great Russia. By Geoffrey Gorer and John Rickman.
(Cresset Press. ios. 6d.)
The English Embassies jin Moscow] had historians whose narra- tives may still be read with interest. Those historians described vividly and somewhat bitterly the savage ignorance and the squalid poverty of the barbarous country in which they had sojourned... . Round the person of the sovereign there was a blaze of gold and jewel: but even in his most splendid palace were to be found the filth and misery of an Irish cabin.. . . Such was the report which the English legations made of what they had seen and suffered in Russia ; and their evidence was confirmed by the appearance which the Russian legations made in England.... They came to the court balls dropping pearls and vermin."
General Hilton's account of his experience, as British Military Attaché in Moscow, is in the tradition of those seventeenth century chroniclers of the English Embassies in Russia, about whom Macaulay wrote the words just quoted. General Hilton describes in some detail what he " had seen and suffered in Russia." He suffered a lot and saw very little ; and so his tale is perhaps more bitter than vivid. He was, he tells us, constantly spied upon, denied the slightest freedom of movement or social intercourse, exposed to the most bizarre and stupid accusations and chicanery ; in a word, he was treated like a virtual prisoner,--not like a person with diplo- matic status. This treatment, systematically inflicted on foreign journalists and diplomats in Russia, must produce in its victims a sense of claustrophobia and acute frustration. Once out of Moscow the victim is happy to give vent to his pent-up emotion ; and for this the Soviet Government has only itself to blame.
But how real is the picture of gussia which General Hilton has sketched ? He rightly warns his readers against " the impressive facade " which the Kremlin's propagandists present to naive visitors from the West. He describes the wretched poverty and shabbiness of ordinary life in and around Moscow : the drab overcrowded houses, the chronic shortages of. consumer goods, and the all- pervading fear of the political police. This, incidentally, was also my own, shocking impression of Moscow when I first saw it years ago. But here a warning should be entered. This " drab facade " is in part as deceptive as is the impressive facade of the Soviet propagandists ; and General Hilton, as he himself says, was allowed to see nothing behind that facade. Soviet life is far richer in con- trasts than a reader of this book may guess. Alongside incredible poverty there is industrial and educational advance ; alongside political fear and depression there is pride in achievement and hope for the future.
Russia still " comes to the court balls dropping pearls and vermin " ; horrified by the sight of the vermin, General Hilton missed quite a few pearls. It is a pity that, although he repeatedly describes himself as a " simple soldier " unqualified to engage in the discussion of subjects which require specialised knowledge, he has not withstood the temptation to air rather simple views on philosophy, education, party organisation, history, literature, art, financial techniques, &c. The only topic about which literally nothing can be found in Military Attaché in Moscow is the Russian armed forces.
Two authors, Dr. John Rickman and Mr. Geoffrey Gorer, have contributed to The People of Great Russia. Their respective con- tributions are of embarrassingly unequal value. Dr. Rickman worked in Russia between 1916 and 1918 as a doctor and member of a Quaker relief unit. His Ten Sketches of Russian Peasant Life, compressed into sixty-odd small pages, are in some respects more valuable and illuminating than ten weighty academic volumes. They convey an unusually sharp and genuine impression of the mode of life of the old nifizhik and of the first impact of the Soviet revolu- tion on the countryside. Such sociological. abstractions as " back- wardness," " barbarous standards of living," or " peasant-like fatalism " take on flesh and blood under Mr. Rickman's unpre- tentious and yet powerful pen. He viewed Russian village life with the eyes of the doctor, the sociologist and the artist. The doctor noticed with dismay the unfathomable depths of superstition in which his patients were living and perishing. The sociologist made the revealing estimate that in the poorest villages consump- tion of iron amounted to about five pounds per peasant—per generation I Artistically, these Ten Sketches stand comparison with the best short stories on muzhiks that can be found in Russian literature ; and this is saying a lot. Dr. Rickman has shown some of the appalling starting-points from which the Soviet revolution in the countryside had to begin its course. He has thereby helped us to measure the distance that that revolution has travelled—from the five pounds of iron consumed per head per generation to the modern machine tractor station servicing the collective farms.
Mr. Gorer's essay on the psychology of the Great Russians ought probably to be treated as an unintentional joke. Mr. Gorer tries to explain the Russian national character—anthropologically and psycho-analytically—from the manner in which the Russian peasants swaddle their babies. This swaddling, we are told, de- velops in the baby all those passions, rages and restraints which make the grown-up into a typical citizen of an autocratically ruled community. Mr. Gorer deduces the salient features of the con- temporary Soviet regime from the swaddling practices of the Russian muzhiks. The snag is that these practices are common to peasants of many nationalities—Poles, Hungarians and even Aus- trians—who greatly differ from one another in character and temperament. In addition, as Mr. Gorer himself says, women of the Russian intelligentsia do not swaddle their babies. How then can one disentangle the various elements in the Russian national character, those that are supposed to reflect the " swaddle " men- tality of the peasants from those that reflect the mind of the intelligentsia ? But it is perhaps superfluous to point to these inconsistencies. " What do you think of the swaddling hypothesis? " may well become a fashionable opening for a not very intelligent but quite pleasant drawing-room conversation.
I. DEUTSCHER.
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