Russia, Without Prejudice

I

EVERYONE knows the type of man who pays a short visit to some country new to him and comes back posing as an authority upon it. In England that type of person is most conspicuously represented by the politician who goes to India for two or three months in the cold weather and then comes back and in the House of Commons lays down the law upon Indian affairs in the presence of administrators who have had a lifelong experience of the country. My visit to Russia was short and left me with a full realization of the fact that the problems there arisen for solution far transcended my powers of understanding. I have nothing, therefore, to say about the Russian Revolution, about the men that it brought into power, about their theories of government and economics, or about the future of the new experiments there being tried. On the other hand a visitor, like any other newcomer, is able to derive a first impression, and if his stay is very short he carries that first impression away with him as a clear and distinct thing, a thing clear and distinct in exactly the same proportion in which it is shallow and limited; yet a first impression has a value of its own and may be worth putting on record.

It is within the experience of all of us, who have heard much about some prominent person before the opportunity of actually meeting him in the flesh arises, that when the day comes and we encounter him in the flesh we may receive a sudden and very definite impression of his personality and one which in no wise squares with what we had expected. Maturer knowledge often reveals that the first impression contained elements of truthful appreciation which long experience ultimately confirmed. As it is with men, so may it be with cities or countries. Who that has been there does not remember his first impression of Venice — or, for that matter, of London or New York? And that first impression may and often does remain a dominant and truthful factor in his idea of the place.

The reader will, therefore, be prepared to expect from me no mature judgment about Russia and the Russians, nor indeed any judgment at all; but only an account, as truthful as I can make it, of the way Russia a few months ago impressed a visitor who went there intending to maintain an entirely impartial attitude of observation. I went to Russia, in fact, almost formally, and certainly honorably, pledged to maintain that attitude. For I had asked for and received an invitation from the Soviet Government to visit Russia for a single and definite purpose, and that was to examine and report upon the condition of works of art in that country. It had been promiscuously stated in all sorts of journals and other publications that the art treasures of Russia had suffered some such damage and destruction as overtook the treasures of France in the great Revolution. Many usually wellinformed persons thought that the pictures in the Hermitage Gallery, in so far as they had not been destroyed, were in danger of dispersal; that the crown jewels had been scattered all over the earth; that the treasures of the ecclesiastical foundations had been melted down and sold; and, generally speaking, that the great reservoir of ancient treasure which Russia was known to have contained was heavily depleted.

Obviously I could expect to be shown what I desired to see only if I kept free from political intrigue. I therefore made it a rule to talk politics to no one, to make no inquiries about the economic situation, and to repel all confidences that might be thrust upon me. It was, of course, understood that I might use my eyes and draw my own conclusions from what I saw; indeed, before I left, formal permission was given me so to do. I am not going to avail myself of it for propaganda purposes; neither shall I endeavor to fix upon any individual or group responsibility for the misfortunes of the country.

A terrific upheaval had taken place, an upheaval which affected the life and fortunes of every inhabitant of Russia. Private property had been destroyed. There had been fighting in streets and palaces; houses had been burned; the whole structure of society had been changed. It was only natural to expect that precious objects large and small would have passed through perilous times. What I found was that, by some concatenation of circumstances which I can neither define nor account for, almost everything of historic and artistic value had passed through this revolution furnace unscathed. A good many private houses and especially country houses had been looted, but they seem to have contained nothing which the historian of Art would consider to be of great value. Some unrecognized treasure may thus have vanished; but looting did much less harm where private property had ceased to exist, and where the acquisition of valuable objects was not only prohibited but rendered almost impossible, than would have been the case in any other country. If a man looted a picture or some other valuable thing and carried it home with him, he was just as incapable of retaining possession of it as its original owner, for every private house, almost every room, in the cities of Russia was examined, and everything of any value was confiscated and carried to some place of assemblage.

The only museum of importance which fell into the hands of the mob for a time and suffered irreparable damage was the Treasury of the Metropolitan at Moscow. The Treasury contained a great deal of valuable plate, jeweled icons, books in golden bindings, and wonderful embroideries. Certainly some of these things suffered. The half of one golden book-binding had passed through the melting-pot before the other half was rescued. I cannot say how far destruction went on that occasion, but it had nothing whatever to do with the Bolsheviki. The destruction was wrought by the mob, and the Government troops were instantly employed to terminate the looting and protect the residue. All the other museums, so far as I could observe or learn, remained intact. So did all the royal palaces of the Emperor and the houses of the aristocracy. In Leningrad the houses of the Yusupofs, Shuvalovs, and Strogonovs, with everything remaining within them, were converted into museums, and several other important houses containing art treasures could be turned into museums if the Government had the funds to maintain them. All the palaces are in like condition, and there is no sign in any of them of the hectic hours when their fate was in the balance. The Kremlin was bombarded, but I could see no trace of damage done, though of course a good many of its halls and chambers were inaccessible to me, being at the time occupied as Government offices and the residences of officials.

I need not delay over this part of my subject, for all that I have to say about it has been told at length in my recently published book, Art Treasures of Soviet Russia. The purpose of the present article is not to cover any of the ground described in that book, but to supplement that inquiry which was the principal object of my journey with some account of the surface appearance of things as beheld by an intelligent traveler.

II

On journeying toward Russia nothing surprised me more than the total ignorance about it that I found among all people with whom I came in contact; and nowhere was this ignorance more abysmal than in Berlin. The tourist-agency offices there did not even know at what hour or on what day of the week trains ran to Moscow. It was not until I reached Warsaw that I could obtain even such rudimentary information. In Poland again most of the information I received about Russia proved to be false. I was told that the moment I crossed the frontier I should find a total change in the aspect of the country. I expected to behold farms abandoned, farmbuildings fallen into disrepair, fields unploughed, and so forth. In point of fact, there was no difference in the aspect of the agriculture on different sides of the frontier. Naturally one can judge but little by looking out of the window of a railway train, but what I did see was farms apparently well tended and quite a number of new farm-buildings recently erected or actually in process of erection. I do not cite this as any proof of the general condition of agriculture in Russia or of the condition of the country as a whole, but merely as an example of the false information which one receives. Before I left Russia I came to one broad conclusion — not to believe anything I was told on either side and to regard with common suspicion the statements both of the supporters and of the enemies of the present régime.

What I gained or lost by the fact that I had never been in Russia before the war I am unable to say. On the one hand I cannot make comparisons which no doubt would have been interesting, but on the other hand neither was my observation clouded by memories of the past. I was able to look at the phantasmagoria of the moment with perfect detachment and to confine my attention to the things seen with no bias resulting from the things remembered. Thus on arriving in Moscow I was not struck, as are those who knew it in the old days, by the complete change in the aspect of the streets. Gone, I am told, is all the ancient picturesqueness of attire of the various races that here met and mingled together. Gone is every bit of aristocratic display. The tide of humanity flows through the streets in as full a flood as ever, perhaps fuller, for Moscow has now become the capital of Russia and the seat of its government. What everybody most notices is not the diversity but the uniformity of the people in the streets. Now and again you may meet a man with the appearance of a gentleman, and very much more rarely you may meet a lady, but practically the entire throng as I beheld it consisted of working people or people disguised as such. Whereas in England and America the working classes tend to approximate in attire and manners to the upper classes, in Russia the force of circumstances and the intention of the Government tend to lower the standard of living and to depress all alike to the working-class level. As I said to a Soviet official, ‘You are trying to arrive at equality by making everyone a wage-earner. We want to arrive at the same result by making every workingman a duke.’

It is a little difficult to convey to a reader the depressing aspect of the streets of Moscow and Leningrad, not so much because of the men, but because of the absence of women with any kind of taste in their dress. I do not think I saw out of doors above half-a-dozen women who were nicely, though simply, dressed; in their case it was evident that they had been the architects of their own clothes and were displaying their own taste. The number of vehicles in the streets was not inconsiderable. Trams were numerous and crowded, and apparently the tramway system was working well. There were generally one or two motor-cars in sight, but I think they were all official conveyances. One-horse carriages were plying for hire in considerable number. The drivers were mostly thieves!

I can speak of the railways only so far as my own journeyings carried me. The weekly train from Warsaw to Moscow had comfortable though not exactly luxurious sleeping-berths, and the same was true of the train which ran, certainly more than once a week, possibly every day, between Moscow and Leningrad. They traveled at a good pace, kept up to time, and there was nothing to complain of in the service as far as it went. Those trains in which I made shorter journeys, distances of fifty miles or so round the two big cities, were certainly far from luxurious. They consisted solely of thirdclass carriages with plain wooden seats; and not only was every seat taken, but standing-room was also crowded from one end of the train to the other. The carriages were scrupulously clean, and I was struck by the cleanliness of the people against whom I was pretty tightly packed. The German customhouse officer who found packages of Keating’s and other insecticides in my luggage, and asked what they were, said to me, ‘You will want them all,’but as a matter of fact I never wanted them at all. I cannot say anything about the condition of the country, but as far as the towns are concerned cleanliness has certainly been attained. The streets are well swept, and the result has evidently been arrived at by a definite and well-maintained policy.

Moscow and Leningrad struck me broadly as rather dilapidated stagescenery might strike one in an empty theatre. There was all the setting for a distinguished society, but the setting was out of repair and the distinction was gone. After all, distinction is the final flower of civilization. The country without distinction is a body without a soul. I do not for a moment suggest that after an enormous revolution, when the whole foundations of society have been broken up and when the future exists only in embryo, an embryo too small to be discovered by the naked eye, it would have been possible for distinction to be arrived at. What the future of Russia may be one hundred years hence no one knows. It may have created an entirely new social structure and arrived at a distinction of a new character. At present the old distinction is gone and nothing has arisen to take its place. Here are the palaces of the Tsars, with their enormous wealth of equipment, splendid tapestries, rare furniture, magnificent services of plate, and fine pictures. Here are the houses of the great aristocrats of the past, rivaling in splendor the palaces of the Emperor. Here are the wide streets, intended to display fine equipages and with open spaces for ceremonial occasions. Here are the gilded domes of many churches, great museums, public offices, and all the rest. Here too are historical monuments, some of them of considerable antiquity, redolent of history. And all these things are but the empty shell of a dead organism.

Thus there arises in the visitor a sense of desolation, a desolation such as one feels in the streets of Pompeii or Timgad; and this sense of desolation grows from day to day and from week to week; nor as yet is it in any considerable degree counterbalanced by any sense of hope of a new world that must some day come in Russia as after the French Revolution it arose in France. Believing as I do in the future of every great people, confident as I am that Russia must rearise from her ashes to a future greatness of some new sort, I yet was unable in the brief time at my disposal to discover the vital germ of a new civilization. Perhaps it is too soon to look for it. Certainly it is too soon for a passing stranger to find it.

The sense of death is most powerfully felt in Leningrad. In Moscow every house is occupied and all damage that the Revolution may have caused has been repaired, but in Leningrad the population is greatly diminished. The whole aristocratic quarter of the town is irreparably damaged. Grass grows in some of the streets, and what at first looked like the façades of stately houses is discovered on closer approach to be nothing but walls behind which are interiors gutted by fire or destroyed by pillage; nor is there any reason, so far as I can see, why these streets of houses fashioned for habitation by the wealthy should ever be repaired. The population of Leningrad is not likely to increase much; the falling-off of manufactures has diminished the workingclass population, while the removal of the capital to Moscow has lessened by tens of thousands the official and bureaucratic classes.

As you pass through the country around the two great cities you see many factory chimneys, but few of them smoking. In England the Labor Party is always eloquent about the vast trade that might be done with Russia if only our Government would promote closer economic relations with the Soviet. I can speak of this with no authority, but I derived an impression, which the study of statistics since published tends to confirm, that manufacture in Russia is carried on at a loss and that capital invested in the making of commodities results in the production of an output which costs more to make than it can replace by sale. If this observation is correct, and if the Bolshevist theory is to be maintained in practice for any considerable length of time, it seems to follow that as the years go on the manufacturing towns of Russia will atrophy, and the drift, already observable, of population from the towns into the country will become more marked and the towns will be continuously depleted of folk. If events turn out thus, the Russia of the future will be a great country of peasant proprietors, working on the land, and the towns will be nothing but market places for the sale of their produce and the supply of their small necessaries of life.

III

The reader will understand that I make no claim to have arrived at conclusions which amount to more than a very scanty hypothesis. I may be utterly wrong, but my opinion, for its small worth, is that the seeds of a counter-revolution do not exist. The pre-Revolution Russia, as depicted by its best writers, was run by a very ineffective and unenterprising bureaucracy. Their complete failure to uphold their power in the face of a revolutionary body, insignificant in number and for the most part intellectually ill equipped, gives little promise of a reaction led by the same people.

I think the origin of the change that has taken place lay very deep in the heart of Russia. Up to the time of Peter the Great, Russia was developing a civilization of her own. In so far as any of its factors arose out of the ancient world, they were either Byzantine or Asiatic. That civilization, if it had been left alone, would have developed on its own lines and would have grown into something different from anything the world has elsewhere to show. But its growth was suddenly stopped; by the forceful personality of Peter the Great it was given an entirely new orientation. Peter the Great, Catherine II, and later Tsars imposed upon Russia the civilization of Europe, and for upward of a century the four or five million people who floated upon the surface of the great sea of Russian peasantry lived a denationalized life which had its roots, not in the soil of their own country, but in the upper classes of Europe. The Revolution put an end to that régime. Whatever Russia becomes in the future, whatever civilization or social structure Russia develops, will not be in any sense European. She will not look West for inspiration. She will not follow Western precedents. She will go her own way, and I have no doubt that great results will follow.

What is going on now is mainly destruction. The whole aim of the Soviet Government is to destroy the traditions of the pre-war civilization. The process is a terrible one. The Government has closed the universities to the children of bourgeois parents and opened them only to the offspring of wage-earners. If this process can be drastically carried out and consistently maintained, the children of the upper and middle classes will become day laborers and the professional classes will consist entirely of the children of the workingman. Imagine that process continued throughout a generation and you will see how deep a gulf will lie between the past and the future. Obviously in such circumstances it is impossible for anyone to prophesy the outcome.

Perhaps I should have mentioned that Lenin, by endeavoring to impose upon the Russian people the theories of Karl Marx, was in fact making the mistake that had been made by Peter the Great. He was endeavoring to construct a Russian civilization in accordance with German theories, and his failure was due to that fact. So long as the Soviet authority attempts to rule the Russian people according to theories which do not take their origin in the soil, and which are not in accordance with the national character, just so long will the birth of the new Russia be delayed.

Every civilization that has attained to stability and has produced an outcome of value to the world has been one that spontaneously arose out of the people. The idea that you can impose upon any people a system of government, and still more a social structure, which has been elsewhere and by other races developed is fallacious. One hears it suggested that experiments in government by one people will be of value to other peoples. Thus the Federal Democracy of the United States has been a great and successful experiment, but it has been successful because it was suited to the people settled in a vast and prolific country capable of enormous exploitation and full of natural wealth. The success of the experiment in no way proves that the same constitution would be of any value to another race living under other conditions of climate, soil, and geographical position. The same thing is true of the British Constitution. The success the people of Great Britain have had in managing their affairs under a constitution that changes with the centuries with almost the variability of their own climate in no wise proves that a similar constitution would be of any value to other races. Thus the attempt to endow Oriental peoples with constitutions based upon voting has so far proved an absolute failure; only a few doctrinaires believe that Egypt or India can ever successfully govern itself with a machine constructed on British principles.

Even if Russia were to make a success of what is called ‘Communism,’ that would be no reason for believing that Communism would be a suitable form of government for other folk. The future form of government of Russia when she attains stability, prosperity, and local happiness will be a form which no one can foresee. It will arise by the application of the forces of nature to the immense human organism that grows upon her soil, and will be something different from what the world has ever known. I am one of those who believe that the germ of this future organism is alive and is growing, but I am bound to admit that my belief has very little of definite observation at its root. The States of Europe were moulded by Christianity, those of the middle East were moulded by the religion of Islam. Bolshevism possesses many of the qualities of a religion and it is those qualities which will prove to be its vital moulding forces.

IV

An illustrative parallel may be drawn between the growth and spread of Bolshevism and of Christianity. Bolshevism took its origin in Lenin, who was a man of enormous force, a man who imposed himself with overwhelming power upon the imagination of those who came under his influence. He surrounded himself with a small group of followers whose faith in him was unlimited. His vitality survives him. It may well be that a thousand years hence he will be as vivid a personality as is Mohammed to-day. However hateful we may think his theories, however we may revolt against his personality, however we may lament the cruelties that accompanied the movement which he led, we cannot deny that he possessed a power, diabolic if you wish to call it so, which as a personal force has been possessed by few men in the history of the world. He impressed himself, rather than his theories, upon his immediate followers. You may call them, if you please, the apostles of his religion. They attracted and organized the support of a larger body of adherents and they obtained control over the destinies of Russia. Thus was formed the ‘ Party, ‘ which consists of some three hundred thousand individuals, corresponding to the Early Church. The creed of that party is in process of definition. Assemblages of its representatives meet from time to time, discuss, and decide upon this and the other principle. Once a decision has been arrived at, it is like the decisions of the religious councils of the Early Church. It becomes an article of faith, which must be accepted, and all those who do not accept it are in the position of heretics. Outside of what has thus been defined, differences of opinion are allowed and are even favored, but with a view to ultimate settlement and incorporation in the orthodox faith.

Thus there is growing up a body of dogma which by analogy I am calling the Bolshevist Church. Behind this body of dogma there is the passionate faith of the Party, which controls Russia just as the Church controlled the Christian world after the days of Constantine the Great. But just as the enthusiastic believers among Christians at that time were but a small proportion of the population, and there survived among the masses of the people a great deal of paganism, so now the mass of the Russian people is but slightly impregnated with Bolshevist doctrines. This mass, however, is practically inert and is little likely in the near future to generate a rival faith able to threaten Bolshevism.

If what I have said is in any way true, it follows that it is foolish to expect any voluntary abandonment of propaganda on the part of the Bolsheviki. In practice they may in time come to discover that their faith finds no acceptance among their peoples. Up to the present day, Islam is in theory as propagandist as it was in the days of Mohammed. Christians, so long as they believe in their religion, will never cease their attempts to spread it. It is indeed the necessary characteristic of any living faith that it endeavors to spread. If the Christian churches ceased to send forth missionaries it would be a proof that the hold of Christianity upon its adherents had practically failed. In so far, therefore, as Bolshevism possesses the qualities of a religion, it must be propagandist. The rest of the world, if it desires to maintain its freedom from Bolshevism, must do so, not by obtaining promises of quiescence from the Bolsheviki, but by maintaining among its own people a lively faith in its own institutions. The Russian Government might promise to abstain from propaganda and, as a Government, it might fulfill that promise, but that would have no practical result, because the body that corresponds to the Bolshevist Church — that is to say, the Community of the Faithful — cannot in fact be restrained by the Russian Government. That Community does not draw its life from the Government, but the Soviet authority draws its life from the Community.

Herein, in fact, lies the peril of Bolshevism for the more advanced societies of the civilized world. Bolshevism may be compared to a low organism, a kind of cancer, which if it once gets into the system is liable to eat up and destroy the more complex organisms on which it grows. So long as other countries are living vigorous and healthy national lives, they are capable of resisting the attack of this low organism; but if there were to be a country which contained among the mass of its people a considerable body of folk of a low type living under bad conditions, and sundered by class and even racial differences from the healthy mass of the people, Bolshevism might quite easily fasten upon that group or class and might thence spread and destroy the whole social structure, in the end extirpating a much higher civilization. Though Bolshevism, coming thus as a disease among the superior peoples of the West, might be productive of the most terrible results, it does not follow that in Russia, among the very backward people that produced it, it might not prove to be the beginning of a reorganization of the people. In Russia some sound polity may grow out of it, which will ultimately organize that vast population into a coherent whole.

Let the reader, however, make no mistake. I am not an apologist for Bolshevism. I am not an admirer of it. I am merely an observer endeavoring impartially to look at the present and to reach out toward the future, firmly convinced that only those forces in a movement can be productive of undying results which are based upon fundamental human qualities. Whatever is contrary to sound humanity must sooner or later come to nothing. If in the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and the emergence of Bolshevism there exist any germs of truth, they will manifest themselves in process of time. The forces of nature and of humanity will suffice, if left alone, to destroy the evil that no doubt exists alongside the good. All that the world has to do is to stand aside and leave Russia to work out her own salvation, seeing to it, each nation for itself, that it preserves its own people in sound national health and contentment.