Russia in 1919 | Page 3

Arthur Ransome
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This Etext prepared by Joseph Gallanar [email protected]

RUSSIA IN 1919 BY ARTHUR RANSOME

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

On August 27, 1914, in London, I made this note in a memorandum
book: "Met Arthur Ransome at_____'s; discussed a book on the
Russian's relation to the war in the light of psychological
background--folklore." The book was not written but the idea that
instinctively came to him pervades his every utterance on things
Russian.
The versatile man who commands more than respect as the biographer
of Poe and Wilde; as the (translator of and commentator on Remy de
Gourmont; as a folklorist, has shown himself to be consecrated to the
truth. The document that Mr. Ransome hurried out of Russia in the

early days of the Soviet government (printed in the New Republic and
then widely circulated as a pamphlet), was the first notable appeal from
a non-Russian to the American people for fair play in a crisis
understood then even less than now.
The British Who's Who--that Almanach de Gotha of people who do
things or choose their parents wisely--tells us that Mr. Ransome's
recreations are "walking, smoking, fairy stories." It is, perhaps, his
intimacy with the last named that enables him to distinguish between
myth and fact and that makes his activity as an observer and recorder so
valuable in a day of bewilderment and betrayal.
B. W. H.

INTRODUCTION

I am well aware that there is material in this book which will be
misused by fools both white and red. That is not my fault. My object
has been narrowly limited. I have tried by means of a bald record of
conversations and things seen, to provide material for those who wish
to know what is being done and thought in Moscow at the present time,
and demand something more to go upon than secondhand reports of
wholly irrelevant atrocities committed by either one side or the other,
and often by neither one side nor the other, but by irresponsible
scoundrels who, in the natural turmoil of the greatest convulsion in the
history of our civilization, escape temporarily here and there from any
kind of control.
The book is in no sense of the word propaganda. For propaganda, for
the defence or attack of the Communist position, is needed a
knowledge of economics, both from the capitalist and socialist
standpoints, to which I cannot pretend. Very many times during the
revolution it has seemed to me a tragedy that no Englishman properly
equipped in this way was in Russia studying the gigantic experiment
which, as a country, we are allowing to pass abused but not examined. I
did my best. I got, I think I may say, as near as any foreigner who was
not a Communist could get to what was going on. But I never lost the
bitter feeling that the opportunities of study which I made for myself
were wasted, because I could not hand them on to some other
Englishman, whose education and training would have enabled him to

make a better, a fuller use of them. Nor would it have been difficult for
such a man to get the opportunities which were given to me when, by
sheer persistence in enquiry, I had overcome the hostility which I at
first encountered as the correspondent of a "bourgeois" newspaper.
Such a man could be in Russia now, for the Communists do not regard
war as we regard it. The Germans would hardly have allowed an Allied
Commission to come to Berlin a year ago to investigate the nature and
working of the Autocracy. The Russians, on the other hand,
immediatelya greed to the suggestion of the Berne Conference that they
should admit a party of socialists, the majority of whom, as they well
knew, had already expressed condemnation of them. Further, in
agreeing to this, they added
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