The Riddle of Russia
by GEORGE SOLOVEYTCHIK
1
POLITICANS diplomats, and authors alike have always found it extremely difficult to see or to present the Empire of the Tsars in its true light, and their position has become even worse since the monarchy was replaced by the Bolshevik dictatorship twenty-nine years ago. Indeed, one of the most hackneyed phrases in the English political and literary vocabulary is “the riddle of Russia.”
During the last seventy-five years or so, two clearlyestablished clichés have developed in books about Russia. The picture presented to the reader was either that of “Holy Russia,” with millions of worthy bearded moujiks adoring their Little Father the Tsar, — kindly men steeped in the mysteries of the Greek Orthodox Church and full of strange “Dostoevskian” complexes, performing a kind of Russian ballet or Christmas pantomime, — or else it was a picture of a villainous tyrant on the throne suppressing the idealist ic liberal patriots, with dissipated grand dukes, heroic nihilists, vodka, samovars, and the yellow ticket to provide that local background without which no book about old Russia would be complete.
Just before the First World War, Mr. Stephen Graham and others were telling a world eager for enlightenment all the secrets of the Russian soul, which they apparently understood well. In France the expression l’âme slave had actually acquired a comic meaning as a result of the peculiar efforts of the various ladies and gentlemen probing into it.
The Russian revolution loosed a torrent of new books which has not dried up to the present day. People who admittedly do not know one word of Russian have produced large volumes which claim to be authoritative. Left-wing intellectuals with an axe to grind; second-general ion aliens whose parents had left Tsarist Russia and settled in the United States or Britain or France and who in their childhood had heard nothing but horrors and abominations; cheap sensation hunters and social hangers-on - they all went to Soviet Russia determined to adore and returned adoring. Having made up their minds to condemn the past, these enthusiasts seemed fervently to believe that until the advent of Bolshevism, in 1917, Russia was an industrial and cultural desert, a prison for the people and a den of vice for the ruling classes.
No amount of evidence showing the country’s economic and social progress or the unique development of art and learning throughout the absolutist nineteenth century would convince these detractors of pre-revolutionary Russia. As one of them said to me on an unforgettable occasion, simply gloating with self-satisfaction, “I do not have to learn anything about Russia: I have imagination.” These sycophantic admirers still stubbornly maintain that Stalin can do no wrong and that under his leadership the Russians have found the right solutions for all the social, economic, and moral problems afflicting the world. Anybody who dares to doubt or contradict this demonstrable distortion of truth is promptly dubbed a reactionary, or else an attempt is made to smear his personal character.
Likewise, and no less stupidly or dishonestly, Russia’s detractors object to everything her people do, — or fail to do, — for the simple reason that they are Russians. What the sycophants and the detractors have in common is that they are completely carried away by their own fads and nostrums, which, though they would never admit, it, have precious little to do with Russia per se.
In a class by itself, and deserving far greater attention, is a very different kind of literature— books by former members of the Soviet administration who at some point in their career have broken away from Moscow or else were pushed out, like Trotsky. Even allowing for all his understandable bias, his writings occupy a unique place among the eyewitness accounts of the Bolshevik revolution. His position, second only to that of Lenin himself, and his talent as a writer make his books a “must in this type of literature.
And among some of the lesser ex-Muscovites who in recent years have jumped over the fence and become émigré authors, let us not overlook one Bessedovsky, who did so in the literal as well as literary sense of the word. He climbed the wall of the Soviet Embassy in Paris and ran for cover to the French police. Subsequently he produced two bulky volumes entitled On the Road to Thermidor. Then there was General Krivitsky, one of the top men in the GPU (or NKVD as the Soviets now call their secret police), who likewise “hopped it ” and wrote a violent book against his former colleagues and masters. Agabekov, another GPL dignitary, followed suit, and also took to the pen. The latest books of this type are: Alexandre Barmine’s One Who Sorrived and Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom.
2
ALL these books are written to a certain pattern and have one particular feature in common which is excessively boring: the author’s invariable insistence on ideological arguments, first for serving the Soviets (with all that such service implies!) and then for leaving them. How refreshing it would be if one of these writers had the candor to admit that selfinterest or fear kept him in the service of a regime which he professes to have hated and despised. What a welcome change it would be to read a plain factual narrative, unadorned by excursions into a renegade’s Weltanschauung, which can be of no interest to anybody but himself.
Mr. Kravchenko, for instance, finds it necessary to inform his readers that “the next step toward world security lies not in a world organization - though that must come—but in the liberation of the Russian masses from their tyrants. One need only suppose that, by some miracle, Russia were suddenly democratized to realize that most of the tensions now threatening humanity’s peace would be automatically relaxed and that genuine world coöperation would become possible.” He does not explain by what means “the weight of world opinion, the leverage of its spiritual support, now serving to fortify the Kremlin’s despotism, must be diverted to quicken and aid the Russian aspirations for freedom.” Mr. Kravchenko is very angry with American Communists, fellow travelers, and other befuddled individuals who affect to believe, or try to make others believe, that. Soviet Russia is a free and democratic country.
What he has to say on this subject is true enough, but it ill behooves him to say it after his own record of service under the Soviets. After all, the Communist Party represents only a tiny fraction of the Russian population even now — some five million members out of a nation of 190 millions. At the time when Mr. Kravchenko chose to join it (presumably responding to much the same sort of impulses that prompted him to choose freedom now), the party numbered only about one and one-quarter millions. Like the vast majority of the Russian people, for whom he professes to feel so strangly, the author could have easily stayed outside the privileged organization so misleadingly called the “Communist Parly.” But he went in and stayed in; so, in the words of his own father, “as a Communist you cannot shirk your share of the responsibility.”
Trimmed of his unconvincing and irritating political meditations, Mr. Kravchenko’s memoirs can rightly claim to be a most important factual and upto-date account of the life of a vital group of Soviet citizens today - not the uppermost leaders or the rank and file, but that mass of men and women who constitute the new ruling class of the “classless” Sov iet Union. Moreover, it is the only book of its kind that gives us an inside picture of Russia during the war.
It was inevitable, then, that this eyewitness testimony by an active participant in the Soviet administration should promptly become the object of violent polemics. Those on the left quite naturally call Mr. Kravchenko a traitor and a deserter; those on the right lavish extravagant praise on him. In my opinion, both attitudes are equally silly.
The fact that there are hardly any sensational revelations in it is one of the book’s outstanding qualities. A feeling of veracity and of genuine knowledge is conveyed throughout this detailed and very human narrative. “I was going on nine when the first World War started. Life was suddenly brimful of excitement and emotion”; from then onwards the author was swept into a welter of further excitements and emotions which have never stopped to the present day. This is how he describes his own early beginnings in the Soviet service: “The minor actors in a great historical drama rarely are conscious of its greatness. They are too deep inside the action to see its large contours. I was among these actors at the beginning of 1929—one of the young enthusiasts, thrilled by the lofty ideas and plans of this period.”
That was also the year of his admission Lo full membership of the Communist Party. He was twenty-five years of age and his successful career as a pillar of the Bolshevik state was just about to begin. The Soviets gave him a technical education. Ordzhonikidze, one of Stalin’s closest henchmen, befriended him: “I had a patron in the seats of the almighty until he died in 1937. I had a feeling of sanctuary. In my worst moments, the knowledge that I could turn to Stalin’s fellow-Georgian of the hawk-face for help gave me a boldness that others could not muster.”
So up and up and up in the Soviet hierarchy — including a short period as a captain of engineers in the Red Army — until he finally got a much coveted job outside the “Soviet Fatherland.” This was with the Russian Purchasing Commission in Washington, from which he escaped on April 4, 1944, thus breaking with the Soviets after a mere seven months of service abroad.
The ruthless totalitarian character of the Soviet administration and its maddening bureaucracy is conveyed in a convincing manner. So is the picture of a terrorized, bewildered, wretched people — yet intensely human, talented, virile, and patriotic.
Unfortunately, the publishers do not disclose who edited his text and who put it into such admirable American prose. The hand of an expert writer and passionate Soviet hater is felt throughout the narrative, and it is hard not to speculate how much of it is by the Russian author and how much by his American editor. A most irritating mannerism of the latter is the mixing of Russian words with the English text and the way he uses — sometimes in the same line — one or two names in English and one or two others in their Russian consonance. For instance he refers to Alexei, George, Vanya, and Pavel, or again to Clavdia, Julia, and Mary; why not stick to one language and have done with it?
Though it is not a thrilling book and though a few good cuts would greatly improve it, I Chose Freedom is an important and timely document. Serious students of Russian affairs will find plenty of facts and much food for thought in it.
3
PRESUMABLY Mr. Bullitt’s book, The Great Globe Itself, is intended not merely for students of Russian a flairs but for a much wider circle, since it carries the subtitle “A Preface to World Affairs.” Broadly speaking, it can be divided into four parts: (1) a violent attack on American foreign policy and especially on President Roosevelt personally; (2) a potted history of Russia; (3) an analysis of the Soviet government and the Communist doctrine; and (4) three appendices of texts and documents, which fill some 80 pages — over a quarter of the book.
Mr. Roosevelt’s first Ambassador to Moscow and last Ambassador to Paris has chosen to deliver a series of extremely dirty attacks on the late President by a most insidious method: rather than criticize him directly, Mr. Bullitt implies that the man who — for no discoverable reason, I may say — gave him his confidence and two key embassies was weak, cynical, sick, tired, and so on. What this former American envoy has to say about American foreign policy may be true enough, but just as it ill behooves Mr. Kravchenko to assail the Communist Party, there is something nauseating about Ambassador Bullitt’s righteous, if curiously belated, indignation over Washington diplomacy.
The core of Mr. Bullitt’s book is devoted to the denunciation of Russia past and present. There again a similarity with the Kravchenko memoirs suggests itself. Though the former Soviet official does not say who edited his book, he does at least acknowledge outside help and leaves the reader guessing whether one of the former Soviet enthusiasts later turned Soviet haters — Eugene Lyons, for instance— may have had anything to do with it. Mr. Bullitt’s book acknowledges no outside editorial help. But it is so stuffed with quotations, mostly from original Russian sources, and reveals such profound command of Marxist literature that the names of one or two experts involuntarily spring to mind: not only the arguments but the way they are presented remind one of David J. Dallin, quoted by the author, or Max Eastman.
Let us assume, however, that the former Ambassador to Moscow is equally outstanding as a Russian scholar and as an authority on Lenin, Stalin, and Marx. Lenin, by the way, is described as a man with “a sense of humor, and immense personal charm”; also as “a man of immense human sympathies, intellect and courage.” Nevertheless, Mr. Bullitt sees in him the root of most of today’s evils in the Soviet dictatorship, “which differed from the Nazi dictatorship most conspicuously in policy toward the Jews. Hitler slaughtered Jews — men, women and children — for no other reason than that they were Jews; whereas Stalin killed only those gentiles and Jews who displeased him.”
Now in the words of President Roosevelt, — and Mr. Bullitt quotes them twice, on page 5 and again on page 168, — “The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the facts knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.” That is undeniable; but to assert that Stalin’s dictatorship differs from Hitler’s “most conspicuously” in the treatment of Jews and to omit all the other far more striking differences is unworthy of a book that claims to be “A Preface to World Affairs.”
In his frisky canter through Russian history Mr. Bullitt rides on a very high horse indeed. Quoting the oracular Mr. Stephen Graham for his source, the author states: “In the Red Square in Moscow, Ivan the Terrible had hundreds who displeased him boiled and roasted alive for the edification of his subjects. When that happened, Shakespeare was alive, Queen Elizabeth was on the throne of England, and the Magna Carta had been in force for three hundred and fifty years. Such is the time lag that separates the Russians from the ways of western civilization.”
One could rewrite this paragraph in relation to German atrocities under Hitler or Negro lynchings in America. Only it would then be as cheap and as irrelevant as Mr. Bullitt’s excursions into Russian history.
Here is another shining example of his “historical” method: “Alexander II, a wavering man of good intentions under pressure of patriotic rage and democratic energy engendered by . . . defeat, liberated the serfs in 1861. And in 1864 he established trial by jury—650 years after it had been established in England.” Well, Alexander did in 1861 what Lincoln could only do in a largely reluctant country two years later and at the price of a bitter civil war.
In any case, if Russia — or any other country for that matter — is to be judged correctly, she must be viewed against her own historical background and not that of other nations.
I have little quarrel with Mr. Bullitt’s analysis of the Soviet system or of the Communist doctrine; only neither subject possesses any novelty and I cannot see that the versatile former diplomat, turned historian or anti-Marxist, has thrown any fresh light on these problems. The only original contribution made by Mr. Bullitt to modern political thought will be found on page 175 of his pretentious “Preface to World Affairs.” Here it is: “Man becomes what he does. Man can not murder without becoming a murderer. Nations can not plan and launch wars without becoming enemies of humanity. . . . We can use only means that conform to the highest moral standards we have, otherwise we shall throw away in advance all chance to lift international morality to the plane made requisite by the existence of the atomic bomb.
“This does not mean that we should hesitate to use the atomic bomb to stop new crimes of Soviet. Imperialism. To execute a murderer is not an immoral act. And the more certain the Soviet Government is that we shall use the atomic bomb against it if it continues its career of aggression, the more likely the Soviet Government will be to refrain from aggressions — at least until it has the atomic bomb.”
Clear enough? Clear enough.