Russia in the Shadows
by . New York. George H. Doran Co. 1921. 12mo, viii+179 pp. Illustrated. $1.50.
MR. WELLS has written the kind of a book on Russia that his readers might predict, — a book of sweep, vivid portrayal, suggestive analysis, sympathetic interpretation, and independent judgment,—wherein he uses Russia’s condition as a flail for joyous, vigorous, and impartial idol-smashing in the temples both of the Bolsheviki and of their opponents. It is a little book, a sort of travel letter, already familiar to many Americans through its serial publication in our press. The volume adds nothing to the newspaper articles but a permanent form and some very interesting photographs — the best selected that have reached us from‘Russia in the Shadows.’
Concretely, the book is a record of fifteen days spent in Petrograd and Moscow last mid-autumn, part of the time as a guest of Maxim Gorky. It is a very vital picture of conditions and persons in those stricken cities. It is almost entirely an account of contacts with people of the intellectual and ruling classes, not of meetings with peasants and workers, who are dismissed rather cavalierly —and, the writer thinks, unjustly — as unpromising and unconscious clay. Mr. Wells did not see the villages; of these he speaks from hearsay. He triangulates a country covering half of two continents from the short base-line connecting its capitals. He does not profess to do more. As in his Outline of History, he summarizes boldly from secondary sources.
Therefore we face at once the question, not of the accuracy of Mr. Wells’s facts, — they carry the conviction of well-reported personal experiences, — but of the adequacy of his facts to support such final and comprehensive judgments. In a way he does not lack due modesty of opinion. He is not so dogmatic as far less competent observers. But he approaches his problem with a definite and decidedly critical attitude toward existing social institutions, and with a breezy philosophy of history, for which he is disposed to make Russia’s chaos a Q.E.D.
Perhaps the book is all the better for that. It certainly throws strong flash-lights into Russia’s intimidating shadows. It does not make us shudder, but it makes us think. It tends to dissipate the ogre myth of Bolshevism; the question is, may it not substitute for that an apocalyptic myth? To Mr. Wells, Russia’s agony is the logical — also the artistic — sequel of centuries of social and political error. His moral indictment does not run against the Bolsheviki, but against the kind of people who mostly read his books.
This is very helpful in a way, and it gives a purpose to writing that might otherwise drift into mere sensation. There are two reasons for studying Russia to-day: to apply its lessons to our own affairs, and to discover how we can answer most effectively that country’s call for help. In respect to the latter, Mr. Wells believes that, unless Russia is aided by her fellow nations, — and he sees most hope in America, — within a year, ‘the final collapse of all that remains of modern civilization throughout what was formerly the Russian Empire’ will occur and that, ‘both eastward and westward other great regions may, one after the other, tumble into the great hole in civilization thus created. Possibly all modern civilization may tumble in.’ V. S. C.