Russia in 1919 | Page 4

that they would as willingly admit a
committee of enquiry sent by any of the "bourgeois" governments
actually at war with them.
I am sure that there will be many in England who will understand much
better than I the drudgery of the revolution which is in this book very
imperfectly suggested. I repeat that it is not my fault that they must
make do with the eyes and ears of an ignorant observer. No doubt I
have not asked the questions they would have asked, and have thought
interesting and novel much which they would have taken for granted.
The book has no particular form, other than that given it by a more or
less accurate adherence to chronology in setting down things seen and
heard. It is far too incomplete to allow me to call it a Journal. I think I
could have made it twice as long without repetitions, and I am not at all
sure that in choosing in a hurry between this and that I did not omit
much which could with advantage be substituted for what is here set
down. There is nothing here of my talk with the English soldier
prisoners and nothing of my visit to the officers confined in the Butyrka
Gaol. There is nothing of the plagues of typhus and influenza, or of the
desperate situation of a people thus visited and unable to procure from
abroad the simplest drugs which they cannot manufacture at home or
even the anaesthetics necessary for their wounded on every frontier of
their country. I forgot to describe the ballet which I saw a few days
before leaving. I have said nothing of the talk I had with Eliava
concerning the Russian plans for the future of Turkestan. I could think
of a score of other omissions. Judging from what I have read since my
return from Russia, I imagine people will find my book very poor in the

matter of Terrors. There is nothing here of the Red Terror, or of any of
the Terrors on the other side. But for its poverty in atrocities my book
will be blamed only by fanatics, since they alone desire proofs of past
Terrors as justification for new ones.
On reading my manuscript through, I find it quite surprisingly dull. The
one thing that I should have liked to transmit through it seems
somehow to have slipped away. I should have liked to explain what
was the appeal of the revolution to men like Colonel Robins and myself,
both of us men far removed in origin and upbringing from the
revolutionary and socialist movements in our own countries. Of course
no one who was able, as we were able, to watch the men of the
revolution at close quarters could believe for a moment that they were
the mere paid agents of the very power which more than all others
represented the stronghold they had set out to destroy. We had the
knowledge of the injustice being done to these men to urge us in their
defence. But there was more in it than that. There was the feeling, from
which we could never escape, of the creative effort of the revolution.
There was the thing that distinguishes the creative from other artists,
the living, vivifying expression of something hitherto hidden in the
consciousness of humanity. If this book were to be an accurate record
of my own impressions, all the drudgery, gossip, quarrels, arguments,
events and experiences it contains would have to be set against a
background of that extraordinary vitality which obstinately persists in
Moscow even in these dark days of discomfort, disillusion, pestilence,
starvation and unwanted war.
ARTHUR RANSOME.

CONTENTS

To Petrograd Smolni Petrograd to Moscow First Days in Moscow The
Executive Committee on the Reply to the Prinkipo Proposal Kamenev
and the Moscow Soviet An Ex--Capitalist A Theorist of Revolution
Effects of Isolation An Evening at the Opera The Committee of State
Constructions The Executive Committee and the Terror Notes of
Conversations with Lenin The Supreme Council of Public Economy
The Race with Ruin A Play of Chekhov The Centro--Textile
Modification in the Agrarian Programme Foreign Trade and Munitions

of War The Proposed Delegation from Berne The Executive Committee
on the Rival Parties Commissariat of Labour Education A Bolshevik
Fellow of the Royal Society Digression The Opposition The Third
International Last Talk with Lenin The Journey Out

RUSSIA IN 1919
TO PETROGRAD

On January 30 a party of four newspaper correspondents, two
Norwegians, a Swede and myself, left Stockholm to go into Russia. We
travelled with the members of the Soviet Government's Legation,
headed by Vorovsky and Litvinov, who were going home after the
breaking off of official relations by Sweden. Some months earlier I had
got leave from the