Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution [1 ed.] 0748647333, 9780748647330

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Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution

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For Leah

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Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution

David Ayers

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © David Ayers, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4733 0 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4734 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1833 1 (epub)

The right of David Ayers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Introduction

1

1. ‘The Two Internationals’

10

2. Masaryk and the New Europe

38

3. Reporting Realities: Henry Noel Brailsford

69

4. British Visitors to Russia

93

5. Clare Sheridan: A Sculptor in the Kremlin

130

6. Conveying the New Russian Culture: From Eden and Cedar Paul to René Fülöp-Miller

156

7. The Criterion, the English Trotsky and the Idea of Europe

191

8. Fiction and Story of the Russian Revolution

221

Coda: Brave New World

251

Select Bibliography

257

Index

271

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One of the ideas which characterizes our age may be called The European Idea. [. . .] It owes its origin to a new feeling of insecurity and danger; it goes to prove that the most important event of the War was the Russian Revolution. For the Russian revolution has made men conscious of the position of Western Europe as (in Valéry’s words) a small and isolated cape on the western side of the Asiatic Continent. And this awareness seems to give rise to a new European consciousness. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Commentary’, The Criterion 6:2 (August 1927), 97–8 The Great War was of course not a war, strictly speaking, in a nationalist or dynastic sense, but a revolution. It was a gigantic episode in the russian [sic] revolution. From one end of the world to the other there was nothing that was not changed by it. Wyndham Lewis, Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926), p. 4 The Russian Revolution, one of the consequences of the world-war, is as disturbing as the results of the war itself, and at first sight even more disconcerting. It has an emotional quality distinct from, and yet akin to, that of the war. It brings out with a crashing violence the undertones of the war, undertones that, vaguely heard, awakened obscure hopes and indefinite fears. [. . .] The War and the Revolution cannot be thought of apart. They are two aspects of the same struggle, which to so many is as much a mental as a physical struggle. Harold Williams, The Spirit of the Russian Revolution (London: Russian Liberation Committee, 1919), p. 1

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Introduction

When Lithuania pops up in The Waste Land, its occurrence seems no more than a social accident, as the unnamed female voice clarifies for the benefit of an unknown auditor that she is not Russian, but is from Lithuania, a true German – ‘Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.’ Whatever inspiration Eliot had for these lines – and his commentators have a few suggestions1 – this single, free-floating sentence is of a piece with Eliot’s technique in the poem of attributing to various speakers a kind of social speech which veils or is blind to the world of inner suffering and isolation. It was not until the later 1920s that Eliot began to shape a public opposition to the Russian Revolution and the Soviet state, and at the time of composing The Waste Land the show-through of his anti-communism is minimal, usually said to occur in the veiled allusion made by the phrase ‘hooded hordes’ which, without Eliot’s own footnote, might never otherwise have been connected to Herman Hesse’s essay on Dostoevsky, ‘Die Brüder Karamasoff oder der Untergang Europas’ (1920), which argued that the desire for the downfall of Europe was part of the Russian psyche.2 Russia is also present, though, in the first paragraph of The Waste Land, and the configuration of nationalities refers obliquely to the events of the revolution. Scholars agree that Eliot composed the first part of The Waste Land before his stay at a sanatorium near Lausanne, so there can be no pretence that the German voice he makes heard there is that of, say, an exiled Lithuanian at Lausanne, waiting out the war. Of course, the words are not dated in such a way as to peg them specifically to events of the war and the revolution, nor are they geographically located. The dispossessed snobbishness of the phrase ‘echt deutsch’ establishes the claims of the (apparently displaced) speaker to be a member of a dominant minority. The Germanness of the speaker does not link her to either the Lithuanian-speaking

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2

Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution

majority or to the powerful Russian or Polish minorities in Lithuania, nor does it have any connection to Germany’s occupation of Lithuania during the war. The speaker is evidently associated with the governing Russian groups and hence now speaks German with a Russian accent. Her claim to be Lithuanian would situate her quite differently than her claim to be German, which would place her outside the ethnic power-dynamics of the area altogether – not Lithuanian nationalist and not related to the former Polish rulers or to the more recent Russian occupiers. Eliot’s selection of a Lithuanian background for his German-speaker might not have been so tightly calculated. It would have meant something quite different if the reference had been to Latvia, which did have a German aristocracy. Even if it is more calibrated to suggest something about the speaker in terms of her relationship to her native tongue and general dislocatedness – in a transnational optic of the kind given voice by Derrida in Le Monolinguisme de l’autre (1999) – this tiny window on Lithuanian history opens out on to a situation in the closing stages of the war on the Eastern Front in which the question of internationalism has come strongly to the front in its Bolshevik incarnation, just as the collapse of the European empires in the wake of the war has initiated a new phase of national independence across Europe. The two forces of internationalism and nationalism emerge at the same moment and as a response to the same events, and their progress is thoroughly intermingled. In that moment in which The Waste Land seems to articulate something like a mêlée of European voices, those voices had in fact been raised on all sides as nationalities clamoured to be heard, and war erupted again across much of the continent. In contrast to a recent tendency to write cultural history in terms of transnational subjects, examining the individual in terms of the complexity of competing national interpellations, this study takes a view which is more geopolitical in orientation, considering the frameworks within which individual actors sought to orient themselves at a specific moment of internationalisation which was national and political in character. That this is a moment in which politics were internationalised in an unprecedented fashion is sometimes overlooked in modernist studies, which usually favour questions of national identity over the history of socialism, and tend to steer away from the huge shifts in the world order which the First World War ushered in. To call this a geopolitical study, though, is to make several shifts from the notion of geopolitics as it was originally conceived. The discipline of geopolitics generally considers its origins to lie in the work of Halford Mackinder (1861–1947), whose

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Introduction

3

1904 address to the Royal Geographical Society, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, is widely taken to be the founding document of geopolitics even though it does not use the term. The term was first steadily promoted by Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) whose ideas and whose journal, Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, was established in 1924 and subsequently became important for German expansionist policies leading into the Second World War. Geopolitics in its original form was a set of loosely related claims and doctrines which reflected and promoted the imperialist strategies of Britain and Germany. As a field, it has subsequently been reclaimed as critical geopolitics in the wake of Henry Kissinger’s revival of the term during the Cold War.3 This critical geopolitics has adduced Foucault and Derrida in support of a multi-pronged analysis of the institutional modes of writing and representing geographical space. The present study takes as one of its orientations the intersecting attempts by competing powers and voices to write the new geography of Europe and the world in environments in which established institutions shifted in importance and new institutions were brought into play. While critical geopolitics pays attention mainly to state or state-level actors such as Haushofer or Kissinger, this study pays attention to the various modalities in which lesser and greater voices sought to figure new geopolitical realities. My own usage of the term ‘geopolitics’ here suggests not simply the politics of geography – abundantly present in the First World War and its immediate aftermath – but the manner in which politics and geography were so thoroughly imbricated in a way that meant geographical and political discourse operated in a complex fashion across national and internationalised spaces. If a loosely reconceived geopolitics takes its place in the general background of this study, it remains desirable to identify a term which can give this period and field some historiographical shape, a rubric under which to place the changes in European and world order which began to take place at such a marked speed after 1917, a theoretical model which would avoid repeating the claims to narrative historical mastery of Marxism, since Marxism as carried forward by the Bolsheviks is a phenomenon of the period which has to be framed and not simply given hermeneutic primacy. For this purpose, I have adopted the term ‘de-imperialisation’ as the name of a phase of modernisation in which changes in the international order, and thereby changes in the national-as-such, begin to emerge after 1917. Without detailing here all the strategic and indeed philosophical reasons for adopting this term, it is worth outlining the basic motivation of the word. In place of the worn term ‘modernity’, with

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Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution

its Habermasian implications that date it to the eighteenth century, and its literary-historical use in the guise of ‘modernism’ which as periodisation is undecided somehow between Baudelaire and the year 1910, I suggest a re-narrativisation of the period from the Russian Revolution and the Great War under the rubric de-imperialisation, viewed as a global process taking place since 1917, one which cannot perhaps be concluded, and a term which incorporates a notion of modernity as a certain kind of moving away, rather than a moving towards the synthesis suggested by the term ‘globalisation’. The term ‘de-imperialisation’ avoids the suggestion of a move towards capitalist domination or victory, but rather allows capitalism to appear as one of the components in the field which the term loosely outlines. Unlike the term ‘globalisation’, the notion of de-imperialisation has the advantage of grouping histories which in terms of a narrative of capitalist/communist or empire/colony might otherwise not be imagined in terms of any continuity. This study does not attempt to talk the reader through the grand narrative shape of the period, which can be found in such fine studies as Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent (1998) and Adam Tooze’s The Deluge (2014). It is the latter, though, with its description of the remaking of the global order and the accompanying uncertainties which most closely matches the premises of this study. Yet this study differs, in that it does not subscribe, as does Tooze, to any overarching narrative frame, to give historiographic logic to the shape of the interwar years. More modestly, and more in keeping with its literary origins, this study documents the break in narrative sense brought about by the war and especially by the Russian Revolution and the entry of the United States into the war in 1917. Concentrating on the handful of years after 1917, the study gives access to the forms and textures of the public discourse that gives so much shape to the thought and feeling of the period. The Great War began as a conflict between six imperial blocs – Britain, France and Russia, on the one hand, and Germany, AustriaHungary and the Ottoman Empire, on the other. At the end of the conflict four of these empires no longer existed, and the remaining two, Britain and France, were weakened as imperial powers. The years 1917–18 can therefore be located as the starting point of the process of de-imperialisation in the Eastern Hemisphere. The process of creating independent nations, from former colonies or from otherwise dominated territories, began at this time and caused a proliferation in the number of nation-states, both within and without Europe, which continues to this day. The concept of de-imperialisation is a

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Introduction

5

useful tool because it provides a ground for the analyst to connect processes that took place within imperial nations and those that took place within occupied or colonised nations. As such, it tends to allow passage between research objects which are often viewed as if belonging to separate domains: the cultures of the hegemonic nations; the cultural processes in colonial and postcolonial nations; the cultures of occupied or dominated nations. In a longer optic, the complex hegemonic processes of the confrontation between communism and capitalism, the umbrella under which the main developments in the decolonisation process took place, can be seen as a mutating global phenomenon with 1917 as its starting point, the Cold War as its sustained realisation, and the period from 1989 as a period of legacy which has scarcely got to grips with the meaning of this history. It should be remembered, though, that this moment does not at all consist of a confrontation between the new form of Wilsonian imperialism and Leninist communism, as if these were equal forces. The Russian Revolution was on the defensive from the outset, unable to project its power, with Lenin himself trying to ascertain from the numerous foreign visitors such as H. G. Wells whether revolution in England would come to the aid of the Russian experiment which would otherwise likely fail. In contrast, the United States was, without any question, the rising power of the world, as was made plain by its role in deciding the outcome of the war and the peace.4 The documentary approach of this study represents in large degree a step back from high theory. While the motivation of this work could be discerned in every angle of high theoretical inquiry, the practice here is in the main to renounce the vocabulary of theory and its tendency to elaborate commentary in favour of simply presenting its objects and their contexts. This approach conceals one of the primary aims here which is to add some elements to the palette of modernist studies and effect a reorientation away from the politics of the institutionalised appropriation of British cultural and literary history. The historicism of so much recent study has inevitably pressed against many of the distorting tendencies which have shaped the cultural historiography of the period, but it remains notable that there can still be found recent studies of British modernism and – in some fashion – ‘politics’ which make no reference to Lenin and Trotsky, nor to Woodrow Wilson, nor to Lloyd George or Ramsay MacDonald, indeed not to any aspect of the political developments in or around the British political environment of the 1920s, whether at the level of government or trades unions, whether national or international, even though these events were the dominant of public discourse at the time. Many of the

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Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution

favoured high-modernist writers allude to this background, if rarely in detail, both because many of these writers were opposed to – or at least uninterested in – the rise of socialism or the creation of a new international order, but also because in some cases simple artistic individualism led writers to conclude that they should avoid the topics which were the commonplace of their time, or at least address such topics only indirectly or obliquely, and as a last resort. So, in a way, this study is an extended footnote to those references to the League of Nations, to Russia, and to socialism and internationalism in general, in the fiction, poetry and criticism of the period from the late 1910s through the 1920s. For that reason, it is mainly descriptive. I have attended to published sources, with the aim of presenting what appeared in the public sphere and in some ways reconstructing the discourse around the League and the Russian Revolution. There is no attempt to re-present the history of the League and the Revolution, both of which are easily discoverable in outline and each of which has received considerable scholarly attention. The history of the Russian Revolution itself is in any case a product of the modernist period. Not only did Trotsky write his first history as early as 1918 while at Brest-Litovsk, and published as The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk (1919), it was also he who produced the first history which can be recommended to the reader of this study, The History of the Russian Revolution (1932), published by Victor Gollancz and reviewed by A. L. Rowse in The Criterion, who found it to be ‘some consolation for the loss of such ability to the Revolution in Russia, when it is devoted to a task like this and so triumphantly achieves its purpose’.5 In sticking to the front story, as it were, I have only occasionally presented much of the backstory, in terms of the revealed opinions of the writers I present whether from letters, archives or even subsequent published comment. That at least has been the rule of thumb, and it will be very evident, for example, that such issues as the (elsewhere closely analysed) loyalty of Arthur Ransome have been presented only in outline. The study is mainly interested in the published archive, even as literary studies in general makes the unpublished archive its proper study. While the notion of public and published discourse is emphasised, this study retains the habits of modernist literary studies in that it focuses in the main on higher cultural production, and also in that it does not take as its field the vast domain of general journalistic discourse on these topics, but concentrates on a few elements of higher journalism, loosely defined, and brings this into relation with a series of sometimes littlestudied cultural figures and objects.

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Introduction

7

Nation and nationalism are common objects of study; internationalism much less so. Yet the period from 1917 sees a growth in internationalist idealism. One driver of this is the collapse of the hegemony in Europe which had limited European war since 1815. Although the system of secret diplomacy in some ways carried on in the same way after 1918, it was in the eyes of many discredited. Nationalism was seen, whether correctly or not, as a cause of the Great War, and as a consequence internationalist idealism gained prominence as an alternative. The principal fact of the de-imperialising world was the need for new structures of security. From our point of view in the present, the principal feature of the post-war settlement was that the attempt to create this security failed tragically. Two competing models of a new international order became available in 1917: the League of Nations of Woodrow Wilson, and the Communist International of the Bolsheviks. These two alternatives are a dominant discursive feature of the period from 1917. The first chapter, ‘The Two Internationals’, aims to give a sense of the manner in which the two forms of internationalism were given discursive shape in journalism. It begins with a survey of some more left or liberal commentators in the New Statesman and The New Age and documents their shifting perspectives on the events of 1917 as they unfolded, and sets this in parallel with the discourse around supranational governance in the work of Leonard Woolf. The second chapter, ‘Thomas Masaryk and the New Europe’, details the manner in which Masaryk and his close supporters in London formed their intervention in nationalities discourse with the aim of obtaining the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the creation of Czechoslovakia. ‘Reporting Realities: Henry Noel Brailsford’ examines the attempt by one leading commentator to present some of the facts on the ground in Central Europe and Russia in order to offset propagandistic and less well-informed claims circulating in Britain. Chapter 4, ‘British Visitors to Russia’, presents a range of accounts by British writers who were either present in Russia in the early stages of the Revolution and civil war, or who were subsequently invited to be shown the new Russia and to meet the Bolshevik leadership. These include Arthur Ransome, later the famous children’s author; John Cournos, the novelist and poet; the correspondents Robert Wilton and Michael Farbman, with their wildly opposing views; Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells, whose accounts are among the most famous; and Francis McCullagh, who gives a fascinating account of his experience as a prisoner of the Bolsheviks following his capture in Siberia. Chapter 5 deals with

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Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution

Clare Sheridan, the sculptor, journalist and novelist, and cousin of Winston Churchill, whose invitation to Moscow to make busts of the Bolshevik leadership caused a scandal in Britain. Sheridan’s journalism unusually bridges Ireland, Russia and Turkey, where she witnessed the Smyrna massacre, and her fiction documents her shift from the values of modernism and communism to a kind of fellow-travelling with Islam. Chapter 6 examines the mediation of the new Russian culture in Britain, beginning with Eden and Cedar Paul, advocates of Proletcult and industrious translators. Developing that strand in this study which takes its impetus from book history, this section describes the pattern and purpose of the Pauls’ translations as an attempt to remodel the conventional discourse of Marxism with reference to Bergsonian vitalism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and sets their work in the context of other attempted mediations, culminating with the influential translation (by other hands) of Fülöp-Miller’s The Mind and Face of Bolshevism. ‘The Criterion, the English Trotsky, and the Idea of Europe’ returns to the conventional ground of modernist literature, focusing on Eliot’s Criterion as it responded to the growing significance of the Russian Revolution and the formation of the League with its advocacy of an ‘Idea of Europe’, set against the background of Trotsky’s important anglophone presence as a widely and prominently translated author in the 1920s. ‘Fiction and Story of the Revolution’ takes the reader through a number of mainly less well-known texts of the period, while the Coda proposes Brave New World as the first really significant British fiction of the Russian Revolution, precisely because its author makes a break with the topic of revolution, and indeed of all Russian particularities, and attends to the question which the Russian Revolution itself had posed – and failed to answer well – as to what the future society might look like. The selected bibliography confines itself mainly to cited sources. I have not talked the reader though the complex and intertwined histories of the Russian Revolution and the League of Nations, which are well documented, nor have I taken every opportunity to peg the discussion to the many references to these topics in the major modernist works of the period, rather intending that this study provide an extended footnote to those references when and where they do occur. Thanks are due to the many people in modernist and avant-garde studies who have supported this work in so many ways and provided meaningful contexts for its exploration. Without their interest and generosity there would be so much less pleasure in work of this kind. Especial thanks are due to Tim Armstrong, Rebecca Beasley,

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Introduction

9

Sascha Bru, Irina Bystrova, Helen Carr, Michael Coyle, Marja Härmänmaa, David Herd, Ben Hickman, Benedikt Hjartarson, Suzanne Hobson, Maggie Humm, Gerri Kimber, Eleni Loukopoulou, Scott McCracken, Laura Marcus, Ariane Mildenberg, Tyrus Miller, Drew Milne, Jan Montefiore, Tania Ørum, Derek Ryan, Natalia Smolianskaia, Angeliki Spiropoulou, Matthew Taunton, Andrew Thacker, Bela Tsipuria, Olga Ushakova, Harri Veivo and Claire Warden. My thanks also go to all of those colleagues with whom I have worked on the European Network for Avant-garde and Modernism Studies, who have brought so much passion to that ambitious project, and to the very many outstanding colleagues with whom I have worked over the years in the context of the London Modernism Seminar, the Modernist Studies Association and the British Association of Modernist Studies. Thanks above all to my wife, Margaret, who has always supported the necessary rhythms of my work. This study was made possible by the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust.

Notes 1. See the notes in Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (eds), The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Volume I. Collected and Uncollected Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), p. 605. 2. For full details on the allusion and its history, including Eliot’s commission of a translation from Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos from Sidney Schiff, see Ricks and McCue (eds), The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Volume I, pp. 693–4. 3. See Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 58. 4. See Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order (London: Allen Lane, 2014), pp. 3–30. 5. A. L. Rowse, ‘An Epic of Revolution: Reflections on Trotsky’s History’, The Criterion 12:48 (April 1933), 371–89, quoted p. 371.

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Chapter 1

‘The Two Internationals’

The entry into the Great War of the United States under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson, and the events of the February Revolution in Russia, were well understood in the British press to be of momentous significance for the conduct of the war and for the shape of the post-war world. It was this sense that the future world might be very different, and that coming changes no longer depended as much on British decisions as they once had, that informed some of the best liberal and socialist journalism of the period, journalism which in turn gave shape to the assumptions of informed discussion in the post-war period. One commentator seemed prescient in predicting a conflict of the American and Russian internationalist models. In ‘Views and Reviews: The Two Internationals’, published in The New Age for 21 June 1917 (that is, before the October Revolution), Alfred E. Randall, writing as ‘A.E.R.’, wrote: ‘Russia and America seem to be destined to bring into conflict two different conceptions of international action to secure peace’, that is, Wilson’s League of Nations, and the ‘union of all the working classes to combat all the attempts of Imperialism to prolong the war in the interest of the well-to-do classes’ of the ‘Executive Committee of the Council of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates’. Randall noted that the ‘division between this conception and that of President Wilson is complete’ but that both ideas ‘coincide in their objects’, namely ‘a secure and lasting peace’. He asked rhetorically: ‘Is it not obvious that international Capitalism is the only guarantee of peace, that the proletarian International broke down at the declaration of war?’, and argued that the Russian Revolution was now an embarrassing exception which forced ‘the Allies to use words like “democracy” and “liberty” in a sense different from that which the Russians convey’. The essay went on to prefer Wilson’s solution, endorsing Wilson’s claim that this should be ‘a people’s war for freedom, justice, and self-government among all

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'The Two Internationals'

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the nations of the world’, but Randall allowed a concluding doubt to stand: ‘will President Wilson’s League of Nations allow for the representation of the working classes of the world; will the two Internationals combine in a Parliament of Man, or shall we exchange the tyranny of Germany for the orderly and constitutional progress of the capitalist system?’1 The February Revolution, in which soldiers sent to fire on strikers and protestors rebelled, and the Petrograd Soviet forced the resignation of the Tsar, had created a frenzy in the British media. Much of the coverage in the conservative newspapers such as The Times, Morning Post and Daily Mail welcomed the revolution but saw it through a rather wishful optic, asserting that the creation of the new Duma (or parliament) would serve to reinvigorate the Russian war effort. These newspapers reflected the policy of the British and French governments, which was to recognise the Duma in the hope of creating a new stability that would keep the Eastern Front with Germany open. Liberals recognised the tyranny of tsarism, and indeed it had been an aim of pre-war British propaganda to alter the hostile public perception of Russia which had been formed in the period of the Crimean War (1853–6), the apex of a long struggle with the Russian Empire. The reporter Michael Farbman, who published in the Manchester Guardian and elsewhere, commented from a socialist perspective on the presentation of Russia in the British press, condemning as propagandistic ‘whitewash’ the British cult of the mysterious ‘Russian Soul’.2 While theories of Holy Russia were sometimes received with scepticism in Britain, Farbman argued, the outbreak of war had served to silence objections to tsarism. The translation of Russian literature during the war might have helped the process of understanding the real Russia, he thought, but the justification of tsarism had continued to make progress during the war, despite the challenge to that model offered by literature. The flattery of tsarism by all but a small corner of the socialist press meant that the occurrence of the revolution seemed baffling in Britain. Farbman noted acidly that: ‘The speedy and complete liquidation of Tsardom was astounding and painful to the followers of the Holy Russia school.’ 3 This is not the place for an examination of the extensive prewar cultural modelling of Russia, but we can note some of its elements.4 Mussorgsky’s very political operas, Khovanshchina and Boris Godunov, were first performed in London in 1913 in productions by Sergei Diaghilev. Mussorgsky was certainly a realist, in thought and operatic mode, and his basic observation was that the

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Russian people had passively suffered through a succession of tyrannical rulers and accompanying political chicanery. However realist, these much-discussed operas may have served to confirm, at least at the high-cultural level, that Russia was indeed a land of perpetual suffering. The opening and closing scenes of Boris Godunov feature laments for the endless trials of the pravoslavnie (the Orthodox people) who can expect no material redemption and can only appeal to God; the closing scene of Khovanshchina shows the collective suicide by fire of the Old Believers (as well as of the amorous principals) as the tsarist guards close in. Opera seemed to offer a guide to Russianness for the culturally privileged. Writing in the New Statesman in 1915 in a piece titled ‘The Psychology of the Russian’, the psychologist Havelock Ellis refers to the production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’or (1909) which had premiered in Drury Lane in the summer of 1914, equating the sumptuousness of the dining scene in the royal court with received notions of Russian ‘barbarity’. His remarks preface an odd propaganda piece, which compares received notions of German and Russian barbarity with the evident (though unstated) aim of legitimising the alliance with Russia by differentiating between the current, propagandistic image of German barbarity and the received notion of Russian barbarity. This is a curious essay, in which Ellis first cautions his readers that notions of barbarity and civilisation do not congeal in any kind of moral hierarchy, but advises his readers that, while German barbarism is ‘masculine’, the Russian type is ‘feminine’, qualities which arise from the geopolitics of national defence – Germany being closely surrounded by enemies, Russia so ‘vast’ as to be able to repel or simply assimilate any assailants. Ellis works through a number of ideological commonplaces about Russia, attempting to counter potential popular doubts about the alliance with Russia based on claims that Russia is not European, is inhumane, and is weak and disorganised in character. Ellis instead argues that ‘anthropologically Russia may be said to be more “European” than much of Western Europe’, that the hardness of Russian conditions has bred ‘the most profound of all Russian traits, humanity’, that Russians may share ‘indolence’ and ‘mystic fatalism’ with ‘the Celt’ (according to a familiar racial formulation) but that these traits are ‘not incompatible with latent energy’ – indeed ‘volcanic eruption from within or violent shock from without has always been the stimulus to the great manifestations of the Russian spirit’. He concludes: ‘We see this great people with a psychology in most respects so youthful, so sensitively receptive, so pliant, even sometimes it

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seems, so weak, yet so vigorously and impulsively spontaneous, so massively powerful, so resistent [sic].’5 Designed apparently to give a scientific gloss to wartime propaganda, this confused piece illustrates both in what ways the nature of Russia in all its ‘vastness’ had become a discursive topos long before the revolutions, and also some of the muddled thinking that accompanied the urgent task of grasping Russia and Russianness. E. M. Forster addressed this topos in a 1915 review of new translations of Chekhov and Sologub by Adeline Lister-Kaye, Marian Fell and John Cournos. ‘Russian literature will scarcely come into its own until we cease to seek in it for the Russian spirit,’ he complains. ‘[. . .] We do not know what animates our great Ally, and, naturally curious, we turn to her literature for what literature seldom provides – a generalisation.’ He notes that Chekhov’s publisher advertises his work as portraying ‘the resignation and patient idealism of the Russian spirit’ but Forster demurs.6 The new and almost overwhelming interest in Russian literature was remarked on by Julius West (translator of Chekhov and later the invaluable Petrograd correspondent of the New Statesman), although in his view the causes were twofold – the discovery by British publishers that Russian works were not protected by international copyright and could be translated freely, and the more mysterious fact that English and Russian literature seemed to have a profound affinity. Not only Andreyev, Gorky, Garshin, Artsibashev and Chekhov crossed the reviewer’s desk, but also hitherto unheard-of figures such as Sologub, Kuprin, Korolenko and Remizov.7 History and commentary on Russia was now of pressing interest, and one reviewer commented that ‘only a year ago no qualifications whatever were required of the authors of papers on the Soul of Russia . . . but the scholars are now getting to work’. Much was at stake in even the more scholarly accounts, such as Russia and the Russian Verb (1915) by the anthropologist Jane Ellen Harrison, which argues that the Russian tense structure ‘offers one clue to the reading of the Russian soul’, and that a grasp of grammar is a route to understanding ‘our Russian Allies’. Asserting that ‘the Imperfective is the aspect of what M. Bergson would call durée, of process, of actuality’, she argues that the widely used imperfective aspect of the Russian verb ‘is in the blood of the Russian people’, so that while Latin languages ‘are precise as to time’, ‘Russia lives sub specie aeternitatis’: the Russian ‘hungers for durée’, Russian novelists such as Dostoevsky consequently demonstrate a moral openness alien to English fiction, and ‘what we get from Russia is in the impulse to live in the living fact’.8

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Russian ethnography and history formed part of the texture of publication eagerly seized on by reviewers keen to help their readers grasp the nature of their Russian ally. Isaak Vladimirovich Shklovsky (who later wrote anti-Bolshevik political commentary as ‘Dioneo’) contributed In Far North-East Siberia (1916), which described customs of some of the least-known ethnic groups, some facing extinction, in the most remote regions of the Russian Empire. Shklovsky’s book caused one reviewer to dwell on the imaginative challenge of Asiatic Russia: The European imagination travels slowly beyond the Ural Mountains into that great plain which embraces nearly the whole of Northern Asia and ends at the Pacific Ocean. Russia in Europe is vast, but the area of her Asiatic dominions exceeds that of the whole of Europe by more than a million square miles, though this enormous tract of country contains fewer inhabitants than half the population of London.9

Although this reviewer does not dwell on it, the theme of the ‘Asiatic’ nature of Russia commonly emerges in accounts of the revolutions. Indeed, the comment on the very low density of the population of Asiatic Russia provides a corrective to the notion of other commentators that Russia is somehow dominated by its Asiatic component – a view that not only the population figures, but also the fragility and vulnerability of Siberian ethnic groups as described in Shklovsky’s book, tended to negate. The imagery of the suffering of the Russian people as the historically perpetual and therefore seemingly invariable condition of the Russian ‘soul’, the marker of an ineradicable Russian otherness, may have served those who wished to ignore the evils of tsarism, such as elements of British royalism who respected Nicholas II’s distant kinship to the British throne. However, liberals and socialists knew well that tsarism was a tyranny and tended to see the February Revolution as a liberal one. While the conservative press fostered delusions about Russian actualities and subsequently interpreted the February Revolution optimistically, the British Labour movement was much clearer in its own mind that the revolution had a socialist basis and was fundamentally related to their own struggle. The revolution had a galvanising effect on the Labour Party, the trades unions and other socialist parties. It served to give confidence to socialists of all stripes from the first moment, even if they could not agree how to interpret it.10 The British labour movement was in the ascendancy during the

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war, as the consolidation of key war industries in government hands served also to concentrate the power of the trades unions, whose bargaining power and influence on public process were significantly increased. This impetus continued into the years following the war, notably in a series of strikes which could have toppled the government, and was a factor in the significant extension of the electorate by the Representation of the People Act of 1918, which allowed the creation of the first, short-lived Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924. This labour ascendancy determined that socialism and socialist-feminism were the dominant motifs of the cultural politics of the 1920s, and contributed fundamentally to the shaping of the modern British social state. For socialists, the Russian Revolution, even from February, was the central, if ambiguous, symbol of socialist hope, and interpreting it, outside the myths of the ‘Russian soul’ and the ‘Asiatic’, became imperative. Under the editorship of Alfred R. Orage, the socialist New Age had welcomed the February Revolution.11 Orage commented in his ‘Notes of the Week’ that ‘The Russian Revolution [. . .] is an event of which the Russian character may well be proud; for it will stand to all time as an act of the greatest popular heroism.’ He compared the Revolution to the liberation of slaves in the United States, pointing out that ‘liberties fall short of freedom by many degrees’ and that Russians, like emancipated slaves, had a long way to go: The abolition of slavery, the abolition of autocratic and oligarchic governments [. . .] are only lengthenings of the rope by which the mass of mankind is tethered. [. . .] In Russia, as elsewhere, it is to be expected that political emancipation will only lay bare the economic facts, and, in all probability, enlarge and aggravate them. Capitalism will, in Russia, pass through the stages of triumph through which it is passing already in the Western world.12

In terms of a similar desire for a gradual transition to socialism, the New Statesman saw matters in an equally optimistic light. The paper had earlier doubted Russia’s commitment to the war and questioned the influence of the pro-German lobby around the German tsarina, but supported what it had identified as a liberalisation policy in the Duma and the army long before the February Revolution, concluding that Russia could even in 1916 be regarded as ‘the symbol of liberty in opposition to that of reaction’.13 The February Revolution took place against the background of the anti-war ‘dark forces’ of the tsar’s court, which were thought not to have been dispersed

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by the murder of Rasputin – there were ‘other Rasputins about the Tsaritsa’ who counselled revenge and threatened to defeat pro-war elements in the Duma and the army. A revolution of the pro-war forces against the tsar and his court was anticipated, but the New Statesman, the organ of the Fabian Society under the editorship of Clifford Sharp, felt that ‘anybody who might otherwise be inclined to organise a revolution’ would be deterred by the possibility that such a revolution would cause the tsar to sue immediately for peace.14 This background explains why the February Revolution was received so positively, even by the socialist press, not only as a revolt against the tsar but also as a likely recommitment to the war by the new government. Yet it was also seen as more than this, with the scale of its importance measured implicitly against that of the French Revolution. A gushing editorial titled ‘The Russian Victory’ began: ‘If the first promise of the Russian Revolution be fulfilled, it is surely the greatest event that has happened or is likely to happen in the lifetime of any of us’, and concluded: The promise has of course still to be fulfilled [. . .] but its prospects are wholly bright. We can hardly yet realise its full significance; yet even now we can see that in relation to the future peace and welfare of Europe what is happening this month in France and Mesopotamia and on the seas is of comparatively little moment beside what is happening in Russia. For two continents the death-knell of absolutism is being sounded.15

An April article claimed that the Russian Revolution had stimulated the rebirth of utopian sentiment and revived ‘the faith of vast multitudes in the spirit of man’, offering a ‘vision of the almost impossible’ and ‘diminishing the incredulity of the average man in regard to the better future of the world’.16 However an article on ‘The Red Flag’ expressed caution, noting that political revolution and social revolution were not the same things, and hoping that the Russian would not go the way of the French Revolution and descend into conflict between the ‘best revolutionary leaders’, likely to be found in ‘the upper and middle classes’, on the one hand, and on the other the working classes who, though they justly desire revolution, lack ‘the education and training which would enable them to lead a revolution to success’.17 The hope of these privileged socialists was to be disappointed. In The New Age, Orage began a running war of words against the coverage of The Times and other conservative newspapers,

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which was suggesting that the revolution had been the product mainly of reactive discontent over food shortages. He praised the Russian revolutionaries and, in an argument consistent with the entire tenor of The New Age, and indeed with its very existence, claimed that ‘it is due to the Russian Revolutionists of the last fifty or so years to acknowledge that without their passion, misdirected as it often seemed to be, the present Revolution would have been impossible’. Disagreeing with The Times’ claim that ‘the extremists and the impossibilists, have delayed rather than hastened the present consummation’, Orage insisted that; it should be observed how surely the molten chaos of revolution has flowed into the intellectual forms long ago prepared to receive it. Thanks to the thinkers, the idealists, the students and the critics of the old administration, who were all until a week or two ago mere utopists in the opinion of the ruling classes, the forces let loose by the revolution have been with marvellous celerity constrained to flow into channels with the least possible waste of spirit and energy. The Russian Revolution, it is already possible to say, has justified thought as no revolution has ever done before. [. . .] And is this not encouraging to students like ourselves and our readers, who are even now engrossed in shaping in imagination the system of national organisation that will one day take the place of Capitalism?18

Many of Orage’s comments were remarkably forward-looking, considering that the news of the revolution was so fresh at the time of his writing. He identified the deep-seated intellectual roots of the upheaval as few commentators chose to do, and predicted that the effects of the revolution would be felt in the British Empire, even though ‘popular ignorance’ and ‘our governing classes’ did not admit the insecurity of the empire: ‘Immediate Home Rule to Ireland, and an immediate concession to the graduated demands of Home Rule for India, are the obvious anticipations we should make of the effects of the Russian Revolution upon both these countries.’ The New Age did not have its own Russian correspondent, and its coverage was intended to serve not as independent report but as a counter to the arguments made by The Times, which was a dominant voice in the interpretation of the revolution.19 A key concern in Britain was the likely impact of the revolution on Russia’s continued participation in the war. In order to sustain any kind of discussion of the democratic legitimacy of the revolution from a leftist perspective, The New Age sought to rebut the general fear voiced

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by The Times that the revolution was likely to lead to a Russian withdrawal from the war with potentially serious consequences for Britain. For this reason, it was necessary for The New Age, with little direct information at its disposal, to argue that the cause of the revolution lay in the careful preparation of revolutionary intellectuals, that it was not simply a response to the circumstances of the war. The bookish New Age in part took its impression of the character of the revolution from ‘Stepniak’ (Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky), the self-styled nihilist who had famously assassinated a Russian general in 1878, and subsequently spent years in exile in London where he published several books in English, became an associate of the circle around Edward Garnett, and a possible model for Peter Ivanovitch in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes.20 Although Stepniak had died in 1895, his books, such as Underground Russia (1883) and The Russian Peasantry (1888; republished 1905, the year of the first Russian Revolution) evidently remained known.21 A. E. Randall had been reading Stepniak’s The Russian Storm-Cloud (1886), and took to the pages of The New Age to rebut Stepniak’s view that, in the future, Russia would inevitably relinquish the territories of the tsarist empire, either because of revolution or simple decadence.22 Randall pushes back, following the generally optimistic view of the British press, arguing that the revolution confirmed that the Russians are a ‘warlike people’, and that it has been conducted not in order to end tsarist war, but to conduct the war more effectively.23 Randall was aware of the intellectual currents of Russian socialism and anarchism, and his reading of Stepniak has planted the doubt that the tsarist empire might dissolve, with catastrophic effects for the war effort, just as Orage foresaw that the February Revolution might have consequences for Irish and Indian home rule, a tendency strongly signalled by the movement towards universal suffrage and the announcement of national language rights by the Provisional Government. Imperial breakdown and self-determination were very much on the agenda. The principal bearer of the idea that democracy and self-rule must be linked was Woodrow Wilson. The United States declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. The date falls between the two Russian revolutions of that year and the events are thoroughly implicated in terms of the eventual formation of the new world order. In the following months, The New Age linked the revolution to the intervention of the United States in the war, and in particular to the insistence of Woodrow Wilson that the war aims set out by the Allies in the Treaty of London be revisited – an objective eventually aided by Trotsky’s

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publication of the secret treaties of the Triple Entente in November 1917, widely reported in the international press.24 From an early date, The New Age predicted a reordering of European nations and politics in the wake of the two events which it considered the most important of twentieth-century history. Noting the scale and historical importance of both the war and the revolution, The New Age announced that ‘the intervention of America in a European war carries with it such implications that our remotest descendants will date an epoch of history from it’.25 Surveying The Times and other organs of the national press of which it was routinely critical, the ‘Foreign Affairs’ section for 3 May 1917 laconically remarked that ‘It cannot be denied that there is a striking lack of enthusiasm in the English Press with regard to the intervention of the United States’.26 ‘Notes of the Week’ for 10 May 1917 claimed that ‘America has entered the war precisely to define its objects in terms of ideas and to lift it above the level of a universal dog-fight’ and that this was ‘therefore, America’s chief offence in our clubmen’s eyes’. Against the columnist of the Daily Mail, The New Age asserted what it construed to be the real meaning of American intervention: ‘the American idea [. . .] is democracy and nothing less than democracy. All the disinclination of our English reactionaries to consider democracy seriously has not affected, and will not affect, the democratic purpose of Mr. Wilson.’27 The New Age continued to see the Russian Revolution in an optimistic light, countering the argument of The Times that it would lead to a Russian withdrawal from the war with dire consequences for Britain. The New Age for 31 May 1917 criticised the report of The Times’ correspondent (probably Robert Wilton) that ‘chaos reigns in the governing circles of Russia, and that what amounts to a perpetual armistice has been declared by the Russian troops’.28 Orage argued that The Times’ histrionic coverage was shaped with a view to the domestic political situation: ‘We in England are to view with horror the Russian Revolution and a fortiori any really radical change nearer home’, and reiterated his argument that continued British miscomprehension of the self-consciously political and progressive character of the revolution was caused by The Times and by ‘the mysterious influences that control the Times’. Optimistically, Orage argued that Russia would continue the war in the name of the liberal political goals which he shared: ‘it is now clear that Revolutionary Russia means to continue the war until the militarism of Prussia is destroyed’. The New Age took a very anti-conservative stance but, short of direct information, continued to share nationalist optimism. For the

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New Statesman, Julius West filed reports directly from Petrograd. His July ‘Sketches in Petrograd’ was partly descriptive – the gardens at the Winter Palace are neglected; tobacco is cheaper in Finland; the militiaman is paid £18 monthly at present exchange rates – but offered partial hints at the future – the socialist pamphlets include Russell’s early book on German Social Democracy (1896) but ‘nothing by Messrs. Shaw, Webb, or Wells, or, apparently, by any other living British Socialist’. West’s implication is that the Fabian or otherwise gradualist view of socialism does not have strong traction in the new Russia. His discussion of the Bolsheviks gives an early hint of what might come: The Bolsheviks’ message is not to Russia, but to the whole world. They see signs of a world-wide revolution, and the early disappearance of capitalism and imperialism. They are not cordial towards England; they denounce Ramsay MacDonald and swear by [John] Maclean, the Clyde deportee, whom Lenin has been widely advertising.29

A second visit, dated October, yielded a detailed account of the structure of the Soviets and of Bolshevik agitation against the Provisional Government, but concluded that the Bolshevik impetus had been lost in the face of a commanding speech by Kerensky, with the result that ‘Petrograd is much quieter than it was three months ago. [. . .] The Red Flag is now symbolical by its absence. [. . .] Some of us still quote Marx, the French Revolution, and the categorical imperative, but one feels the presence of a new, and probably fruitful, empiricism.’30 Even so close to these events, West, fluent in Russian and based in Petrograd, could not interpret them correctly, and it is small wonder that those sections of the press with no such correspondent struggled to shape any but the most speculative and wishful accounts. The events leading to the October Revolution were documented only hazily in the British press. While reports of the February Revolution had been sufficiently detailed to allow for the kind of optimistic speculation found in The New Age, subsequent events were treated more cautiously as uncertainty deepened. Allied military hopes were pinned on the legitimacy of the Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky. This government was based on principles of national unity and was resolutely resisted by the Bolsheviks, who, under Lenin’s leadership, refused to participate. The Provisional Government continued to pursue the war, to the satisfaction of the Allies, but to the intense dissatisfaction of Russian workers whose protests in the so-called July Days were violently suppressed. David

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Soskice, born David Vladimirovich Soskis, was a long-time Socialist Revolutionary who had been present at the 1905 Revolution, and travelled from London to Petrograd in June 1917 to replace Michael Farbman as the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. His reports of the July Days in that paper frankly reported the violence but, close as he was to Kerensky, whose staff he joined, Soskice did not quite communicate the severity of the situation, blaming extremist provocateurs, exculpating the Provisional Government, and remained positive of the effectiveness of the government’s robust defence of ‘public safety’ against the ‘Leninists and anarchists’.31 In September, the preparation of a military coup by General Lavr Kornilov was defeated by soldiers and workers mobilised by the Petrograd Soviet. Kornilov had demanded sole power in Russia, and the Provisional Government did not yield, but the press coverage in Britain did not explain that Kornilov saw the Petrograd Soviet as his adversary and that it was the Soviet, rather than the Provisional Government, that had defeated him. Growing in strength, the Bolsheviks were able to secure the release of those arrested during the July Days, including Leon Trotsky, who assumed leadership of the Petrograd Soviet on 25 September. A crucial actor in the February Revolution, the Petrograd Soviet now became the organisational centre of Bolshevik power, and as German troops advanced on Moscow, throwing the Provisional Government into disarray, the Bolsheviks organised the relatively bloodless coup of October 24, declared the Provisional Government defunct, and transferred all of its powers to the Petrograd Soviet. During this period and with little reliable information to go on, the New Statesman continued to back Kerensky and criticise the Bolsheviks, but West remained in Russia and was one of a handful of Western journalists filing reports during the first two months of the October Revolution. The first of these, which appeared only belatedly in early December, documents a key moment. West was present at the Second Congress of Soviets, which met at the Smolny Institute, formerly a school for girls under the patronage of the tsarina, now the Bolshevik headquarters and about to become the centre of government. West documents the meeting on 7–8 November at which the Bolsheviks declared the end of the Provisional Government and the creation of a new government, Sovnarkom, or the Council of People’s Commissars, led by Lenin and with Trotsky as Commissar of Foreign Affairs. Perhaps sensing how truly rare his account was, West framed it with a description of the building – its architecture and its present state – before proceeding to events, beginning with

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an account of the reigning confusion interesting only because it confirms that, while outside Trotsky had organised the almost bloodless coup which ended the Provisional Government, inside there was little sense of what was happening. Uncertainty ended with the appearance of Lenin, who was introduced to the meeting by Trotsky, a fact not mentioned by West who concentrates on the figure of Lenin. Lenin, of course, came to be of considerable interest throughout the world, and many writers would attempt to take an impression of him from public appearances or from their meetings with him. West chooses to downplay Lenin’s appearance – comparing him to Auberon Quinn, the clerk randomly selected as head of state in Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) – but the character sketch is otherwise shrewd: Lenin, his head shaved for purposes of disguise, is obstinate and able, his expression that of a ‘pained humorist’, his short speech greeted with rapturous applause. According to West, his speech was not that ‘of a theorist’ but ‘surprisingly practical’, and he concludes that ‘it was impossible for anybody present not a cynic to check the rising feeling that Lenin’s speech might turn out to be a landmark in human history’. West also documents the incredible speed with which the two major acts of this assembly were decided – the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land – the former, which had massive implications for the Allied war effort, decided in an hour and a quarter, the latter, which momentously abolished private property in land, decided after a two-hour recess. This early document confirms the clarity and radical nature of Bolshevik actions on which many later commentators would remark. West also identifies the particular way in which Britain was interpellated by the Bolsheviks from the outset, and what many later British commentators would view as Lenin’s mistaken assessment of the socialist movement in Britain: ‘Lenin stated his belief in the special efficacy of his appeal [for peace] on British labour, on the grounds that the Chartist movement had shown the peculiarly sensitive class-consciousness of the English working-man.’32 Although West does not expand on this report, the condition of British socialism and the readiness of British labour for revolution was a cornerstone of Lenin’s thinking in the years after the revolution, as revealed in his many conversations with British visitors to Moscow, and was the topic of Trotsky’s later Where is Britain Going? (1926), a polemical attack on Fabian gradualism. In the ensuing months, events in Russia were reported more by impression than anything else, and the principal effects of the October Revolution were those related to the war effort – first, the Bolshevik publication in November of the texts of the secret treaties between the

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Allies, which revealed the territorial objectives of the war, and second the peace negotiations conducted by the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk from December 1917 to March 1918 – negotiations so protracted that Trotsky famously found the time to write The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk while he was there.33 Comment on the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk generally focused on the disadvantages for the Allied war effort, in that German troops would be released from the Eastern for the Western Front. However, Brest-Litovsk constituted an unusual spectacle in itself, in that all negotiations were held openly – in the spirit of challenging the secret diplomacy which had shaped the war – and Bolshevik actions and statements were all made with a view to addressing European and indeed American workers, so that while the Central Powers focused on questions of territory and formal ceasefire, the Bolsheviks were focused on the question of international revolution. One unsigned article in the New Statesman identified this key set of questions. The Bolshevik government, it argued, had laid down the principle of the right of national self-determination in arguing for a peace settlement for the whole of Europe without indemnities and annexations (of the kind provided for in the secret treaties of the Allied Powers and of the kind now sought by the Central Powers): It was not merely annexations that were discussed at Brest-Litovsk, but also the area of social upheaval, not merely the problem of peace and war but also that of revolution and counter-revolution. Had the Central Powers agreed to withdraw their armies from the occupied provinces, the revolt would have spread throughout the whole of Courland, Lithuania and Poland, and would thus have reached the very gates of Prussia. Whilst at Petrograd, Moscow or Kazan the social revolution was something distant, semi-Asiatic, at Warsaw, Lodz or Tchenostochova it would take out a patent of European naturalisation. [. . .] Thus the question discussed at Brest-Litovsk was also whether the occupied districts were to serve as a conductor or as an insulator of revolution. When still in appearances discussing annexations, the Central Powers were already fighting for the cause of counter-revolution. [. . .] What Trotsky is now out to achieve is either to limit Germany’s interference to the districts which she had claimed at Brest-Litovsk, or to nail down the fact that Germany’s aim is to stave off revolution everywhere, just as it is his aim to spread it everywhere.34

On this interpretation, Brest-Litovsk demonstrated that the almost eighteenth-century model of ‘annexations’ was in the process of

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being supplanted by a more dramatic and strangely asymmetrical form of reterritorialisation, in which questions over the redrawing of European boundaries, themselves the object of the war treaties and soon to be the topic of the peace negotiations at Versailles in 1919, were interdicted by the Bolshevik strategy of internationalising revolution. National self-determination was as much a plank of Bolshevik policy as it was of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which were issued during the Brest-Litovsk negotiations on 8 January 1918 and which, among other things, explicitly opposed the annexations of former Russian territories. Yet, while Wilson’s vision of national self-determination was based on traditional notions of national governance, with peace encouraged by open trade agreements and reinforced by ‘a general association of nations [. . .] formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike’, the Bolshevik defence of national self-determination was aimed at internationalising the revolution. In terms of cultural debate, all questions about the Russianness or otherwise of the Russian Revolution – as manifested discursively in terms of the ‘Asiatic’ or of the ‘Russian Soul’ – would always already be subordinated by the Bolsheviks’ own rationalist view of the merely contingent nature of nationality and their adherence to the ideal of international revolution. It is more than an accident of history that the Commissar for Nationalities for the Council of People’s Commissars, elected under Lenin’s premiership, was Josef Stalin, a Georgian, regarded as the expert on the nationalities question, which would remain a key policy focus for the Bolsheviks as inheritors of the Russian Empire. The outbreak of the war had signalled a crisis for the existing international order. While the patriotic press marshalled outrage by asserting the necessity for Britain to defend a victimised Belgium against the Prussian bully, elsewhere a general discussion began not about the proximate causes of the war but about the failure of the existing practices of international diplomacy to prevent it. These discussions focused on the question of international authority, and began to acquire real substance with the entry of the United States into the war and the advocacy of Woodrow Wilson for a League of Nations. In July 1915 the New Statesman published two documents as ‘special supplements’, titled ‘Suggestions for the Prevention of War’. While the second is of less interest, being a description of the possible form of a future intergovernmental organisation, the first of these, Leonard Woolf’s ‘An International Authority and the Prevention of War’, is fascinating. Commissioned by the Fabian Society,

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over the objections of Keynes and others who thought it would be ‘boring’ at a time of national crisis, Woolf’s paper is of interest, of course, for its anticipatory purpose, and it is often claimed to have been an important influence on the Versailles settlement, where a copy may have been circulated among the British delegates, although Woolf himself was not a member of the delegation. Woolf though had been a member of the executive of the League of Nations Society in May 1915, with Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, John A. Hobson and Henry Noel Brailsford.35 The publication of this treatise in the New Statesman evidences key features of the Fabian grouping as a subset of the English ruling class at this time. The democratic, socialist and anti-imperialist beliefs of this group were formed in the context of the British ruling class, which it was by no means their object to destroy. One consequence of this was an intellectual confidence and sense of global perspective derived from their elite education, access to professional, military and governmental groups, and sometimes, as in Woolf’s case, their direct experience of national or colonial administration. A reader of the wartime issues of the New Statesman might well be struck by the coolness and confidence of many of the forwardthinking and often far-ranging articles which appeared there. While the war was, of course, a time of national emergency, the New Statesman did not adopt the propagandistic tone of The Times and other newspapers, continued to query the (secret) war aims, looked ahead to the shape of the post-war settlement throughout Europe, and kept in view the necessary renegotiation of Britain’s imperial position. The New Statesman is therefore one of the key documents for any mapping of the process of de-imperialisation, which can be dated as beginning in practice in 1917–18 but which had already begun to adopt discursive form. In terms of European and world history, the Fabians should perhaps be grouped with the Bolsheviks. Trotsky saw the Fabians as the nemesis of revolution. A decade after Woolf’s piece and in very changed circumstances, Trotsky’s Where is Britain Going? (1926), a book-length commentary on and intervention in British politics, contained a venomous attack on Fabianism. Noting that ‘at present it is customary in England in certain fields of activity to speak with a certain contempt of the men of the “Victorian era”’, Trotsky goes on to label the Fabians themselves as remnants of the ‘insipid, optimistic Victorian epoch, in which it was believed that tomorrow will be somewhat better than today’, and concludes that ‘the Fabian Society, founded in 1884 with the object of “awakening the social

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consciousness”, is now the most reactionary group to be found in Great Britain’, because this group does not present itself as an enemy of the working class, which can be readily identified and ‘destroyed’, but instead situates itself among the ‘leading ranks’ of the proletariat, acting as a restraint.36 The Fabians might have regarded themselves as part of the attack on Victorian culture – that attack on the celebration of ‘great men’ conducted in the literary field by Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf – but Trotsky identifies, not the culture around great men, but the Victorian ideology of progress as the force from the past holding back the labour movement. Trotsky’s rhetorical vehemence is aimed in part for the hearing of the British labour movement in the wake of the election of Ramsay MacDonald as the first Labour prime minister in 1924, a victory which might have seemed to prove the claims of gradualism. Beneath this rhetoric, and the strategic differences which it reflects, there was a common commitment to a more equitable world which the Fabians and Bolsheviks shared. The long historical view might consider the movement of de-imperialisation and the development of socialism in Europe to constitute a single narrative, in which the reformist and revolutionary approaches have been repeatedly opposed to each other. In this narrative, British Fabianism might be considered as significant a historical protagonist as Bolshevism. From the point of view of the present inquiry, it is the common basis of both Bolshevism and Fabianism in a kind of Enlightenment universalism which is of interest. Bolsheviks and Fabians shared a rationalism which considered differences of class and culture to be merely accidental and extrinsic, and the discourses that supported them to belong to an unenlightened realm of reaction. Each assumed, too, that the world-historical process tends towards an actualisation of as-yet-unrealised (and therefore abstract) human equality not simply within but across nations. For this reason, the discourses of socialism and of supranational organisation were more closely related than might be supposed. In 1915 it was already clear that the war had put considerable pressure on the internationalist idealism of the labour movement. An unsigned editorial article in the New Statesman for 12 June 1915 discusses a proposed meeting of the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) planned to take place at The Hague. The ISB was the official organisation of the Second International and had sponsored a series of congresses between 1901 and 1914, the last taking place in Brussels, followed by a series of partial conferences, the first in London (January 1915) and a second in Copenhagen (February 1915). The Hague meeting did not in fact take place as expected by the writer

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of the New Statesman, but September of that year saw the famous Zimmerwald Conference at which a left grouping led by Lenin denounced imperialism and the reversion to nationalist chauvinism of the Second International. The conference adopted a manifesto scripted by Trotsky which in effect formalised the division between the internationalist-revolutionary and the nationalist-centrist Left. The editorial defends the nationalist position adopted by the French Socialist Party, which has refused to take part in the proposed Hague conference. The British labour movement was at that time split between the Labour Party led by Arthur Henderson, which had adopted a nationalist line, and the Independent Labour Party, which maintained a pacifist and internationalist stance. The authors argue that the British Labour Party is right to imitate the French Socialist Party, which, in siding with the national government, has presented itself as a party fit for national power in the future. By contrast, the Independent Labour Party is said to have flown the banner of a theoretical internationalism, but it has written across it ‘“Futility”’.37 The New Statesman assumes that the labour leadership can lead the labour movement only if it demonstrates its nationalist credentials, and reflects the climate in which the socialist movement found itself in the first year of the war. In contrast to the British Labour Party, the Bolsheviks remained adamant in their commitment to socialism and internationalism, since they considered it impossible to rally to the support of tsarism. This was a defining movement for the European labour movement. At this historical point, internationalism and socialism were equated, since the notion of internationalism did not imply a unity of existing capitalist nations, but the international solidarity of the working class in opposition to imperialist war. It is against this background that Leonard Woolf, among others, began to envisage an internationalist politics which would not in the first instance take the form of a political opposition to capitalism and imperialism, but would nevertheless tend to diminish imperial rivalry and the likelihood of war. In that respect, the direction of Woolf’s essay is defined by the collapse into chauvinism of much of the European labour movement, which is in effect the ghost that haunts the notion of ‘international authority’. That even this form of internationalism had a universalistic if not quite a socialist tinge is reflected perhaps in the fact that both Bolshevism and the League, in later years, were made the objects of repeated attack by rightwing commentators, including such literary figures as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis.

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Woolf claims that there is already a widespread desire for an international authority, citing both the resolution of a ‘Socialist Conference’ and a ‘well-known paper’, whether, in the socialist version, to arbitrate among nations or, in the words of what is presumably The Times, to contain Germany. The conference which Woolf mentions is the London Conference of the Allied Socialists, a break-off group of the Second International which met in London in February 1915. Their resolution endorsed the ‘task of liberation’ of the ‘defensive war’ but rejected ‘any attempt to transform this defensive war into a war of conquest’. Once the war was concluded, the working classes of all industrial countries could unite against ‘the interests of militarism and those of armament makers, and establish some international authority to settle points of difference among the nations by compulsory arbitration and to compel all nations to maintain peace’.38 This text testifies to the contradictory thinking on the Left, but Woolf cites it really only in order to show that even a labour movement given over for the moment to nationalist passions will ultimately recognise the need for an international authority. Woolf’s pitch for an international authority is for something between the international and the national: ‘Many people at the present time seem to think that there is no half-way house between a federation into a world-State and the existing splendid isolation of independent States. If this is true, our alternatives are Utopia and chaos.’39 His model of an authority is designed to take into account changes in the effective balance of power between nations, and changes in the desires of smaller nations incorporated into or subjugated by larger ones. However, Woolf takes no account of the kind of change envisaged by socialist internationalism and in effect models the nation as if it were the legal subject of Roman Law. While his discussion takes account of the kind of events which had taken place in Europe since 1815, it has nothing to say about the likely impact of any event such as the French Revolution, although issues of transnational politics are touched upon – in particular, the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Woolf’s text recognises the question of small nations but does not anticipate the scale on which the creation of small nations would take place in the period of de-imperialisation which would be triggered by the war. Woolf’s basic argument is that the system of treaties which had prevailed during the hundred years from the Treaty of Vienna (1815) to the present day was no longer adequate to ensure peace. One reason for this is that treaties attempted to impose fixity where there was inevitably underlying change. A series of European congresses since

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Vienna had gone no further in their words than to act as mediators, but at times had in effect sought to act as international legislature, demonstrating some need and appetite for such a body. An international legislature would not simply mediate between independent states but would have an authority to arbitrate and judge, and to impose the international will by military force if necessary. In effect, each nation would stand in relation to the legislature as an individual citizen stands in relation to the state. While mediation involves finding a solution acceptable to both sides in a developing conflict, arbitration involves the imposition of a settlement by an international judiciary which would be the expression of the will of the majority of nations. Woolf accepts that the analogy between individual legal subjects and states is an imperfect one, but considers that the desire to maintain sovereignty is likely to mean that states would be more likely to be induced to enter a form of international federation than to merge into a truly federal state such as the United States. Woolf’s projection of the nation as an individual does not rest on any conception of the inherent differences of nations and peoples, and does indeed distinguish between ‘nation’ (i.e. nation-state) and ‘nationality’ (that is, historical nationhood or ethnicity). Woolf argues that wars can only begin when people are ‘made excitable and afraid in large masses by springing something on them suddenly which they do not understand’. A mechanism that would necessitate a diplomatic conference and force contending nations to set out their claims in public would make it harder for ‘warmongers’ to deliberately ‘work up excitement and fear’, as had happened in 1914.40 The ‘cosmopolitan or International State implies a cosmopolitan or international patriotism’, claims Woolf. It therefore remains a utopia, while an ‘International Authority’ which can provide a framework of law and mechanisms of arbitration is an obtainable objective.41 Woolf’s discussion of cosmopolitanism recalls Kant’s model of the federalism of free states. Woolf differs from Kant in refusing the utopianism of suggesting that all participatory states must be republics for such a system to work, even though he admits this as an ideal. Perhaps more importantly, he is agnostic with regards to the potential emergence of a world state under a ‘universal monarchy’ (which Kant argues to be unattainable, on the grounds that ‘as the range of government expands laws progressively lose their vigour’ and despotism, then anarchy, ensue).42 Woolf’s model, in which the political difference between states is pragmatically recognised as a reality which must be negotiated, does not thereby disavow Kant’s idealism and, unlike Kant, Woolf does not seem to deny the desirability of

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a world state. As ‘the interconnections of international life’ become closer, the principle of saving ‘international society from dissolution’ becomes more imperative. It is the ‘diplomatic, governmental, and, to a lesser extent, popular view of the independence and sovereignty of States’ which stands in the way of the acceptance of this principle.43 Yet Woolf’s discussion of the Greek struggle for independence, which forms a key part of his account of the role of conferences in international diplomacy during the nineteenth century, points in another direction, suggesting that what is largely at stake in questions of international relations are the destinies of small nations. This was the ‘first question’ at the Congress of Vienna. In 1815 the position of Greece in the Turkish Empire was regarded in international law as a ‘domestic question to be settled between Greek and Turk’. Nevertheless, the feeling persisted that any matter affecting the peace of Europe was a matter for all European nations: States were still regarded in theory and professions as isolated units [. . .] but in practice it began to be admitted that the nations of Europe formed a real society, the constitution of which might be established and altered by methods other than warfare.44

Woolf notes that, with the Greek Revolution of 1821, the ‘bogey of international politics’ came into existence and ‘persisted all through the nineteenth century’.45 He goes on to treat the pattern of intervention against Turkey, and the related European congresses in some detail. Turning to the settlement of the present war, which will parallel the Congress of Vienna, Woolf offers the following prediction: At the end of the war we shall again try to establish international society in Europe. For a few brief weeks or months the position of Poles, Italians, Serbs, even Finns and Irishmen, under that constitution may be a matter of international discussion; but, once Europe has been settled in this way, there is to be no international method or machinery for revising the constitution. Four million Finns and Swedes are to be permanently handed over to the generosity and liberality of some 83,000,000 Russians, just as 4,000,000 pure-bred Irishmen are to be permanently handed over to the 40,000,000 mixed population which inhabits the rest of the British Isles. National questions will remain domestic until and unless they become so acute that war has broken out [. . .]46

Of course, the kind of authority which Woolf imagined was indeed brought into being, contrary to his prediction, but the process of the

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wholesale renegotiation of national boundaries went much further even than he had imagined in 1915. The parallel between the Russian and British Empires is slyly chosen to underline the similarity between tsarist Russia and liberal Britain. However, Woolf’s working assumption that smaller nations would continue to be subject to the imperial powers proved defective; it did not anticipate the process of de-imperialisation which was about to take place, and failed to draw conclusions from the example of Greece which was the central exhibit of the whole essay. Two weeks after the appearance of his essay, Woolf appeared again in the pages of the New Statesman reviewing John A. Hobson’s Towards International Government (1915), which had appeared at the same time. While in one aspect this study documents the impact in Britain of events in Russia, it is hardly necessary to say that British historical experience and its intellectual mediation was the sine qua non of the Russian Revolution. While his impact is hardly comparable to that of Marx and Engels, Hobson’s niche in Bolshevik history is secured by the direct use made of the British writer’s Imperialism: A Study (1902) by Lenin in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (written in 1916 and first published mid-1917). The entry into history of this text was not what Hobson might have imagined. Hobson was an important liberal thinker whose contributions to internationalist theory, especially in the later 1920s and 1930s, are held to be an important developmental current in the movement away from the classical internationalist theory of the nineteenth century.47 However, Hobson’s massive hostility to imperialism was based on a liberal, not a socialist, outlook. Hobson had summarised his liberal philosophy in The Crisis of Liberalism (1909), a collection of pieces published in the Manchester Guardian, The Nation, The Contemporary Review and The English Review. There, he criticised militarism and argued for a reorientation of liberalism around ‘a new conception of the State in its relation to individual life and to private enterprise. [. . .] Not Socialism, [. . .] though implying a considerable amount of increased public ownership and control of industry.’ This new direction would be a challenge to the Liberal Party itself, which had been undermined by a confident ‘Imperialism, composed of force, finance, and false philanthropy, now masquerading as defence, now as mission, now as commercial policy’ that had ‘found its climax and direct expression in the Boer War’ and been ‘exploited by Conservatism to break and dissipate the new forces of social reform which were beginning to assert themselves in Liberalism’.48

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When Hobson turned his attention to questions of internationalism and peace, in Towards International Government (1915), new emphases emerged. Hobson was among those to sound an early warning that a punitive peace settlement after the war would be a ‘folly’. The ‘dismemberment or national degradation of Germany’ would result in an unstable future, and any settlement should be based on the ‘larger constructive policy of internationalism’.49 Hobson blames the war on the primacy of the state and on protectionism. There has been a ‘conscious or unconscious acceptance of a half-legal, half-philosophical theory of the National State as the final stage in the process of social evolution’ supported by ‘the doctrine that “consciousness of kind”, and the community of experience necessary for effective realization of common purposes, are confined within the limits of the nation’. This ‘false, immoral doctrine’ was the key cause of the war, driven by the arms trade which is international in character but exploits national sentiment.50 International trade has brought nations closer and as a result the ‘noxious fallacies of an antiquated political economy, which represented nations as hostile beings in commerce as in politics, are rapidly dissolving in the full light of international experience’. Consequently: The formal establishment of international government would be able to appeal to the immense resources and community of interests and activities which constitutes the economic unity of the modern world. While international finance is the most consciously powerful expression of this unity, organized labour has been long reaching out towards international co-operation, based upon a clearly felt identity of interests and a class sympathy transcending nationalism. [. . .] What has happened [. . .] is the creation and emergence into clear consciousness of an international mind.51

It is on this question of the ‘international mind’ that Woolf takes Hobson to task in his review. Woolf criticises Hobson’s idea that an international government would be populated not by governmental representatives but by delegates directly elected by the people. It is not so much the debate about the exact mechanisms of these speculative accounts which is of interest, two years before the intervention of Woodrow Wilson, but the philosophical goal, beyond the question of democratic representation, which had turned Hobson to the question of an ‘international mind’. When T. S. Eliot, ten years later, addressed the question of the ‘European mind’ (see Chapter 7), it represented a continuing echo of these debates. Woolf does not believe that state

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mechanisms can be superseded in any near future, and, in any case, had advanced his model of an open international body for the negotiation of national conflicts mainly as an alternative to the secret diplomacy which had caused the war. He mockingly claims that Hobson’s conception of a directly elected committee ‘shall not represent the interests of the several nations but the interests of the Cosmos’.52 In reply to Woolf’s pragmatism, Hobson defended his views with a reference to the ‘mutations’ and ‘discontinuous variations’ of biological evolution, arguing that states, too, may undergo similar abrupt change.53 There were other contributions to the discussion of supranational government, including later interventions from Henry Noel Brailsford, in A League of Nations (February 1917) and H. G. Wells, in In the Fourth Year: Anticipations of a World Peace (1918), but this 1915 debate is a reminder of the temperament needed to maintain and advance an internationalist stance at a time of nationalist fervour. There is evidence, in fact, that British publishers and their public had taken a renewed interest in national identity more broadly, at a time when so much war propaganda made reference to supposed national character. One reviewer in 1915, faced with a pile of books which included volumes on The Soul of Europe, L’Esprit européen, The Spirit of the Allied Nations, and others, remarked drily that ‘nationality [. . .] is for the moment pre-eminently the cause of the making of books’, noting that ‘an itch has fallen upon the world’s writers to lay bare the souls of nations, to explain exactly what a Frenchman and a Belgian, a Russian and a German mean’.54 The Fabians had made an important opening in the discussion of internationalism. By the time of the United States’ entry into the war, of course, that discussion was in full flow.

Notes 1. ‘A.E.R.’ (Alfred E. Randall), ‘Views and Reviews. The Two Internationals’, The New Age 21:8 (21 June 1917), 186–7. 2. See below, Chapter 4, for a contextual discussion of Farbman. 3. Michael S. Farbman, Russia and the Struggle for Peace (London: George Allen & Unwin, [1918]), pp. 4, 6. 4. But see Michael Cherniavsky, ‘“Holy Russia”: A Study in the History of an Idea’, The American Historical Review 63:3 (April 1958), 617–37, for an early summation. 5. Havelock Ellis, ‘The Psychology of the Russian’, New Statesman 22 May 1915, 154–6.

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6. E. M. Forster, ‘Short Stories from Russia’, New Statesman 24 July 1915, 373–4. Reviews Anton Tchekov, The Steppe and Other Stories, trans. Kay (Heinemann), Anton Tchekoff, Stories of Russian Life, trans. Fell (Duckworth) and Feodor Sologub, The Old House and Other Tales, trans. John Cournos (Secker). 7. Julius West, ‘Translated from the Russian’, New Statesman 14 August 1915, 447–8. 8. Jane Ellen Harrison, Russia and the Russian Verb: A Contribution to the Psychology of the Russian People (Cambridge: Heffer, 1915), pp. 3, 8, 11, 12. 9. ‘The Fringes of Civilisation’, unsigned review, New Statesman 13 January 1917, 355. 10. For a range of contemporary comment, see R. Page Arnot, The Impact of the Russian Revolution in Britain (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1967), pp. 20–3. 11. For the general history of The New Age, see Wallace Martin, The New Age under Orage: Chapters in English Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967) and Gary Taylor, Orage and The New Age (Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University Press, 2000). 12. ‘Notes of the Week’, The New Age 20:21 (22 March 1917), 481–3. 13. ‘The State of Feeling in Russia’, unsigned article, New Statesman 15 January 1916, 345–7; ‘The Russian Army and the Duma’, unsigned article, New Statesman 25 November 1916, 172–3, quotation from p. 173. 14. ‘The Crisis in Russia’, unsigned article, New Statesman 5 February 1917, 412–13. 15. ‘The Russian Victory’, unsigned editorial, New Statesman 24 March 1917, 580–1. 16. ‘The Spirit of Man’, unsigned article, New Statesman 14 April 1917, 33–4. 17. ‘The Red Flag’, unsigned article, New Statesman 24 March 1917, 582–4. 18. ‘Notes of the Week’, The New Age 20:21 (22 March 1917), 481–3. 19. See Kenneth O’Reilly, ‘The Times of London and the Bolshevik Revolution’, Journalism Quarterly 56:1 (Spring 1979), 69–76. 20. On Stepniak in London, see Anat Vernitski, ‘Russian Revolutionaries and English Sympathizers in 1890s London: The Case of Olive Garnett and Sergei Stepniak’, Journal of European Studies 35:3 (September 2005), 299–314. On Stepniak and Olive Garnett, see Frances Reading, ‘At Home among the Russians: The Short Stories of Olive Garnett and Katherine Mansfield’, in Gayla Diment, Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin (eds), Katherine Mansfield and Russia (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 107–24. On the connection with Conrad, see Andrew Glazzard, Conrad’s Popular Fictions: Secret Histories and Sensational Novels (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), ch. 4,

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21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

35

and Thomas C. Moser, ‘Ford Madox Hueffer and Under Western Eyes’, in Conradiana 15:3 (1983), 163–80. Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life, pref. Petr Lavrovich Lavroff (London: Smith, Elder, 1883); The Russian Peasantry: Their Agrarian Condition, Social Life and Religion (London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1888 and London: Routledge, 1905). See Stepniak, The Russian Storm-Cloud; or, Russia in Her Relations to Neighbouring Countries (London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1886), p. 86. ‘Is It a Revolution?’, New Age 20:21 (22 March 1917), 499–500. See, for example, the summary, but accurate, report in ‘Russia and Secret Treaties: Terms Published’, Manchester Guardian 26 November 1917, 5. The New Age 20:24 (12 April 1917), 553–4. S. Verdad, ‘Foreign Affairs’, The New Age 21:1 (3 May 1917), 4. ‘Notes of the Week’, The New Age 21:2 (10 May 1917), 25. ‘Notes of the Week’, The New Age 21:5 (31 May 1917), 98–9. Julius West, ‘Sketches in Petrograd’, New Statesman 28 July 1917, 399–40. [Julius West] unsigned, ‘Petrograd – From July to October’, New Statesman 3 November 1917, 105–6. For an account of Soskice’s life and career, see Barry Hollingsworth, ‘David Soskice in Russia in 1917’, European Studies Review 6 (1976), 73–97. For Soskice’s reports on the July Days, see ‘A Rebel’s Orgy: Unarmed Civilians Shot Down’, Manchester Guardian 19 July 1917, 5, and ‘Order Restored in Petrograd: Arrest of Leninists’, Manchester Guardian 20 July 1917, 5. Julius West, ‘The Bolshevik Revolution’, New Statesman 8 December 1917, 229–31. The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1919; and Glasgow: Socialist Labour Party, 1919). Unsigned article, ‘Brest-Litovsk and After’, New Statesman, 23 February 1918, 489–90. On Woolf’s influence, see Duncan Wilson, Leonard Woolf: A Political Biography (London: Hogarth, 1978), pp. 87–91. On Keynes’ opinion, see Ibid. p. 64, and on the League of Nations Society, p. 84. For a longer treatment of Woolf’s theories of international government, see Peter Wilson, The International Theory of Leonard Woolf: A Study in Twentieth Century Idealism (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 23–51. The two parts of Woolf’s text were republished in Leonard Woolf, International Government (London: Allen & Unwin, 1916). For a more recent evaluation of Woolf’s influence which draws on Foreign Office papers, see Janet M. Manson, ‘Leonard Woolf as Architect of the League of Nations’, South Carolina Review (2007),

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36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution 1–13. For a caustic treatment of the Bloomsbury Group’s anti-imperialism, see Dina Gusejnova, European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917– 1957 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 177–207. On Leonard Woolf’s internationalism in the context of Bloomsbury, see Christine Froula, ‘War, Peace and Internationalism’, in Victoria Rosner (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 93–111. Leon Trotsky, Where is Britain Going?, intro. H. N. Brailsford (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1926), pp. 74–5. ‘Internationalism and the War’, New Statesman 12 June 1915, 222–4. Quoted Olga Hess Gankin and Harold Henry Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War: The Origins of the Third International (Stanford: Stanford University Press; London: Milford, 1940), p. 279. ‘An International Authority and the Prevention of War’, New Statesman 10 July 1915, Special Supplement, 19. Ibid. p. 24. Ibid. p. 24. ‘Towards Perpetual Peace’, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor, intro. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 317–51. Republicanism and federalism are Kant’s first two conditions for perpetual peace. The quotation is from p. 336. ‘An International Authority’, p. 23. Ibid. p. 7. Ibid. p. 8. Ibid. p. 6. For a shorter survey of Hobson’s career, see Jules Townshend, J. A. Hobson (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990). For a review of his internationalist theory, see David Long, Towards a New Liberal Internationalism: The International Theory of J. A. Hobson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). The latter adopts a somewhat idealist approach, abstracting ideas from Hobson’s writings in different periods and genres, and explicitly eschews the type of chronological or historicist approach which is the methodology adopted in the present study (see Long’s ‘word of warning to the reader’ on p. 2). Since it was widely distributed in English, French and German, it has not proved possible to identify the first English publication of Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. For brief comment on the difference between Hobson and Lenin, see Townshend, J. A. Hobson, pp. 144–5. John A. Hobson, The Crisis of Liberalism: New Issues of Democracy (London: King, 1909), viii, xii. J. A. Hobson, Towards International Government (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1915), p. 174. Ibid. pp. 180, 185.

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51. Ibid. pp. 195, 197. 52. Leonard Woolf, ‘The Prevention of War’, review of J. A. Hobson, Towards International Government, New Statesman 24 July 1915, 379–80. 53. J. A. Hobson, ‘The Prevention of War’, letter, New Statesman 7 August 1915, 420–1. 54. ‘Rival Kulturs’, unsigned review, New Statesman 28 August 1915, 499.

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Chapter 2

Masaryk and the New Europe

Among those with the keenest interest in the emergence of small nations was Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. By training a professor of philosophy, Masaryk had been a member of the Reichsrat (the Austrian parliament) until he chose to leave following the outbreak of the Great War. His firm agenda was the creation of an independent Czech nation following an Allied war victory and the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In collaboration with a small group which included his former student Edward Beneš, Masaryk set out to influence policymakers towards this end. Beneš also chose exile and established a base in Paris as part of this strategy. Although they represented a tiny minority among Czech politicians, they were to realise their goal, and Masaryk became the first President of an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918, with Beneš as his Foreign Minister. Masaryk achieved this from his base in London with the help of Robert William Seton-Watson, the historian and dedicated supporter of the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It suggests an interesting genealogy to note that Seton-Watson was the father of Hugh Seton-Watson, author of Nations and States (1977), described by Benedict Anderson, in his seminal study Imagined Communities (1983), as the ‘best and most comprehensive English-language text on nationalism’.1 Masaryk was in London in April 1915 and then based there from September 1915 to May 1917, with long visits to Paris.2 With the support of Seton-Watson, who himself published extensively in these years on the national question in Hungary, Romania, the Balkans and Poland, Masaryk joined the newly founded School for Slavonic Studies at Kings College London, in 1915, as its first lecturer. From that base, he advocated the rights of small nations and led a network of agents.3 He travelled to Russia in May 1917 to found the Czecho-Slovak Legion which fought first against the Central Powers, with the support of the Provisional Government, and

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subsequently against the Bolsheviks in the Civil War. Masaryk’s stay in London is of interest because it contributed so much to the shaping of discourse about nationalism, and this intervention, cultural as well as political, was of course the basis for his influence on the creation of what he called the ‘New Europe’ – the title both of the journal he helped to found in London under Seton-Watson’s editorship, and of a key treatise. Masaryk’s strategy was as much based on the absorption of British culture as it was on the projection of a certain construction of Czech culture. As Seton-Watson later claimed in his admittedly rather hagiographical biography: Masaryk had his own methods of getting information. He made it his business to see all and sundry, he studied the gutter press, he read patriotic novels and pamphlets, he was always reading our representative novelists as the key to British psychology: he paid special attention to food prices and the cinemas, to see what went down with popular audiences and how the portraits of politicians and others were received. In short, no detail was too trivial.4

At the time he left for the West, Masaryk was part of a small political minority which believed that the future of a Czechoslovakian state lay in the West, and not as part of a greater Slav empire presided over by Russia (an idea that was abandoned only when the tsar fell).5 The challenge of this task was that the Czech people had no political or cultural representation in the West. Masaryk’s National Czech Council, based in Paris, aimed to establish the discourse of the rights of the Czech nation with politicians and the public, something that he believed could be accomplished only by cultural propaganda rather than by direct agitation. Masaryk looked to the example of Poland, which he believed had a head start in regard to the issue of creating a recognisable cultural identity, with the fame of the pianist Jan Paderewski and the Nobel laureate novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz, while the Czech ‘store of such helpers was small’.6 In addition to establishing the notion of a Czech cultural identity abroad, it was also necessary, albeit from a distance, to ‘de-Austrianize our people thoroughly while they were still in Austria’.7 Masaryk’s own cultural preparation involved not only the kind of groundwork in the press and popular culture which Seton-Watson mentions, but copious reading in anglophone literature. Masaryk was strongly influenced by David Hume’s scepticism, but, despite this, his reading in England focused on literature rather than philosophy. In addition to reading the entire works of Hardy and Meredith, he tackled Gissing, Galsworthy,

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Bennett, Walpole, Conrad, Lawrence, Richardson and Woolf, and was struck by the number of great women writers in English, including his own favourite, Charlotte Brontë, along with Austen, Eliot and Elizabeth Browning. He compared English literature favourably with French, finding in French writing ‘sexualism’ and ‘decadence’, and in English ‘a morality more humane and natural’ – with Joyce and Lawrence noted as exceptions to this rule.8 His remarks on English literature in his autobiography confirm a cultural traffic that flows both ways. If our habitual notion of the transnational subject of modernism tends to focus on the privileges of the cosmopolitan or on the hybridity of multiple identifications, Masaryk adopts a perspective which is simultaneously nationalist and supranational. His ideal of the Czech nation is a speculative notion based on a vision informed by his internationalism and his easy familiarity with Russian, German, French and anglophone traditions, and congealed around his admittedly abstract idea of ‘democracy’. Certainly, his model of Czech national history relied on the repetition of certain narratives, and his projection of a Czech democracy has been considered paternalistic.9 Yet Masaryk resisted the romantic mythification of Czech history and, in England, asserted the real historical line of descent from John Wycliffe to Jan Hus. While this fifteenth-century world was remote and arguably functioned little differently from more romantic myth, it was not a legend, and while Masaryk certainly instrumentalised his huge cultural knowledge in the service of the Czech nation, his emphasis on the transnational and historical trajectory of thought and values – in this case of the values of the Reformation in a specific Anglo-Czech configuration – reflects an admittedly pragmatic sense of the ways in which the international imaginary might function. In the context of Masaryk’s strategy and thought as a whole, this is a step away from the notion of ‘imagined community’ advocated by Benedict Anderson, which stresses the self-imagining of those who believe themselves to be a nation, to a kind of speculative nationalism which is pragmatically geared towards the creation of a nationstate, even where such as state is not in fact linguistically bounded, as in the example of the Czechoslovak state which contained Czechs, Slovaks, Germans and others. A key feature of Masaryk’s approach, and evidently the reason for its success, was that the projected nation must be established in the international imaginary, that techniques must be developed for realising this goal, and that this strategy itself presumed a certain porosity and indeed interinanimation of supposedly ‘national’ cultures and values, even if, finally – as Masaryk’s creation of the Czech Legion in 1917 showed – there would always

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be a need for ‘boots on the ground’ when it came to the negotiating table, over and above any programme of cultural propaganda. Masaryk’s shrewd adaptation to local conditions was apparent in his inaugural lecture at Kings in October 1915, entitled ‘The Problem of Small Nations in the European Crisis’.10 In its published version it has a foreword by Prime Minister Asquith, who endorses Masaryk’s ‘candour, courage and strength’. Masaryk’s credentials as an intellectual were substantial and included a lengthy study of Russian thought later published in English as The Spirit of Russia (1919), which Seton-Watson praised as ‘epoch-making’, and a full-length study of Marx, which did not appear in English in his lifetime.11 In his interventions on the question of small nations, Masaryk had to tread carefully, so as not to offend his British hosts by implying that the British Empire should be dismantled, and more concretely not to extend his theory to the allied Russian Empire by implying that a desirable outcome of the war would be independence for its constitutive nations. He did this by focusing on the question of ‘Central Europe’ and by claiming that the British and tsarist empires were different cases. The printed text of Masaryk’s lecture describes him simply as ‘Lecturer at the School for Slavonic Studies at London University, King’s College’. What follows is a series of arguments which eventually gained much traction, and which he later developed at greater length. Beginning with the claim that at that time there was no ethnographic map of Europe to be found, Masaryk argues that ethnography is exactly what the war has been about. Europe has ‘twice as many nations as states’ and intellectual discourse should distinguish between states and nations. We might note ourselves at this point how frequently in contemporary discourse we find casual references to the concept of the ‘nation-state’; Masaryk’s intervention, though, shows that in this period the disaggregation of the terms was a crucial point of argument. Bracketing Russia as a different case, Masaryk argues that ‘Central Europe’ is now ‘the kernel of the so-called Oriental question’ and that ‘It is this zone which has confronted the statesmen of Europe with the problem of Small Nations’. The claim that Central Europe can be thought of as the centre of the ‘Oriental Question’ is only surprising if we forget that this so-called question concerned the boundaries of the East, specifically the roles of Turkey and Russia. Masaryk wants to remind his British audience that Central Europe represents a kind of boundary, not only against Turkey, but against the German plan for a ‘Berlin–Baghdad axis’ which would allow Turkey a firmer base in Europe and, more to the

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point, allow Germany a route to British possessions in the East based on the creation of the Berlin–Baghdad railway. As well as harnessing British imperial self-interest, Masaryk also seeks to engage the British sense of fair play, by reminding his auditors that Britain entered the war to protect Belgium, but in doing so has ended up protecting Serbia.12 Great Britain protecting the liberty of Belgium was led by the right feeling of justice; all nations, especially the unfree, appreciated the noble decision of the English nation; the fact that Great Britain, in protecting Belgium, protects herself and Asia, does not impair her merit. Justice is not only noble, it is quite sensible and useful too.13

Deftly sidestepping any questions about the British Empire – even of Ireland14 – Masaryk attributes the vice of nationalism based on might to ‘Pan-Germanic imperialist theory’, and argues against its implicitly Hegelian basis by advocating diversity: ‘History tends not towards uniformity, but towards variety. [. . .] History is in favour of all individuals, of individualism in general.’ His objective is to make a claim for a non-jingoistic nationalism compatible with internationalism and peace. ‘Mankind strives for unity, but it does not strive for uniformity,’ he announces, ‘this war is a revelation of this historic truth.’15 Masaryk believed that his lecture ‘had a good and far-reaching effect’ and that ‘henceforth the small peoples and the possibility of their independence were seriously talked and written about’16. In this he had an ally in Wickham Steed, at that time foreign editor for The Times, who simultaneously called for ‘a radical transformation of Austria-Hungary’ in an article for the Edinburgh Review.17 On the question of Ireland, Masaryk later claimed that ‘had there been time I should have been glad to visit Ireland, for I knew the political and literary sides of the Irish movement and our people had long sympathised with the Irish’.18 It is a safe guess that he refrained from visiting Ireland for diplomatic reasons. Masaryk’s evasion of the question of the British and tsarist empires is of course pragmatic, but that is not to say that the argument he develops in the space that he thereby creates for himself lacks substance. The opposite in fact, and these arguments, which were also unfolded in the journal New Europe, are unpacked at length in a privately printed book, The New Europe: The Slav Standpoint [1919]. It is worth reviewing this book – or large pamphlet – both with regard to what it was as a circulating text, and with regard to the elements of the argument,

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which demonstrate the complexity and difficulty of articulating the intersection of nationalism and internationalism at this time, a problematic nexus for much subsequent discussion even among those who were perhaps unfamiliar with Masaryk’s workings. While this study is principally concerned with public discourse, this privately circulated text is of interest for the circumstances of its creation and the mode of its circulation. It was drafted by Masaryk when he was crossing Russia with the Czecho-Slovak Legion in order to leave Russia via Vladivostok and travel to the United States. It was originally intended for his own troops, as an attempt to inform them of the motives for the war. The draft was probably never printed, but this English version was prepared presumably with a view to influencing policymakers and other key thinkers and distributed accordingly. The copy held at the National Library of Scotland is from the library of Charles Saroléa, Professor of French at Edinburgh University, an old friend and supporter of Masaryk who probably gave it to him in Prague, when Saroléa was en route to Russia for the visit which yielded his anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic Impressions of Soviet Russia (1924).19 While Masaryk’s original text may have been intended, as he says, for his troops, the version presented here is steeped in philosophy and would have been of more interest to policymakers and statesmen. Since it was published in English, it is likely the intended audience were influential Britons and Americans involved in the peace negotiations. The essay, which represents a substantial amplification of the case sketched in Masaryk’s inaugural lecture, now very explicitly grounds that case in the philosophy of history. Indeed, both the causes of the war and its eventual outcome are strictly related to the philosophy of history, specifically in the question of the conception of state and nation. Masaryk’s argument is at the same time speculative and politically pragmatic. If the Bolsheviks regarded themselves as fulfilling the theory of history, Masaryk, too, believed that the independence which he desired for his nation was in accordance with historical movement, and equally that it was necessary to make the historical-theoretical case in order to bring about this change. Masaryk’s arguments in The New Europe are not made in opposition to the Bolsheviks, but they have as their background a detailed knowledge of the uses of the theory of history in Russian thought prior to the war, as was shown in the 1919 English translation by Eden and Cedar Paul of Masaryk’s Zur russischen Geschichts- und Religionsphilosophie: Soziologische Skizzen,20 and had been preceded by studies in Marxism which never appeared in English.21

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British readers of Masaryk’s study would have obtained a thorough view of Russian intellectual life, but the impression is that the numerous works by visitors to Bolshevik Russia and commentators on it were not so well equipped. Clare Sheridan, who visited Moscow in 1920, was probably typical of the educated anglophone reader. Her knowledge of Russia before her visit was, she said, based on reading Constance Garnett’s translations of Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky, and her sense of Russian exceptionalism based on the received myths about ‘Holy Russia’.22 Masaryk’s study maps Russian thought quite clearly in terms of the two currents of religious and historical philosophy, substituting detailed analysis of Russian religious thought for the touristic and propagandistic notion of ‘Holy Russia’, and making precise claims about the nature of Russian revolutionary thought. The continuation of this study, which because of the war was not realised until later, was to deal with Dostoevsky, who Masaryk considered ‘the great analyst of the Russian revolution’.23 As it stands, the part of the study dealing with the later decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth presents sustained commentary on religion, socialism, Marxism, anarchism, the Social Revolutionaries, the Narodniks and liberalism, as well as on democracy and revolution. Key figures discussed include Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Peter Kropotkin and Vladimir Solovyov. The world which British readers could see through Dostoevsky’s fictional lens – Solovyov, for example, was a friend of Dostoevsky and model for some traits of the protagonists in his Brothers Karamazov – is presented in terms of its key ideas. If the events of 1917 surprised anyone in Britain who had believed the myths of Russian exceptionalism, Masaryk, writing before the revolutions of 1917, was already clear that revolution was at the head of the Russian agenda: These studies might well be entitled ‘The Russian Revolution’, for since the days of Peter, Russia has been in a chronic condition of revolution, and the problem of the revolution is one of the leading interests of all philosophers of history and statesmen in Russia. We may indeed say that the problem of revolution is pre-eminently the problem of Russia.24

Masaryk rejects ‘the fashionable explanation of historical evolution as determined by nationality and race, as the outcome of national character’. He similarly rejects historical materialism, claiming that man is shaped by his ‘natural environment’, and goes on to summarise his own position:

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in the extant natural and social conditions man forms himself. In fact I share [the socialist literary critic Vissarion] Bělinskii’s belief that man is free in his historical environment. It is not chronology, it is not space and time, that constitute the essence of mankind; man himself is that essence.25

This statement of position, which is not elaborated, is worth noting perhaps simply for its evasion of the very question of the theory of history which, Masaryk has said, lies at the centre of Russian thought, in a particular form, and by extension of all modern philosophy. For someone who will not much later make bold claims and conduct even bolder actions in the name of a philosophy of history, this model of freedom-within-determination implicitly accepts that nation (space, in some sense) and state of societal development (time) do indeed govern environment, but refuses to accept that they can inhibit freedom of action, without giving any sense – because at this stage Masaryk, not yet shaping his wartime propaganda, does not need to – of the ends to which such freedom should be exercised, or the manner in which it might be implemented. So, at the stage of composing his Russian opus, Masaryk emphasised the intellectual rather than the social basis of Russian thought, which, he says, takes the form either of philosophy of history or philosophy of religion.26 The defect of Russian thought is that it has taken up the German Romantics – Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach – without taking much notice of Kant, let alone of Hume. It therefore lacks an epistemology and is inclined to mythology: The Russians failed to accept Kant because they were and still are more inclined towards mythology than the Europeans. [. . .] Russian thought is negative, but not critical; Russian philosophy is negation without criticism. This explains why Russian negation remains believing negation. The educated Russian abandons the faith of his childhood, but promptly accepts another faith – he believes in Feuerbach, in Vogt, in Darwin, in materialism and atheism.27

Schelling, as against Kant, introduced myth into philosophy; and Hegel, despite his opposition to theology, furthered both theology and mythology by his dialectic with its suspension of the principle of contradiction. For this reason, ‘The questions continually agitating the Russian mind are two: Whither? and What is to be done?’28 Masaryk’s own preparation – he had, unusually, specialised in Hume

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– prepared him for his own scepticism towards Feuerbach and Hegel, and their Russian reception.29 While his Russian studies may seem now to be a historically marginalised document, they are significant as the work of someone to whom the later, actualised Russian Revolution would present significant existential questions. In fact, these studies do identify a question, whatever evaluation we might make of his answer, as to the nature of Russian revolutionary conviction. Opponents of Bolshevism and Marxism can always label its proponents dogmatic; Masaryk’s point is subtler, that it is a question of conviction rather than dogmatism, and his study, while it does not encompass Bolshevism, might have been valuable after 1917 in that it so specifically located Russian revolutionary conviction in terms of an analysis of the Russian reception of German philosophy. In that, Masaryk’s study is surprisingly modern, proposing a definite genealogy, avoiding clichés about national temperament and, despite its immersion in the philosophy of history and Masaryk’s subsequent involvement in the pragmatics of historical action, rejecting myth and taking its own cues from the empiricism of Hume. The war turned Masaryk’s attention firmly towards Germany, and his writing in the pamphlet The New Europe embodies a propagandistic stance in which Germany, Austria and Hungary are vilified and the values of Britain and America celebrated as consonant with those of the suppressed Czechoslovakian nation. Viewed in a sceptical light, the text could be seen as little more than a betrayal of the intellectual skills which it instrumentalises. Yet it is more than this, as the argument it adopts regarding the relationship between state and nation gives an intellectual substance, however flawed and contingent, to the remodelling of Europe after 1918, and brings into relief the concerns of modernist writers, among others, with questions not only of nation and state and of the philosophy of history, but also with conceptions of internationalism and of Europe. Masaryk’s vision of the ‘New Europe’ is exactly what it says: not, in fact, the vision of a new global order, but of a new European order based on a new reality of internationalisation. While there is a fashion to repudiate the notion of internationalism, as if it conservatively implied a relationship between stable states, and substitute for it the more migratory term ‘transnationalism’, as implying the boundarycrossing strengths of the transnational subject, Masaryk shares the common use of the term ‘internationalism’ in this period as implying the transcendence of national boundaries, not the relationship between (‘inter’) states. He argues that contemporary internationalism is entirely different from the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth

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century, which was aristocratic in nature and limited to the nobility and the educated classes. Now, communications, and the relative prominence of several nations other than France and England, as well as ‘intermigration’, make a new twentieth-century form of internationalism possible. ‘The socialist “International” is its peculiar organ; but not merely the working men, to-day all classes – scientists and philosophers, engineers, merchants, lawyers, artists etc., are organised internationally.’30 This new internationalism is ‘more intimate than ever it was’, democratic views have consequently been strengthened, and a ‘radical political reorganisation’ is required now that ‘the war and its significance have knitted mankind closer together’ with the consequence that ‘humanity is now an organised unit’.31 The argument is therefore that a move away from strong and ‘aristocratic’ states towards smaller nations is made possible by the new internationalism; new forms of nationhood depend upon internationalism and are not in conflict with it. Germany and Pan-Germanism are to blame for the present war, focused on the creation of a new order based on the Berlin–Baghdad axis. The aggression of Germany and Austria-Hungary arises from the German philosophical view of the state. The doctrine of PanGermanism, which aims at the unification of all German-speakers, is ‘mainly a philosophy of history, the history of the German nation and of all mankind’. The philosophy of history is said to be the dominant mode of modern intellectual and scientific life, practised by all nations, leading to a flourishing of the disciplines of history, economics, politics and the social sciences, with sociology now the emergent discipline which draws on all of these others and ‘seeks to become the general science of human society and its development’. Germany has led this development, Masaryk argues. The philosophy of history began with Herder, and German philosophy since Kant has been ‘substantially historical’, as exemplified by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and, in turn, by socialism and especially Marxism. Not only social and political science but even natural science has been ‘devoted to the study of the German nation’. Pan-Germanism, claims Masaryk, has founded itself on this political and philosophical science: ‘[Paul de] Lagarde is its leading philosophical and theological representative; [Heinrich von] Treitschke is its historian; and Kaiser William is its statesman’, and these ideas are widely disseminated.32 It is ‘Pangerman imperialism’, espoused with great fervour also in Austria, which has been the basis of the German plan to dominate Central Europe, eventually link with the Netherlands, Belgium and the Scandinavian countries, and with explicit designs also on ‘the Baltic, the

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Black Sea, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf’.33 Confined to the West by strong nations, the push to the East, which takes in the ‘zone of small nations’ of the east and south, has been adopted as the core Austro-German war aim.34 Masaryk is telling a scare-story, let it be said, since the more prosaic reality was that attempts to end the war had for a long time sought to split Austria from Germany and thereby preserve itself. Although some talks had taken place, the withdrawal of Russia from the war had taken the pressure off in the east, so Austria had much less need to negotiate a separate peace. Masaryk well knew all of this, but at the time of writing his pamphlet he would have considered it imperative to exaggerate the Austrian complicity in PanGermanism, since the goal of dismantling Austria-Hungary had not yet been firmly adopted by the Allies. In this crucial question, Masaryk and the Czech National Council pored over every word in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of 8 January 1918. The Entente Reply to Wilson’s Peace Proposals, sometimes called the ‘Allied note’, of 10 January 1917, had called for ‘liberation from foreign domination’ for Slavic, Italian, Romanian and Czechoslovak peoples. The phrasing was ambiguous and the inclusion of Czechoslovakia in the list had taken place only at the last minute as the result of an intervention in Paris by Beneš after the text of the note had been drafted.35 Wilson’s Fourteen Points, despite its key commitment to the selfdetermination of small nations, and call for the establishment of an independent Poland, did not explicitly call for the dismantling of Austria-Hungary, but vaguely asserted that its ‘peoples’, without specifying them by name, should be given the ‘freest opportunity to autonomous development’. On such textual details hung Masaryk’s project, and at the moment of writing The New Europe, perhaps only months before he began to be recognised as the de facto Czech leader, the discursive struggle remained critical.36 Masaryk argues that the key to the new conception of the nation is the analysis of the relationship between the nation and the state. He concedes that the Pan-Germanists also appeal to the principle of nationality, but claims that they set the nation above the state. Instead, he asserts, ‘the nation and nationality should be held to be the aim of social effort, while the state should be the means; de facto, every self-conscious nation tries to have its own state.’ The state is an old and apparently universal institution, and for that reason seen as the ‘most valuable achievement of human society’, while ‘the principle of nationality is comparatively new, unsettled’. Yet while there are twenty-seven states in Europe there are up to seventy nations, and

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only the very smallest states are ‘purely national’.37 Citing the distinction in Herder between nations as ‘the natural organs of humanity’ and states as ‘only artificial organs’, Masaryk asserts that the state has been the expression of organised force, ‘the subjugator of its own nation and of other nations’, the creation of aristocracies or plutocracies which were indifferent to national differences, while a nation ‘is a spiritual and cultural organisation’ and the embodiment of new democratic principles.38 Masaryk is keen to show that the principle of nationality will not lead to what was soon to become routinely labelled the ‘Balkanisation’ of Europe. Although he does not use the term in 1918, it appears in his analysis of the new Europe which has emerged from the peace settlement in The Making of a State. In that text, he notes that ‘big people’ such as Britain and the United States ‘are not greatly troubled by questions of language’ and ‘are wont to look upon the liberation of small peoples and the creation of small States as a bothersome process of political and linguistic “Balkanization”’, but maintains that the resulting ‘freedom and democracy’ are preferable to the simplification by violence of Europe formerly imposed by Turkey, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia.39 These words were written long after Czechoslovakia had been officially recognised in the 1919 peace treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye between the Allies and Austria. Even at this stage he evidently considered it necessary to address concerns that the new Europe might be more unstable than the old. T. S. Eliot, in an editorial comment of August 1927 to which we shall later return, wrote: ‘Instead of a few “oppressed minorities”, the oppressed minorities seem to be almost in a majority; instead of a few potential Sarajevos, we seem to have dozens.’ His comment exactly encapsulates the doubts of those who felt that ‘Balkanization’ might lead to further war. Eliot’s commentary spins off in a different direction, to address the question of communism and fascism, but when he notes that the ‘idea of nationality’ has changed, his vocabulary reflects the new discourse to which Masaryk contributed: ‘Not how Europe can be “freed”, but how Europe can be organized, is the question of the day.’40 While Eliot appears to suggest that peace and freedom may be compromised by the Balkanisation of a reorganised Europe – although Eliot’s meanings in this moment are part of a different pattern – Masaryk was at pains to formulate a rhetoric in which both peace and freedom depended on the new nationalism. It was evidently pressing in 1918, before the existence of his new state had been secured, to explain that the prospective new nations would be not the negation of a new spirit of

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peace and internationalism but its embodiment. Questions of nationality have been made into ‘international questions’, he notes, by the Allied note to Wilson. A future League will depend for its effectiveness on national liberation: A real federation of nations will be possible only when the nations are free to unite of their own accord. The development of Europe points to that end. The program of the Allies answers fully to this development; free and liberated nations will organise themselves, as they find necessary, into greater units, and thus the whole continent will be organised. History aims at the unification of all mankind. This historical development is a double process; together with the individualisation of all departments the organisation of individuals is taking place. [. . .] Interstatism and internationalism become more intimate. Europe emphatically tends towards a continental organisation. The principle of nationality stands alongside of the international (interstate) principle. [. . .] Europe and humanity are becoming more unified.41

Masaryk’s language may seem vague and high-minded, but it also contains a warning. Any attempt to secure a European peace on the basis of the balance of power between the great states will fail. The peaceful organisation of Europe can come into existence only through the will of the newly created states. The first step towards unity involves a separation. In order to be together, peoples must now be allowed to stand apart. The Allies must maintain their commitment to the principles they have acknowledged in their note. In Masaryk’s broadly formulated claims there is a residue of the philosophy of history which he is otherwise minded to reject. In this argument, increasing individualisation in all aspects of human life, along with the technologies of communication which produce it, also somehow tends to human unification. The style of the claim is perhaps Hegelian; there are residues of Kant’s essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795); the worldview generally is socialist; but the mechanisms by which the increasingly individualised elements and the increasingly unified totality are to be brought into relation are not detailed. The nation as newly conceived is one of these forms of individualisation, and will yield a patchwork of benign nation-states which will constitute the peaceful alternative to the world of the aristocratic state which is about to be left behind. There is a further intermediate term which receives even less analysis than that of nation – Europe. The

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question of human unification depends for its realisation on the reorganisation of Europe, and it is this Europe, rather than the individual nations, or rather even than an imagined global humanity, which is the object of the process of post-war reterritorialisation. We will return to the question of Europe later in this study. Nations are usually assumed by Masaryk to be defined by language. He was intrigued by the question of how Irish character might manifest itself in those who no longer spoke the language.42 The question of whether Ukraine should be an independent nation should be resolved, he claimed, by linguists.43 Masaryk, of course, had strong reason to avoid the topic of Ireland because of his dependence on Britain, let alone for the incoherence which the example of a people so fully separated from their once-native language presented to his idea of the nation. The example of Ukraine, though, was even more immediate. The independence of Ukraine was far from being a question for linguists at this time, since in the wake of the October Revolution a series of contested independent governments were established in Ukraine which took varying views on the extent of Ukraine’s independence from Russia. In the spring of 1918 Ukraine signed a trade agreement with Germany and AustriaHungary, a reminder that the new dispensation in the former Russian Empire might yet favour the continued existence of Austria-Hungary. Although he does not discuss the matter, Masaryk must have known that the Bolsheviks had given the question of national independence maximal importance, and that the immediate effect of events in Russia had been to create the opportunity for many of its constituent nations to declare their autonomy. His discussion of this point – by contrast to his earlier, careful discussion of Russian intellectual life – reveals the extent to which the immediate goal of the break-up of Austria-Hungary has pulled Masaryk’s public rhetoric very far over into the realm of propaganda: The great majority of the peoples of Russia are uneducated and without national conscience; the Russians themselves have not developed to the point of national consciousness; the masses of the people have their religious viewpoint, and the intelligentsia, as far as it is Socialistic, does not feel nationally. The watchword of self-determination of nations is applied by the Russians to their various parts; hence the birth of so many republics, or rather communes; and, therefore, the solution of national and languages questions in Russia is different from the European solution. [. . .] The nations of Russia are on the whole small, fragmentary, and uneducated.44

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Masaryk does not quite here turn to the game of making generalisations about Russian character – a sport which he had dismissed in his Russian study and which played its inevitable part in much discussion of the revolutions. It is clear, though, that his conception of nation depends on the criterion of the national cultural stage of development. The mood of Masaryk’s words, penned in part in Siberia and in a state of unfolding emergency, is plainly visible here. There is an almost neutral flavour in the claim that ‘the solution of national and languages questions in Russia is different from the European solution’, which almost accidentally excludes Russia from Europe at the same time that it allows for a legitimate Russian difference. Yet there is a stark sense of hierarchy in the claim that national consciousness has not yet been achieved in Russia or its empire, with the unstated implication that the break-up of Russia should not be allowed by the Allies. The propagandistic function is even clearer when Masaryk discusses Austria: ‘an artificial State [. . .] composed of fairly large and civilised nations, held in subjection by the dynasty and the German Magyar minority. [. . .] Austria-Hungary is politically and morally condemned. [. . .] Austria is a medieval survival [. . .] in all its substance, its history, geography, and ethnography, a denial of the modern State and nationality.’45 While it would have been implausible to question the level of advancement of Austrian culture, Masaryk feels able to advance a clumsy generalisation about the level of Hungarian culture: ‘the Magyars lack a deeper culture. [. . .] The Magyar people are in no respect superior to the Slovaks; quite the contrary.’46 These are more than propagandistic barbs. The remarks on Austria encapsulate his view of the form of the imperial state, while the remarks about the Magyars reveal his underlying view of the relative value of national cultures. Masaryk’s closing remarks in this discussion both represent the actual values active in his thinking, and at the same time are designed to reassure his British and American audience that the reorganised Europe he has in view will not simply be a new and more complicated chequerboard of competing national chauvinisms: I have never been a national chauvinist; I have not even been a nationalist; I have stated frequently that nationality has appealed to me from the social and moral side – the oppression of nations is a sin against humanity. [. . .] If I had to say which culture I considered the highest I would answer, the English and the American; at any rate, my stay in England during the war [. . .] convinced me that the English, as a whole, come nearest to the ideals of humanity.47

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This review of Masaryk’s arguments serves to illustrate just one manner in which the discourse of nationality came to achieve a new significance in the months after the Russian revolutions and preceding the anticipated Allied victory once the United States had entered the war. It is only one model, of course, and it would be wrong to assume that Masaryk’s Czech National Council were the sole or even most important driver on the evolving thinking of Wilson and of the Allied governments regarding the eventual peace. Indeed, the moment of composition of this text, and its exact relationship to the wording of the Fourteen Points and to the Allied note, is a key moment in Masaryk’s campaign to expand the explicit backing of the creation of an independent Poland into a commitment to the general dismantling of Austria-Hungary both as an act of social justice and with the key regional aim of creating a ‘barrier against Pangermanism’ of strongly motivated, independent and democratic nations. As hazy as Masaryk’s formulations are, they reveal the contradictions in the discourse of the new nationalisms as a whole, between democratic idealism and the realpolitik of security, and between the goal of human unity under the umbrella of a ‘New Europe’ and the proliferation of new states. One specific aspect of these contradictions was at the core of the creation of the Czechoslovak nation itself. It was not merely the double-barrelled name which indicated that the new state would not indeed have a single language and culture, although the adjective ‘Bohemian’ is frequently used by Masaryk and his allies to suppress the awkward ‘Czechoslovakian’ and the hierarchical ‘Czech’. There was also the straightforward question of large minority populations which interrupted any straightforward narrative of national reterritorialisation. The Ottoman treatment of Armenians and Greeks had already highlighted the brutal consequences of what is now called ethnic cleansing. The intellectual difficulties of the new nationalisms, to the extent they were to be founded on the principles of a new kind of state which would express rather than suppress national identity, were evident to all commentators, including the ideologues of Czech nationalism. Whatever its function in The Waste Land, the oftenquoted line ‘Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch’ very precisely points to this question of ethnicity and national boundaries. Lithuania declared independence in 1918, but part of its territory was quickly annexed by Poland – opponents of the European reorganisation would frequently cite Polish aggression on the back of resurgent nationalism as an undesirable consequence of the peace – and indeed the minority German population would offer

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the pretext for Nazi Germany to demand control of the Klaipėda region the year before the Soviet Union was attacked. Masaryk was alert to the question of German-descended populations in the Baltic states, as he understood that Germany had indeed made claims to these areas after Brest-Litovsk, and took the trouble to assert that ‘the Germans in Russia do not possess a continuous territory, they are colonists’ and that ‘the Baltic provinces are not German but Lithuanian, Lettish, and Esthonian’.48 This question of minorities could not be made to disappear so simply, though. Seton-Watson was perhaps franker than Masaryk in his administratively minded and pragmatic analysis of the make-up of the new Czechoslovakia. A few months later, Seton-Watson addressed objections to the formation of Czechoslovakia in a series of articles for The New Europe.49 Noting that ‘unfriendly critics point out that Czech claims are compounded of historical and ethnographic principles which are mutually irreconcilable’, Seton-Watson goes on to admit that the contradictions of principle regarding the linguistic-cultural grounds for the creation of the new Czech state have a strategic and pragmatic rationale. Notably, he addresses the question of German speakers on the Czech borders. He argues that peripheral German districts cannot be allowed to revert to Germany for strategic reasons, that there are still Czech minorities in these areas, and that in any case throughout the Czech areas there is a mixture of races, with Germans present in the central areas only as a minority. Nor is the division of Slovakia from Magyar areas any tidier: ‘several hundred thousand Magyars will inevitably be included in Czecho-Slovakia’ for strategic reasons of territorial integrity, while Slovaks ‘will be obliged to sacrifice a number of flourishing colonies – amounting to 226,972’, including over 20,000 in Budapest. The argument about the new state has come down to very specific questions of census data, which is why SetonWatson has such apparently precise numbers, but even the meaning and validity of this data are in question since the Austrian census recorded Umgangsprache, or ‘language usually spoken’, and not the ‘mother tongue’, on which the argument for the identity of the new state depends. To justify retention of the German areas he further argues that the natural barrier (of mountains) and the natural balance of resources (between mining and agriculture) make it in the interest of even these German residents of Czech peripheries to be part of ‘Czecho-Slovakia’. He concludes that the inclusion of these (very large) minorities on either side of the new borders is a desirable ‘guarantee of mutual tolerance’ and better than the alternative of forced population exchanges.50 Seton-Watson introduces several

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new elements. He admits that the new state is not ethnographically unified, and that this is not just for the practical reason of the inevitable inclusion of small enclaves. He also admits that the new state must be formed on the basis of its geographical security and its economic self-sustainability. The question of cultural identity and the issue of the democratic status of minorities are both subordinated to these practical considerations. Of course, the German presence in Czechoslovakia was the pretext for the German occupation of Sudetenland in 1938, the precursor to what became a brutal occupation of the whole country designed among other things, to suppress Czech nationality. Masaryk’s warnings about the designs of Pan-Germanism seem inarguable from this historical perspective. On the other hand, the obviously correct objection that Czechoslovakia was not at all an ethnographically unified nation was confirmed when the Czech and Slovak Republics formally and peacefully separated in 1993. In terms of the period which concerns this study, these texts confirm the relatively untidy way in which a new nationalities discourse was set before the public, and the very distinct manner in which an argument about democratic, ethically defined culture and nationality was so closely embedded in the grain of rapidly unfolding events and the calculation by the major powers of geopolitical strategy. This brings us back to The New Europe and Masaryk’s design of cultural propaganda. With strong encouragement from Masaryk, Seton-Watson published the first number of The New Europe in October 1916. The journal was conceived against the background of the discussion of Allied war aims. Seton-Watson had greatly damaged his standing with the authorities by the publication of an outspoken article in The English Review making a detailed critique of the foreign policy pursued by Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916 and responsible, as Seton-Watson saw it, for the ‘drift’ towards war, characterised not least by ignorance of the German ‘character’. Seton-Watson’s argument is focused on what he describes as the current complete absence of a foreign policy, by which he means the absence of coherent war aims, and a view then gaining ground that Germany was already defeated, a view which was considered too short-term, not least because his own theoretical goal, as he later outlined, was already ‘La Victoire Intégrale’, which would include ‘European reconstruction on a basis of nationality, the rights of minorities, and the hard facts of geography and economics’ as the only way to avoid another conflict.51 A letter from Masaryk confirms their shared perspective on the need of the new journal as a counter to the current climate. Masaryk criticises the

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New Statesman’s coverage of Mitteleuropa, identifying a ‘Germanophil spirit’ and stating that the journal ‘protects the Government. [. . .] This paper does not teach to think [. . .] it is positively wrong and harmful.’ Just the whole tendency, the spirit of ‘The Weekly’ [i.e. The New Europe], I hope would be different, and truly new [i.e. as opposed to the spurious newness of the New Statesman]: it must teach people to think and to imagine, and it must be new: it must be the organ of literary revolution, if a political revolution is impossible.

He concludes darkly: ‘you must expect that the Government will be against The Weekly; you must be prepared to issue and to circulate The Weekly against suppressive measures.’52 Masaryk was not exaggerating. Seton-Watson’s article on Grey had led to a ‘veto upon my employment in an Allied country’. He had been requested by Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador in Petrograd to be sent out to work with Bernard Pares and Harold Williams as ‘a kind of liaison with the Balkan and Austrian Slavs in Russia’. The assignment was abruptly cancelled.53 Entirely different in nature and function from The Spectator and The New Age, The New Europe did indeed emulate those two journals in 1919 by adopting the subtitle ‘A Weekly Review of Foreign Politics, Literature, Art, Drama and Music’, and employing a selection of cultural commentators such as John Cournos and Storm Jameson, but its focus was much more specific than that of those other reviews.54 Although Masaryk had called for a ‘literary revolution’, he had not by any means intended that they should launch a literary review, and the temporary introduction of cultural pages in 1919 was probably intended to open a window on the cultural identities of the liberated nations as part of the approach to the settlement, but this goal was not strongly realised. The journal provided a platform for articles advocating national liberation and, in particular, the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The editorial board included the Russian specialist Bernard Pares, who after the October Revolution was placed in a propaganda role with Kolchak’s White Army in Siberia, and Harold Williams, another Russian specialist who before the October Revolution was employed in the British Propaganda Office in Petrograd. Russian contributors included the former Marxist turned anti-Bolshevik Peter Struve, the Oxford professor Paul Vinogradoff, and other experts on the nationality question such as H. Wickham Steed, the supporter of

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Masaryk and later editor of The Times. The New Europe was sufficiently visible to attract the attention of the patriotic Morning Post, which devoted a lead article to it, condemning it as an ‘ethnological museum’ and ‘the Dago’s friend’, denouncing its advocacy of the League of Nations, and accusing it of allowing British interests to be ‘crowded out’ by foreigners. The New Europe calmly replied that it believed that better understanding of foreign affairs could only make a practical contribution to the Allied victory.55 This brief confrontation indicates something of the climate in which educated and liberal journalism found itself during the war, but the reply of the journal conceals the full palette of its aims. The initial task of The New Europe was to promote Masaryk’s vision of a Europe of small nations. As we have already seen, the changing situation in Russia in 1917 was especially influential on the agenda of the advocates of the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary. It is especially interesting for the purposes of this study, in which we trace some of the connections between nationalities discourse and the reception of the Russian revolutions, to consider the evolution of the treatment of Russia in The New Europe. When the Russian revolutions arrived, the journal was well placed to develop an agenda and comment, and it constituted a discursive space in which the themes of national democracy and anti-Bolshevism could be brought together. The remit of the journal was set by an editorial in its first issue which stated: An ‘integral’ victory such as alone can secure to Europe permanent peace and the reduction of armaments, the fulfilment of the solemn pledges assumed by our statesmen towards our smaller allies, the vindication of national rights and public law, the emancipation of the subject races of central and south-eastern Europe from German and Magyar control – such must be our answer to the Pangerman project of ‘Central Europe’ and ‘Berlin–Baghdad’.56

The issue included Masaryk’s position piece, ‘Pan-Germanism and the Eastern Question’ (1–19), one of his numerous publications on the topic, later summarised in The New Europe: The Slav Standpoint.57 Masaryk, for strategic reasons, feigned to believe that, while nationalism was a force in Central Europe (a geopolitical category which Masaryk was largely responsible for bringing into modern political discourse), it was not so in the Russian Empire, where Finns, Latvians, Letts and Estonians, he argued, were content with the Russian umbrella, and only Poland presented any kind of nationalist

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problem.58 This was basically a pretence on his part, mirroring the propagandistic defence of tsarism in terms of Russia’s supposedly special status. His claims did not anticipate the manner in which the question of nationalities was to emerge as an urgent one for the Bolsheviks. The treatment of the Russian revolutions in the pages of The New Europe solidly reflected Masaryk’s agenda. Like the New Statesman, the journal backed the Provisional Government against what Miliukov had called the ‘dark forces’ led by Rasputin.59 Masaryk blamed the war on ‘German and Magyar Pangermanism’ and absolved Russia of the ‘Panslavism’ which Germany claimed to be the root of the war in the east,60 and ‘Rurik’ (Rex Leeper of the British Government’s Intelligence Office) perhaps rather wishfully identified the agenda of the new Russia with that of The New Europe: ‘[. . .] the new Russia must not and cannot deny to the nationalities of Austria-Hungary the same rights that she bestows so generously on her own nationalities. [. . .] Austria-Hungary is not a nation; the partition of Austria-Hungary is not in any way an infringement of the national principle.’61 The keen and persistent interest which The New Europe took in Russian affairs meant that it was well placed to react quickly to the October coup. Lenin’s very presence in Russia prompted the publication of a letter, purportedly written by General Anton Ivanovich Denikin, presumably sent from prison where he had been confined for his part in the Kornilov affair, claiming that Lenin was a German agent ‘instructed to agitate for peace’.62 The warning came too late, however, and The New Europe responded decisively to the Bolshevik coup in its issue of 15 November which was titled simply ‘La Révolution dévore ses enfants’. The editorial noted that for the moment Lenin and his followers have gained a precarious control of the Russian capital, but we believe that this time Russia will have learnt her lesson. [. . .] The Bolševiks are not the true representatives of our Eastern Ally, and their day of power will be short. [. . .] The Bolševiks we decline to recognise [. . .] because they represent neither Russia nor the Revolution. The cause of the Russian People is our cause; the ideals of liberty and self-government for which the new Russia stands are our ideals; [. . .] we repudiate those whose diseased fancy bids them proclaim nightmares as realities.63

Rex Leeper again singled out Lenin, summarising what little was known of his life and concluding: ‘The friends of Democracy in

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Western Europe can only view Lenin’s meteoric course with dismay. We do not believe that his work of destruction will achieve the ends he anticipates. Lenin is the futurist of the revolution [. . .].’64 This passage confirms the hope and expectation of the journal that Russia should lend its weight to the cause of small nations. In this way, The New Europe reflected its own variety of the wishfulness that had informed liberal views of the fall of tsarism in the February Revolution, as signalled most notably in Masaryk’s contradictory position vis-à-vis the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. The journal nevertheless was in a position to set some of the best information before a readership which on balance, we may imagine, preferred realism to propaganda. Just a few weeks after the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the exiled Russian historian Alexander Onou catalysed a debate in the pages of the journal with a piece on ‘Patriotism and Internationalism’. Onou’s approach as a historian was sociological, and he was an expert in the origins of the French Revolution.65 His condemnation of events in Russia is shaped by anger over Brest-Litovsk: he contrasts the patriotic audacity of the French revolutionaries with the effective surrender of the Bolsheviks, and finds the cause of the Bolshevik withdrawal from the war not in the circumstances of war and revolution but in the doctrines of Karl Marx. It was Marx’s view of patriotism as an outmoded survival of the bourgeois order, and the attempts of communists in the 1860s to revive the idea of ‘the brotherhood of all nations’, which, Onou claims, has ‘tragically perplexed’ the Russian intelligentsia, and especially the Left, which is now dominated by demagogues. The Russian people and intelligentsia are ‘slumbering’ and unable to withstand the ‘Utopian propaganda of the most dangerous kinds of internationalism and pacifism’. Internationalism may be a corrective to ‘hypertrophied nationalism’, Onou concludes, but must always be allied to a ‘human patriotism’.66 The article illustrates how internationalism itself was being identified as an object of contestation, and also the manner in which émigré Russian intellectuals began to create platforms to argue for intervention as soon as Russian withdrawal from the war was confirmed. As we have seen, in 1918 Masaryk, sensing that the argument needed to move on, was at pains to argue the opposite – that internationalism and nationalism were not only not opposing movements but required each other. An immediate response to Onou came in an even-handed review of events since November 1917 by Rex Leeper (as ‘Rurik’), who sought to soften Onou’s ideological focus by situating the peace in terms both of international idealism and the pragmatism of power

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politics. Because they feared the largely peasant army, given its role in suppressing the 1905 revolution, the Bolsheviks lost no time in issuing the notorious Order No. 1, which did so much to weaken the bonds of discipline, and to organize political propaganda among the troops. [. . .] The real essence of the conflict between the bourgeois and socialist parties during the summer and autumn of 1917 was whether Russia’s policy should be national or international, but a secondary aspect of it was the struggle for control of the army, and it was this struggle that from the point of view of the Allies proved so disastrous, for it could only end in one way – the complete demoralisation of the existing army. Great as may be the responsibility of the Bolševiks for what subsequently happened, there is no proof that the actions of the leaders of the party were not sincerely directed towards certain definite ends. [. . .] But whatever were their motives, the effect upon European democracy as a whole was disastrous, for the collapse of Russian resistance has so far merely served to put the Prussian militarists more firmly in the saddle.

Quoting earlier speeches by Lenin, Leeper argues that a separate peace with what Lenin had called the ‘German bandits’ had not initially been a Bolshevik goal, but that events had simply overtaken their original intentions. Leeper saw reason to doubt the outcome of a revolution which seemed already predicated on violence, and noted that the wave of strikes which had affected German arms factories in March and April were insufficient to sustain the German revolution which the Bolsheviks hoped for, but concluded that ‘Social Revolution is now the dominant factor in Eastern Europe’, even though ‘in Russia it has taken a form which cannot commend itself to the British people’, while remaining optimistic that the Bolsheviks are a ‘transitory force’ which ‘will have to make their bow to the public when normal conditions are restored’.67 With the war still in progress, and German troops now free to switch from the Eastern to the Western Front, Leeper sought to take a dispassionate view of events, portraying the Bolsheviks as rational actors and refusing any recourse to the vocabulary of Bolshevik diabolism or mystification of the Russian character. His article provoked a furious response from Onou’s fellow historian and now Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, Paul Vinogradoff, who repeated the accusation that the Bolsheviks lacked patriotism, and detected in Leeper’s hesitant recommendation of the Bolsheviks a renewed version of the ‘political opportunism’ which had allowed an alliance with tsarist

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absolutism, summarising Leeper’s position as ‘make friends with the Bolševiks if you do not wish to make friends with the Germans’.68 Bernard Pares, another editorial member based at King’s College, also weighed in against Leeper’s endorsement of the Bolsheviks. Pares reports that he had spoken with members of the Petrograd Soviet before the October coup and taken their views on the ‘issue of the rights of peoples’, receiving their reassurance that they supported the reunion of Poland on the basis of an ‘unconstrained plebiscite’ and took a similar view on the rights of the Austrian and Russian nationalities. As he notes, when the Bolsheviks came to power, these aims were progressively abandoned in the rush to secure peace with Germany, in March 1918 signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which renounced Russian claims on Finland, Poland, Ukraine and Belarus and ceded the Baltic states directly to Germany.69 An unsigned editorial, presumably by Seton-Watson, noted that ‘It was not unreasonable to suspend judgement of the Bolševiks in the earlier stages of the Brest negotiations, when for a time it seemed that they were in earnest in their advocacy of self-determination’, but concludes that ‘Cooperation with them to-day [after Brest-Litovsk], when their whole system is bankrupt and the disillusionment of their dupes is proceeding apace, would be the supreme height of folly.’70 This unmitigated anti-Bolshevism became the policy of The New Europe, although the editors did allow the appearance of one unnamed dissenting voice, who reminded the editors that one objective of the journal had been to increase Anglo-Russian understanding, that this was lost if it did not remind its readers that the political parties and the middle classes which The New Europe might favour were a tiny minority and therefore not the basis for government which the liberal classes in Britain might wish.71 The socialist correspondent of the Manchester Guardian Morgan Philips Price, who was present in Petrograd in February 1917, had noted at the time that the demands on the street, as formulated by the Petrograd Soviet, for ‘peace without annexations or indemnities’, were dramatically at odds with the claims made to him in interview by Pavel Miliukov, Foreign Minister of the Provisional Government (and another historian and ally of Masaryk), that Russia would continue to fight for the Allied war aims, including the partitioning of Austria and the capture of Constantinople.72 Philips Price’s comments confirm that the hope, shared by Bohemian nationalists, that Russia would stay in the war always looked unrealistic to inside observers, and that foreigners were unwise to depend on the claims of the minority represented by the Provisional Government.

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The agenda of The New Europe was clear once Brest-Litovsk had rudely confirmed that Russia would undertake no further action against Germany and had in effect accepted peace at any price. With Germany as yet undefeated, the prospect of a total victory and the creation of newly independent nations was receding. Vinogradoff brusquely dismissed the notion that Allied war goals might eventually be met by supporting Lenin and Trotsky in the development of a new army, predicted that the Bolsheviks would be overthrown by a new movement of national independence, advocated the establishment of a Russian government in exile, and urged the creation of an Allied presence in northern Russia.73 Intervention very quickly became Allied policy not, of course, in support of any agenda set by The New Europe, but in order to counter the spreading and unopposed German occupation of large swathes of Central and North European territory. Yet within the otherwise decisive pages of The New Europe, it was the more literary-minded Harold Williams who began to raise doubts about the difficulty of really grasping Russian events. Williams, an accomplished linguist, had been a member of the Anglo-Russian Bureau in Petrograd, was the Russian correspondent of the London Chronicle and later foreign editor of The Times, had lived in Russia for many years, had numerous Russian political contacts, and was a chief source of information for the British Government.74 Recently returned from Russia, Williams’ May 1918 article, ‘A Furnace of Democracy’, noted the contrast between life as he had left it in Russia and as he had found it in England, asking rhetorically ‘Which is real?’ He presents the difference between England and Russia not at all in terms of the clichés of national character but entirely in terms of the absolute existential instability of post-revolutionary Russia as opposed to England where, in spite of the war, ‘everything is so simple and orderly and clear’. In Russia, the ‘collective mind has been plunged into the strangest adventures’, traditions have disappeared, there is intense joy and constant fear: ‘sometimes one had the feeling that too many illusions had been torn away, that one had seen things that it was not good to see in this life’, while by contrast his companions at the English golf club discuss the problems of finding good maintenance staff for the grounds. He concludes: ‘that is why it is so difficult to speak of Russia in England now.’ The war has ‘shocked England’ but not, as in Russia, ‘thrown all values into the melting-pot’. Williams goes on in a more straightforward fashion to raise questions in the light of the experience following the February Revolution of the effects of introducing democracy in Russia,

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by way of questioning The New Europe’s advocacy of democracy for all nations regardless of national situation.75 Williams, though, returned to his theme of the political and social imagination in confronting the vastness and complexity of Russia and its immediate history in a piece called ‘The Search for Russia’. While endorsing Vinogradoff’s call for intervention, he points out that Allied intervention will be a ‘psychological adventure’ led by guesswork: ‘We know the Russia that was. We believe in the Russia that will be. We are going out to rediscover Russia – that strange Persephone that has been wandering an underworld for us invisible.’ The political imaginary is challenged not just because English politics does not directly map onto the Russian parties which the Allies support or oppose, but also because these parties are themselves so fluid, under the pressure of events, and their chief representatives are each singularities, not really the embodiment of any party or class – so Lenin is the only real Bolshevik and Miliukov the only real Cadet. The difficulty of intervention is that: the whole process is enveloped in a mist in which Russia, as a tangible, accessible entity, seems to have disappeared. We do not certainly know what and how to grasp. We are in a chaos. [. . .] There are no stable institutions representing either the will of the people or the power and authority of the State. Russia is a great memory and a great potentiality. She is disembodied. At present she has an intense psychological but not a physical existence. Our search is a search for a spirit that is fashioning anew its earthly shape.76

Williams was issuing a warning not only to his colleagues at The New Europe but to all of those journalists and politicians who hoped to discern the pattern of events in the Russian revolutions from the statements and actions of the key participants. This question of grasping Russia is obviously of importance to this study, but in the context of the debate on nationality it has additional resonance. Williams poses his question as an epistemological one. The ‘we’ which must ‘grasp’ the ‘Persephone’ of Russia is a stable one, the British nation, still at war, which urgently needs to grasp the implications of events in Russia which might even pose an existential threat to Britain and its empire. The structures of the British state are clearly present, known and self-knowing. Russia exists, though, not as state but as spirit. Persephone is goddess of the Underworld, but also of fertility, minding the dead but also enabling renewal. Williams’ representation of Russia as an ungraspable spiritual entity corresponds

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in a way to the old idea of Russian exceptionalism, in the figure of Holy Russia, a place where a different spirit walks, or indeed to the dialogic and conflicted world known to anglophone readers through Dostoevsky, corresponding to Williams’ reference to Russia’s ‘intense psychological [. . .] existence’. His remarks, though, suggest more than this and correspond to Masaryk’s vision of the realisation of national identity not through any Hegelian or Marxist dialectic, but through action. This is a question not of the epistemological grasping of what is there, but an existential or ontological question of the mode of becoming of a state. The Russian state, however, does not exist. It has disintegrated into individual actors, none of whom can command the national narrative, Williams believes, because the machinery of state which might give meaning to their pronouncements is absent. Of course, the question of what was happening in Russia would persist long after the date of Williams’ essay, and as the Soviet state gradually asserted itself and fashioned itself as the actual government of Russia, that country did indeed become more graspable as an entity. Yet in the period leading to Allied intervention Williams had sure reasons for inserting this phenomenological caveat in the margins of the discourse.

Notes 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; revised edn, London and New York: Verso, 2006), p. 3. 2. See Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, The Making of a State: Memories and Observations, 1914–1918, intro. Henry Wickham Steed (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1927), pp. 82–131. This text has some variations from the German version, published as Die Welt-Revolution: Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen, 1914–1918 (Berlin: Reiss, 1925). Although the chapters are generally the same, the discussion of the formation within the Czecho-Slovak Legion of a council of workers and solders under the leadership of Alois Muna appears in the German edition (pp. 191–3) but not in the English (p. 177), as if this episode might contaminate the myth of the heroic anti-Bolshevik legion. On Muna, see Alain Soubigou, Thomas Masaryk (Paris: Fayard, 2002), pp. 411–15. 3. For Seton-Watson’s detailed account of the founding of the School of Slavonic Studies at Kings, see R. W. Seton-Watson, ‘The Origins of the School of Slavonic Studies’, The Slavonic and East European Review 17:50 (January,1939), pp. 360–71.

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4. R. W. Seton-Watson, Masaryk in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943), pp. 22–3. 5. Masaryk, The Making of a State, pp. 34–5, 58. 6. Ibid. pp. 89–90. 7. Ibid. p. 47 8. Ibid. pp. 115–17. 9. See Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslavakia in Europe, 1914–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 30–2. 10. Thomas G. Masaryk, The Problem of Small Nations in the European Crisis: Inaugural Lecture at the University of London, King’s College (Westminster: Council for the Study of International Relations, [1916]). 11. Seton-Watson’s comment appears in Masaryk in England, p. 11. Masaryk discusses the Russian reception of his work on Marx in The Making of a State, p. 133. Originally published in Czech in 1898, in German in 1899 and in Russian in 1900, this work appeared in English in an abridged edition as Masaryk on Marx, ed, and trans. Erazim V. Kohák (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1972); for its publication history, see p. 17. 12. Masaryk, The Problem of Small Nations, pp. 11–12, 16. 13. Ibid. pp. 31–2. 14. Apart from his contributions to The New Europe, Masaryk’s major intervention in British journalism was an argument with opponents of the break-up of the Hapsburg Empire, including H. N. Brailsford, which was conducted between The Nation, which called for an early end to the war, and the New Statesman, which supported its continuation. For an account of this debate, see H. Hanak, ‘T. G. Masaryk’s Journalistic Activity in England during the First World War’, The Slavonic and East European Review 42:98 (December 1963), pp. 184–9. 15. Masaryk, The Problem of Small Nations, pp. 20–1, 23. 16. Masaryk, The Making of a State, pp. 95–6. 17. See Harry Hanak, ‘The New Europe’, The Slavonic and East European Review 39:93 (June 1961), 369–99, reference to Steed’s article at p. 370. 18. Masaryk, The Making of a State, pp. 98–9. 19. On Sarolea’s relationship with Masaryk, and on the involvement of his journal Everyman with the propaganda for Czech independence, see Sam Johnson, ‘“Playing the Pharisee”? Charles Saroléa, Czechoslovakia and the Road to Munich, 1915–1939’, The Slavonic and East European Review 82:2 (April 2004), 292–314. 20. T. G. Masaryk, Russland und Europa: Studien über die geistigen Strömungen in Russland, vol. 1: Zur russischen Geschichts- und Religionsphilosophie: Soziologische Skizzen, 2 vols (Jena: Diederichs, 1913).

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21. See, for example, Die philosophischen und sociologischen Grundlagen des Marxismus. Studien zur socialen Frage (Vienna: Konegen, 1899). 22. Clare Sheridan, To the Four Winds (London: Deutsch, 1957), p. 89. 23. Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia: Studies in History, Literature and Philosophy, vol. 2, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1919), p. 565. 24. Ibid. p. 528. 25. Ibid. p. 557. 26. Ibid. p. 465. 27. Ibid. p. 469. 28. Ibid. p. 561. 29. On Masaryk’s interest in Hume, see Soubigou, Thomas Masaryk, p. 49. 30. Thomas G. Masaryk, The New Europe: The Slav Standpoint ([London]: privately printed, [1919]), p. 27. 31. Ibid. p. 3. 32. Ibid. p. 4. 33. Ibid. p. 6. 34. Ibid. p. 15. 35. The last-minute nature of the insertion is discussed by Masaryk in The Making of a State, pp. 126–7. For a recent discussion of the Allied note, see Tadayuki Hayashi, ‘Masaryk’s “Zone of Small Nations” in His Discourse during World War I’, in Tadayuki Hayashi and Hiroshi Fukuda (eds), Regions in Central and Eastern Europe: Past and Present (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2007), p. 7. 36. See Masaryk, The New Europe, pp. 10–11. 37. Ibid. p. 18. 38. Ibid. p. 19. 39. Masaryk, The Making of a State, pp. 370–1. 40. ‘A Commentary’, The Criterion 6:2 (August 1927), 97. 41. Masaryk, The New Europe, p. 26. 42. Masaryk, The Making of a State, p. 99. 43. Masaryk, The New Europe, p. 43. 44. Ibid. p. 42. 45. Ibid. pp. 34–5. 46. Ibid. p. 37. 47. Ibid. pp. 45–6. 48. Ibid. p. 43. 49. ‘Czecho-Slovak Claims’, in R. W. Seton-Watson, Europe in the MeltingPot (London: Macmillan, 1919), pp. 273–96. The original articles appeared in The New Europe 10:128, 10:129 and 10:130 (27 March, 3 April and 10 April 1919). 50. Seton-Watson, Europe in the Melting-Pot, pp. 276–8, 286.

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51. R. W. Seton-Watson, ‘The Failure of Sir Edward Grey’, The English Review (February 1916), 135–161. On ‘La Victoire Intégrale’, see Seton-Watson, Masaryk in England, p. 88. 52. Seton-Watson, Masaryk in England, p. 86. 53. Ibid. p. 87. 54. The change of subtitle comes in The New Europe 13:159 (30 October 1919). 55. ‘The Morning Post and The New Europe’, unsigned article, The New Europe 7:81 (2 May 1918), 72. 56. The New Europe: A Weekly Review of Foreign Politics 1:1 (19 October 1916), 1. 57. For a useful discussion, see Hayashi, ‘Masaryk’s Zone of Small Nations’. 58. ‘Pangermanism and the Zone of Small Nations’, The New Europe 1:9 (14 December 1916), 271–7. 59. ‘Dioneo’ (I. V. Shklovsky), ‘The “Dark Forces” in Russia’, The New Europe 2:16 (1 February 1917), 82–5. ‘Russia at the Crossroads’, unsigned article, The New Age 2:22 (15 March 1917), 257–65. 60. Thomas G. Masaryk, ‘Russia: From Theocracy to Democracy’, The New Europe 2:23 (22 March 1917), 293–304. 61. ‘Rurik’, ‘The New Europe through Russia’s Eyes’, The New Europe 3:30 (10 May 1917), 116. 62. ‘Russian Revelations: Lenin Exposed’, unsigned article, New Europe 4:50 (27 September 1917), 342–4. 63. ‘Lenin and Kerenski’, unsigned editorial, New Europe 5:57 (15 November 1917), pp. 129, 132. 64. ‘Rurik’ [Rex Leeper], ‘Lenin: His Career and Methods’, New Europe 5:60 (6 December 1917) 236–8. 65. See obituary in The Slavonic and East European Review 14:40 (July 1935), 185–7. 66. Alexander Onou, ‘Patriotism and Internationalism: A Russian View’, The New Europe, 7:79 (18 April 1918), 7–10. 67. ‘Rurik’, ‘The Bolševiks: (iii) Since November 1917’, The New Europe, 7:80 (25 April 1918), 29, 31–2. 68. Paul Vinogradoff, ‘“The Bolševiks”: A Protest’, The New Europe 7:81 (2 May 1918), 71–2. 69. Bernard Pares, ‘Bolševism and a New Europe’, The New Europe 7:84 (23 May 1918), 125–9. 70. ‘Have the Allies a Russian Policy?’, The New Europe 7:83 (16 May 1918), 99. 71. ‘A Collaborator’, ‘The New Europe’s Attitude to Russia’, The New Europe 7:85 (30 May 1918), 148–52. 72. M. Philips Price, My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921), p. 18. 73. Paul Vinogradov, ‘The Manner of Intervention in Russia’, The New Europe 7:86 (6 June 1918), 176–8.

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74. On this last point, see Michael Hughes, Inside the Enigma: British Officials in Russia, 1900–1939 (London: Hambledon Press, 1997), p. 56. 75. Harold Williams, ‘The Furnace of Democracy’, The New Europe 7:85 (30 May 1918), 152–6. 76. Harold Williams, ‘The Search for Russia’, The New Europe 7:87 (13 June 1918), 195–8.

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Chapter 3

Reporting Realities: Henry Noel Brailsford

I have seen such faces before among refugees in the Balkans. All central Europe has been Balkanized today. Brailsford, Vienna 16 February 19191

Henry Noel Brailsford was one of the outstanding commentators both on changes in the emerging new Europe and on the Russian Revolution. Brailsford wrote for British and American newspapers, including the Herald (later the Daily Herald), the Manchester Guardian, the New Republic and the Baltimore Sun, as well as producing many books aimed at influencing British and American opinion.2 As an adherent of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), Brailsford was well placed to articulate socialist opinion, and as one of the most respected journalists of the Left he found himself funded to make important journeys, not least to occupied Central Europe between February and May in 1919, and to the Russian Workers’ Republic between July and October in 1920. As a sometime advocate of the League of Nations and keen student of the reformulation of the international order, as well as a visitor to the new Soviet state with a good grasp of economic and political questions, Brailsford was one of the most important contributors to the discourse of internationalism. As a linguist with a good knowledge of German and French, who also acquired a basic knowledge of Russian, he was in an excellent position to operate effectively in the variety of environments to which his journalistic credentials gave him access. Brailsford therefore exemplifies a type of authorship and presence in the public sphere which stood at the fore of cultural, political and general intellectual discourse. To compare Brailsford’s account of the emergent Soviet state to those offered by Wells and Russell (see Chapter 4) is to be reminded of the

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convergence of the disciplines of literature, philosophy and journalism, not only because Wells and Russell at this time both sought to construct popular and accessible personae in the public sphere, but because Brailsford himself had a background in literature and philosophy, and had preferred a career in journalism to the academic career which was open to him. Brailsford’s philosophical preparation began at Glasgow University where he took a degree in Greek and Latin and was influenced by the Hegelian Edward Caird. After graduation, Brailsford went to Berlin and attended lectures by Carl Stumpf, Friedrich Paulsen and Georg Simmel.3 He did not follow the academic career that was open to him, but Brailsford’s classical preparation would inform his broad grasp of historical process, and his exposure to Hegel would equip him with ways of thinking about historical progress, as well as giving him an implicit understanding of the bases of Marxism. Brailsford also had an interest in the literary history of British radicalism in its context in the French Revolution, and produced a short account of Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle (1913), which focused mainly on Godwin’s Political Justice.4 Brailsford’s background and preparation, together with his career choice of journalism, exemplify a certain and very specific form of cosmopolitanism, and engender an approach to history which, while it is cognisant of the Hegelian–Marxist philosophy of which the Bolsheviks were bearers, refused to endorse that narrative, yet at the same time instantiated a search for a historical-theoretically grounded narrative which might adequately account for historical events, continued quietly to endorse the claims of a transcendent justice, and at the same time made proper use of the best practices of independent journalism. The marks of all of this are found not in the explicit construction of complex theoretical positions, but in a detailed adherence to research conducted in travel and personal interview, as well as in copious reading in the newspapers and journals of many countries. I have called this ‘cosmopolitanism’ to attract attention to some recent uses of this term in accounts of modernism, where very often it is used to suggest the capacity of literary authorships and texts to transcend national boundaries and offer transnational perspectives. Although recent discussion of cosmopolitanism makes reference to Kant’s famous 1784 essay on Enlightenment, and draws on the attempt at a philosophical renewal of this topic by Derrida and others, the deployment of the term in literary and cultural criticism has tended to diffuseness and, as often in cultural-theoretical discourse, is used in a manner which resists rigorous critique and poses no real limits on further speculative use of the term.5 It has been argued that

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a new ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ of the modern world consists of a kind of ‘international engagement’ which is averse to ‘heroic tones of appropriation and progress’ and suspicious of ‘epistemological privilege’, while the cosmopolitan novel will be found to ‘disorient the conventions of national literature and cultural distinctiveness by adding new experiences’.6 The tendency of this claim can be endorsed if the model can be questioned for its insistence on the heroic role of the novelist as the bearer of intervention in a ‘national literature’ which is assumed to be an important agent of national self-definition. This emphasis on the author of fiction seems to replicate the familiar position in which creative literature is viewed as a privileged site of epistemological and ontological renegotiations. Such a view can be legitimate, but only where the parameters of the limits of the available models which are being ‘disoriented’ are assessed and where the limits within the intention, scope and effectiveness of the intervention are brought into view. In the case of late imperial Britain, where the world-historical perspective of all important thinkers and actors is unusually broad and well informed, the cosmopolitan would be any figure who seeks to bring to the anglophone public sphere a synthesis of international experience, knowledge and theoretical modelling with an intention of intervening in the already-advanced discourses of world affairs. Journalism, perhaps more than the creative arts, has been the vehicle of such intervention, and Brailsford’s cosmopolitanism appears in this respect exemplary, moving between speculative discourse, realpolitik, visits to affected sites across Europe, interviews with government figures and with local people, and examination of the competing claims circulated by a variety of governmental and nongovernmental agencies. In all of this, central to Brailsford’s effort is the attempt to locate particular national circumstances in the actual and potential international situation, and key to this cosmopolitan international strategy is the confrontation with the real limitations of individual linguistic competence. While theory has often sought to mark the ontological limits of language as such, the empirical problems of surmounting quotidian language barriers is rarely made a topic of cultural theory, and while there is a copious literature on the ethics of alterity, inspired by the work of Levinas and others, there is much less attention paid to the ethics involved in language acquisition. While a glamorous philosophical machinery is sometimes brought to bear on the supposed complexities of communication between ‘Western’ and ‘Oriental’ linguistic modes, in the extended wake of Heidegger’s famous essay ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, there

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is little attention given to the ethical–practical questions regarding acquisition of the core European languages – English, French and German – or those languages which lie outside this group, most notably Russian. The question of acquisition of core languages is seen as one simply of schooling, while the acquisition by non-native speakers of languages outside these groups is assumed to be a matter of aptitude, opportunity and enthusiasm. Indeed, modern theory in its fondness for a simplified binary of West and East has managed to obscure a great deal of history regarding the various formations of anything that might be considered a ‘West’ and has notably written Russia out of the West–East model, while at the same time obscuring the workings of ‘Eastern’ history throughout the period of de-imperialisation by ignoring the role of Russian intervention and communist thought in that process. One motif sounding in the background of this study is this limitation of the East–West model in dealing with ‘Russia’ (whether Greater or Lesser) as a gigantic liminal state which in its extent, sometimes reckoned as a sublime vastness, seems to dwarf the Europe of which it is supposedly a margin (and therefore of which it is a part). In many texts examined in this study, the notion of Russia as European and Asiatic is set in a complex and non-reductive set of optics, while the geopolitical role of Russia as a contestant of British and (after 1917) capitalist interests in Turkey, India and elsewhere is repeatedly highlighted. This is very much in contrast to the simple omission of Russia from almost all discourse about the twentieth century in the field of colonial and postcolonial studies, which tends to be anglophone-dominated with occasional bows to French colonialism and its francophone consequences. It is in this respect that the ethical cosmopolitanism of Brailsford appears exemplary, grounded as it is in a practical approach to breaching linguistic and national boundaries while eschewing philosophical synthesis. There is probably much to be admired and emulated in the ethical commitment of Brailsford in his approach to the ‘other’, which at the very limit of the period of focus of this study led him to become a vocal advocate of Indian independence.7 Brailsford’s journalistic practice, which is not the practice of journalism-as-such but an ethical and political praxis with journalism as its vehicle, contains elements which should perhaps more regularly be enumerated as virtues in cultural theory. Contemporary postcolonial discourse is influenced by Levinasian ethics with elements drawn from Sartre. It emphasises the role and function of the intersubjective encounter as the ground or site of the différend of the ‘Western subject’ and its ‘Other’ or ‘other’, in a frame which purports to eschew grand narratives of any

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kind on the grounds that they are held to be sponsored by a Western subject-centred reason (a notion which seems to be mainly Hegelian and is perhaps not plausibly extensible beyond certain philosophical frameworks). Brailsford’s apparently more empirical approach implies a subtler ethics in which notional ‘subjects’ are not the only actors. Instead, individual and collective agencies take their place within a form of assessment and description in which ‘encounters’ take their place within a complex process of evaluation among various national and international discourses and interventions, in an ethical work in which such discourses can never simply be subordinated to a transcendent organising consciousness, but where the overall priority is never to let go of the vision of a global world in which peace might eventually take priority over the clash of national interests. This will seem to overinflate the claims of what remains, after all, ‘merely’ journalism, but it would be wrong to underestimate the intellectual complexity of Brailsford’s positioning in a world dominated by grand gestures of public rhetoric supported by massive armed forces, emanating from the governments of America, Russia, France and, of course, Britain. Brailsford was well known for a book which he published on the eve of the war and which continued to be republished in successive editions after the outbreak of hostilities. The War of Steel and Gold: A Study of the Armed Peace was first published in May 1914. The basic hypothesis of the book is that the major European powers are on a continuous war-footing driven by economic rivalry: ‘For the old recurrent wars of flesh and blood have been substituted a continuous war of steel and gold.’8 The fourth edition of October 1915 adds an important postscript that addresses the notion of a League of Nations which might prevent another outbreak of war.9 One formula which appears in this postscript might stand for the whole of the international political negotiation which occupies Brailsford throughout these decades. Warning pacifists that they should not support a conservative League which would act merely as a policeman tasked to defend the status quo and simply ‘prevent war’, Brailsford writes: ‘Our problem is larger; it is to provide for international change without war.’ The notion of ‘change’ allows in part for industrial and economic changes, but the qualifier ‘international’ indicates Brailsford’s interest in the process of de-imperialisation. In the period before the war, Brailsford had become involved with questions around national liberation struggle in Macedonia against Ottoman occupation, and had exposed Turkish abuses in the Manchester Guardian.10 His ethical interest in the relationship between the undesirable qualities of

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nationalist violence as set against the legitimacy of such violence in anti-imperial struggle had led him to produce a major study in 1906, Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future.11 Brailsford also had an interest in nationalist movements in Egypt and Ireland, and an association with exiled Russian revolutionaries, but his Balkan focus and experience can be counted as the cornerstones of his sense of the complicated relationship between liberal values and the sometimes illiberal forces which might become the bearers of those values. Leon Trotsky, a considerable journalist, passed much of 1912–13 in the Balkans as a newspaper correspondent and produced a similarly well-informed, detailed and reflective body of work.12 The nature of war, in particular the bare historical anger of oppressed nationalities and the ruthlessness and organisation of the competing imperial powers, is strongly registered in the work of both correspondents. It is in this context that Brailsford warns the English, and all liberals, pacifists and socialists, that any future League must not be simply a vehicle to impose the will of the victors: It would be easy to imagine a League of this type which would become as revolutionary as the Holy Alliance. If peace should come to mean the perpetuation of any settlement, the stereotyping of any established order, the writing of an imperious Ne varietur across a map of the world, it will sooner or later come into a clash with the living forces, the restless energies of mankind.

Britain entered the war with ‘no bitter grievance, no unsated ambition’, but should learn to imagine the world ‘from the standpoint if the unsatisfied nations’.13 Brailsford’s developing arguments on the new international order which he believed should appear after the war are consolidated in his book A League of Nations (1917).14 Much of the text consists of a detailed survey of the geopolitical situation which shaped the war and which will shape the settlement. Brailsford is basically an advocate of the right of self-determination of small nations. As we have seen, the rights of small nations had become a major topos of war discourse in Britain. Already in 1917 it was clear that any war settlement would be obliged to take some account of the war rhetoric around the rights of small nations and what had been presented as ‘bullying’ by the Central Powers. Less abstract and more informed than Woolf’s foray into the same area some two years earlier (see Chapter 1), Brailsford’s League of Nations outlines in some details the competing imperial ambitions which have shaped

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the war and will have to be worked through in the peace. A section on ‘The Roads of the East’ argues that competing German and Russian ambitions to control Constantinople, the question of access to Baghdad, and the road to India, had been factors in the outbreak of war, and in the light of this concludes by showing how the potential break-up of the Ottoman Empire and a ‘reform of Turkey’ under the auspices of a League will be subject to the interests of the victors.15 While Brailsford is able to argue clearly that the strategic interests of the great powers are likely to be manifested in any settlement, even where the right to self-determination of small nations is made part of the official, legitimising discourse, he faces the struggle common to most socialist discourse of developing an account of nation which will be psychologically and practically different from the nationalisms which have governed the Great War, and which might supply the basis for a new international order. In a short section headed ‘Nationality as Culture’, Brailsford tackles the tensions inherent in making nation the basis of the new order. He admits that questions of religion and culture are crucial for any definition of the national but fails to allow any real substance to either, tending to regard both as mainly inconsequential practices. Brailsford argues that before the war it had been possible to entertain an idea of nationality within Empire based on the tolerance of cultural and linguistic independence. Unfortunately, he argues, ‘war has driven us back upon the more primitive and less civilized solution’ to the problem of nationality, namely ‘territorial change’. Change in the aftermath of war is likely to be territorial rather than administrative; empires have shown the way, albeit in imperfect form, of what a more liberal form of supranational organisation might look like, because empires can transcend states and can address and accommodate the desires of minorities. Examples of such accommodations are said to include the Boers in South Africa, the French in Canada, Christians in the Ottoman Empire, and the Poles and Czechs in Austria; in the latter case, with the introduction of manhood suffrage, electoral blocs have been created for the separate nationalities: ‘The result was to wean them in some degree from their barren racial strife.’ Yet electoral machinery designed to preserve the voice of dominated nationalities is much less important than culture. While the war, Brailsford argues, will force a return to a territorial conception of nationality, before the war ‘we [. . .] are inclined I think to the view that on the ultimate analysis the essential thing in nationality is not territory but culture. A race which nowhere rules may none the less find its Church, its schools, literature and art in a corporate

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life which can keep the national consciousness alive.’ Turning to the example of the Ottoman-ruled Balkans, Brailsford goes on: The national temperament and the national idea are expressed richly and vitally in the peasant art, the ballads, even in the newspapers and the party politics of the Balkan States; but they do not really shape the organization of the States themselves. [. . .] Nationality does not in the east need the State for its expression [. . .] One may have an elaborately organized society without the State. The essential for nationality is that it should be wholly free to cultivate its own language, to worship in a national or ‘autocephalous’ Church, to express itself with entire sincerity and without external restraint in literature, journalism, and the arts, to maintain its own tradition in a complete educational system under its own management [. . .] and, finally, to associate with full liberty in parties, clubs, and in literary, commercial, co-operative, or charitable societies.16

Brailsford offers his utopian account as no more than a lost possibility, since he believes that the war has carried history in another direction. Yet there are problems and contradictions here which this study should note, since the positioning of ‘culture’ in relation to ‘nation’ in a context where nations are subordinate to states begs a number of questions. Like many socialists, Brailsford seems to assume that culture can be thought of as a matter of ballads and peasant art, that language is merely an accident of contrast, that religion engages no principles, and that freedom of journalism on a national basis will not lead to any conflict or have any other intercultural implications. Tradition or culture seems like a mere colouring; the state itself is the embodiment of universal values even where that state is an imperial power which, in another optic, can be seen as subordinating the rights of smaller nations to a nationalist–imperialist agenda. Brailsford’s working assumption is a dialectical one, though he does not express his argument in philosophical terms. Imperial states are supranational organisations which, although they embody particular, national interests and imperatives, nevertheless, in their administrative experiences, are acted on by the nationalities which become their objects. The effect of this is that the imperial practice of satisfying national psychology by granting religious, cultural and linguistic freedoms – in the context of a supranational organisation which increases trade and enriches the subordinated as well as the dominant power – comes to be exemplary of the potential trajectory of a possible post-imperial form of supranational organisation, potentially on a global scale. What can be discerned behind this is a

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rationalist assumption that religion is little more than a superstition, that language is accidental, that there is no substantive difference of social practice entailed by culture, and that therefore any conflict between nationalities is brought about by objective conflicts of interest instrumentally fuelled by the careful manipulation of national prejudices. Of the books which Brailsford produced in the immediate postwar, Across the Blockade (1919) documented his travels in Central Europe to assess the effect of the Allied blockade and the likely outcome of the peace process; After the Peace (1920) was an essayistic survey of the Treaty of Versailles and the goals of the victorious Allied powers in setting up the League of Nations; The Russian Workers’ Republic (1921) is his major contribution to the literature of visitors to the early Soviet state. Across the Blockade is an impressive piece of field reporting combined with analysis, while After the Peace is less good as a book but makes further denunciations of the settlement. The two plainly did not have the impact of Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), but both establish and illustrate the scale of arguments present in or available to debates around the settlement, in particular impinging on discussion at the time regarding nationality and culture, and Across the Blockade, which we will now examiner further, is at least a notable example of cosmopolitan political travel journalism. Across the Blockade documents the period of travel in Central Europe which Brailsford undertook between February and May 1919. It gathers material despatched to the Daily Herald, The Nation, the New Republic and the Manchester Guardian, with further analytical material added on the author’s return. Brailsford’s journey takes in Hungary, Austria, Poland and Germany. In early 1919 these sites are of exceptional interest. The picture which Brailsford paints is a reminder of the scale of renegotiations which took place across and beyond Europe in the immediate post-war. The American novelist Thomas Pynchon has given narrative shape to the period in Europe at the end of the Second World War in which one order is brought to an end and another emerges. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is a fantasy which is also a penetrating historical novel, depicting the ‘Zone’ of Central Europe at the end of the war, when combat fronts have melted away, as a kind of unbounded ground zero in which agents of the various powers engage in a struggle over the technology which they believe will grant future power to its holder – the missileguidance system developed by German scientists at Peenemünde, used in the V-2 bombing of London, and capable of adaptation to

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deliver nuclear weapons. Questions of weapons technology are not relevant to Brailsford’s world in 1919, but Pynchon’s attempt to model the transition between one order and another, in a situation where there is much at stake and much still to play for, is a reminder to present-day scholars to keep in view the apparent fluidity of the emergent world order at this particular historical juncture, and notably so in cultural discourse where questions about national culture, ‘Europe’, religion, education, order and the state – so often raised by leading cultural commentators such as T. S. Eliot – need to be set against the background of the history from which they stemmed and the field of cultural commentary which those events had occasioned. While the present study thematises the contrast between the two internationals represented by the Third International and the League of Nations, respectively, Across the Blockade is a reminder how much of Europe was brought to the edge of financial and human ruin by the end of the war and by the Allied decision to maintain their blockade of Germany until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919. Brailsford had studied in Germany and in his journalism risked accusations of being pro-German, although in retrospect his attempt to argue against a settlement designed to impoverish and humiliate Germany has obvious validity. Brailsford uses his book principally to argue against the use of the settlement to embed French military interest by creating new states which could act as proxies (notably Poland) and in the dismembering of old states (notably Hungary). To describe this process, we might properly use the terms ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘reterritorialisation’, set into circulation by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Mille Plateaux (1980), but in the context of actual territorial questions assuming a more literal meaning. These terms define well the process in which huge populations found themselves located in new states, in many instances due to forced displacement. The first topic in Brailsford’s book is one of the most radically reterritorialised zones of all, the new Hungary, separated from Austria and from many of its pre-1914 territories. Brailsford arrived in Hungary three weeks after the formation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic led by Béla Kun; by the time the proofs for his book were being prepared, the communists had been ousted and the monarchy restored. Believing that Kun’s communists are quite independent of Moscow, Brailsford contrasts the ‘creative’ atmosphere in Hungary to the sense of ‘ruin’ which he has found in still-capitalist Vienna. This theme of a Europe in ruins is found throughout Brailsford’s accounts of his travels in Central Europe and is picked up again in his account

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of Russia. Brailsford is basically anti-capitalist, but because he does not subscribe to any theory of history he needs another vocabulary to present the desirability, if not the necessity, of socialism. He lights on the notion of the ‘creative’. Following an interview with the deposed Mihály Károly, Brailsford concludes: ‘From the ruined past and the intolerable present, Hungary turned to Communism because it could recover health only in a gigantic effort of creation. There was nothing left that seemed worth conserving.’17 Brailsford’s account of the situation which enabled the revolution includes a materialist element (the absence of an ‘old middle class’ in Hungary creates more openness to change) and a racial element (Hungarians are ‘Gamblers’ and ‘anyone who has heard Hungarian music knows with what fire the blood of this people moves’).18 Brailsford combines several explanatory frameworks, touching on geopolitics, economics, class and race, and within those elements of historical conditioning he privileges the ‘creative’ or ‘creative will’, a term with Spenglerian and Nietzschean associations which is, however, used only loosely by Brailsford. Brailsford’s framework is eclectic and undeveloped. This lack of development, or lack of theoretical structure, could of course be viewed as no more than the product of a journalistic mentality or of the confusion and lack of class commitment of non-revolutionary British socialists (the kind of accusation later levelled by Trotsky in Where is Britain Going?). Yet it is also possible to see Brailsford’s eclectic approach as an attempt to avoid the Marxist view of the inevitability of communism which so possessed the Bolsheviks. Once that narrative has become a belief and steering principle of actors within the historical process, it is necessary either to accept that the bearer of the doctrine and the doctrine are mutually fulfilling principles, or to develop an alternative historicising account which will locate and place that historicism and its agency in some other historical ‘context’. This condition of historicism – that its own agency makes historicism its own object – creates a particular dilemma for proponents of socialism in the period of communism, notably for those who, like Brailsford, are basically informed by a Marxist materialism even where they are not committed to the argument of historical inevitability. The claims of a strong philosophical historicism are likely to be countered not robustly and explicitly, but weakly and inexplicitly. The danger of such ‘weak thought’ (I have in mind the pensiero debole announced by Gianni Vattimo in the 1980s) is that it does not rise above myth. The binary of ruin and creation adopted by Brailsford risks this, but gives him a vocabulary with which to recommend communism that avoids any endorsement of

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or confrontation with Bolshevik doctrine. So, in Hungary Brailsford praises the constructive nature of the education policy being pursued by Georg Lukács as Minister for Education. Lukács has raised the age of school leaving, improved the status of teachers, and socialised theatres and cinemas. Brailsford has reservations only about the arts policy which sees artists voted by their peers to be kept at public charge, which he condemns as ‘a deplorable and thoughtless check upon the artists’ liberty and individuality.’19 Brailsford will only need to develop further his vocabulary for analysing communism when he travels to Russia. In Across the Blockade, as well as describing the destitution in Austria and Germany, Brailsford gives a compelling account of the human as well as the economic consequences of both the war and the settlement in the state of Poland newly created under the Treaty of Versailles. His account is important because it combines testimony and anecdotal personal observation with the argument against the reterritorialisation of Europe in the interests of the defence concerns of the Entente, rather than in the interest of future harmony based on economic collaboration. Brailsford visited Łódź in what is now central Poland, which in 1919 he found to be a ‘dead city’ which had seen no work for four years. The city had been occupied by the Russians, who had been expelled by the Germans. With the end of the war, a short-lived and half-hearted Łódź Soviet had attempted to create work on infrastructural projects, but the socialists were kept in check by police and military as the propertied classes reasserted themselves, led by the pianist Jan Paderewski and with the backing of the Entente. In Łódź, Brailsford found lack of work and stifled socialist sentiment, but in Brest he found more direct evidence of the suffering caused by forced displacements. Brest is in present-day Belarus, but at the time of Brailsford’s visit it had been incorporated into Poland. It was of course famous as the site of the peace negotiations between the early Soviet state and the Central Powers, chosen because of its border status and position on the railway connection between Berlin and Moscow. In 1915 the Germans had advanced on Brest and the Russians had pursued a scorched earth policy, destroying much of the town and using Cossacks to force the local peasant population to move east with the retreating Russian army, notionally to escape the Germans. These peasants are now returning from the forced exile. ‘Brest is no happy place to-day [. . .] They are streaming back from starving Russia to starving Poland, and when they reach their villages it is to find the ashes of their homes amid untilled fields.’20 The population of Brest, according to Brailsford, is largely Jewish, and the newly occupying

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Polish powers treat the Jews ruthlessly and plan to repopulate the area with ethnic Poles. France is promoting Polish nationalism as a bulwark against both Germany and Russia; Brailsford opposes the consequences of this. Brailsford sees Polish anti-Semitism as a simple racial fact: the Poles are ‘politically and culturally an immature and backward people’ who ‘have won the power to make their land a hell for its three million Jews, by no merit of their own, but simply by the victory first of Germans over Russians, and then of the Allies over the Germans.’ It is the failure of the League, though, which must be blamed for making nationalism, and not the solidarity of the human condition, the basis of the new European order: ‘In this modern world, it is much more important that men produce, shoulder to shoulder, and share common interests as workers and creators, than it is that they profess the same historic nationality.’ 21 Presently, Jews in Poland are barred from many jobs, and proposals by the League to protect Polish Jews, by measures including the establishment of Jewish schools, fall short of what is needed. The Allies have already failed to stop the small war of their Polish allies against Ukrainians and will not stop persecution of Jews. ‘While the League remains a militant alliance against Germans and Bolsheviks, it will achieve nothing for the Polish Jews,’ notes Brailsford. ‘To place minorities (be they German or Jewish) under Poles or Tchechs, and then to imagine that all will be well because some magic League of Nations will watch over them, is a pitiable self-deception.’22 Poland’s role is strategic, as part of a French strategy of encirclement. This is the ‘new militarism’ and is no basis for progress. In 1917, when there was already much discussion of the independence of Poland after the war, Brailsford had argued for a League that could prevent the new Poland being a mere military satellite, seeing the League as the site of an international solidarity that would place Poland in an ‘alliance with the whole of civilization’: ‘If our own championship of little nationalities is more than a sentiment, if it can inspire us to any constructive effort, then [. . .] we must fuse our warring groups in the collective life of a League of Nations.’23 By 1919 Brailsford’s optimism for the League has vanished. He notes that Poland has already fought wars on four fronts against each of its neighbours. The French plan for Poland to act as a ‘barrier’ revives the Napoleonic idea of Poland as the ‘arch stone’ of Europe. The Poles will gravitate to France as a sure ally, rather than turning to the League as ‘judge’, and Brailsford notes, as he revises his manuscript, the inclusion in Poland of Eastern Galicia (which has Ukrainian population) and the creation of the Danzig Corridor. Brailsford’s

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conclusion is that the peace settlement has basically been shaped to serve French defence purposes: The Treaty of Versailles is a monument on which is written in legible characters the epitaph of the Liberal age in Europe. [. . .] On to this old-world settlement the Liberalism of Mr. Wilson has grafted, as a pathetic survival of his defeated idealism, the institution of the League of Nations. [. . .] The League, founded without Germany or Russia, is, before all else, an alliance of the victors to ensure their conquests [. . . and usher in] an age of Imperialism, in which the ruling classes of the victors will increase their power, through the control of monopolized raw materials.24

In his general survey of the following year, After the Peace (1920), Brailsford introduced new elements into this account of the politics of race and nation in the Europe of the settlement, as further treaties were concluded. Referring to the economic notion of the poverty of the ‘submerged tenth’, Brailsford claims that the poverty caused by the treaties has created a ‘submerged half in Europe’. Trade restrictions on Germany and Russia have brought poverty across the world. ‘In these two achievements, the laming of German industry and the pushing of Russia outside the European system of trade, our victorious capitalist society showed a lack of [. . .] self-preservation. It worked against life, against creation, against production. It organised famine and produced death.’ Capitalism has ‘crushed the most productive people’ and ‘showered its favours on Poles, Roumanians and Jugo-Slavs, primitive unschooled races, not indeed without their own charm and emotional genius, who never, even after generations of experience, are likely to replace the Germans as industrial or intellectual workers.’ Brailsford argues that the aim of the treaties has been to crush capitalist rival Germany, confirming that capitalism aims not to maximise production but to maximise profit, regardless of the destructive effects of doing so. While to modern ears this mixture of egalitarian anti-capitalism and apparently in-egalitarian race discourse may sound like a jarring mix, this should not obscure for us how Brailsford’s account develops a sophisticated reckoning of the mechanics of both racial and national reterritorialisation in the wake of Versailles.25 According to Brailsford, the new nations which have been created have been set up not in the spirit of the doctrine of national self-determination, but with a view to replacing the old mechanics of the balance of power of the large imperial blocs with a renovated version based on the complex dependencies which the treaties had

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created: ‘To each of the minor Allies, from Belgium to Roumania, something was given, which must keep alive against her the enmity of the vanquished, and force her to rely on the major Allies for protection.’ What has motivated the Allies in their dismemberment of Austria-Hungary has been ‘less a regard for the abstract principle of nationality than a resolve to cut Germany’s road to the East, and to ring her round with a galaxy of hostile States moving in the Allied orbit.’ This has happened in the wake of what Brailsford believes was Woodrow Wilson’s almost accidental discovery on a map of the Berlin–Baghdad railway, on which he based an important speech.26 Although the new states have been founded in the name of selfdetermination, where it has been expedient the Allies have not observed the principle of nationality. ‘They have made of Poland and Czecho-Slovakia composite polyglot states, packed with recalcitrant and reluctant minorities, which repeat on a somewhat smaller scale the weaknesses of the Hapsburg Dominions.’ Brailsford particularly notes the inclusion of 3 million German speakers in Czechoslovakia. Much as he could make a qualified defence of the British Empire, Brailsford identified certain benefits of the Hapsburg monarchy, which had constituted a large free-trade area with a common currency.27 The Entente has created poverty by breaking up established trade links with its policy of what Brailsford continues to call the ‘Balkanisation of Europe’: It would be difficult to overstate the evils with which this process of Balkanisation threatens the whole life of Central and Eastern Europe, cultural, economic and political. This exaggerated emphasis laid on national or racial individuality breeds a temper of egoism and isolation. Where it prevails, there vanishes all concern for the welfare of mankind beyond the newly-won frontiers.28

Brailsford criticises the doctrine of self-determination and the ‘sentimental enthusiasm for “little nationalities”, as though their smallness were a positive advantage’. ‘Englishmen’, he continues, ‘are much given to this phase of enthusiasm, though we have taken great pains to avoid being ourselves a little nationality.’ Nationality has not asserted itself ‘as a positive and shaping force’ but is resurgent because ‘the big structures have broken down’ and ‘the elaborate organisms have split into their component parts’. He concludes: ‘The politics of the Tower of Babel means a return to a poverty-stricken and elementary existence, a weakening of constructive and creative power, a decline in civilization.’29

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Brailsford’s account of the Treaty and the League has at its centre a very specific vision of the ruin of Europe in the wake of the war. The blockade and the dramatic reterritorialisation of Europe have brought economic ruin to Central and Eastern Europe, with effects fanning out across the world. More than this, the new order represents merely the failure of the old, the slippage back from higher to lower organisms in a kind of reverse evolution. Socialist universalism views race, religion and culture as things which are essentially superseded, though they must be politely allowed expression, but the new order represents a shift back to atavistic nationalism, with the alarming modification that the new states are in many cases not based strictly on ethnic divisions, so that ‘race’ has now been purposely subordinated to the intention of the Entente to create a new balance of power, while the ideology of ‘self-determination’ is a smokescreen, testimony to a dead ideal. This vision of a Europe of new nationalisms had evidently taken hold at the time when Eliot used his Criterion ‘Commentary’ for August 1927 to discuss ‘The European Idea’. Eliot is discussed elsewhere in this study but it is worth reminding ourselves of his claim in this piece that nationalism is now an outdated phenomenon which could be replaced by the ‘European Idea’. Eliot adopts a posture of aloof superiority, fairly customary for him, when commenting on press discussions of the new European nationalisms: ‘Instead of a few “oppressed minorities”, the oppressed minorities seem to be almost in a majority; instead of a few potential Sarajevos, we seem to have dozens’ (see Chapter 7).30 Our account of Brailsford helps us to grasp how discourse in the public sphere was shaped by the peace process, illuminates Eliot’s impatience with or even disdain for that discourse of a many-headed Europe which can no longer be mastered by the high-cultural discourse of the main European nations, and greatly amplifies our sense of the context of his desire to define Russia and its revolution as the ‘other’ of an imaginary ‘Europe’. Brailsford visited Russia in the autumn of 1920 and published his report of that visit in The Russian Workers’ Republic (1921). Brailsford knew only basic Russian, but his visit was assisted by Michael Farbman, correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, and he claims that he was allowed considerable freedom to travel and talk, ‘alone’, with whomever he wished, despite already widely touted claims about the Bolshevik control over foreign journalists.31 The more remarkable section of the book concerns his stay in the city of Vladimir, some 120 miles east of Moscow, where he was able to examine at first hand some of the manifestations of local political

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structure. Brailsford’s account differs from many of the better-known books which came out of the stream of visitors to the early Soviet state in the quality of its direct observation and analysis, and in the particular strategies it brought to redeeming some positive notion of socialism from the equivocal reality. Although other accounts preceded Brailsford’s, achieved greater prominence, and have a longer history (especially those by Wells and Russell), it is useful to survey Brailsford’s writing here because his account conveys nuances that many others lack, and because his attempt to provide a preliminary map of the nascent Soviet state is contextualised by his knowledge of the effects of the reterritorialisation of Eastern Europe in the wake of the settlement. Brailsford’s opening account is of the workers’ takeover of the cotton mill at Sóbinka in the Vladimir Oblast. Every whitewashed wall in every Russian town repeats the watchwords of the proletarian Revolution in phrase and picture, in satire and command. It was not from these symbols, nor yet from the bountiful literature of propaganda, that its aim and meaning came home to me most directly. I felt it most clearly of all in a factory amidst the forests of Central Russia.32

Brailsford here acknowledges the capacity of the symbolic and textual struggle taking place under the rubric of the master-symbol of ‘Revolution’ as a feature so dominant that any reality – itself not dissociable from the ‘aim and meaning’ which transect and shape it – must be carefully differentiated from the semiological technology of the Party and state. By constructing how life at the factory might have been under the former owning company – oppressive but broadly functional – Brailsford is able to give some sense of what the community has had to do to ‘lay the foundations of a human and autonomous life’ by learning to manage the plant and attempt to improve its own material and cultural conditions. The situation has been made difficult by the civil war and the accomplishments are limited, but Brailsford finds progress in the unleashing of ‘the collective will of thousands’, and concludes that ‘to the worker the Revolution has brought the power to will and act’.33 Brailsford will repeatedly adopt the vocabulary of vitalism, referring to the ‘creative will’ which the revolution has freed, but while there is a general echo of Bergson or Nietzsche (and of Eden and Cedar Paul’s advocacy of ‘creative revolution’ discussed in Chapter 6), Brailsford’s ‘will’ is a materialist one, emphasising the force of human creativity otherwise

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stifled by ‘autocratic wealth’. Brailsford finds this energy, but not the corresponding material success of which the Bolsheviks would always boast. So Brailsford will not pay lip service either to the success of the Bolsheviks or to their theory of historical inevitability. He alights on the theory of creative will – a notion that recurs in other of his writings – less as a highly theorised position but more straightforwardly as a way of defending the realities and the possibilities of socialism or of socialised human potential without entering the labyrinth of heavily ramified Hegelian high theory. This weak-theoretical positioning and terminology retains residues of the theory of history – it assumes a liberation of human potential and a goal of material, even spiritual, improvement. Indeed, in some ways Brailsford’s account depicts the small progresses of the revolution as its reality, almost as if to redeem revolution from its grand-narrative claims by reclaiming them as local practices – the improvement of accommodation, engagement with the arts, exercise of local democracy. Brailsford’s strategy also demonstrates the dilemma that the revolution has created for socialists and other progressive thinkers. The leadership position of the Bolsheviks in the movement for socialism and their worldwide struggle over ideas both at the level of propaganda and theory, has positioned non-communist socialist thought awkwardly, depriving it of a theory of history and seeming to validate the theory of revolutionary, rather than progressive change. One of Brailsford’s principal objects is to assess the Bolshevik claims about economic reconstruction. While some English visitors had criticised the food (and, by extension, the prospects of Soviet-led agricultural reform), Brailsford notes that this is partly a matter of taste (‘I am used to black bread, and like it’) and partly relative – ‘My own rule was to ignore English standards entirely, and to compare Russia with blockaded Central Europe as I saw it last year.’34 The sight of Petrograd with its closed shops and depleted population, Brailsford claims, ‘is still less pitiable then Vienna’, which has suffered more from the enforced Allied economic reconstruction of Central Europe than has Petrograd despite successive blockades by the Germans and then by the Allied intervention. Brailsford makes some fairly detailed assessments, finding serious shortages, increased prosperity in the country, serious problems in the cities. The reason that discussion of the early Soviet state focused on economic matters was, I think, that questions about the legitimacy of the Bolshevik takeover had no purchase on the Left and perhaps not so much on the Right, since the record of tsarism, however softened by war propaganda designed to reinforce the alliance, had always been one of despotism.

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This meant that assessment of the Bolshevik regime tended to focus in rationalistic or utilitarian style on its effectiveness – the claim to legitimacy of the Soviet system would be that it worked, to echo the famous phrase of Lincoln Steffens. In other words, the legitimacy of the Soviet system would be judged by its performance. Negative British judgements on the Soviets, Brailsford implies, ignore that the reconstruction had itself been deliberately undermined first by the Allied blockade and latterly by the invasion from Poland, ‘at a sign from Paris’, claims Brailsford, maintaining his view of Poland as a French military satellite.35 Following the economy, the next performance indicators would be culture and democracy, probably in that order. Brailsford paints an interesting portrait of the Vladimir Soviet in action, limited both in scope and experience, but his most clarifying remarks about governance come in his discussion of administration. Speaking of what he has found at Vladimir, but in terms that reflect the whole development of the country, Brailsford identifies a key element of the shift from capitalist to soviet society: The word ‘administration’ suggests to our Western experience an important but limited conception. One thinks of roads and police, public health and elementary schools. It means under Communism the entire organisation of life. The State is manufacturer and merchant, farmer and railway director, and on the brains at its head, and the bureaucratic machinery below them, every detail of the citizen’s welfare depends. The work of every counting-house and bank has been concentrated [. . .] The banker’s cashier and the book-keeper have now become civil servants. The young women who would have been typing and calculating in a hundred separate offices are now working at rather similar tasks in a few big rooms. Nearly everyone in what we call the ‘middle class’ (Russians with more dignity describe it as the ‘intelligentsia’) is now a public servant on salary and rations. Only the big capitalists and landlords have fled.36

The total administration of life, which becomes a theme of Trotsky’s writings, along with the potential of bureaucracy for retarding and betraying the revolution, is here signalled by Brailsford only as a motif – he does not unfold any theory of administration as now the key reality of the workers’ republic. This theme of absolute administration would become the dominant theme of the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer who, in the published text of The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), pointedly created a vocabulary which treated

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communist administration and capitalist trusts and governments in the same analytical breath. Brailsford does not theoretically extend his claim both because he is not a theorist – and, as we have noted, seeks to keep theory-governed Bolshevism at a distance from his own analysis – but also because his goal is to counter press criticism of the revolution in Britain. There may have been a terror in Moscow, Brailsford claims, but the Extraordinary Commission has executed only 79 people in the Vladimir Oblast, population 1.6 million – he has been assured of this from the books of the Commission to which he has been given access. The books accounted, too, for the reasons for the executions – mutiny, corruption, brigandage, desertion; no one ‘was shot merely for hostile political opinions’. The need to organise labour, in order to make agricultural and industrial production more efficient and feed the armies and cities, is the dominant necessity, and Brailsford counters the claim that the middle class has been a target of revolution by noting that professionals have turned productively to the work, although he admits pity for middle-class women – ‘as I pitied no-one else in Russia’ – obliged to work though ‘brought up to consider all work “unladylike”’, and now ‘stood daintily on the fringe of life’. Brailsford endorses the policy robustly, though: ‘The Revolution has established absolute sex equality in Russia, but this means that while every office and opportunity is open to women, public service is also expected of them.’37 If Brailsford’s words about women’s work only awkwardly offset a wave of criticism from the British press about the Bolshevik ‘prostitution’ of women, his account of education policy and of the arts give him firmer ground to defend Bolshevik accomplishments. Echoing Lenin’s theory, in State and Revolution (1917), of the ‘withering’ of the state in the transition from the dictatorship of the proletariat to communism, Brailsford boldly claims that the Russian Communist Dictatorship [. . .] is preparing its own eventual disappearance. It is ripening the whole Russian people for responsibility and power by its great work for education. [. . .] To my mind the most inspiring thing in Russia is that the Socialist Revolution, instantly and instinctively, began to realize the ideal of universal education, which the interests and prejudices of class have thwarted in the rest of Europe.38

Brailsford’s visits to three schools impressed him with the philosophy of education, even where resources were short – children were active in the arts, able in languages, energetic in debate, and settled

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into co-educational structures which aroused doubts in Britain. Above all, Brailsford celebrates what he takes to be the creative and active approach to schooling, reflecting his own concept of human liberation in terms of a movement from (tsarist) passivity to the (communist) unchaining of individual and collective ‘creative will’: ‘The old routine, which pumped “knowledge” out of textbooks into passive children, was so much easier than the new methods of activity, “self-initiative” and realism.’39 Alongside this programme of education, matched by a literacy programme for adults, Brailsford, like many commentators, mentions the Bolshevik democratisation of high-cultural activities – the opening of access to things like opera and concert music, and in particular the publishing programme designed to place the works of great literature in the hands of the people. More important than this access to the already-created though is creativity itself. The phrase which best captures Brailsford’s secularised Protestant view of creation is found in his assessment of the role of the communist worker: ‘their role is to lead, to stimulate zeal, to quicken the tempo of the sluggish Russian pulse and to set the example of sacrifice and unstinting labour [. . .] For this zeal, recollect, the reward is not profits, but only joy in creative work.’40 Only that work which unleashes the creativity of the worker can be transfigured by joy, and it is this transformation which Brailsford finds to have begun among the Russian people; it is this finding which he can then hold against the domestic critics of the revolution, even while he shares in a nuanced way the doubts of other socialists concerning the Bolsheviks’ implementation of change and their likely trajectory. In the context of Brailsford’s own transnational trajectory and view of race, one strand of his discussion stands out. A recurring motif of discussion of the Russian Revolution in Britain is the difficulty of commentators in deciding on its status as a modern and Western phenomenon, or as an event which is in some degree ‘Asiatic’ and remote. While the Bolsheviks themselves took a rationalist approach to the question of nationality – a key question for them – even such a lucid commentator as Brailsford was able to oscillate between a reasoned projection of Russia as a modernising, ‘Western’ country, and generalisations about the Russian character based on received notions of Asiatic difference. As rational as he is in his attempt to correct the propagandistic view of the revolution, Brailsford’s attempt to modify the image of revolutionary destruction and of mindless attacks on private property draws on a conventionalised racial analysis:

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Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution There seems to be in the character of the primitive races of Eastern Europe a positive zest in destruction. [. . .] The Bolsheviks took great pains to protect artistic treasures, I believe with fair success, but they had as yet no organization capable of controlling the conduct of remote villages. [. . .] Most of the exiles and the foreigners who quitted Russia saw the Revolution only during this destructive phase, and to them is due the still prevalent belief that Russia is in a state of anarchy. [. . .] The Communists are essentially Western in their outlook, and they stand for order, authority, and creative work. The anarchical element is Russian, Eastern, and entirely spontaneous, a tendency always latent in the unschooled Russian soul.41

This is a rare departure from materialist analysis for Brailsford which certainly indicates how hard it was for even the most earnest commentator to escape the idea of Asiatic otherness. More than this, though, there is an almost Coleridgean imaginary at work here, in which order and work are menaced by a sublime and vast hinterland of violence. Though this is only hinted here, this construction seems to lurk in every imaginary construction of the revolution. Lest we cast this in terms of ‘anxieties’ about communism and/or the Asiatic, it is worth reminding ourselves that the ‘ruin’ which Brailsford, like Wells, finds at the heart of the revolution, had already been worked across much of Europe, and was not an exclusive feature of those Russian peasants and workers who wilfully destroyed the properties of the aristocracy.

Notes 1. Henry Noel Brailsford, Across the Blockade (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1919), p. 42. 2. On Brailsford’s contributions to the Herald immediately after the October Revolution, see R. Page Arnot, The Impact of the Russian Revolution in Britain (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1967), pp. 115–16. 3. Details of Brailsford’s education are from F. M. Leventhal, The Last Dissenter: H. N. Brailsford and His World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), pp. 14–25. 4. Henry Noel Brailsford, Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle (London: Williams & Norgate, 1913). 5. See ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, intro. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 17–22; and Jacques Derrida, Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! (Paris: Galilée, 1997).

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6. See Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 2. 7. See Brailsford’s books on this subject, Rebel India (London: Stein, 1931) and Subject India (London: Gollancz, 1943). 8. Henry Noel Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold: A Study of the Armed Peace (1914; 4th edn, London: Bell, 1915), p. 18. 9. Ibid. pp. 310–38. 10. See Leventhal, The Last Dissenter, pp. 48–9. 11. Henry Noel Brailsford, Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future (London: Methuen, 1906). 12. See Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 167–70, and Leon Trotsky, The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky: The Balkan Wars, 1912–1913, ed. George Weissman and Duncan Williams (New York: Monad, 1980). 13. Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold, pp. 319–20. 14. Brailsford, A League of Nations (February 1917; 2nd and rev. edn, London: Headley, November 1917). 15. Ibid. pp. 142–77. 16. Quotations from Brailsford, A League of Nations, pp. 136–41. 17. Brailsford, Across the Blockade, p. 19. 18. Ibid. p. 12. 19. Ibid. pp. 32–4. 20. Ibid. pp 68–9. 21. Ibid. p. 86. 22. Ibid. pp. 88–9. 23. Henry Noel Brailsford, Poland and the League of Nations, reprinted from The Polish Review (London: George Allen & Unwin, [1917]), pp. 26–7. 24. Brailsford, After the Blockade, pp. 146, 155–7. 25. Brailsford, After the Peace (London: Leonard Parsons, 1920), pp. 11, 22–3. 26. Ibid. pp. 44, 46. The speech in question was an address to the American Federation of Labor Convention in Buffalo, New York, on 12 November 1917, titled ‘Labor Must Be Free’. Wilson had seen a map showing German holdings, marked in black, extending from ‘Hamburg to Baghdad’. 27. Brailsford, After the Peace, pp. 47, 48–9. 28. Ibid. p. 52. 29. Ibid. pp. 54, 60–2. 30. Henry Noel Brailsford, ‘A Commentary’, The Criterion 6:2 (August 1927), 97. 31. Henry Noel Brailsford, The Russian Workers’ Republic (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921), p. 5. 32. Ibid. p. 11. 33. Ibid. p. 15.

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Ibid. p. 22. Ibid. p. 37. Ibid. pp. 52–3. Ibid. pp. 56, 58. Ibid. pp. 73, 74. Ibid. p. 83 and n. Noting that Scottish schools are in any case often coeducational, Brailsford adds that it ‘does not seem a dangerous innovation. The statement made in the English Press that girls and boys occupy the same dormitories is a gross untruth.’ 40. Ibid. p. 48. 41. Ibid. pp. 166–7.

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Chapter 4

British Visitors to Russia

The Russian Revolution prompted extensive discussion and necessitated urgent investigation, both among supporters and opponents, and this generated a great deal of print publication, in newspapers, political and cultural journals, pamphlets and books. A handful of these came from the British who were based in Petrograd, as correspondents or on government business, at the time of the February Revolution, some of whom left before the October Revolution; others – including the members of the British Embassy – who left before the government of what was by then called the Russian Soviet Republic displaced to Moscow in March 1918 to escape German aggression; and a very few who followed the new government to Moscow. The formative Soviet State was keen to influence perceptions abroad, and to this end operated an efficient press office and invited sympathetic visitors to Moscow, with many overlapping arrivals in 1920, the year in which the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement was being negotiated. This literature embodies a complex climate in which both factual observation and intellectual opinion become in a degree uncertain and exploratory, as commentators attempt to decide exactly what has happened in Russia, arrive at a vocabulary for describing it, and evaluate its global implications. These writings include descriptions of journeys, places and meetings with common Russian people as well as with ministers of the Bolshevik government including Lenin and Trotsky, and the texts have to be seen from the perspective not only of politics but of the broader question of the presentation of the new and changing Russia in the public imaginary. Most of these publications were intended as a form of intervention, and the earliest among them arrived as part of political pamphlet series, whether sponsored by left-wing groups such as the Communist Party or the Workers’ Socialist Federation, or the Right, notably the Russia Liberation Committee. Among the most noted

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of those present in Moscow in 1917 was Arthur Ransome. Ransome’s career is well documented, and the debate about his status as a double agent continues to attract comment. In many ways, though, the story of the author is more interesting and romantic than his frequently tendentious publications. Although he was a witness to the February Revolution and to later developments in Petrograd and Moscow, Ransome was absent from Petrograd in October, returning only in December 1917, leaving Moscow in August 1918 in the wake of the alleged ‘Lockhart plot’ to assassinate Lenin – with which, as a friend of Lockhart, he was implicated by association – and following the renewal of British military activity in the north. The fascinating narrative around Ransome himself concerns his closeness to the Bolshevik leadership, including Lenin, Trotsky and, especially, Karl Radek; his love affair with, and eventual marriage to, Yevgenia Shelpina, Trotsky’s personal secretary; and his recruitment to MIi(c) (later MI6) which took place in Stockholm in October 1918, when he was approached by Clifford Sharp, the editor of the New Statesman who was at that time posted to Stockholm on behalf of the Foreign Office.1 Ransome was suspected by both sides of being a double agent, but there is little evidence that he sent back much of use to London, and the bias in what he did send was very evident from his correspondence for the radical Daily News and later for the Manchester Guardian, so on balance he was regarded by MIi(c) as more useful than otherwise.2 In any review of activity in the public sphere at the time, these questions remain in the background, and in any case the political tenor of Ransome’s publications was transparent enough when read alongside the contributions of Robert Wilton for The Times, on the one hand, or of Morgan Philips Price and Michael Farbman for the Manchester Guardian, on the other. Each of these journalists made one or more book contributions to the literature, based on their time in Petrograd, Moscow and elsewhere, and all of these publications are clearly intended as timely interventions in a public debate in which facts are not always available but in which the ideological lines are already drawn. In the wake of the February Revolution, socialists were encouraged by the blow struck against tsarism, and conservatives cautiously evaluated what approach to the new regime might best serve to keep Russia in the war. After the October Revolution and start of the unorthodox negotiations at Brest-Litovsk in December, when continued Russian participation in the war seemed unlikely if not impossible, the denunciations by the Right escalated and the Left, whether qualified by experiences in Russia or otherwise, rushed

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to explain the new politics. The introduction to Ransome’s pamphlet The Truth about Russia, issued in London in May 1918, but written first for an American readership, begins by quoting Emerson’s poem ‘Letters’, and expresses Ransome’s hopes that Americans, who had supported the French Revolution, can ‘wholeheartedly admire the story of the Bolshevik adventure’, while denouncing ‘the intellectual sloth, the gross mental indolence’ that prevents the English from doing the same.3 The narrative of the pamphlet is entirely Bolshevik in character and in its polemical sections could almost have been written by Trotsky. Ransome presents the February Revolution as ‘an artificial premature revolt’ fomented by the ‘servants of autocracy’. The tsar ‘left the stage as politely as he could’, and the English, French and Americans applauded ‘the most moderate, the biggest, the most surprising revolution in the world’, but the celebration was premature, as the outsiders had not understood the struggle that was taking shape between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet. Lenin and Trotsky arrive from exile, saying ‘with Christ, that they brought not peace but a sword’, while the government foundered with its disastrous Galician Campaign and General Lavr Kornilov’s failed coup. The Soviet was ‘the most vital organ’ and, far from having struggled for power in a contest that could have gone either way, the October Revolution merely ‘cleared away the waste growths that hid the true government from the world’.4 The dissolution of the elected Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, which made way for Soviet rule, ‘died like the Tsardom’, according to Ransome, showing ‘in the manner of its dying’ that it had no right to live. And, regarding Brest-Litovsk, Ransome describes Trotsky’s plan of using the negotiations as a platform to appeal to the workers of the world, as ‘one of the most daring plans with which any David has sought to destroy his Goliath’.5 Far from conveying any proximity to events, Ransome is keen only to advance the Bolshevik case, without nuance or reservation. Ransome’s Six Weeks in Russia (1919), which documented a return in January and February of 1919, was based on his journal and offered rather more colour, reporting conversations with Bolshevik leaders which gave more of a flavour of their mentality, even if he ignores the growing terror and continues to cast the leadership in a romantic light. His conversation with Bukharin yields a moment of grand philosophical reflection when Bukharin muses that ‘we have entered upon a period of revolution which may last fifty years’ before it is victorious throughout Europe and the world, concluding balefully: ‘Sometimes I am afraid that the struggle will be so

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bitter and so long drawn out that the whole of European culture may be trampled underfoot.’6 Ransome comes away with some amusing judgements on English writers from Lenin, who sees Bernard Shaw as ‘a good man fallen among Fabians’, and Sidney Webb as having ‘more industry than brains’. As with many English visitors, Lenin was keen to discuss the likelihood of revolution in England, at first dismissing Ransome’s view that it is not imminent, despite labour unrest, but later conceding that it might not happen.7 Michael-David Fox has argued that the encounters with visitors from abroad have so often been studied from the perspective of the Soviet attempts to control opinion, from the creation of the Russian All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS) in 1920–22 onwards, that the influence of the visitors on Soviet development has been overlooked, with the effect that the Soviet experiment is often treated as a more isolated phenomenon than it actually was.8 The fact that Lenin asked so many of his visitors the same question, and that the conversation always took the same turn, is an indication that his reason for allowing these conversations was not simply to broadcast his opinions, which were in any case well-known, but to help formulate policy – the Revolution at this time was still supposed to be an international affair. As Ethel Snowden commented after her later visit, Lenin’s method was to be engaging and frank, suggesting by his manner ‘a more or less confidential exchange of opinions’, but the interviewer realises afterwards that ‘he has told you far less than you have told him’.9 Visitors though were mostly interested in Lenin’s character. Ransome’s judgment on Lenin has a romantic tone and tends to echo Lenin’s own beliefs and rhetoric, but at the same time conveys something of his psychology not visible in the general propaganda. Lenin is ‘a happy man’, ‘without personal ambition’: he can accept even that the revolution might fail for reasons no individual can control and ‘is consequently free with a freedom no other great man ever had’.10 The overall purpose of Ransome’s book is to research the functions of the different departments of state, and his other interviewees include the Commissars of Finance, Agriculture, Trade and Industry, Labour, and Education. He attends the theatre and, like many subsequent visitors, is impressed by the range of programming and the vitality of performers and audience. Ransome was an unusually privileged visitor, a near-insider, although his interviews with Lenin and the Commissars are perhaps not very different from those of visitors with far less personal or linguistic access. His accounts of the workings of the departments of state are flattering and relatively

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functional, although he does occasionally ask testing questions. Ransome knew Trotsky better than he knew Lenin, and Radek better than Trotsky. He notably does not attempt to characterise either, and the sketch of Lenin is partial and respectful. What is perhaps striking about these writings is that Ransome seems to use so little imaginative and or linguistic skill, though he was already a literary author and had been taken to Russia by his interest in Russian folklore. Not every account coming out of Russia suffered from such committed dryness and suppression of flair. One writer who did adopt a more creative approach was the Kiev-born, London-based novelist and poet John Cournos, who had been struggling for income as he worked on his novel The Mask (1919), and welcomed a request to work as a translator of Russian Government Wireless at the Wireless Press in Marconi House in the Strand.11 As a Russian speaker, he was contacted by the novelist Hugh Walpole and asked to join the Anglo-Russian Bureau in Petrograd, which Walpole headed.12 The role of this bureau had been to persuade the Russian press to give more favourable reports of British material support for the joint war effort.13 Following the February Revolution, Walpole’s mission was expanded. Walpole contacted Cournos at the end of August or early October 1917 and invited him to the Foreign Office, where he was asked to join the ‘Anglo-Russian Commission to Petrograd’.14 Cournos did not stay long in Russia once the October Revolution had begun, claiming in his Autobiography that his stay there no longer had a purpose, and escaped via Murmansk in an adventure that is given more narrative space in that book than the revolution itself. His fiction and poetry draws very little indeed on his experience of the revolution, but Cournos did prepare a short text, published as a propaganda pamphlet in 1919 by the Russian Liberation Committee,15 called London under the Bolsheviks: A Londoner’s Dream on Returning from Petrograd.16 The Russian Liberation Committee was a very active anti-Bolshevik exile organisation which in 1919–20 issued a series of pamphlets and bulletins, as well as the weekly The New Russia.17 The committee had been founded by the exiled historian Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff in January/February of 1919 and was very well funded.18 The executive was mainly Russian but included Harold Williams, known to Cournos from the AngloRussian Commission. Rostovtzeff’s own contribution to the pamphlet series was Proletarian Culture (probably 1919) which dealt with the Proletcult of Lunacharsky (his nephew), while Williams contributed The Spirit of the Russian Revolution (probably 1919).

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Other contributors included the author Leonid Andreyev and the historian and founder of the Constitutional Democratic Party, Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov.19 The tone of the series was set by the first volume, Isaak Vladimirovich Shklovsky’s Russia under the Bolsheviks, which was introduced by Harold Williams. Shklovsky was an ethnographer whose work had appeared in English as In Far NorthEast Siberia (1916), and had settled in England as a correspondent of the Moscow daily Russkiye Vedomosti. As ‘Dioneo’, he had been part of Williams’ project of placing articles on British democracy in the Russian press. Shklovsky points out that many former opponents of tsarist autocracy, including authors known in Britain, are now opposed to the Bolsheviks, and strongly rebuts the tendency of some British Labour and Trades Union commentators to idealise Bolshevik Russia as an industrial paradise by quoting figures showing falling production and emphasising the difference in material comforts between the Bolsheviks themselves and the starving populace.20 Cournos’ London under the Bolsheviks is of a piece with these other publications in terms of its hostility to Bolshevism, but differs in its subjective and literary nature. The inside front cover carries an advertisement inviting those ‘interested in the overthrow of Bolshevism’ and who ‘want to help save civilization from the menace of anarchy’ to contact the committee at their Fleet Street address.21 Eschewing facts and arguments, Cournos recounts a ‘dream’ in which experiences and impressions from Petrograd are relocated in an imaginary London. Some of these impressions are recapitulated in his Autobiography, but some of the more dramatic incidents are absent, perhaps because Cournos did not actually witness them himself. In the dream, Cournos returns from abroad to a London which has been taken over by Bolsheviks, and wanders the streets observing the descent into poverty and anarchy, seeking explanations for what he sees from people he encounters by chance. In this London, the deposed Kerensky is (Ramsay) Macdonald, whose government, the dreamer is told, ‘were bad enough, well-intentioned but weak’. Macdonald’s rule has been ended by MacLenin and Trotsman; counter-revolutionaries, who include Viscount Grey, Asquith and Lloyd George along with H. G. Wells, are confined to the Tower and likely to be executed; the ‘comrades’, who are drunk on wine from ransacked wine-cellars, drive down the Strand in a tank, shooting at random, ‘to give people a scare and show them who’s boss of the town’.22 The drunken behaviour and lawlessness on the street was also the impression of Meriel Buchanan, daughter of the British Ambassador, George Buchanan, whose eyewitness account of 1917 in Petrograd sees events mostly

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from a safe distance, and represents events on the street mainly in terms of looting and, especially, the drunken behaviour following the raiding of wine-cellars: These shrieking hooligans who slouched about the streets, drinking, shooting, and marauding, were soldiers too, that was certainly a fact one could not get away from; but knowing their ignorance, one could not so much blame them as loathe and perforce admire the fiendish cleverness of the people who knew so well where Russia’s weakness lay, how to play upon that weakness, using it to their own best advantage and turning those gentle, patient men into utter brutes, drunk and blind and mad with the false knowledge that had been so subtly instilled into them.23

Cournos, like the privileged Buchanan, describes only the anarchy of the street, not the unfolding political events on the other side. Recalling the weight given to the famous incident in Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1907), the dreamer moves to the Embankment where a horse is being barbarously beaten. Such a beating would not have been permitted in the old days, comment bystanders, but the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have been disbanded as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Matters escalate from this very English period concern with animal welfare when the dreamer moves to Westminster Bridge and witnesses the summary execution of a thief by a mob, an incident which testifies to the absence of law and policing. The dreamer then witnesses a moment in the London equivalent of the October Revolution, as an unarmed crowd demonstrating support for the elected Popular Assembly is dispersed by armed guards. A bystander provides the narrative: The Popular Assembly was to meet today in the old House of Commons [. . .] but the Bolshevik Red Guards, representing a mere minority consisting mostly of the worse elements, have got orders from MacLenin and Trotsman to keep the Assembly from meeting at all costs.

The bystander explains that the Bolsheviks attract only ‘criminals and rowdies’ whose ‘one object in life is to live without working’.24 The despairing dreamer seeks out an old literary acquaintance at the Karl Marx Flats (formerly the Queen Alexandra Chambers) whom he finds reduced to penury and in daily fear of the arrival of the ‘comrades’. This once respected writer comments: ‘They can only

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shoot me [. . .] but they cannot confiscate my intellect.’ As the narrative closes, the dreamer himself is arrested and, at the point of execution, awakes.25 If the tone and setting of Cournos’ short fiction owes a little to Wells’ vision of refugees arriving in central London in The War of the Worlds, it should nevertheless not be mistaken for any kind of lost prototype for 1984. The attempt to present the street-level reality of the revolution by transferring it to London is well conceived according to its straightforward agenda, and the narrative might be thought to achieve something that dry statistics and tendentious political claims cannot. The tendentiousness is there, though, even if Cournos does not express any plain interest in the politics of the situation, but his text is among the first to present Russian politics in terms of the absurd, an approach more strongly taken up by William Gerhardie in Futility (1922). More visceral and tendentious by far than Cournos’ rather halfhearted attempt at propaganda, and based on much more direct knowledge, were the interventions of Robert Wilton, the correspondent of The Times in Petrograd in 1919. Wilton’s opinionated reporting in 1917 confused the British government and adversely affected its ability to formulate a coherent policy towards the Provisional Government.26 Wilton was a vituperative anti-Semite. He had been a very active war correspondent in Russia and his dispatches featured regularly, if anonymously. He had used an article in March of 1917 to air his view of the Jewish role in the developing revolution. Wilton was reporting from Riga, celebrating the efforts of the ‘gallant 12th Army’ in its fight against the Germans, but went on to report a mutiny in nearby Estonia: The news from Yurieff [Dorpat] is less satisfactory. Jewish students at the University have set up their own Militia, and defy the authority of the local Militia and of the Provisional Government. Under the influence of the resulting anarchy bloodshed and destruction of property have occurred. I am grieved to have to state that the Jews are not behaving well. They have become free citizens of Russia, but do not display a sense of the responsibility befitting their new position. Similar claims have reached me from Petrograd. Hot-headed and hysterical Jewish youths are, unfortunately, playing into the hands of the worst demagogues and of the external enemies of Russia. Let their co-religionists in Great Britain warn them of the dangers of such a course. If anarchy prevails in Russia there is bound to be a reaction, in which the Jews would be the first sufferers.27

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In Russia’s Agony, Wilton calls this article an ‘appeal to moderation’ which ‘was wilfully distorted by the Jewish Press [. . . A] campaign of slander and intimidation followed.’28 Wilton’s account may have been based on ‘fact’, as he claims, and he was certainly a well-informed, if propagandistic journalist. His account of the war effort in Russia’s Agony is very much that of a military correspondent who has followed the army, and his accounts of politics are very detailed and include both a wide range of name-reference and a close knowledge of events, although it is not clear what Wilton has actually witnessed and what he has taken on what he believes to be good authority. Wilton blamed Bolshevism for betraying the Russian war effort, with which he was closely identified, and for inflicting a new ‘agony’ on Russia, and he uses Russia’s Agony to unfold those views on the influence of the Jews which he had kept in abeyance in The Times. Wilton’s approach to the Jewish question has a semblance of materialist history. Polish Jews had fled German persecution in the eighteenth century. Russia had restricted them to the Pale, west of the Dnieper, and restricted their rights to land ownership: Among this suffering multitude the devil of class-hatred raised a fearsome harvest. The teachings of Karl Marx, a German Jew, were hence decocted in their quintessence and spread by migrants from the Pale into more favoured lands – into the heart of Russia, into England and far America. Like many a noisome malady which has come to afflict mankind from the Near and Farther East, the worst political poisons exude from the Pale.

Jews have gone on to dominate certain professions to which they were admitted, but educated Jews are said to be motivated not by religion but by the ‘desire for freedom rather than a thirst for learning’: It becomes clear that the purpose for which the Pale and all other anti-Jewish restrictions had been devised was mistaken and mischievous. It defeated itself. It led to the penetration of Russia by Hebrew elements of the most aggressive kind which had severed themselves from Jewry – had become pseudo-Jews – while it left the Jewish masses to suffer in congestion and misery.29

A handful of extremists among the ‘pseudo-Jews’ are now among the Bolshevik leadership, and the Jewish press in Russia published Soviet proclamations that the ‘moderate’ press refused: ‘The revolutionary

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pseudo-Jews were thus destroying Russia’s hopes of a national revival and dragging the country into disaster.’ The creation of a Zionist state, Wilton suggests in his conclusion, might be the answer to the ‘Jewish Problem’.30 Wilton also begins the game of identifying the Bolsheviks with apparently Jewish names for which they had substituted Russian names, including ‘Apfelbaum-Zinoviev, Rosenfeldt-Kamenev, Goldmann-Gorev’ and, most prominent of all, ‘Bronstein-Trotsky’.31 This tactic was taken to a heightened level by Victor Marsden, Petrograd correspondent of The Morning Post, who had stayed on into 1918 when most Britons had left, but who had been arrested when the authorities raided the near-empty British Embassy building in Petrograd on 31 August 1918. Although eventually freed, Marsden’s treatment resulted in his premature death.32 Marsden had prepared his list of Jewish Bolsheviks in 1918, although it was published only in 1921, as a pamphlet titled Jews in Russia: With Half-Jews and ‘Damped’ Jews, by ‘The Britons’ press of Henry Hamilton Beamish (whose The Jews Who’s Who of 1921 took a similar approach to financiers). It isn’t clear that the title or the short accompanying essay actually came from Marsden, nor is it clear how much intervention there had been in his systematic seventeen-page list of the personnel of the Soviet Bureaucracy, beginning with the Council of the People’s Commissars and going down through War Commissariat, Commissariat of the Interior, and other branches of government. Each member is listed and nationality added, which is ‘Jew’ in most cases. The accompanying essay claims that almost all of the Commissars are Jews, that all the agitation was done by Jews, that only the Jews in Petrograd have food while others starve, and that ‘Jewry is a nation with its own (secret), government, and has been governed by Sanhedrim or equivalent all through the ages’.33 ‘The Britons’ also published the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (which had been partly translated for The Morning Post by Marsden, whose complete translation saw repeated posthumous publication) and even boasted a journal, The Hidden Hand: or, Jewry Ueber Alles. The strength of anti-Semitic feeling in these two conservative journalists seems surprising, not least because we might expect that, as serious journalists, they would look harder for explanations of the events they were witnessing. They did have a factual starting point, in that Trotsky and other socialist leaders of Jewish descent had assumed false names during the years of tsarist repression, both as a political means and as the age-old defence against anti-Semitism.

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This material premise explained almost nothing, though, and they were obliged to create the category of ‘pseudo-jew’ or ‘damped jew’ to avoid the contradiction that these Bolsheviks of Jewish extraction were internationalists who denied the categories of race and of religion. In 1925 Trotsky’s Jewishness began to be used against him, and against other prominent members of the Left Opposition, by Stalin and Bukharin. Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky’s sympathetic biographer, later glossed this when he noted that: Jews were, in fact, conspicuous among the Opposition although they were there together with the flower of the non-Jewish intelligentsia and workers. Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev; Sokolnikov, Radek, were all Jews. (There were, on the other hand, very few Jews among the Stalinists, and fewer still among the Bukharinists.) Thoroughly ‘assimilated’ and Russified though they were, and hostile to the Mosaic as to any other religion, and to Zionism, they were still marked by that ‘Jewishness’ which is the quintessence of the urban way of life in all its modernity, progressiveness, restlessness, and one-sidedness. [. . .] They were in a sense the ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ on whom Stalin was to turn his wrath openly in his old age. Not for them was the ideal of socialism in a single country. As a rule the progressive or revolutionary Jew, brought up on the border lines of various religions and national cultures, whether Spinoza or Marx, Heine or Freud, Rosa Luxemburg or Trotsky, was particularly apt to transcend in his mind religious and national limitations and to identify himself with a universal view of mankind.34

It is hardly necessary to add that supposedly ‘Jewish’ communism became a key feature of Nazi propaganda. Here, though, Deutscher – in the 1950s less under the pressure of questions of identity politics but still answering to the values of socialist internationalism – is trying to complicate the issue slightly by adding to the mix of political expediency and racial prejudice the question of cultural difference. Wilton, too, had started with this historical-cultural difference – his ‘pseudo-jew’ is simply a more openly abusive term for the ‘assimilated’, ‘cosmopolitan’ Jew – but his view can accurately be labelled as extremist in that it takes almost no account of the phenomena he is dealing with and can appeal only to the more excitable reader. We should be clear, too, that this psychology had a proximate cause (whatever else we might decide to say in light of the extraordinary development of the psychoanalysis of anti-Semitism in subsequent decades).35 The Russian exit from the Entente was a shock to the British war effort, felt as a colossal and inexplicable desertion, and

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a breakdown in narrative order which was as readily filled by scapegoating as by rational consideration of a country and events which seemed alike unassimilable. The journalist Michael Farbman, a defender of the Bolsheviks, attempted to map the reasons for the misprision of Russia which had arisen during the war. Farbman was at some point the Petrograd correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, although his correspondence with that newspaper in September of 1917 identify him as the ‘London Correspondent of the Izvestia’. He later wrote on Russia for The English Review, and his books mention numerous visits to Moscow.36 Farbman, whose birth name was Grigory Abramovich, was originally from Odessa, and related by marriage to Zinovy Grzebin, the founder of Gorky’s ‘World Literature’ publishing house.37 Farbman had used his July lecture to the National Council of Civil Liberties to strip away some of the illusions in London about the February Revolution, denouncing the myth that the monarchy had been swept away because it was pro-German, as the British press constantly repeated, and warning his auditors that the problem in Russia was ‘what you in England call “public spirit”’ – what we would now call “civil society”’.38 War mobilisation had crippled the economy and the view advocated by the Russian liberals and touted by the British press, that the revolution was intended to further the war effort, was viewed in Russia with disappointment. The Allies should abandon this illusion and recognise that the ‘New Russia’ was for the first time becoming a true state, the possession of all the people. Farbman continued to wage war on prevailing views in Russia and the Struggle for Peace, written in March 1918, as the BrestLitovsk negotiations reached their conclusion, and dedicated to Maxim Gorky. Farbman blames the propagandistic myth of ‘Holy Russia’ for the Allied misprision of events in Russia. Against the press denunciations of the peace negotations, Farbman explained that the collapse of Russia’s war efforts was based on existing economic factors not on politics, and that attempts to withdraw from the war were warranted. The revolution had come as a surprise abroad as Russia had been so misrepresented, in part because tsarists had created the myth of ‘Holy Russia’ to justify tsarism, but mainly because Britain’s alliance with Russia had led to a need to endorse this kind of myth and consequently to a failure to offer a realistic interpretation of events. Wilton is singled out as one of the prime offenders. The rapprochement of England and Russia brought about by the war might have been led to a better understanding of Russia and the Russian people, Farbman claims, but:

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From the beginning of the rapprochement in 1907 it became the fashion to depict Russia and the Russian people with sentimental flattery. The previous conception of Russia as a backward country, with rotten political institutions and a monstrous despotism, was said to be biased and false. Russia had to be ‘discovered’ again. And since then Russia and the soul of Russia have been successfully discovered many a time. The real aim of these discoveries was not so much to give a full and veracious account of the real Russia, as to blind the British people to Russian realities. [These] ‘discoveries’ of Russia and of that mysterious ‘Russian Soul’ differ very little from the old-fashioned political art of applying ‘whitewash’.39

The theory which Farbman denounces was widely touted. In 1914 Paul Vinogradoff, the Russian historian forced into exile before the war for his liberal views, explained from his chair in Oxford that German claims to represent civilisation in a struggle against ‘Muscovite barbarism’ was a gross misrepresentation, and that Western scholars should learn more about Russia’s liberalising tendencies, not least in the press and universities. Vinogradoff still ends up reminding his readers that ‘the Russian people have the Christian virtue of patience in suffering’ and that aggressors should recall ‘the “old believers” of Russia who went to Siberia and to the flames for their unyielding faith’ – referring to the seventeenth-century church practice of self-immolation in anticipation of the end of the world, as represented in the climax of Mussorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina, known to British readers from its 1913 London performance at Drury Lane.40 Vinogradoff tries to have it both ways, simultaneously evoking both modern Russia and its ancient, mystical capacity for suffering. Denis Garstin – who later joined Walpole at the AngloRussian Bureau in Petrograd – told the readers of his Friendly Russia (1915) that Russia was not ‘bellicose’ but would fight a war of defence of the ideal of ‘Holy Russia’.41 Garstin’s book was reprinted several times in early 1915, perhaps because it had an introduction by Wells, who argued that Britain needed a new and clarifying literature on Russia and praised Stephen Graham, Harold Williams and Maurice Baring for their efforts towards that end. These publications from early in the war indicate that the notion of ‘Holy Russia’ could fulfil more complex functions than Farbman allows, allaying fears that a bellicose Russia might emerge as an active and empowered enemy after the war against Germany while maintaining the notion that Russia was perfectly able to suffer passively for its ideals and was, therefore, a reliable ally. According to Farbman, though,

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the theory had recast the suffering of the material deprivation of Russian people as ‘the mystical way of her spiritual perfection’. The translation of Russian literature during the war had helped the process of understanding the real Russia but had not been enough to offset the tsarist myth, he believed, with the result that outside the enclaves of the Labour and Liberal press the revolution had seemed baffling, and this was the fault of ‘those who had pronounced as “Holy” the bigoted and unholy corner of darkest Russia’.42 Farbman argues that the Allies had entirely overestimated the capacity of the fledgling Russian industrial economy to sustain war, and that the press had connived in this with their flattering failure to report the true state of the Russian military. Against the press hostility to the revolution, Farbman asserts that ‘the Revolution was the result of the economic exhaustion of Russia; not by any means its cause’.43 Farbman’s detailed report on Russia after the death of Lenin in 1924 notes that the general misprision of Russia has had equally baleful effects for the policy of intervention: If Western statesmen had been free from the superstition which regards Russia as a different and mysterious country, they would have recognised à priori [sic] the inevitable reaction of Russia to intervention. But this mental bias is so deep-rooted that even the failure of the policy of intervention [. . .] has failed to eradicate it. English people are still inclined to judge Russia as if Russians differed in fundamentals from all other human beings.44

Farbman described at an early stage the map of propaganda and ideological distortion which had prevented a proper understanding of events, although it is perhaps surprising that hostility to socialism as such is not given a more prominent role in his accounts. By the time that visitors to Russia from Britain picked up again in 1920, the uncertainties of 1917 and 1918 had been replaced by other agendas. By the end of 1919, following the policy of Lloyd George and in the wake of White defeats, British forces had evacuated north Russia and Siberia, and by the end of March 1920 they had left Novorossiysk in the south.45 This left the way open for the curious or the committed to visit Moscow, not least with a view to the creation of the AngloRussian Trade Agreement, which was signed in March 1921. This was before the creation of the British Society for Cultural Relations (SCR) in 1924 or the proper establishment of VOKS in 1925, or its predecessor, the United Information Bureau (OBI).46 One major visit was that of the Labour Party and Trades Union Delegation in May

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and June of 1920, but before that came the visit of the pacifist former MP and editor of the Daily Herald, George Lansbury, whose observations were collected as What I Saw in Russia (1920). Lansbury was allowed to visit at a time when other Labour leaders were still excluded, on account of his relationship with the Daily Herald, which was rewarded by the Bolsheviks for Lansbury’s visit with a shipment of newsprint valued at £25,000.47 The visit was widely covered in the press, as were the telegrams concerning the shipment of paper, which were published by the government to embarrass their recipient.48 The resulting book, swiftly issued after the visit, is uncritical almost to the point of parody. Lansbury denounces the British Secret Police and prison system, while defending the Bolshevik record on rights. He met Lenin on 22 February and finds in him the embodied spirit of religion, ‘too big in his outlook and much too wide in his sympathies to want to kill anyone’, a ‘saint’ who has ‘devoted his life to the destruction of capitalism’.49 The state still permit freedom of religion, children are poor but have ‘the joyous gift of play’, cinemas will ‘teach citizenship and love of humanity’, Lunacharsky’s education policy fulfils Christ’s command to ‘suffer little children to come unto me’, and the Bolsheviks are ‘the true Christians of today’.50 The Labour Party and Trades Union delegation, which arrived in May, brought with it two people who proved less amenable than Lansbury: Bertrand Russell and Ethel Snowden – always referred to at the time as ‘Mrs. Philip Snowden’, the name under which her account appeared. Other members of the delegation subsequently produced accounts of the visit, notably Leslie Haden-Guest, whose The Struggle for Power in Europe, 1917–1921 (1921) has the advantage that it includes secretarial notes on the delegation’s visit. It was evident from the outset that Russell’s findings would attract a great deal of interest, but it was Ethel Snowden’s Through Bolshevik Russia (1920) which became a byword among Bolsheviks and their supporters for the misrepresentation of the revolution. Snowden saw the delegation’s visit as an investigation on behalf of the British labour movement, but came to realise that their hosts assumed that they were there to offer support.51 This may be why the Bolsheviks were so angered by the critical nature of her account, which begins by reporting starvation on the streets, and goes on to deplore the dictatorship of a regime founded on hate and the suppression of liberties, even while she finds encouragement in the seriousness of educational policy and practice, and in the liveliness of the arts. Her meeting with Lenin yields one of the numerous pen-portraits which is a recurrent feature of the genre, finding as Ransome had,

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and as Wells would later report, that Lenin seemed to believe that an English revolution was imminent and seemed reluctant to accept claims to the contrary. Like many, she testifies to Lenin’s ‘immoveable and overpowering self-confidence’.52 Russell’s The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920) spends little time on personal impressions from his visit (an attractive feature of Snowden’s book) apart from discussions of his meetings with Lenin, Trotsky and Gorky – though Russell later said that his time there had been one of ‘continually increasing nightmare’. 53 The delegation travelled on a special train and was met by parades of soldiers, spending five days in Petrograd and eleven in Moscow. Russell specifies that the party was allowed access to opposition figures and had many meetings with local people, but the principal concern in the book is not to describe the visit but to negotiate the intellectual issues presented to anti-capitalist thought by the apparent actualisation of socialism in the Soviet state. His governing motif is, perhaps curiously, the notion of ‘hope’, and his inquiry is principally aimed at differentiating the local (Russian) character of the revolution from its universal claims and implications. Russell had welcomed the February Revolution with enthusiasm, and was optimistic that it would end the war, usher in a new internationalist age, and even endorsed a very early call of the Leeds branch of the No-Conscription Fellowship for the creation of Soviet-style ‘Councils of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates’ which Russell probably felt could work in a manner consonant with the Guild Socialism which he advocated.54 The hopes therefore are as much Russell’s own as they are hopes for the world. The first chapter, ‘What is Hoped from Bolshevism’, rejects the emphasis on facts and statistics which already dominates pro-Bolshevik commentary, claiming that it is the spirit of hope which the revolution has generated which is its principal feature, a hope doomed to be disappointed: To understand Bolshevism it is not sufficient to know facts; it is necessary also to enter with sympathy or imagination into a new spirit. The chief thing that the Bolsheviks have done is to create a hope, or at any rate to make strong and widespread a hope which was formerly confined to a few. [. . .] If Bolshevism remains the only vigorous and effective competitor of capitalism, I believe that no form of Socialism will be realized, but only chaos and destruction.55

Russell formulates the dilemma of socialism as he sees it – if Bolshevism is the route to socialism, then socialism will fail. What follows

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is a psychological assessment of Bolshevism which draws on Russell’s well-known dislike of proselytising religion, and a political assessment which among other things reminds readers of the threat posed by Bolshevik anti-colonialism to the British Empire. Russell does not trade on the mystification of ‘Holy Russia’, but does utilise the established framework of considering Russia a part ‘Asiatic’ country, noting that the Bolshevik commitment to Marx’s notion that communism is ‘fatally predestined to come about [. . .] fits in with the Oriental traits in the Russian character, and produces a state of mind not unlike that of the early successors of Mahomet. Opposition is crushed without mercy [. . .].’ This projection of an Oriental other is complicated by comparisons of the supposed fanaticism of the Prophet’s successors to the French Revolutionary Constituent Assembly, Cromwell, and Plato’s Republic, while Lenin is compared to a ‘Christian martyr’. Although communism is internationalist, Russell notes, the re-conquest of the East in the civil war has inspired a new nationalism, and crowds cheering Trotsky resemble London crowds in 1914. ‘If the Bolsheviks remain in power, it is much to be feared that their Communism will fade, and that they will increasingly resemble any other Asiatic Government – for example, our own Government in India.’56 Russell complicates the narrative of the opposition between Western democracy and Oriental despotism by reminding his readers that British rule in India is a classic form of despotic Asiatic governance. Rather, he is arguing that the Bolshevik form of government will likely never resemble anything acceptable to British socialists, and that the drive to the east is likely to reinforce that tendency. The Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan, which attempted to found a movement of national liberation in the colonies, would not be held until September of that year, but Russell has caught wind of a shift in policy from a European to an Asiatic strategy. So, the warning he sounds to Britain is twofold: first, that Bolshevism is despotic, and second, that it threatens the British Empire. Russell states clearly that, while the Soviet government is ‘internally aristocratic and externally militant’, rather than democratic and peaceful, his own interest in saying so lies in his hope for socialism and not its reactionary rebuttal. Russell learns from his interview with Lenin that his goal is world revolution, and his desire to see a Labour government in Britain is merely tactical. British workers will come to see bourgeois democracy as a façade once a Labour government is elected. Making a point that he would later reiterate against Trotsky’s argument against the Fabians that Britain was

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indeed ready for revolution in Where is Britain Going? (1926),57 and confirming the reports of Snowden and others, Russell gets little impression from Lenin of ‘knowledge or psychological imagination as regards Great Britain’.58 Yet, if Lenin at this time had looked at The Coming Revolution in Great Britain (1920) by the journalist Gerald Gould, he would have encountered a quite different evaluation of the state of British politics. Gould outlines the history of the strike for improved pay of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) in September 1919, and the at that time still-ongoing fight of the Miners’ Federation which had in April 1920 balloted its members over strike action with the demand of higher wages, a generally reduced cost of living, and in the background an objective of nationalisation of the mines. This was the period of the ‘Triple Alliance’ of the mining, railway and transport unions, which had emerged powerful from the war and were in a position to conduct disputes at the national level. This was also the period of strikes, including the police strikes of 1918 and 1919, and Gould argues in this context for the efficacy and legitimacy of direct action, and outlines plans for a centralised ‘general staff for labour’ amid broadening acceptance of the idea that strikes – and even a general strike – could be conducted for political ends. Lenin surely knew of the increased centralisation of British labour organisation and its growing politicisation.59 Negotiations with the NUR had been held at Downing Street, and on the first day The Times labelled the strike ‘a challenge to the state’ and a ‘blow against the community’.60 The strikes, the conservative press reaction, and the interpretation of left-wing socialist thinkers, against the background of other strikes in France and Belgium, the defeated German Revolution and the short-lived establishment of a soviet republic in Hungary in 1919, all encouraged the Bolsheviks to believe that a revolution in Britain was possible in 1919, and that this would be key for the future of the world revolution, even as in 1920 these prospects had come to seem more remote. Russell sees a different danger, in the wake of the disappointment of Bolshevik hopes in the West, and warns the British, and especially those elements in the government and press arguing for further armed intervention in Russia, that destabilisation will extend not only to the European continent but to the British colonies. Russell argues that the Bolshevik government ‘will be driven more and more, from mere self-preservation, into a policy of imperialism’: ‘Almost the whole of the former Russian Empire in Asia is within their grasp. [. . .] If we continue to antagonise the Bolsheviks, I do not see what force exists that can prevent them from acquiring the whole of Asia

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within ten years.’61 In support of his argument, Russell quotes Lenin’s ‘First Sketch of the Theses on National and Colonial Questions’ of June 1920, which was the most recent formulation of Lenin’s longstanding view:62 We cannot therefore any longer confine ourselves to recognizing and proclaiming the union of the workers of all countries. It is henceforth necessary to pursue the realization of the strictest union of all the national and colonial movements of emancipation with Soviet Russia, by giving to this movement forms corresponding to the degree of evolution of the proletarian movement among the proletariat of each country, or of the democratic-bourgeoisie movement of emancipation among the workers and peasants of backward countries or backward nationalities.63

This formulation of what Marxists have generally called ‘critical support’ for national liberation struggles would have resonance for many decades to come. It would lead, Russell claimed, to Bolshevik alliances with Sinn Féin or with nationalist movements in Egypt and India, and the British labour movement had failed to grasp that Bolshevik policy in Asia was intended not to spread socialism but nationalism, as part of a more long-term strategy. Russell concludes that Bolshevism is akin to ‘Mohammedanism’ rather than to Christianity or Buddhism: which are personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world. [. . .] What Mohammedanism did for the Arabs, Bolshevism may do for the Russians [. . .] Asiatic empire with all its pomps and splendours may well be the next stage of development, and Communism may seem, in historical retrospect, as small a part of Bolshevism as abstinence from alcohol is of Mohammedanism.64

Although his own conclusion rests heavily on a broad and therefore questionable cultural-historical analogy, Russell advises against the tendency of the British press to demonise the Bolsheviks: ‘they are neither angels to be worshipped nor devils to be exterminated, but merely bold and able men attempting with great skill an almost impossible task.’65 Russell suggests that the Bolsheviks must be evaluated as human actors, not as divine agents. His analogy with the period of the early Muslim conquests, qualified by references to the English and French Revolutions, is intended not as a synonym for the Oriental or

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Asiatic other, but a suggestion for a model with which the psychology and geopolitical intent of the Bolsheviks can be understood. That said, when he remarks that Bolshevism is ‘partly Asiatic in character’, and hypothesises that some minds are fixed on Asiatic conquest accompanied by ‘rubies and golden thrones’, it may be that the stereotyped speculation diverges from the materialist goal.66 Russell is not so far immersed in Bolshevik discussions that he can discern the ramifications of Lenin’s theses, and the reasons they had been the subject of internal debate, so he does not explore the contradictions between socialist internationalism and the politics of national self-determination as an international and internationalist desideratum.67 As well as sounding a warning about likely future events to the British government and the Left, Russell is one of the few early commentators to highlight this question of the ‘two internationals’, even though he does not make the connection of the incipient process of de-imperialisation in the East to Wilson and the League. The second part of the book is a patient socialist critique of Bolshevik theory and a defence of gradualism against revolution. Russell claims that the problem of capitalism is not the unequal distribution of wealth but of power, a problem which can be proposed by industrial self-government arrived at by gradual changes in mentality – a version of G. D. H. Cole’s ‘guild socialism’. The critique of Bolshevism reads effectively; the advocacy of guild socialism much less so, suggesting that Bolshevism had opened up a gap in the thinking of British socialists, whose plans for a socialist future needed to present a more concrete alternative to revolution. Responses to the articles and books of the returned members of the delegation were predictably divided. While The Times Literary Supplement praised the ‘astounding chain of evidence’ in Snowden’s work, for revealing the ‘mockery of the Soviet system of government’, R. Page Arnot, writing in The Communist under the title ‘Bertrand the Bolshevik’, seeing the gap offered by his tepid advocacy of guild socialism, sneered that Russell expected to find a ‘Shelleyan liberation of art and emotion, and human energy and human relationships’ in Russia, but instead found that revolution was a ‘nasty business’, distant from the ‘pure air of the Whig Olympus’.68 Arnot seems to have taken it for granted that his readers would understand that only the great and good would expect a revolution to be anything other than ‘nasty’. When Clare Sheridan visited Moscow a few months later, Trotsky threatened her with unstated consequences if she were to go back to England and criticise the revolution, ‘as the others have’.69 British and Russian communists alike had hoped for

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better treatment by a Labour delegation, especially as such efforts had been made to impress them and treat them well. Communist visitors, such as Thomas Mann, produced much more favourable accounts. Mann, who visited Moscow in 1921 as a delegate to the Trades Union International, praised the Bolsheviks for succeeding in feeding the people in a time of starvation and for creating employment while unemployment in Britain soared over 2 million, and described Lenin and Trotsky as ‘lovable, quiet and kindly’.70 But it was not these communist voices which reached the wider public ear, and Moscow was inevitably frustrated. Wells, visiting a few months after the Labour delegation, was introduced to the Petrograd Soviet where he was politely told to treat the regime more fairly than earlier visitors. Wells arrived in Russia in September 1920, a few months after his predecessors. The general argument of his Russia in the Shadows (1921), based on a lucrative series of articles for the Sunday Express, is that Russia is economically damaged, that the Bolsheviks are the only organised body that can address this, and that though Wells does not endorse Bolshevik ideas he endorses Bolshevik rule. The economic collapse might have happened in Britain or any other European country had the war continued, he argues; the disaster is not caused by Bolshevism but by the civil war and foreign invasion; Wrangel, Denikin and other White leaders supported by elements in Britain are simply strongmen with no political vision for Russia’s future. Marxist doctrine is incoherent, though Lenin is ahead of others in recognising that Russia is undergoing an experiment; Marxist doctrine predicts that revolution should have come in England and other advanced countries, not in Russia, and Wells, like others, was repeatedly asked when the English revolution would happen. The book concludes with an interview with Lenin, in a famous chapter called ‘The Dreamer in the Kremlin’, in which Wells finds Lenin to be intelligent, genial and flexible. Winston Churchill replied to Wells’ original articles in the Sunday Express, attacking Bolshevik ‘wickedness’, and was in turn furiously rebutted by Wells.71 Wells was shown a film of the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East, held in 1920 to launch the anti-colonial strategy which Russell had discussed.72 Wells brought the film back to England where it was shown in cinemas.73 Wells found it politically curious, discerning only ‘a vague idea of hitting back at the British government through Mesopotamia and India, because it has been hitting them through Kolchak, Denikin, Wrangel, and the Poles [. . .]’. He comments at length on a dancer who is, he says, the ‘central feature’

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of the film, dancing with knives to ‘distinctly oriental music’. Wells sees only a piece of Orientalism in this dance, and concludes that it is the Western worker with a ‘huge hammer and sickle’ which will remain the dominant and Western-looking symbol of Bolshevism, but notes that ‘if we maintain the European blockade that ideal may give place altogether to a nomadic-looking gentleman from Turkestan with a number of knives. We may drive what remains of Bolshevik Russia to the steppes and the knife.’ It was ‘a pageant, a Beano’ but ‘as a meeting of Asiatic proletarians it was preposterous’.74 While Russell had taken the trouble to read Lenin and had grasped the meaning of the anti-colonial strategy, Wells satisfies himself a little too easily with his own impression. Wells in general takes a more literary than analytical approach, relishing his depiction of Russia as having descended into chaos. His first chapter is called ‘Petersburg in Chaos’, his second ‘Drift and Salvage’. This is the writer of The War of the Worlds at work, finding in Petersburg and Moscow the embodiment of collapsed civilisation. Our dominant impression of things Russian is an impression of a vast irreparable breakdown. The great monarchy that was here in 1914, the administrative, social, financial, and commercial systems connected with it have, under the strains of incessant war, fallen down and smashed utterly. Never in all history has there been so great a debacle before. The fact of the Revolution is, to our minds, altogether dwarfed by the fact of this downfall. By its own inherent rottenness and by the thrusts and strains of aggressive imperialism the Russian part of the old civilised world that existed before 1914 fell, and is now gone.75

This is a Petersburg in which all shops and markets have closed, and most people are close to starvation. Tramcars are heavily overcrowded and there are frequent accidents – Wells reports seeing a child cut in half by a tramcar. The roads are full of holes, the few surviving cars are run on kerosene, making a noise and emitting blue smoke. The population of Petersburg has fallen dramatically as many return to country – Bolshevik statistics put this as a decline from 1,200,000 before 1919 to 700,000. Food is necessarily rationed; profiteers are shot. There is a lack of general goods, men are unshaven due to lack of blades, conditions in the hospitals are poor, and the railways are deteriorating as engines wear out, and rails loosen.76 These circumstances, Wells claims, are not the results of Bolshevik rule:

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this desolate Russia is not a system that has been attacked and destroyed by something vigorous and malignant. It is an unsound system that has worked itself out and fallen down. It was not communism which built up these great, impossible cities, but capitalism. It was not communism that plunged this huge, creaking, bankrupt empire into six years of exhausting war. It was European imperialism. Nor is it communism that has pestered this suffering and perhaps dying Russia with a series of subsidised raids, invasions, and insurrections, and afflicted upon it an atrocious blockade. The vindictive French creditor, the journalistic British oaf, are far more responsible for these deathbed miseries than any communist.77

The image which best captures this sense of a civilisation become a museum culture is found in Wells’ account of the Expertise Commission: ‘The palace that once sheltered the British Embassy is now like some congested second-hand art shop in the Brompton Road.’ The authorities do not allow looting but, following an initiative set by Maxim Gorky, store and catalogue ‘everything that could claim to be a work of art’: We went through room after room piled with the beautiful lumber of the former Russian social system. There are big rooms crammed with statuary; never have I seen so many white marble Venuses and sylphs together, not even in the Naples Museum. [. . .] I could not find out that anyone had any idea what was ultimately to be done with all this lovely and elegant litter. The stuff does not seem to belong in any way to the new world.78

There is a hint of relish in Wells’ assertion that this ruin could befall the whole of Europe, as well as a careful political point that it is the war, the civil war and foreign intervention which have caused this almost unimaginable descent: Ruin; that is the primary Russian fact at the present time. The revolution, the Communist rule [. . .] is quite secondary to that. It is something that has happened in the ruin and because of the ruin. It is of primary importance that people of the West should realise that. If the Great War had gone on for a year or so more, Germany and then the Western Powers would probably have repeated, with local variations, the Russian crash. The state of affairs we have seen in Russia is only the intensification and completion of the state of affairs towards which Britain was drifting in 1918.79

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Such a crash may yet come to Western Europe perhaps due to speculation and a currency failure: The shops of Regent Street will follow the shops of the Nevsky Prospect, and Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Bennett will have to do what they can to salvage the art treasures of Mayfair [i.e. as Gorky has done]. It falsifies the whole world situation, it sets people altogether astray in their political actions, to assert that the frightful destitution of Russia to-day is to any large extent the result merely of Communist effort; that the wicked Communists have pulled down Russia to her present plight, and that if you can overthrow the Communists every one and everything in Russia will suddenly become happy again. Russia fell into its present miseries through the world war and the moral and intellectual insufficiency of its ruling and wealthy people. (As our own British State – as presently even the American State – may fall.)80

The meeting with Lenin – Wells’ purpose in visiting Moscow – is the centrepiece of the visit and subject of the most famous chapter, ‘The Dreamer in the Kremlin’. There is the obligatory pen-portrait of the leader – Lenin has ‘a pleasant, quick-changing, brownish face, with a lively smile and habit (due perhaps to some defect in focussing) of screwing up one eye as he pauses in his talk’81 – and the conversation revolves around two motifs: Wells’ inquiries about the future of Russia, and Lenin’s about the possibility of revolution in England. Wells concludes generously that communism ‘could be enormously creative’ but that Lenin is tied to ‘the Marxist dogmas of the inevitable class war’.82 Wells’ account evidently irked the Bolshevik leadership. Trotsky’s 1924 memoir of Lenin, published in London in 1925, records Lenin’s reaction to the interview: ‘“What a bourgeois he is! He is a Philistine!” he repeated, raised his hands above the table, laughed and sighed, as was characteristic of him when he felt a kind of inner shame for another man.’83 Trotsky, who admits he does not know Wells’ work, labels him an ‘English drawing-room socialist, Fabian, bellelettrist on visionary and Utopian themes’ and finds ‘hardly a trace of Lenin in Wells’ article, Wells himself, just as he is, is contained in it’. Despite his professed socialism, Wells is a stock, conservative Englishman of imperialistic mould, was completely obsessed with the notion that he was conferring a great honour upon this barbaric land and its ruler by his visit. Wells’s article from first to last line exhales this unjustifiable self-sufficiency [. . .]

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Wells embodies that race of ostensibly educated, narrow bourgeois, who look but see nothing, and believe they have nothing more to learn.84

There is much more in the same vein, Trotsky admitting that he is influenced as he writes by the fact that the Labour Party is in government in Britain for the first time, and that his polemic against gradualism is for that reason all the stronger. Wells, he believes, represents ‘the soul of the leading class of the English Labour Party’, though he concedes that ‘Wells is not the worst among them’.85 There are other important first-hand accounts to emerge from visitors to Petrograd and Moscow. Both British and American accounts were published in London: John Reed’s famous, breathless Ten Days That Shook the World (1919); Sylvia Pankhurst’s Soviet Russia: As I Saw It (1921); Emma Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia (1923); Anna Louise Strong’s The First Time in History: Two Years of Russia’s New Life (1924). It is a relief to turn from these, though, to an account which arrives in Moscow from a completely different angle, Francis McCullagh’s A Prisoner of the Reds: The Story of a British Officer Captured in Siberia (1921). It was conversation with McCullagh on the boat to Yokahama, as we will see later, that led Gerhardie to decide to become a writer. If Gerhardie experienced ‘futility’ in his role in the intervention prior to the evacuation from Vladivostok, McCullagh experienced field service as a captain with the Royal Irish Fusiliers as part of the British Military Mission, and was captured when Krasnoyarsk fell to the Bolsheviks on 6 January 1920. McCullagh was an experienced journalist, having held posts with the New York Herald and the Japan Times, and was fluent in Russian. As a prisoner, he had more freedom than other members of the British military captured alongside him, who remained in prison and whose liberty he continued to campaign for following his own release.86 McCullagh was able to use his status as a journalist – he had old clippings with him – to persuade the authorities that he was not an agent but was preparing a book on Russia, and was allowed to continue to move around freely even though not permitted to leave the country. Major L. E. Vining, who was also captured at Krasnoyarsk, and who reported his experiences in Held by the Bolsheviks (1924), relates that the Red soldiers ‘were all exceedingly nice to us’, simply paying visits, sharing Bolshevik literature, and chatting in a friendly way, not even at first disarming them.87 McCullagh continued to work for British Intelligence, corresponded with Bernard Pares, and was allowed to leave Russia via Finland

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under the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in May 1920.88 His book is one of the most revealing and engaging accounts of post-revolutionary Russia to emerge from this period. McCullagh argues that Bolshevism has survived because the Allied intervention united Russia behind the Bolsheviks and because exaggerated anti-Bolshevik propaganda has created sympathy for them among workers and paralysed the intervention.89 His book aims to be politically neutral and indeed shows a fascination with the Bolsheviks. He has ignored, he says, the other books by recent visitors to Russia, expecting, we can surmise, incompetence and propaganda, and denounces all positive, romantic versions of the country: the very name ‘Siberia’ weighed upon our souls like lead. To most of us there had always been something dreadful in the very sound of these two words, ‘Russia’, ‘Siberia’. A great deal has been done to whitewash both of them, and some people in this country have almost brought themselves to believe that the serfs had on the whole a rather good time [. . .] But in the past they suggested only the clack of chains, and they suggest it still. To me, at least, Russian history is one long horror.90

McCullagh has a kind of epiphany when, following his capture after the long retreat from Omsk to Krasnoyarsk, he is spared by his captors who express a principled reluctance to massacre prisoners, even though the Whites generally killed all Red prisoners: I began to see that Bolshevism, like Puritanism, the Great Tai-P’ing Rebellion, and even Mohammedanism, owes all its explosive force to – the Bible. The Divine element in Christianity is of such tremendous and supernatural potency that, if mixed with the wrong ingredients, it is capable of blowing the world to pieces. A grain of primitive Christianity added to a mass of Marxian error has made Russian Communism the terrible and most dangerous compound that it is.91

McCullagh repeatedly damns the Bolsheviks, especially their opposition to Christianity. In contrast to Lansbury, who argued that the Bolsheviks were Christian even if atheist, McCullagh compares them to the Ottomans in the early seventeenth century in their persecution of Christians. Both Red and White Russia are ‘fast losing every vestige of Christianity and civilization’. McCullagh, an Irish Catholic, took up this theme of the persecution of Christians on his return, campaigning in the press about the imprisonment of church leaders

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and producing a book, The Bolshevik Persecution of Christianity (1924). He had begun work on a three-volume study of Bolshevism, but so came to hate it that he abandoned the project, concluding that the communists aimed at bringing about ‘universal chaos’ and were worse than the ‘German militarists of 1914’.92 In contrast to the many theoretical polemics for and against Bolshevism and the effects of the revolution, McCullagh’s account gains its force from documentation. The apocalyptic scope of the revolution and civil war emerges most clearly in his account of the typhus epidemic and the effects of the massive displacements of people. McCullagh witnessed the effects of typhus on the retreat from Omsk to Krasnoyarsk. He describes one of the retreating trains, which was ‘crammed with typhus patients, and was throwing out naked corpses at every stopping place with as little ceremony as the stoker threw out ashes’: callous hospital assistants made a practice of stripping corpses stark naked, and then piling them in the open, like logs of wood, alongside the track. [. . .] During a life spent in war [. . .] I have never seen similar disrespect shown to the dead. [. . .] It seemed to us that even the most elementary observances of the most primitive civilization had been swept away by this tidal wave of civil war, that human culture had collapsed, and that the end of all things was approaching. [. . .] The crowning horror was the typhus, but the sights which I saw in this connection and the statistics which I collected were so staggering that, when I afterwards told about them in Europe, my hearers simply shrugged their shoulders and refused to believe me.93

Vining offers similar testimony, describing and photographing the so-called ‘train of death’, a White train with 12,000 Bolshevik prisoners on board which was shunted back and forward across Siberia until only sixty remained alive. Vining includes a photograph of the dead unloaded from one car. A prisoner Vining spoke to had been on board for thirteen months and told him they were never allowed to leave the train unless dead. Vining describes it as ‘about the most fiendish thing I have come across’.94 The typhus epidemic is generally considered to have killed 3 million people but, more than this, McCullagh documents the social effects of the civil war, the massive dislocation of family life which had been going on for two years before the retreat from Omsk, which he considers probably ‘the greatest dislocation of family life that has ever taken place in the history of the world’. He details how girls fell into prostitution, the

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countless notes searching for loved ones pasted on station walls, on trees and in the newspaper, and recalls how in 1918 I had seen how respectable and delicately brought-up Russian girls had drifted into Harbin and there become the prey of Russian and Jewish speculators, of Chinamen, of every kind of human vampire, every kind of international dealer in white flesh. Those girls came from Kiev, from the Crimea, from the most distant parts of the former Russian Empire, but they were penniless, friendless, and absolutely helpless.95

As well as detailing the massive human cost of the civil war, McCullagh makes telling contributions to the literature on Trotsky and on Moscow. Able to travel freely, except for a short period when he was held by the CHEKA, who failed to notice scraps of evidence which linked him to British Intelligence and accepted his claim that he was a journalist, McCullagh travelled to Ekaterinburg in February 1920 and then to Moscow. In Ekaterinburg, he witnessed Trotsky’s attempt to convert the military into a labour force. McCullagh’s assessment was that the idea was inefficient, as skilled officers were put to work doing simple manual work, an opinion he later shared with Trotsky, who was ‘rather snappy’, evidently ‘disturbed by the criticisms of his grand idea which came from England’, although subsequently the scheme was dissolved.96 Nevertheless, McCullagh is no less impressed than many of those who met Trotsky and subsequently romanticised him in print. He noted Trotsky’s capacity for work, witnessing him shovelling snow and requiring other members of his train to do the same, and like others could not resist a pen-portrait which emphasised his Jewish ethnicity: He wore no belt and carried no weapon; his face is sallow, Mephistophelean, and distinctly Jewish; his eyes dark and bright; his beard and moustache scanty. His movements are quick and animated, and his capacity for work superhuman. The employees on his train told me they led a dog’s life of it. [. . .] [. . .H]e has Jewish adaptability, has no very fixed principle, and possesses the gift, invaluable to a political adventurer, of throwing himself heart and soul into any cause he takes up. [. . .] Trotsky has all the mental precision and extreme intellectuality of his race. Owing to this fact [. . .] I am doubtful if he will always remain a Bolshevik or will always submit to the deeper but less agile Lenin. Trotsky in many ways resembles Lloyd George, whose brilliant work in the Ministry of Munitions is quite on a par with Trotsky’s brilliant work in the Ministry of War [. . .]97

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He notes the power of Trotsky’s oratory – ‘Bolshevism is really run to a large extent by a clique of Socialist journalists’98 – and the speed with which his slogans are disseminated by the media. McCullagh is one of the first to document the manifestations of the state information machinery, describing the poster displays in the station hall at Ekaterinburg and at the stations he passes through en route to Moscow. In a detailed account of these ‘propaganda points’ he notes how even the British Empire is a common topic: ‘Some posters dealt with British rule in India – soldiers shooting down Hindoos or blowing them from the mouths of cannon, Sahibs in solar topees ploughing with natives instead of horses.’ In general, McCullagh finds the Bolshevik press machine to be its greatest achievement, ‘certainly the most wonderful institution of its kind in the world’, and offers one of the earliest descriptions by an outsider of the nature and practices of the Bolshevik communications industry.99 Arriving in Moscow, McCullagh aims to set straight the accounts given by the numerous Labour visitors who were met by a ‘smoothtongued’ interpreter, did not travel freely, and who had never seen the city before so had been unaware of its precipitous decline. Noting that ‘of all the Britishers who arrived in Moscow during the last year, I am probably the only one who arrived unexpectedly and without having impressions made to impress him favourably’, and that ‘an account of the minuteness of the care taken by the Bolsheviks to ensure that a favourable impression was made on British journalists and members of British Labour Deputations would be amusing but hardly credible’, McCullagh contrasts the city he once knew to Moscow as it is now and concludes: ‘The change that has taken place now is the change from a joyous life to a condition of torpor not far removed from death.’100 Like Wells, McCullagh is in his own way struck by the vision of collapse, as he passes the still, rusting trains and carriage on the lines into Moscow, and reflects that decay is the universal future of all civilisations, including the English: our present form of civilization is as frail as the many forms which have preceded it, and has no more chance of permanence than the Egyptian or the Babylonian. [. . .] Formerly the signs of desolation in a mighty metropolis were the cold altar-stones, the roofless hut, the deserted palace; but in future these signs will be hundreds of miles of grassy railway tracks covered with abandoned trucks, gigantic masses of rusty machinery amid which the birds will build their nests [. . .]101

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The country now depends on its vision of the future, and while ‘all the pictures which the Bolsheviks have so far given us of a future world constructed on the design of Lenin are so depressing that nobody would like to read about such a world, much less to live in it’, he mentions ‘the present craze for publishing all the forecasts of a future Utopia that have been made from the time of Sir Thomas More to the time of Mr. H.G. Wells’.102 As unimaginable as the future may seem, McCullagh’s descriptions of the present are given most force by the discussion of his meeting with Yakov Yurovsky, who had been the executioner of the tsar and his family in July 1918. The Bolsheviks had issued an untruthful account of his death at the time, but later conducted a trial of the perpetrators.103 Robert Wilton had issued a thorough account of events, The Last Days of the Romanovs (1921), also based on a visit to Ekaterinburg, and including transcriptions of depositions from the trial, although he considered the trial a sham designed to blame the killings solely on the drunken Yurovsky and conceal the role of the Bolshevik leadership. Wilton pursued the direction of Russia’s Agony, blaming the ‘Jewish conclave in Moscow’, focusing attention on the Jewish descent of Yakov Sverdlov, the senior Bolshevik in Moscow who Wilton believed to have issued the order for the executions, down to Yurovsky himself, and emphasising the role of German-speaking Magyar guards, describing Russia as the ‘willing handmaid’ of Germany, continuing at that time unnecessarily to pay vast sums in war reparations to Germany. The ‘Red Jew government of Russia’ was to blame for the murders.104 McCullagh’s account is remarkable for the account of his visit to the Ipiatev House, where the murders took place, and he also had access to the documents in the official report and depositions. The description has many authentic touches – the nurse who uses a cushion to deflect upward the barrels of the guns pointed at the children; the stray bullet which takes off the fingertips of Yurovsky, the Bolshevik officer who, in McCullagh’s interpretation of the findings, ordered the assassination; the dignified procession of the family to the underground chamber where they seem not to have suspected that they would be shot; Yurovsky’s pale face as he reads out the order to kill Nicholas Romanov and all his family by candlelight; the ‘frightened look’ of the Empress and the ‘pitiless countenances’ behind the revolvers before the shooting begins; the ‘shriek from the beautiful Grand Duchess Tatiana who, having suddenly regained consciousness, sat up, shouting “Mother! Mother!”’, at which ‘two or three of the soldiers instantly jumped towards her,

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and, while some of them ran their bayonets through her, others beat in her head with the butt of their rifles. There were seventeen deep dents made in the cellar floor by bayonets.’105 McCullagh’s account is sombre and carefully detailed, given narrative colour while reflecting his role as an intelligence gatherer. Although his account compels sympathy, he carefully qualifies its effects: I might add here that the horrors which I have just described are tame in comparison with the other horrors which have taken place all over Russia. [. . .] The murder of a poor workman or shopkeeper with his wife and children excites my sympathy more than the murder of an Emperor and his family, for the mighty enjoy great privileges if they are, on the other hand, exposed to great perils, whereas the poor, who have few privileges, should at least be safe from butchery; but as descriptions of wholesale massacre are not read by the public, and as the murder of Royalty excites special attention, I confine myself to this typical case.106

The art in his account is to concentrate on the character of Yurovsky, whom he has interviewed. Yurovksy is haunted by the fear of vengeance, even though he believes that he has left no trace of the bodies in existence. He is well provided for by the state but the Bolsheviks avoid him and do not wish to speak of him. Even his house is uncanny, and McCullagh feels reluctant to approach it. Although Yurovsky speaks vehemently about White massacres, and justifies some of the large numbers he killed when he was for a time the head of the Extraordinary Commission in that region, ‘he cannot bear to speak about the eleven deaths about which I was anxious to get the details. [. . .] Approach the subject and he trembles with rage or horror or incipient insanity.’107 Between the Mephistophelian Trotsky and the Gothic Yurovksy – whose Jewish extraction in both cases is repeatedly emphasised – McCullagh gives body to a vision of the Bolshevik spirit which he is elsewhere keen to refute, denouncing the general demonisation of the Bolsheviks according to which ‘Lenin should be seated on a heap of skulls quaffing human blood, while Trotsky should be engaged nightly in bacchanalian revels’, whereas in fact ‘Lenin leads as austere a life as Oliver Cromwell, while Trotsky is as busy as Lloyd George’.108 If McCullagh cannot cast light on the future of the revolution that is because, immersed in the conflict, he sees only the carnage and the effects of war. The documentary contrast between this account and

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those of official visitors is as great as he claims. The massive displacements, the destruction of infrastructure, the effects of disease, and the general demoralisation of the population are shown here for the first time. From a different perspective, McCullagh arrives at a vision of universal collapse not dissimilar to that of Brailsford and Wells, with the passing mild irony that, as McCullagh notes, it was Wells who was one of the most feted pedlars of the utopia which, McCullagh believes, cannot emerge from Russia as he finds it.

Notes 1. Ransome’s story has been told in detail, closely mapped on to events in Russia, in Roland Chambers, The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome (London: Faber & Faber, 2009). On Sharp and Stockholm, see pp. 249–51. 2. See Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), pp. 173–4. 3. Arthur Ransome, The Truth about Russia (London: Workers’ Socialist Federation, 1919), pp. 2–3. 4. Ibid. pp. 5–10, quotations pp. 9, 10. 5. Ibid. pp. 14, 16. 6. Arthur Ransome, Six Weeks in Russia (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1919), pp. 54, 56. 7. Ibid. pp. 78–9, 147–51. 8. See Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 313–14. 9. Mrs. Philip Snowden, Through Bolshevik Russia (London: Cassell, 1920), p. 117. 10. Ransome, Six Weeks in Russia, pp. 81–2. 11. This section is excerpted from David Ayers, ‘John Cournos and the Politics of Russian Literature in The Criterion’, Modernism/Modernity 18:2 (April 2011), 355–69. 12. The mainly literary members of the Anglo-Russian Bureau – sometimes known as the Anglo-Russian Commission – will recur several times in this study. As well as Walpole and Cournos, they included Somerset Maugham, William Gerhardie and Harold Williams. The bureau was created at the instigation of Ransome, another literary author. See Keith Nelson, ‘“Joy Rides”?: British Intelligence and Propaganda in Russia, 1914–1917’, The Historical Journal 24:4 (December 1981), 885–906. Michael Hughes, Inside the Enigma: British Officials in Russia, 1900–1939 (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon, 1997), pp. 56–7.

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13. See, for example, Hughes, Inside the Enigma, p. 55. 14. John Cournos, Autobiography (New York: Putnam, 1935), p. 294. 15. For a full account of the activities of the Russian Liberation Committee, see Charlotte Alston, ‘The Work of the Russian Liberation Committee in London, 1919–1924’, Slavonica 14:1 (April 2008) , 6–17. 16. This piece also appeared in Nineteenth Century 85 (1919), 383–94. 17. The New Russia was issued from February to December 1920, and appeared as Russian Life from March to August 1921. 18. Marinus Antony Wes, Michael Rostovtzeff, Historian in Exile: Russian Roots in an American Context (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1990), pp. 25–9. 19. See Leonid Andreiev, Russia’s Call to Humanity: S. O. S. An Appeal to the Allies (London: Russian Liberation Committee, [1919]), which features a long introduction by Miliukov and a cover illustration by Frank Brangwyn R.A.; and Paul Miliukov, The Case for Bessarabia: A Collection of Documents on the Rumanian Occupation (London: Russian Liberation Committee, [1919]). 20. Isaak Vladimirovich Shklovsky (‘Dioneo’), Russia under the Bolsheviks (London: Russian Liberation Committee, [1919]). Shklovsky was an uncle of Victor Shklovsky, the well-known Formalist. 21. John Cournos, London under the Bolsheviks: A Londoner’s Dream on Returning from Petrograd (London: Russian Liberation Committee, [1919]), IFC. 22. Ibid. pp. 5–6. 23. Meriel Buchanan, Petrograd: The City of Trouble, 1914–1918 (Glasgow, Melbourne and Auckland: Collins, 1918), pp. 245–6. 24. Cournos, London under the Bolsheviks, p. 9. 25. Ibid. p. 12. 26. See Kenneth O’Reilly, ‘The Times of London and the Bolshevik Revolution’, Journalism Quarterly 56:1 (Spring 1979), 69–76. 27. [Robert Wilton], ‘M. Gutchkoff’s Visit to Riga’, The Times 41438 (28 March 1917), 6. 28. Robert Wilton, Russia’s Agony (London: Arnold, 1918), p. 174. 29. Ibid. pp. 58, 59, 60. 30. Ibid. pp. 174, 326. 31. Ibid. pp. 137–8n. 32. See ‘A Victim of the Bolshevists: British Journalist’s Cruel Torture’, The Times 42555 (30 October 1920), 7. 33. Victor E. Marsden, Jews in Russia: With Half-Jews and ‘Damped’ Jews. With a list of the names of the 447 Jews in the Soviet Government of Russia (London: ‘The Britons’, [1921]), p. 6. 34. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921–1929 (1959. London: Verso, 2003), pp. 217–18. 35. I have touched on this in my essay, ‘Wyndham Lewis: Internationalism and Race’, in Len Platt (ed.), Modernism and Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 156–72.

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36. See Martha S. Vogeler, Austin Harrison and the English Review (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), p. 232, and Michael Farbman, ‘The Soviet’, Manchester Guardian 14 September 1917, 8. 37. See Galya Diment, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2013), p. 78. 38. Michael Farbman, The Russian Revolution and the War (London: National Council for Civil Liberties, 1917), p. 6. 39. Michael S. Farbman, Russia and the Struggle for Peace (London: George Allen & Unwin, [1918]), pp. 3–4. 40. Paul Vinogradoff, Russia: The Psychology of a Nation (Oxford Pamphlets. London: Oxford University Press, 1914), pp. 3, 10, 11. 41. See Denis Garstin, Friendly Russia, intro. H. G. Wells (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1915), p. 242. For an account of Garstin’s life, see Hugh Walpole, ‘Denis Garstin and the Russian Revolution: A Brief Word in Memory’, The Slavonic and East European Review 17:51 (April 1939), 587–605. 42. Farbman, Russia and the Struggle for Peace, pp. 5, 8. 43. Ibid. p. 31. 44. Michael Farbman, After Lenin: The New Phase in Russia (London: Leonard Parsons, 1924), p. 10. 45. See, for example, David Bullock, The Russian Civil War, 1918–22 (Oxford: Osprey, 2008), pp. 90–106; and Jonathan D. Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World (London: Hurst, 2015), pp. 105–40. 46. On the SCR, see Emily Lygo, ‘Promoting Soviet Culture in Britain: The History of the Society for Cultural Relations between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the USSR, 1924–1945’, Modern Language Review 108:2 (April 2013), 571–96; on VOKS, see Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–40 (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 93ff.; on the formation of OBI and subsequently VOX by Olga Kameneva, see Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 34–43. 47. For a detailed account of this payment in the context of the Herald’s ongoing funding problems, see Kevin Morgan, Bolshevism and the British Left: Part One. Labour Legends and Russian Gold (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2006), pp. 105–13. 48. See ‘British Labour Paper and the Bolsheviks: Admiralty’s Wireless Dossier. Mr. Lansbury’s Reply to the Attack’, Manchester Guardian 19 August 1920, 8. 49. George Lansbury, What I Saw in Russia (London: Leonard Parsons, 1920), pp. 26–7. 50. Ibid. pp. 92, 94, 107. 51. Snowden, Through Bolshevik Russia, p. 50.

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52. Ibid. p. 119. 53. And see Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (London: Cape, 1996), pp. 574–87; Caroline Moorehead, Bertrand Russell: A Life (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992), pp. 313–17; Alan Ryan, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), pp. 81–3, 89–94, and Bertrand Russell, Autobiography (1967–9 in three volumes; single volume London: Unwin, 1978), pp. 326–56. Quotation is from Autobiography, p. 333. 54. Monk, Bertrand Russell, pp. 496–8. 55. Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920), pp. 15, 18. 56. Ibid. pp. 29, 42, 35. 57. For a collection of responses to Trotsky’s book on Britain, see Leon Trotsky on Britain, intro. George Novack, no translation credit (New York: Monad, 1973). Russell’s response to Where is Britain Going?, ‘Trotsky on Our Sins’, from the New Leader for 26 February 1926, is on pp. 214–17; Trotsky’s lengthy response to Russell, ‘Once More on Pacifism and Revolution’, is on pp. 194–208. Trotsky’s book was published as Whither Britain? in the United States in 1925 and as Where is Britain Going? in 1926. 58. Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, pp. 31, 38. Russell can be found repeating the same arguments four years later: Bolshevism and the West: A Debate on the Resolution ‘That the Soviet form of government is applicable to Western civilization’. Scott Nearing, affirmative; Bertrand Russell, negative, intro. Samuel Untermayer (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924). 59. Gerald Gould, The Coming Revolution in Britain, intro. George Lansbury (Glasgow: Collins, 1920). 60. ‘Railwaymen’s Strike’, The Times 42216 (27 September 1919), 6. 61. Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, pp. 108, 109. 62. On the first phases of Lenin’s view on national self-determination, see Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 46–9. On Lenin’s development of this thesis and dialogue with M. N. Roy in advance of the Second Comintern of July and August 1920, see John Patrick Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N. Roy and Comintern Policy, 1920–1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 11–13. 63. Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, p. 110. 64. Ibid. pp. 114–15. 65. Ibid. p. 116. 66. Ibid. p. 112. 67. See the references to Pipes and Haithcox (above) on these discussions. 68. Captain George A. Scott, ‘Mrs Snowden in Russia’, The Times Literary Supplement 973 (9 September 1920), 574; R. Page Arnot, ‘Bertrand the Bolshevik’, The Communist 1:2 (12 August 1920), 9.

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69. Clare Sheridan, Russian Portraits (London: Cape, 1921), p. 145, and see chapter on Sheridan below. 70. Tom Mann, Russia in 1921 (British Bureau Red International of Labour Unions: London, [1921]), p. 32. For a detailed discussion on the attempts by the hard Left in Britain to square the circle with the Bolshevik government, see Martin Durham, ‘British Revolutionaries and the Suppression of the Left in Lenin’s Russia, 1918–1924’, Journal of Contemporary History 20:2 (April 1985), 203–19. 71. See Michael Foot, The History of Mr Wells (London: Doubleday, 1995), pp. 188–9; David C. Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal. A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 270; Michael Sherbourne, H. G. Wells: Another Kind of Life (London and Chester Springs, PA: Peter Owen, 2010), pp. 259–61. Wells’ articles appeared in the Sunday Express for 31 October and 7, 14, 21 and 28 November 1920. Churchill’s reply, ‘This Frightful Catastrophe: Mr. Wells and Bolshevism’, appeared on 5 December, and Wells’ response, ‘Mr. Wells Hits Back: Rejoinder to Mr. Churchill’s Criticism – the Anti-Bolshevik Mind’ on 12 and 19 December. Details from Smith. 72. For a full account, see John Riddell, To See the Dawn: Baku 1920. First Congress of the Peoples of the East (New York: Pathfinder, 1993). 73. Smith, H. G. Wells, p. 271. A clip from the film, without sound or titles, can be found on YouTube. 74. H.G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows (London: Hodder & Stoughton), pp. 80–4. 75. Ibid. p. 11. 76. Ibid. pp. 13–26 77. Ibid. pp. 27–8. 78. Ibid. pp. 51–2. On the Expertise Commission, see Martha Weitzel Hickey, The Writer in Petrograd and the House of Arts (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), pp. 16–17. 79. Wells, Russia in the Shadows, pp. 53–4. 80. Ibid. p. 55. 81. Ibid. p. 130. 82. Ibid. pp. 137, 139. 83. Leon Trotzky [sic], Lenin (London: Harrap, 1925), p. 212. 84. Ibid. pp. 202, 214. 85. Ibid. p. 213. 86. See Francis McCullagh, ‘Prisoners in Russia’, The Times 42523 (23 September 1920). 87. Major L. E. Vining, Held by the Bolsheviks: The Diary of a British Officer in Russia, 1919–1920 (London: Saint Catherine, [1924]), p. 142. 88. For an excellent account of McCullagh’s career, see John Horgan, ‘“The Great War Correspondent”: Francis McCullagh, 1874–1956’, Irish Historical Studies 36:144 (November 2009), 542–63.

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89. Francis McCullagh, A Prisoner of the Reds: The Story of a British Office Captured in Siberia (London: John Murray, 1921), pp. vii–xii. 90. Ibid. p. 25. 91. Ibid. p. 24. 92. Ibid. pp. 55, 37, 53. 93. Ibid. pp. 6, 15–16, 31. 94. Vining, Held by the Bolsheviks, pp. 96–7 and photograph facing p. 97. 95. McCullagh, A Prisoner of the Reds, p. 39. 96. Ibid. pp. 106, for Trotsky’s shovelling p. 63. 97. Ibid. pp. 92–3, 101, 103. 98. Ibid. p. 90. 99. Ibid. pp. 111, 252. 100. Ibid. pp. 193, 196. 101. Ibid. p. 189. 102. Ibid. p. 214. 103. See, for example, ‘Murder of the Imperial Russian Family: The Complete Story at Last Told’, unsigned article, Current History 13:1 (1 October 1920), 158–61. 104. Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs: from 15th March 1917 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1920), phrases quoted from pp. 29, 22, 161. 105. McCullagh, A Prisoner of the Reds, pp. 137–8. 106. Ibid. p. 141. 107. Ibid. p. 130. 108. Ibid. p. 108.

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Chapter 5

Clare Sheridan: A Sculptor in the Kremlin

Clare Consuelo Sheridan (1885–1970), née Frewen, was a sculptor, journalist and novelist. She was also the cousin of Winston Churchill who, at the height of the Russian Civil War, travelled to Moscow to make busts of Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders – an action that made her a central figure in public discourse about the revolution. Sheridan was born into a rich family, but the family wealth collapsed due to bad investments, and her relatively poor husband was killed in action in 1915, leaving Sheridan with two children and a war pension of £250 per annum, which enabled her ‘to consider herself free to the end of her days’.1 Sheridan followed an independent feminist track, electing to work rather than remarry. She nevertheless had a series of male lovers and depended a great deal on her attractiveness to men – her biographer notes that she ‘maddened most women but to men, especially strong men who would carry out tasks useful to her, she had immense appeal and her sense of drama delighted them’.2 The theme of a woman’s independence against the background of serial relationships with men recurs in Sheridan’s novels, and her belief in and practice of free love came to be a key component in her sympathy for Bolshevism. To support her family, Sheridan became a professional sculptor, and established herself with busts of such eminent people as Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, her cousin Winston, and the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, whose bust is still on display in the Oxford Union which commissioned it. Although evidently privileged, and able to make progress in her work through her connections, Sheridan was nevertheless an example of a woman who had suffered, as had many, from the loss of her husband in the war, and had made a virtue of her independence, rather than throw herself into the fight for a wealthy husband. It was

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her special brand of independence, though, and her desire to be as famous as her eminent cousin, which put her at the centre of a political and personal storm. Sheridan was unlike most of the visitors to Moscow in 1920. Her interest in politics had hitherto been limited to the issue of Irish Home Rule, but she had seen a newspaper photograph of the Russian trade delegation which had arrived in London during the mild thaw in relations following the winding-down of the British intervention, and was attracted to the image of Leonid Borisovich Krasin, the member of the delegation who eventually negotiated the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement in 1921.3 Sheridan expressed an interest to friends in adding a bust of Krasin to her collection, a casual declaration which came to the ears of Lev Borisovich Kamenev, the leader of the trade delegation in London and member of the Politburo. Kamenev saw an opportunity, and invited Sheridan to Moscow to make busts of Lenin and other members of the Politburo. Sheridan later told her biographer that she did not realise what the motives of the Bolsheviks were, and imagined that the resulting sculptures would make her world-famous and guarantee her career in London. She also later revealed that it was Sidney Russell-Cooke who had facilitated her sitting with Krasin. Cooke worked for British Intelligence, and wanted to place her in Kamenev’s office as a spy, though Sheridan claims she demurred and indeed claims to have attempted (unsuccessfully) to reveal an important intelligence secret to Kamenev – that British Intelligence had cracked the code he used in his messages to Moscow and they were being intercepted, a fact she had learned from ‘F.E’, probably cryptanalyst Ernst Fetterlein, the head of the Government Code and Cypher School, who led this operation.4 Litvinov, whom she met regularly, later told her that they were of aware of Cooke’s role in sending her to Moscow but appears not to have believed she was an agent.5 The extent of Sheridan’s intelligence role in relation to either side remains obscure and was not at the time publically visible, although the ambivalence surrounding her loyalty was, even if Sheridan claimed that she had not imagined the outrage that her visit would cause, not least the anger of her cousin, the most forceful and prominent enemy of the Bolsheviks.6 According to her own account, Sheridan was unaware of the storm that her visit had created in Britain, and of the propaganda coup that she had gifted to the Bolsheviks. In contrast to many of the 1920s visitors to Moscow, Sheridan was politically uncommitted, and seems to have had little grasp of the realpolitik in which her cousin was so expert. Unguarded comments to a mass of reporters who ambushed her at Reval on her return journey

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from Moscow led to headlines that portrayed her as a Bolshevik sympathiser. Her brother arranged for her own account to appear in the press immediately on her return. The first instalment, based on her diary, appeared in The Times on 22 November 1920 under the title ‘With Lenin and Trotsky’, and was followed by five further pieces.7 Sheridan was reportedly paid an enormous sum. According to Sheridan, ‘Placards at the street corners announced “Mrs. Sheridan’s Diary,” in letters of purple. [. . .] All the city clerks read it in the omnibuses and the Tube on their way to work. I boarded during the “rush” hours to watch them doing it.’8 These articles were collected and amplified in the book Russian Portraits (1921). The serialisation was for several days billed by The Times as its main feature. Sheridan’s sympathetic treatment of the Bolshevik leaders, and her evident intimacy with them, infuriated Churchill and severely damaged her personal relationships. Although Sheridan clearly expressed support for Bolshevism, she did not appear to have become especially radical, but sufficient suspicion surrounded her for MI5 to document her subsequent anti-British and pro-Bolshevik statements, and when she moved to Algeria in the 1930s the agency believed her to be in the pay of the Russians.9 Whatever the truth of this, Sheridan was not a political agitator nor overtly the member of any party, and did not appear on any platform. Apart from her relationship to Churchill, the diaries which made up Russian Portraits evidently made their impression by their direct observation, which is presented, at least, as untainted by any prior political persuasion. Moreover, her meetings with the Bolshevik leaders could be intimate and revealing. While Wells spent just one hour with Lenin, Sheridan had several sessions with both Lenin and Trotsky while they sat for her, sometimes pursuing their normal business. She had a high degree of access, and even Lenin warmed to her, while Trotsky was enchanted. For this reason, her verbal portraits of them are among the most interesting in this literature, and are determinedly free of the demonisation of the Bolshevik leaders found in The Times and The Morning Post. While such sympathetic accounts might appear to have been useful to Moscow, we now know that Aleksandr Zuzenko, a Bolshevik agent in London, reported disdainfully to Moscow that the British communists such as the groups led by Bill Gallagher and Sylvia Pankhurst were weak and unorganised. They ‘mimic Wells without talent and repeat his statements parrot fashion, borrowing the views of Mrs Sheridan on Russia and its leaders, and bandying catchphrases like “Lenin is ice; Trotskii is flame”.’10 Evidently, Zuzenko sought to contest the view in Moscow that Wells and Sheridan had been ideologically

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useful – in contrast to Ethel Snowden’s hostile Through Bolshevik Russia (1920), which had so inflamed the Bolshevik leadership. Sheridan used the opening pages of Russian Portraits to set up a limited defence against her public image as a pro-Bolshevik. Declaring that ‘as a portraitist I have nothing to do with politics’,11 and pointing out that Moscow was as exercised by her relationship to Churchill as London was by her relationship to Lenin and Trotsky, Sheridan claims that her status as an artist sets her above politics. As part of his attempt to persuade her to travel to Moscow to make the busts, Kamenev, she claims, told her that artists were better paid there than government ministers, and that she would be ‘regarded as an artist, international and non-political’.12 Sheridan’s account of her conversations with Kamenev – if we take her apparent artlessness at face value – perhaps unintentionally reveals his shrewd manipulativeness, as when he skilfully turns the question of any danger to herself into a joke which both softens the image of Bolshevik violence and turns the journey into a kind of upper-class jape: laughing, he said that he would have me put against a wall, arms crossed on breast [. . .] with a firing party before me, and then he would save me at the last moment. Then I should have lived through every thrill and my friends would not be disappointed.13

Kamenev was at that moment expelled from London and Sheridan travelled with him in September 1920 to Russia. This journey took place via train to Newcastle, then by steamer to Bergen in Norway, and overland to Christiana (Oslo) – where she met Maxim Litvinov, formerly the Bolshevik representative in London who had been arrested and exchanged with Moscow for Robert Bruce Lockhart, and now had a roving remit as a key foreign ambassador. The journey continued by boat to Hanko in Finland and then to Reval (Tallinn) in Estonia. One feature of this journey, as with those recounted by other travellers to Moscow at this time, is the sense of a rite of passage, with deteriorating conditions of travel and numerous colourful and illuminating encounters: There are no pleasure trippers or any of the idle curious on board. Everyone practically is bound for Russia, and we look at each other curiously, wondering what each other’s mission is. There are Comrades returning, and there are journalists, traders and bankers; people who hope to get through from Reval, people who probably will, and others who certainly will not.

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The mere fact of being under the wing of a man like Kameneff, and bound for Russia, seems to make people talk to me as if I were a man. It is a great comfort not to meet people on a social or superficial ground.14

Yet, once in Moscow, the question of who Sheridan was allowed to meet was clearly determined by her rank and propaganda value. She stayed in Kamenev’s apartment at the Kremlin, with a ministerial Rolls-Royce parked outside.15 She was mistaken by a man on the street for Sylvia Pankhurst (whose fame as a communist supporter was apparently already great), briefly met John Reed (whose funeral she soon after attended), and conversed with Andrew Rothstein, founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In the disarming fashion which is characteristic of her writing, Sheridan affects not to know why abuse has been heaped on Rothstein by the English press. In his conversation, it is the situation of women in Russia which attracts her attention. She had already been impressed in Sweden by one of Litvinov’s secretaries, who ‘held forth to me on the great difference the Revolution had brought in the position of women. She is an ardent Communist, and works 10 hours a day with a willing heart and little pay.’16 According to her own account, it was communist feminism which attracted Sheridan, in contrast to the conservative press in England which, Sheridan claimed, talked incessantly about the socialisation of women as an act of collective prostitution. Sheridan, who practised free love, was evidently very open to the Bolshevik approach. The conversation with Rothstein drifted on to that eternal comedy, the Nationalisation of women. I happened to say that this had done more to harm the Bolshevik cause than almost anything, and, moreover, that quite serious people still believed it. Mr. Rothstein interposed rather sharply, ‘Well, a little select circle which reads the Morning Post perhaps believes it’. Is it possible, I wonder that he is right, and that the ‘little select circle’ do not count as much as I have all my life taken for granted that they did?17

A different conversation with a party worker on communist policy towards children elicits a more complex response from Sheridan, who questions the fact that he and his wife do political work while their six-week-old child is sent to a crèche. ‘It was the cold, dispassionate way in which he said it that gave me the creeps.’ However, Sheridan has to admit that when she was widowed by the war her children went to her parents, and that there must be many women

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who have to earn a living and have ‘no family in the background on whom to plant the baby. What happens in a country where there is no paternal State? In Russia the State will clothe, feed and educate them from birth until fourteen years of age.’ It is one thing to disaggregate the bond of father and mother, another that of mother and child. ‘It is difficult to preserve one’s maternal sentimentality in the face of this Communistic generosity,’18 notes Sheridan, who will later make this theme of the mother–child bond a central organising feature of her novel Stella Defiant (1924). The question of family was related to the hostile focus of the British press on the Bolshevik introduction of co-education. Sheridan weighs in on the side of the Bolsheviks by quoting Trotsky: I talked to him of things I had heard about the schools. In reply, he said that he had heard no adverse reports of the co-education scheme for boys and girls. [. . .] He then compared the present system with that of boy colleges of his own day, and he said that his own boy of fourteen had nicer ideas about girls, and far less cynicism, than he had at the same age.19

Sheridan repeatedly emphasised the feminist dimension of communism, usually anecdotally, as in this account, from her later tour by motorbike with her brother Peter, of a young woman she met in Kiev: [She] had been a soldier and done the retreat from Poland with the Red Army. She had short dark hair, regular features, and eyes that expressed courage, vision and fanaticism. From her I learned that sex complexities can be obliterated by real camaraderie. ‘I forgot I was a woman,’ she said, referring to her life in the ranks; ‘and they never remembered it.’ The Russian woman is the most unself-conscious, the most detached, the most highly evolved feminist in the world.20

This emphasis on Bolshevik feminism is unusual among Sheridan’s contemporaries and her occasional encounters with striking women are not simply observations but testimony to an existential shift in herself. However they might or must be qualified, they are offered as relatively untheorised evidence of the realisation of the communist goal of liberating women. As she later expressed it, ‘Socialism must not be merely a materialistic conception but a spiritual realisation; and independence was my total aim.’21 Like other visitors, Sheridan was exposed to Bolshevik art policy. She is taken to the ballet to see the policy of admitting the masses in

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action, and notes their rapt attentiveness, enthusiasm to meet the artists, and unwashed state. At an exhibition of proletarian art, Sheridan dutifully finds it ‘very interesting, and deeply imbued with the modern movement’. Taken to a political meeting to discuss Kamenev’s work in England, Sheridan is impressed to hear Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai speak, but is frustrated by her lack of Russian and leaves ‘at the moment when a great many repetitions of Churchill and Lloyd George’s names were rocking the house with laughter’.22 These visits to theatres, galleries and meetings or rallies were part of the routine for foreign visitors, but the material which really caught the attention of her readership was the accounts of the extraordinary sittings with the Bolshevik leaders, which are vividly narrated and persuasively humanising. The names would have been familiar to English readers. Politburo member Grigory Zinoviev is restless while he sits for her, and reads newspapers. Sheridan’s account focuses on his face and the character she reads off from his presence: He seemed to me an extraordinary mix-up of conflicting personalities. He has the eyes and brow of the fighting man, and the mouth of a petulant woman. [. . .] At moments he threw his head back and seemed to be dreaming. Then he looked like a poet. He is only thirtyeight. It is amazing how young all these revolutionaries are.23

Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Extraordinary Commission (Cheka) was well known in Britain as the orchestrator of the ‘Red Terror’. Sheridan attributes his stillness as a sitter to his years in prison and concludes wistfully: ‘When the Savonarola of the Revolution left, I felt a real sadness that I may never see him again.’ Béla Kun, by contrast is disappointing: ‘I had imagined a romantic figure, but he looks most disreputable.’24 It is small wonder that British readers were so astonished to read about such close encounters with people who were indeed enemies of the British state, whose natures were so hardened and whose hands were indeed bloody, in words which made them seem so vivid and human. The sittings with Lenin and Trotsky are the most extraordinary. Lenin sat with Sheridan two days after his meeting with Wells. Wells had arrived in Moscow from Petrograd on 4 October and exchanged news with Sheridan. Conditions had been harsher in Petrograd than Moscow, but Sheridan found him ‘as usual, laughing and extremely humorous about the condition of life in Petrograd’. Wells interviewed Lenin for an hour the next day and reported to Sheridan that he was impressed and liked him. As a leading socialist, Wells’ treatment was

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quite different to that of Sheridan. This difference accounts for the very contrasting tone of Sheridan’s own accounts, and is what makes her situation so striking. ‘H.G. may learn a lot of facts about schools and factories and things, but it is only by living a life of dull routine and work, even of patient inactivity and waiting, that one absorbs the atmosphere. Inactivity is forced upon me, I have to wait.’25 Sheridan did not have to wait much longer to see Lenin, though, and while Wells had been in with him for only an hour, she began a series of long sittings two days after the famous interview with Wells. Sheridan found Lenin genial, and while at first he concentrated on work, he eventually began to talk. Their conversation offers a glimpse into the Bolshevik view of Wells. Lenin had read only Joan and Peter (1918), and then not to the end, but he enjoyed the satire on English bourgeois life, though he regretted he had not read the ‘earlier fantastic novels about wars in the air and the world set free’. When they discuss Churchill, Sheridan reveals that another cousin is a member of Sinn Féin, and Lenin laughs to imagine the family get-togethers. Churchill was evidently of much concern to Lenin. When Sheridan shows him a picture of her bust of Churchill, he finds it romantically ‘embellished’ and Sheridan notes: ‘He seemed to have this on the brain.’26 The relaxed conversation is remarkable enough, but again it is the artistic observation which really focalises the whole encounter: He has a curious Slav face and looks very ill. Never did I see anyone make so many faces. [. . .] I watched these expressions, waited, hesitated, and then made my selection with a frantic rush – it was his screwed-up look. Wonderful! No one else has such a look, it is his alone.27

What is more remarkable though is the subtext of their meeting. It is the surrogate for a meeting that can never take place. Lenin’s mind was set on evaluating the likelihood of revolution in Europe. Churchill, he knew, was his most outspoken and dangerous enemy. Here in front of him was Churchill’s cousin, the feminised surrogate, a conversationalist rather than a speech-maker, an artist rather than a politician, each now in the presence of the other after extraordinary manoeuvring of agencies on both sides, Lenin clearly knowing that everything that passed between them would be reported back to Whitehall.28 Sheridan’s interaction with Trotsky – who flirted heavily with her and asked her to accompany him to Crimea29 – is especially interesting,

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and it is easy to see why her complex portrait of him, as well as the sense of mutual charm and their shared grim humour at the situation – and the erotic subtext – might have offended as well as fascinated The Times readership: His manners are charming. I said to him: ‘I cannot get over it, how amiable and courteous you are, I understood you were a very disagreeable man. What am I to say to people in England when they ask me: “What sort of a monster is Trotsky?”’ With a mischievous look he said: ‘Tell them in England, tell them –’ (but I cannot tell them!).30

They joke that he could hold her as a hostage, a danger that had been pointed out to her in England before her departure. She tells Trotsky that if she were taken hostage Winston would just say ‘shoot’: ‘Winston is the only man I know in England who is made of the stuff that Bolsheviks are made of. He has fight, force and fanaticism.’31 This remark highlights another element of the extraordinary subtext – that Churchill is the double of Lenin and Trotsky, in an oblique summit of doppelgängers. This parallel was satirically noted by Lloyd George, and given visual form by David Low in a cartoon labelled ‘Winstonsky’, which depicts Churchill with Lenin’s balding head and Trotsky’s moustache and beard. Churchill is looking at photographs of Lenin and Trotsky on his wall, inscribed ‘Affectionate remembrances, from Len’ and ‘From Trot to Winnie with love’. In his hands, Churchill carries a bottle of ink and a quill, as if he has inscribed the photographs himself. Although he wears a top hat, Churchill appears stooped in an awkwardly fitting raincoat, and the image bears the caption, ‘Horrifying effect of concentration on Russian affairs’, and also quotes Lloyd George’s disdainful remark: ‘Lenin I believe is an aristocrat, and Trotsky is a journalist. My right hon. friend the Secretary for War is an embodiment of both.’ The cartoon appeared in The Star for 12 August 1920 – the month before Sheridan’s visit.32 While it serves to make Lloyd George’s case, it also points up the mythical status of the three men in British public consciousness, and the sense that their political struggle has a personal, intimate and even erotic component. Satire is sometimes just satire, but Low’s image informs the subtext of Sheridan’s quite differently intimate encounters with Lenin and Trotsky. Sheridan tells Trotsky that ‘Russia with its absence of hypocrisy and pose, Russia with its big ideas, has spoilt me for my own world’. Trotsky, like Lenin angrily aware that Russell and other apparently sympathetic visitors have criticised Bolshevism on their return to

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Britain, responds: ‘that is what you say now, but when you are away—’: Then suddenly turning on me, with clenched teeth and fire in his eyes, he shook a threatening finger in my face: ‘If, when you get back to England, vous nous calomniez as the rest have, I tell you that I will come to England et je vous—’ He did not say what he would do but there was murder in his face.33

It is overall the generosity of Sheridan’s verbal portrayal of Trotsky, against this background of dark humour, which must have impressed or horrified her readers: He has the manner and ease of a man born to a great position; he has become a statesman, a ruler, a leader. But if Trotsky were not Trotsky, and the world had never heard of him, one would still appreciate his very brilliant mind. The reason I have found him so much more difficult to do than I expected, is on account of his triple personality. He is the cultured, well-read man, he is the vituperative fiery politician, and he can be the mischievous laughing school-boy with a dimple in his cheek. All these three I have seen in turn, and have had to converge them into clay interpretation.34

Sheridan’s description of his face and expression add extra layers of romance to Trotsky without discounting his diabolic status among his enemies: [He] pointed out to me how unsymmetrical his face is. He opened his mouth and snapped his teeth to show me that his underjaw is crooked, and as he did so he reminded me of a snarling wolf. When he talks his face lights up and his eyes flash. Trotsky’s eyes are much talked of in Russia, and he is called ‘the wolf’. His nose is also crooked and looks as though it had been broken. If it were straight he would have a very fine line from the forehead. Full-face he is Mephisto. His eyebrows go up at an angle, and the lower part of his face tapers into a pointed and defiant beard.35

The Bolshevik focus on events in Britain, evident from many of the conversations with Lenin reported by visitors, emerges clearly in Sheridan’s exchanges with Trotsky. ‘England is our only real and dangerous enemy,’ Trotsky tells her. ‘France is just a noisy, hysterical woman making scenes: but England – that is different altogether.’ British press coverage of Russia is subtly undermined by her account

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of looking through London papers with Trotsky and laughing to read that he has been wounded.36 Sheridan’s readers and her society may or may not have been impressed by the fact that she travelled independently as a widow and mother, able to persuade Lenin that she was not a bourgeoise on the grounds that she adopted a regular seven-hour working day. As an ideological intervention in Anglo-Russian relations, Sheridan’s writing, apparently so artless, was much subtler than any polemic of the Left or Right. Her concentration on family and education policy, and lack of reference to other fundamentals of socialism or indeed of Bolshevik method, humanise Bolshevism without confronting its full implications. Sheridan gives her stay a spiritual dimension by emphasising the simplicity of life which she was obliged to lead in Russia as an artist – even though she was in fact materially very well supported. Her ‘conversion’ to Bolshevism is oblique. There is little identification with the workers, little sense of socialist politics, but instead a satisfaction with the fairly basic conditions which enable her to function as an artist, and in that way be independent: The big ideas, wide horizons and destruction of all the conventions have taken hold of me. [. . .] It may seem a strange taste to those people who have the sense of possession, the collector’s instinct, or the love of home. I have none of these; so long as I have a place to work in, and plenty of work to do, and leisure in which to think about it, I ask little more.37

This formulation, and its specific form of feminism focused on the space and liberty to work alone, anticipates Virginia Woolf’s culturally lionised comment in A Room of One’s Own (1929) regarding the support required by women to produce great art, namely, a ‘room of her own’ and an independent income. It differs, in that Sheridan’s focus is on the artist as worker or producer, and on her own existential state, while Woolf has asked what is materially needed to enable women to produce great art. Woolf’s account is turned away from socialist feminism, and retains a classical notion of great literature, as opposed to the more socialist conception of Sheridan’s artist-worker. The juxtaposition, though, is interesting. Neither gives any account of the social function of art. In Woolf, it is a question of what it means to write a good book; in Sheridan, a question of the spiritual condition of the artist. When Sheridan visited Moscow, Russian debates about art and writing were not very prominently visible in Britain, but they became so, and anglophone readers such as Woolf

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could easily access Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, published in London in 1925, which offered a detailed window on to Soviet artistic discussion of the relationship between art and the society of the future. Woolf plainly did not identify with either the Soviet approach to the functionality of art, and the socialist-feminist agenda of Soviet education strategy, but if Woolf’s position in the late 1920s seems like a strike against the socialist-feminist agenda, whether domestic or foreign, Sheridan’s contrasting view of the artist’s room as a workspace was probably in material terms no different from Woolf. Just as Woolf’s imaginary writer with an independent income would have been sheltered from material necessity and indeed from any direct social responsibility or accountability, so too Sheridan’s sense that she was, as we might say, ‘slumming it’, reflected the expectations of her class, but in relative terms she was materially well supported and did not in any way share the privations of most people in Moscow at that time. Yet Sheridan makes clear that for her this has been a moral and personal revolution: I am appalled by the realization of my upbringing and the futile viewpoint instilled in me by an obsolete class tradition. [. . .] Now for the first time I feel morally and mentally free, and yet they say there is no freedom here.38

Although this study is principally concerned with documents which were publically circulated in the period in question, it is worth noting that Sheridan later revised the account of her state of mind during the visit, stating that she had ‘never felt more utterly lost and lonely’, and that Russia was ‘no paradise for workers or for any others’.39 While the new account, given in the 1950s, may amount to little more than belated revisionism, it also allows for the possibility that Sheridan’s original accounts are more intentionally propagandistic than they might appear. If Sheridan had thought she was merely tweaking the noses of the conservative British press with her serialised diary, she was mistaken. On her return journey in November she was besieged by reporters in Stockholm. Her unguarded remarks to these reporters served merely to throw fuel on the fire. Accused of representing Trotsky as a ‘perfect gentleman’, Sheridan countered that she would never have described him in such mediocre terms, but as ‘a genius, a superman, or a devil’. At Newcastle, she was met by reporters and treated with suspicion by Customs. The hostility was overwhelming, and Sheridan complains she has been ‘pursued, besieged, harassed, feasted,

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attacked, appraised in turn’ by ‘the anti-Bolshevik in all his glory of prejudice, hate and bitterness’.40 So hostile was her reception that Sheridan decided to leave England. The opportunity came when Russian Portraits was published in the United States, as From Mayfair to Moscow, and Sheridan travelled to America to promote the book. This led to a commission from New York World to act as roving reporter in Europe, an assignment which in the second half of 1922 took Sheridan on a rapid tour of hot-spots including Ireland, the occupied Rhineland, Berlin, Danzig, Geneva, Smyrna, Constantinople, Bulgaria, Romania, Rome and Lausanne. Sheridan had no experience of journalism and had limited patience with politics, but she did have access to many leading figures, witnessed extraordinary events, produced some extraordinary scoops, and was even assaulted by Mussolini. Her account of these six months, In Many Places (1923), is not by any means as analytical as the studied and informed accounts of a skilled journalist like Brailsford, but Sheridan’s sketches give a vivid sense of the turmoil which Europe was experiencing in 1922. Sheridan travelled widely, but her story is not one of transnational adventure. Instead, it is a litmus of the upsurge in nationalism that followed the process of deimperialisation which was occurring right across Europe. As Sheridan expresses it: I hurried from one National crisis to another, and sometimes there were several in different parts of Europe, and one could not make up one’s mind which to go to! [. . .] Everywhere in every country I found the flaming spirit of Nationalism and its involved threat to world peace.41

On arrival in Dublin, Sheridan met with Oliver St John Gogarty – Joyce’s model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses – who introduced her to Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith, Darrell Figgis, Æ (George William Russell), Stephen McKenna, W. B. Yeats and James Stephens (author of The Crock of Gold). Michael Collins informed her that her family house in Innishannon had been burned down by Sinn Féin in reprisal for the Black and Tans – counter-insurgency units created on the orders of Churchill – burning down their houses, and Sheridan duly travelled to Cork to visit her childhood home.42 On her return to Dublin, Sheridan went to the Four Courts to interview Rory O’Connor, the leader of the IRA splinter group which opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 that had been negotiated with the British government by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith in an attempt to

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end the War of Independence. Sheridan claimed to be ‘the only correspondent in Dublin who got into the Four Courts and interviewed Rory O’Connor’.43 Days later, the Four Courts were attacked and partly destroyed by Michael Collins; O’Connor was taken prisoner and executed a few weeks later. This famous incident, which resulted in the destruction of the entire Irish Public Record Office, was the trigger of the civil war between pro- and anti-Treaty forces. Sheridan was hardly the best informed of correspondents, but she had been in the right place at the right time and her interviews were a scoop. Her almost accidental success, and her new sense of a Europe in violent turmoil, resulted in further assignments in Paris and Germany, and then to the Third Assembly of the League of Nations at its headquarters in Geneva. Sheridan did not much enjoy the rather staid and serious proceedings but, hearing talk of a new war between East and West following the British failure to create the promised Arab Nation in favour of giving Palestine to the Zionists and Syria to the French, she travelled to Constantinople, at that time under inter-Allied control in the closing stage of the Greco-Turkish War, and in the grip of resurgent nationalism following the successes of the Turkish nationalists under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal. Sheridan’s observations are not elaborate, but capture the menace of the moment and the variety of competing forces, civil and military: Almost one footstep too far might bring about another World War, with the battlefields in the East instead of the West. [. . .] Here the inter-Allied forces were divided among themselves, the British on the brink of war with the Turk and the French equipping the Turk while declaring with the Italians that they would take no part in any hostilities. The Americans were neutral and calm with that detachment which is genuine indifference. Here also were ragged remnants of Wrangel’s Russian Army, terrified lest the entry of Kemal into Constantinople bring in the allied Bolsheviki. Innumerable Greeks and Armenians, who formed part of the permanent population, were in a state of panic at the possibility of Turkish occupation. Meanwhile the Sultan, who had bound himself body and soul to the Allies for protection, and who a year ago condemned Mustapha Kemal to death, was lamenting the Turkish victories and praying to Allah to protect him from the Kemalists. The Turkish population of Samboul were jubilant with delight and wearing pictures of Kemal in their buttonholes. [. . .]

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After a while I began to see, and I began to understand. Almost the greatest phenomenon of our age, after the Russian revolution, is the spirit of Turkish nationalism. It is genuine, it is immense.44

In September, Sheridan travelled to Smyrna, recently taken by the Turks and set ablaze. She witnessed the situation of the Greek and Armenian victims fleeing massacre, and assisted many to board the American warship on which she had travelled, in a dock filled with floating corpses. She then moved on to Mudanya, where the armistice between Turkey and Britain, France and Italy was signed in October, and thence to the Conference of Lausanne, which began in November 1922 and resulted in the 1923 treaty which ratified the new Turkish borders and, among other things, agreed a massive exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, a final legacy of the bitterness left behind by the ethnic cleansing which had taken place throughout the three-year war. Sheridan was hostile, not towards the competing nations, but towards the peace process itself: All the sparks of my Bolshevism were fanned into flames. Governments, statesmen, generals and diplomats, at their repeated conferences, have played with frontiers and with towns, with human souls and lives and with the spirit of each Nationalism as though they were playing a game of chess. Everything I ever believed had been shattered, and had been replaced by nothing very tangible. I have ceased to believe in equality, freedom or justice. 45

Her only consolation was a new-found love of the East: In Turkey I found all the beauty, if not the peace, and I found an intellectual stimulus, a philosophy and a refinement that I have never found anywhere else, except in Russia. [. . . The Turks] have all the ideals the West has lost, and none of the crudeness or the brutality of the Russians. They have a sensitiveness that is unequalled in any other race.46

Though Sheridan’s accounts are no more than snapshots of larger narratives, her decisions about where to travel and who to talk to were prescient. The Europe she uncovers is one of displacement and continuing violence, far from the supposed peace which the West European commemorations of the 1918 Armistice seem now to celebrate. These experiences also gave her the material for fiction.

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Sheridan’s first novel, Stella Defiant (1924), is a remarkable modernist novel. Subtitled for advertising purposes as ‘The Passionate History of a Modernist Woman’,47 the novel is modernist not by dint of its form, but for its combination of topics – marriage, paternity, fatherhood, single-parenthood, the femme fatale, serial relationships, the Irish independence struggle, the Russian Revolution, Islam, the independence of the woman artist and, not least, modernist art and style. Topically interesting from beginning to end – the novel concludes with the dialogue: ‘“Allah must decide” [. . .] “Allah did decide”’48 – the narrative traces a trajectory through Ireland, London, Berlin and Constantinople, featuring ambassadors, émigrés, artists, spying, murders, arson and even a portrait sitting with Hitler. The novel is perhaps unusual for this period, too, in that the terms ‘modernism’ and ‘modernist’ appear frequently in the text. While there are many autobiographical elements – and while many of the characters can be easily identified as people from Sheridan’s life – this is nevertheless a reworking of experience rather than a simple re-presentation. The novel follows the consequences of its protagonist’s defiance and its final conversion into a kind of acceptance – not, in fact, a conversion to Islam, but a kind of intimate fellow-travelling with the East. The defiance takes the form of embracing modernist art, the Irish independence struggle and communism. The narrative is carefully shaped to interweave political and domestic themes and could be broadly seen as an analysis of the nature of the revolutionary temperament in a privileged British woman, with the strong caveat that the central character is a very particular individual and that, despite obvious parallels with the life of the author, the novel cannot in a straightforward way be read as autobiographical. Nor is the protagonist strictly British. Stella Mallory believes she is the natural daughter of Henry Mallory, an Irish landowner, and Peggy Graham, daughter of a broke aristocratic family. As Peggy is unable to conceive, her father has arranged a surrogate mother, a Russian dancer in Paris, who never appears in the novel. Stella is therefore half-Irish, half-Russian, and the novel asks whether her wild temperament comes from her Russian blood, or from her irregular upbringing. Her parents live separately, the father on the Irish estate, the mother in London, where she takes a series of lovers. The more conventional narrative of the absent or unknown father is inverted and replaced by an absent (legal) mother and unknown (biological) mother. Stella will go on to invert this yet again when, after a short-lived first marriage and the subsequent

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death of her first son, she marries again, only secretly, then has a second son by a Turkish lover whom she lives with but does not marry. Stella’s ‘defiance’, then, is a response to her origins, whether by birth or by culture. Stella’s approach to the question of women’s independence – or, more particularly, to her own independence – is of a piece with her modernism and socialism. Brought up by her father on his estate in Ireland, Stella is relatively isolated because of her class. Unlike other absentee landlords, Stella’s father remains on his estate instead of delegating all the work to an estate manager. However, the father is no socialist and maintains a business-like attitude. Stella tries to make friends outside of her class, but falls out with father when he evicts tenants she has befriended as a drunken father cannot pay the rent. Stella has promised their son, Jim, that the eviction will not take place, but she is too young to influence her father and cannot make good her promise – a hint that the well-meaning rich will break their promises to the poor, and that Stella’s rebelliousness may have a more virtual than practical character. After the outbreak of war, as the Irish struggle for independence grows, Stella identifies with the oppressed Irish, angering her father with her ‘socialistic views’.49 She marries a neighbour, but the union lasts only six months, long enough to give her a son, Desmond. The husband is killed in the war – a motif derived from Sheridan’s own life, although the circumstances are quite different – and the real point of the marriage is to give her a son, and examine her attitude to maternity. Stella’s next important relationship begins in London, with one Lord Anthony Tremaine. Tremaine seems to have been based on Lord Alexander Thynne, a lover of Sheridan until his death in combat only weeks from the Armistice.50 Among other functions, Anthony provides the theme in this novel of the lost husband who may eventually return, a theme shared with Sheridan’s next novel, The Thirteenth (1925), which narrates the succession of (thirteen) lovers its female protagonist takes in search of her missing husband. Even though Stella’s return to Anthony never takes place, this narrative thread gives the novel a conservative bent, linking Stella’s rebellious politics to the psychology of her rejection of patriarchal conservatism. Indeed, while in the novel it is Stella whose support of Irish independence outrages her father, in Sheridan’s own life it was her father who supported Home Rule and indeed became MP for Cork as a member of the Irish Nationalist Party.51 In the novel,

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Anthony represents conservatism and stability as opposed to Stella’s support of the Irish struggle and modernism. It seems that he is being set up as the lodestar of British conservatism to which she will eventually return, but this does not happen. His attitude to Stella is in a way paternalistic. ‘Others laughed at Stella’s uncompromising modernism, but [not] Anthony.’ Yet ‘It was this absurd modernism of hers that stood between them [. . .]’. When Stella teases Anthony about the traditional paintings in his old house and asks him whether he could replace the ‘Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas’, he replies ironically, ‘I could replace them with a few bright coloured futurists, Dadaïsts, I believe they are called! [. . .] A good portrait by Matisse, for instance, would help to fill the gaps I should think.’ She rejects this patrician irony: Stella was obdurate. ‘I prefer harmonies and designs, to coloured illustrations. I prefer even the immature future to the traditional past.’ Anthony exhaled a cloud of smoke. ‘Damn your modernism!’ he said with sudden irritation.52

Such passages anticipate the exploration of women’s modernist art in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), adding an element of futurism to Lily Briscoe’s formalist interests, and discussion of Stella’s need for independence again anticipates Woolf’s ‘room of one’s own’. Stella’s need for a room of her own takes more concrete form, although, as the novel shows, her desire for independence is chimerical. Anthony spends the night with her regularly at her home, but is annoyed that she makes him leave early, before the maid arrives. Stella responds with characteristic defiance: ‘I obliterate the familiarity of home life. I avoid the intimacy of a man in and out of my room, which means a perpetual tidying up, an unrelaxed effort. I avoid that horrible sight of a man in his shirt sleeves shaving! In fact, we avoid each other’s relaxed moods – you don’t understand, Anthony. If a man tries to dominate me I hate him, and if he doesn’t I despise him – that’s why I cannot love anyone. I’m an individualist!’ ‘An individualist!’ he repeated with contempt, ‘you are instinctively a non-moral woman, and if everyone followed your example there would be chaos in the world! Chaos!’ Stella laughed. ‘No, there would be freedom and happiness, and many lives worth living that now are not.’53

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Stella’s leftism and modernist feminism are here linked, her interest in the collective mixed with an individualism of a kind celebrated by the Egoist journal. An aloof father and absent mother have conditioned her anti-traditionalism: ‘I am simply the adopted daughter of — And I laugh at those who have got tradition and those who want it! Let those who have tradition take warning by the Russian Revolution. Traditions provoke Bolshevism, and Bolshevism levels all traditions!’54

The tradition in question is of course marriage. Stella goes on: ‘It is surprising to me that your traditional class do not talk Revolution, their social conditions are so intolerable. The working classes have no such petty tyrannies. Take for instance men, with their entailed properties and all their nauseating requirements. The unfairness that is necessitated by the English system of heritage. The contempt this involves towards female children. The martyrdom of mothers who are treated as responsible, instead of God . . . . I’m a Revolutionary, a new kind of Revolutionary. The workers can look after their cause. I’m going to work for the amelioration of the socalled Bourgeoisie.’55

While the novel does not concentrate on such conversations, the exchange is an indication that Stella’s defiance is being set up for a fall, her reading of Bolshevism and opposition to marriage a projection of her psychological circumstances. Stella’s objection to marriage and attachment to Anthony contradict each other. She marries Anthony in secret then goes away to her former husband’s house in Ireland to have his son. When Anthony visits her, he finds the house decorated in a modernist fashion by one Zakunsky, who ‘belonged to the Russian wave of culture that Stella said was beginning to dominate the world’.56 She is surrounded by a literary and artistic circle of ‘Friends of Irish Freedom’, including the thinly disguised ‘F. C. Mells’. When the estate agent of Stella’s father is murdered, she and her Republican crowd raise a glass to his killer. Anthony accuses her of lack of feeling – at first over the murder but then over her feeling towards him. She breaks down: ‘I can’t love – I can’t love,’ she repeated, ‘it’s no use reproaching me – I have never loved anyone. [. . .] I don’t believe I’m human – I’m a creature without a soul. [. . .] I have no soul – and you scold me because I cannot love!’57

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This outburst plainly locates Stella’s politics as the product of affective disorder. Her coldness is confirmed when her own father is murdered, and she responds with a justification of revolutionary violence: What horrible violence, what bloodshed in the cause of Irish Freedom! And yet it seemed to her that it was justified. Ireland must be freed. Ireland had wrought for 700 years. This was the last fight. It must succeed. Her father had stood in the way, and anyone in the way must be swept aside. Anthony, too, belonged to the enemy race. Stella viewed herself as a champion of freedom. Was she not Irish and Russian, too? The Russians had fought their bloody fight, and thrown off the oppression of centuries, and now it was for the Irish to prove their worth.58

Following raids in Cork by the Black and Tans, revenge burnings start. Stella is in favour of these burnings and goes to watch her own family home at Dromany Castle be destroyed, happy to contemplate its destruction – unlike Sheridan herself, who on returning to the family home at Innishannon in the summer of 1922 found herself trembling and sad to see a burnt-out ruin.59 While Stella is away from her own house watching her father’s house burn, her own house is also burned, and her infant son, abandoned by his nurses, dies in the flames. Despite this extraordinary loss, Stella continues in her revolutionary zeal, and travels to Berlin, where she attempts to obtain a visa to travel to Moscow. Her time is divided between various men – a member of the Turkish Embassy, a member of the Russian Embassy, a Russian artist, a Russian émigré and the British Ambassador. Stella’s modernism is affirmed by her participation in a circle of Russian artists whose objective is to travel to New York, which they see as the new home of modernism. She takes up art and, after a tentative beginning, is invited to do a portrait of ‘Littler’ – Hitler, who at that time was of course not so famous. Her portrait reflects modernist precepts, producing a very geometric design based on the moustache – ‘Through half-closed eyes she did not see the man, but saw a pattern – a design of shades and shadows dominated by that central cube of black.’60 There seems to be an intended irony – although how much of Hitler’s future Sheridan could have foreseen in 1924 is not clear – as Stella sees only form and not character, severely misjudging Hitler’s potential, even though she is taken to see him at a mass rally which calls for the death of the Jews, and giggles to herself ‘at the thought of Charlie Chaplin as a serious Revolutionary leader’.61

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The Russian Embassy will not at first grant Stella a visa, despite her pleading that ‘My whole object of life is to go to Russia [. . .] That is my natural ultimate home. I have a right to be there. My life has no raison d’être except in Russia, and for Russia. [. . .] I want to be where I belong.’62 When in the end she is offered a visa, her contact there, and one of her lovers, warns her that Moscow does not see her as a revolutionary in the way she sees herself. She is compromised by her links to the British ruling class, by her lack of party membership and demonstrable commitment, and will not receive any special treatment in Moscow. Stella rejects the plan of the Russian art circle to travel to New York. Against what she sees as their idealisation of the West, Stella cites Otto Spengler, provoking an intense response from Runi, the Futurist member of the group: ‘The rejection of Americanism is Europe’s undoing. Spengler himself is part of the crumbling civilization of which he writes. Dying Europe may reject Americanism! But Russia, which is neither Europe nor Asia, Russia, who is not dying, will not reject Americanism.’ ‘American civilization,’ quoted Stella ‘is a fruitless vanity; the only path towards wisdom is contemplation, and the land of contemplative psychology is Russia.’63

Runi counters: ‘New York is beginning to represent what Paris represented until to-day. Paris created in the soul the absolute necessity of being of one’s day. One inhaled modernism. New York, I am told, represents a hundred-fold more modernism than Paris; a giant background of cubist lights and shades, it brings with it a thirst for synthesis and style.’64

This exchange confirms a key disaggregation of ‘contemplative’ spiritual value and artistic and societal ‘modernism’, and points to Stella’s eventual rejection of the West and choice of Constantinople. Among the many men who love Stella, and seduce or assault her, it is a member of the Turkish Embassy in Berlin, Mehemet Aaly Bey, whom she eventually chooses. Unlike the others, he shelters her without making any sexual demands. When they finally have sex, in contrast to all her other lovers, it is she who goes to him in his bed. Aaly’s opposition to Western feminism is frequently iterated:

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It was all very well for Europeans to introduce freedom and emancipation, and to see their women undressed in public as they do not undress at home. The crudeness of European life had shaken him. He had not, at first, been able to live among European women and not suffer. Orientals could not, he said, play with passions as Europeans did.65

He remains a protective presence for Stella, in the background during her various affairs, and as she passes through a dark night of the soul and is found in a decadent night club, looking like a boy, dancing with a feminine man, high on cocaine. Stella finds Aaly’s patient but patriarchal support galling, and roughly asserts: ‘We are the dominating races – we of the West.’ His reply, in an unstable and decadent Germany, suggests an entirely different temperament to Stella’s own revolutionary defiance: ‘It’s at an end – wait, it won’t take long. The storm clouds are gathering. The Occident is doomed. Already the Western man is submitting his rule to woman. I am all for the emancipation of woman; but don’t imagine for one moment, Stella, that women can battle in the world on an equality with man. Take yourself, for instance. Every time you leave my roof and go forth, as you think, to be independent and stand on your own feet, as you call it, I know that sooner or later you will come back broken, dispirited, spiritually bruised and physically wrecked. Every time you persist in your experiment I shudder. [. . .] As an Oriental, I hate it fiercely. [. . .] In time, if you go on with your experiments, you will be so wearied, so broken in spirit, that you will—go—back—to—your—husband.’ Stella’s eyes flashed rebellion. ‘I’ll die first—’.66

Against Aaly’s prediction that she will return to the normative values represented by her husband, and to the normative situation of the open and avowed marriage she has so desperately avoided, Stella defiantly continues to assert the alternative of communism: Marriage was, in her eyes, the root of all evil. She loved living in Aaly’s house because she was not married to him, and because he had no ‘rights’. Aaly’s opinions were an argument in favour of Communism. ‘I think it is going to fill the gap. I think Communism is going to establish the proper sex standard. Man and woman Communists can share the same bed in an emergency; they can live platonically like you and me, in the same house, they are the people who are going to solve all the problems, social, sexual, religious and economic.’67

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Stella now is divided between her love of communism and the love of God, which she has learned from Aaly. Pregnant by him, Stella travels to Constantinople with Aaly, where she gives birth. It is there that under Aaly’s protection and in his house – though not married to him – that she is finally able to tell him that she loves him, words she has never before been able to utter.68 Stella’s husband locates her in Constantinople and offers to take her back, child and all. Aaly tries to persuade her to return to her husband. On the final page, as he tries to persuade her, Aaly says ‘Allah must decide—’, to which she replies, ‘But Allah did decide – Aaly, the night that I did not go to Russia—’.69 This is not an absolutely decisive ending, as it may appear. Stella has long rejected Aaly’s fatalism. This is the first time that she utters the word Allah, and she does so knowing that it is she who has chosen Constantinople over Moscow. She has not fulfilled Aaly’s desire that she return to her husband; instead she lives with Aaly, unmarried, as a wife, with his child. She has accepted the spiritual calm which he offers, but not the formality of marriage which Aaly’s own ethics and culture demand. Although the novel does not explore the implications of this, it means that Aaly has accepted Stella’s values, as well as she his. The novel is a complex take on the conventional genre of the romance, in which the rebellious girl must learn how to love and accept love, and in particular a reworking of the desert romance, where the Oriental is not now the seducer or rapist but a patient and self-controlled man who is instead seduced. There is, of course, none of the romance of tents and deserts; instead, the scenes are revolutionary Ireland, conservative London, the Russian émigré community in Berlin, and a Constantinople which is seen only from the beauty and security of her new home. What is really remarkable is the manner in which themes of modernism in art and life are woven into the question of the Russian Revolution and the future of Western values. Remarkable, too, that the novel is so decisive in its analysis of the revolutionary and feminist temperament – and indeed in its linking of the two. Stella’s turn to the East is not exactly mirrored in Sheridan’s later return to Turkey which she describes in A Turkish Kaleidoscope (1926). There, the emphasis is on Turkish nationalism and ‘modernism’ under Mustapha Kemal, with Russia ‘helping, pushing and encouraging’. Sheridan’s own behaviour there is that of the privileged outsider, not a spiritual acolyte – she steals a gravestone from a Muslim cemetery on a jape. Sheridan’s trajectory, though not informed by the global theorising of a Lenin or a Wells, is notable for its synthesis

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of political, artistic and personal themes, its feminism, socialism and modernism, and for the manner in which her connections, not least her relationship to Winston, carried her across so much of the postwar European world.

Notes 1. Anita Leslie, Cousin Clare: The Tempestuous Career of Clare Sheridan (London: Hutchinson, 1976), p. 79. Leslie was the granddaughter of Sheridan’s mother’s sister and most of the biography is taken from Sheridan’s own accounts to her. It at times re-narrates events that Sheridan recounted in her autobiographies. 2. Ibid. pp. 120–1. 3. Ibid. p. 104. 4. Clare Sheridan, To the Four Winds (London: Deutsch, 1957), pp. 90, 94. On Fetterlein, see Robert Service, Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West (London: Macmillan, 2011), Kindle edition, Chapter 21. 5. Ibid. p. 140. 6. Leslie, Cousin Clare, pp. 108, 113–14. 7. ‘With Lenin and Trotsky’, The Times, 22 November 1920: 13+. The Times Digital Archive (accessed 26 November 2014). 8. Clare Sheridan, Nuda Veritas (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1927), p. 198. 9. These claims came to light in the British press in 2002 when the relevant archives were made public. See, for example, Neil Tweedie and Peter Day, ‘MI5 suspected Churchill’s Cousin was a Red Spy’, http://www. telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1414562/MI5-suspected-Churchillscousin-was-a-red-spy.html (accessed 4 December 2014). 10. Kevin Windle, ‘“A Bolshevist Agent of Some Importance”: Aleksandr Zuzenko’s Autobiographical Notes and British Government Records’, The Slavonic and East European Review 92:2 (April 2014), 284–304, see p. 291. 11. Clare Sheridan, Russian Portraits (London: Cape, 1921), p. 7. 12. Ibid. p. 12. 13. Ibid. pp. 34–5. 14. Ibid. pp. 52–4. 15. Ibid. pp. 64–7. 16. Ibid. p. 46. 17. Ibid. p. 75. 18. Ibid. pp. 123, 124, 125. 19. Ibid. p. 146. 20. Clare Sheridan, Across Europe with Satanella (London: Duckworth, 1925), p. 97.

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154 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution Sheridan, To the Four Winds, p. 77. Sheridan, Russian Portraits, pp. 74, 93, 80. Ibid. p. 84. Ibid. p. 88. Ibid. pp. 101, 103. Ibid. pp. 108, 109, 112. Ibid. pp 109–11. Sheridan was indeed debriefed by the Foreign Office, but left no account of the meeting. See To the Four Winds, p. 147. Leslie, Cousin Clare, pp. 125–7. Although the flirtation can be felt in the account in Russian Portraits, it is only later that Sheridan revealed the extent of Trotsky’s passionate interest. Sheridan, Russian Portraits, p. 133. Ibid. p. 134. A copy is held at the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent. Sheridan, Russian Portraits, p. 145. Ibid. p. 149. Ibid. p. 129. Ibid. pp. 138, 147. Ibid. p. 176. Ibid. p. 178. Sheridan, To the Four Winds, pp. 110, 102. Sheridan, Russian Portraits, pp. 199–200, 201. Clare Sheridan, In Many Places (London: Cape, 1923), pp. 9–10. Ibid. p. 29. Ibid. p. 8. Ibid. pp. 144–7. Ibid. pp. 190, 11. Ibid. pp. 210–11. The first edition has no subtitle but the advertisement for the ‘cheap edition’ from Sheridan’s second novel subtitles it ‘The Passionate History of a Modernist Woman’. Clare Sheridan, The Thirteenth (London: Duckworth, 1925), ifp. Clare Sheridan, Stella Defiant (London: Duckworth, 1924), p. 334. Ibid. p. 36. Leslie, Cousin Clare, p. 88. Ibid. p. 63. Sheridan, Stella Defiant, pp. 53, 57. Ibid. p. 58. Ibid. p. 61. Ibid. p. 62. Ibid. p. 74. Ibid. p. 79. Ibid. p. 99. Leslie, Cousin Clare, p. 164.

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155

Stella Defiant, p. 251. Ibid. p. 249. Ibid. p. 242. Ibid. p. 194. Ibid. p. 195. Ibid. p. 133. Ibid. pp. 227–8. Ibid. p. 229. Ibid. p. 306. Ibid. p. 334.

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Chapter 6

Conveying the New Russian Culture: From Eden and Cedar Paul to René Fülöp-Miller

Eden and Cedar Paul are known mainly to historians of this period as translators. However, they also figure in the mediation of certain aspects of the Russian Revolution though their involvement in the Plebs League and their attempt to develop a notion of workers’ education. The Pauls therefore offer an example of the translator as something much more than a medium supposed to convey an otherwise little-known culture. Rather, they are a fascinating example of translation as intervention with the translator as political agent. Although they were committed to workers’ education before 1917, they took inspiration from Proletcult and from the educational reforms of Anatoly Lunacharsky, and combined this interest with the concepts of progressive education, psychoanalysis, Bergsonian vitalism and Charles Badouin’s theory of suggestion. As remarkable as this combination of elements may seem for the time, the Pauls were only partly able to work through the implications of their own lines of thought, and the pattern of their thinking has to be construed from some of their decisions as to which texts to translate, as well as from their own writings. Eden Paul and his wife Cedar (née Gertrude Davenport) were friends of Beatrice Webb, who described Cedar as an associate of Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin, and were committed to the revolutionary Left. Eden was the son of the publisher Kegan Paul, was a qualified medical doctor and long-standing friend of the Webbs, who had suddenly converted to communism.1 Eden and Cedar’s usually joint translations are numerous and include several works of political theory, such as Robert Michels’ Political Parties (1915),

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Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky’s ABC of Communism (1922), and Rosa Luxemburg’s Letters from Prison (1923), alongside numerous works on psychology and education, including A Young Girl’s Diary (1921) with a preface by Sigmund Freud, and Pierre Janet’s Psychological Healing (1925).2 The wide range of their translations also includes works by Romain Rolland, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Walter Rathenau and René Marchand. The Pauls were members of the Plebs League, a Marxist breakaway group at Ruskin College in Oxford. Ruskin was independent of Oxford University, mainly to make the point that it was dedicated to the education of working-class men who would otherwise have no access to higher education. As such the college was a beacon of working-class education, but the Plebs League had broken with its management over their refusal to teach Marxist economics. The League argued for what it called a ‘proletarian education’ geared to social change, and denounced the approach of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) which, they claimed, treated education ‘as a commodity of which certain institutions called Universities have the monopoly’. According to the League, the WEA treated education as if it were a ‘commodity’ which had been stolen from the workers and which could in some simple fashion be returned to them. Against this, the League argued for a qualitative shift in the approach to workers’ education. Yet, although the League called for an education centred on political economy, it did not aim to create a revolutionary consciousness, nor did it demand an imitation of the October Revolution. The Russian Revolution, which called forth so much commentary elsewhere, did not merit a single article in the 1918 or 1919 issues of the journal, and indeed was barely mentioned, even though the magazine endorsed the ‘out-and-out’ Bolshevism of Arthur Ransome’s despatches for The Daily News as an alternative to the Fabianism of Julius West’s pamphlet The Russian Revolution and British Democracy (1917).3 Yet, in their introductory essay to a special issue of the journal on Marx, Eden and Cedar Paul asserted that ‘the Marxists of the new school’ had renounced the emphasis on the state, and were instead concentrated on educating workers, ‘aiming at the control of industry on industrial unionist lines, hoping that the growth of industrial unionism will dry up the springs of capitalism at source’. Their position was not in fact very distinct from that of the gradualists, so while the Russian Revolution was ‘an exemplification of the power of Marxist thought’ it was ‘(paradoxically) a refutation of Marxist extremism – a refutation, let us say, of Engelism’. In a relatively

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conventional analysis, the Pauls conclude that Russia does not exemplify the future of the West because the economic backwardness of Russia does not fulfil the conditions stipulated by Marx.4 If the Pauls endorsed the idea of a politicised workers’ education, it was not because they shared the enthusiasm of some Plebs contributors for soviet democracy. The Pauls favoured what they called ‘ergatocracy’, from ergatēs (worker), by which they meant not government by the workers but government by the few for and on behalf of the workers, taking their models from Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905), with its caste of ‘Samurai’, and from Robert Michels’ Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, which the Pauls themselves translated in 1915. They did, though, share the Plebs’ enthusiasm for the ideas of Anatoly Lunacharsky, whose ‘Problems of Education in Soviet Russia’ and ‘Working-Class Culture’ appeared in translation in the journal.5 As Commissar of Education, Lunacharsky had his own special status in the Soviet pantheon. Surveying the Bolshevik leadership in Bolshevist Russia, Étienne Antonelli wrote: ‘Lounatcharsky [sic], with the thin, emaciated profile of a Slav Christ, mild mystical eyes, and a gentle mind which has more of art than of strength of will, is one of the most attractive types of the group.’6 For Bruce Lockhart, who met him on his Moscow mission in 1918, Lunacharsky was the Bolshevik leader who ‘made the deepest impression’, praising his ‘brilliant intellect and wide culture’, and admiring his ability to draw bourgeois intellectuals to Bolshevism at the same time as preserving the bourgeois arts in the museums, operas and theatres.7 At this stage, Lunacharsky was a supporter of Proletcult. Noting that ‘A conscious popular rule is only possible with a high degree of popular culture’, Lunacharsky reminded his readers that the majority of Russian intellectuals, especially teachers, had sabotaged the social revolution in the period since 1905, when Karl Kautsky had hoped that intellectuals would become allies of the workers. The proletariat should now learn from this earlier betrayal, and Soviet schools should enable this with a ‘polytechnic’ approach, without class or gender distinction, with free access, free books and meals, and free clothing for the poorest.8 The Pauls were much taken with the notion of proletarian culture, with an emphasis on education rather than on cultural organisation in the version they adopted, and produced their own book on the topic, Proletcult (Proletarian Culture) (1921). However, there is a tension between the self-activating and anti-elitist mode of official Proletcult and the Pauls’ belief in the necessary role of an elite as set out in their book Creative Revolution: A Study of Communist

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Ergatocracy (1920). The Pauls certainly felt that they were close to the mainstream of communism, as is evident from their pamphlet Communism (1921), prepared for the Labour Publishing Company. Although lost in the storm of such transient publications which followed the Russian Revolution, this pamphlet is interesting for the ambition which the Pauls show – an ambition, in terms of their attempt to intervene in the shaping of communist discourse, which was not realised, in part no doubt due to unfolding events in Russia, in part due to the Pauls’ own shifts of position, but also and, in my view, largely because the Pauls did not succeed in working thorough all of the intellectual moves that would have been necessary properly to connect and to integrate Marxism, psychoanalysis and psychology, the philosophy of progressive education, and Bergsonian evolution.9 It is probably not unsurprising that they were unable to do so, but theirs is a very early attempt to synthesise such a range of approaches. Communism is an orthodox defence of Marxism in almost every detail, although it includes an original passage that gives new substance to the Marxist distinction between utopian and scientific socialism by adding to Engels’ discussion in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) the anglophone fictional utopias of Bellamy, Morris, Howells and Wells. The Pauls did though signal their desire to broaden the intellectual basis of Marxism in their defence of the Leninist notion of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Following Lenin, the Pauls argue that the revolution must be defended not by a body ‘based on the people’s will’ but one ‘broad-based upon proletarian ideology’ which ‘must harmonise with instinctively felt proletarian needs’ and ‘in large measure be a spontaneous outgrowth of creative evolution and creative revolution’. The allusion to the Pauls’ own version of Bergson is not elaborated by them here, in the context of a pamphlet intended to defend Marxist orthodoxy, but they do use the occasion to defend their own version of ‘ergatocracy’ which, it turns out, corresponds closely to the Soviet Dictatorship of the Proletariat, of which they argue: once established, its stringency will gradually relax as popular ideology is modified by the new conditions. The co-ordinations of the workers, when they realise that at last the government is their own government, will come more and more to resemble the harmonious self-discipline of an orchestra or a choir; while the dictatorship in its turn will become more like the guiding will and inspiration of a competent orchestral conductor or choirmaster. But there will always be guidance.

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Outlining Lenin’s view of a future, non-violent, ‘integrated’ society, the Pauls add: Stated in the terms of modern psychology this means that man has a group self as well as an individual self, and that freedom cannot be secured for the individual self alone. The new society will be based, not upon the specious freedom of the ‘individual voter’ [. . .] but upon the freedom of self-governing occupational groups or soviets – selfgoverning in so far as is consistent with the needs of the whole of communist society.10

Albeit in an approximate manner, the Pauls map their own model of workers’ government (‘there will always be guidance’) on to their Bergsonian notion of collective human evolution. It is clear that 1917 gave the Pauls confidence in the ideas they had already developed, and the impetus to advance them. Creative Revolution was dedicated to Lenin, but even Lenin is criticised for his commitment to democracy in State and Revolution (1917). ‘Leave democracy to the liberal bourgeoisie and to the Laodiceans among the socialists’, the Pauls tell Lenin: ‘Your objective is ergatocracy.’11 Ergatocracy will be an extension of the dictatorship of the proletariat and will mean ‘the administration of the workers, for the workers, by the workers’ and since all but the ‘immature, the retired and the incapacitated will then be active workers, there will be no class rule’.12 As vast as is the contrast between the influential Lenin and the marginal Pauls, it is in some ways a remarkable moment in which two fairly radical socialists are found taking to task the key Marxist doctrine of revolutionary agency and attempting to substitute another model of the drive to social change without having recourse, as Fabians and others did, to the comforts of gradualism. The Pauls’ model of change had its root in Engels’ rejection of utopian socialism, and was strongly reinforced by their reading of Bergson and Freud. They did not believe that socialism implied simple changes that could be achieved by straightforward administrative adjustments, but that it represented the potential for an evolutionary transformation of the human. Bergson is invoked, in the Pauls’ own version: Creative evolution, as the right wing thinks, and creative revolution, as the left wing thinks, has still to work upon the developing plasma, has still to fashion the developing limbs of the growing organism. It still lies shrouded within the womb of time [. . .] It exists only in the

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realm of mind – or, at least, prior to November 1917, it existed only in the realm of mind. And as a mental entity, it exists quite as much in the realm of art and feeling, in the realm of impulse and desire, as in the realm of reason or intellect. [. . .] Socialism is still in the world of the unborn, the world of human conation, the world (as a Freudian might say) of the libido.13

The Pauls in fact have much less to say about Freud than about Bergson. They draw on the work of the Swedish Bergsonian Algot Ruhe, whose reading of Bergson’s Creative Evolution led him to ‘picture life as a great current emerging from some central point, radiating in all directions but almost everywhere arrested’, and argue that ‘Man is the place where, as nowhere else, the vital current makes a way.’ Man must allow intuition to lead him on that way.14 Bergson becomes the lever for the Pauls to argue vigorously against the ‘utterly false’ version of Marxism, which ‘reduces the entire content of history to an automatic process wherein the consciousness of the human units plays no part’. They argue instead that it is only ‘man’s desire’ which brings about changes in the methods of production, and that these changes in turn ‘act upon the mass psychology of society, arousing new tastes, generating fresh impulses and desires, modifying the intelligence’.15 While traditional Marxism has emphasised the objective condition of an advanced industrial economy necessary for revolution, the Pauls argue that the Russian and Mexican Revolutions, occurring in countries where capitalism was barely developed, alike demonstrate that the desire for change is as much a factor as the supposedly objective conditions. Bergson, then, is given pride of place in the ‘new conception of social dynamics’, between Marx and Freud: But call it poetry, call it philosophy, call it mysticism, no left-wing socialist who grasps the meaning of the vital impetus will contest the value of the conception [of élan vital] (when applied to social evolution) as the obverse of the materialist conception of history. This idea of human conation, of human impulse and desire, acting and reacting on the material conditions of production, operating throughout history as the instrument of creative evolution, and manifesting itself in times of crisis as the quasi-omnipotent force of creative revolution – have we not here one of those generalisations which answers to the two great tests of scientific truth; have we not here a truth which is the supplement and logical development of Marxism? [. . .] since November 1917, we have seen creative revolution at work.16

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The Pauls’ belief in human evolution is strangely contradicted by their assumption that an elite will always be needed to guide the masses. In a chapter entitled ‘The Iron Rule of Oligarchy’, Creative Revolution defends the conception of an elite of Samurai in Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905), invoking Robert Michels’ Political Parties (which furnishes the phrase used in the chapter title).17 The Pauls positively celebrate the creative power of the elite who, they believe, correspond to Wells’ ‘kinetic type’: Who can doubt that Trotsky is one of the most efficient army organisers that ever lived; that this remarkable anti-militarist feels an abiding delight in the making and the management of the famous Red Army? And who can doubt that Lenin and Bukharin and the Lunacharskys are all persons who secure a supremely congenial mode of self-expression in their task of large-scale manipulation of man the social being; in their very work of modifying the plastic social environment [. . .] Fundamentally poietic [sic], yet gifted with a due share of the efficiency which the artist so often lacks, they are, before all, creative revolutionists.18

The Pauls evidently shared the cultish admiration for Trotsky, Lenin and other of the Bolshevik leaders which grew up in this period among supporters and enemies alike, yet their overall conception goes a little beyond the recurrent tropes of poetic revolution and sublime administrative grasp. Although the Pauls do not quite state as much – perhaps because they grasped their own project in slightly different terms – the frame of ideas they assembled is implicitly a critique and modification of the Hegelian, Marxist and Leninist concepts which underlay and drove the Revolution. Their quest was in a loose sense an anticipation of the later dissatisfaction of the New Left with unsatisfactory Marxist psychological theory, and with models of progress and of revolutionary agency, though the Pauls’ tentative solutions are very different from those of the New Left. Central to their enquiries is the question of the proletariat as the ‘subject of history’, although the Pauls do not field a direct discussion of this concept. When Adorno and Horkheimer tackled the question of the psychology of the HegelianMarxist subject in The Dialectic of Enlightenment and elsewhere, it had come to seem, judging by events in Germany and Russia, that the proletariat could be and had been deflected from a historical mission which could no longer be depicted as scientifically inevitable, and that a new cultural psychology was needed in order properly to model the reality of defeat and impasse. The Frankfurt School responded

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with pessimism to a situation of defeat; the Pauls, who did not in any case share the intellectual resources of the Adorno–Horkheimer group, advanced their own theories in a much more optimistic mood. In other words, the imperatives for the Pauls to seek to elaborate the theory of the proletariat as subject of history were not driven by perceived historical emergency. Neither does their thinking appear to have been driven by the spirit of intellectual contestation. They seem to have believed that they were simply enhancing or extending Marxism and not implicitly challenging its foundations. The Pauls were strongly interested in the question of education in both of its roles: as the means of forming the mind of the workers with the goal of producing radical change, and as the method by which the consciousness of the newly socialist worker, and therefore of the humanity of the future, would be developed. These are, as will readily appear, quite different questions. When Trotsky turned his mind to the questions of the formation of the new society in its arts and other social practices, in the essays from 1923 published in English as Problems of Life (1924) and Literature and Revolution (1925), he seemed divided in his view of the nature of the necessary transformation. In part, it must be simply quantitative: The proletariat will be able to prepare the formation of a new, that is, a Socialist culture and literature [. . .] by large, social, cultural and economic means. Art needs comfort, even abundance. Furnaces have to be hotter, wheels have to turn more quickly, schools have to work better.19

After the effective end of the civil war, he noted that it was no longer necessary to persuade the working class of the need for revolution, and that the ‘our chief problems have shifted to the needs of culture and economic reconstruction. They have become more complicated, more fractionary and in a way more prosaic.’20 ‘Prosaic’ as reconstruction may have seemed, compared to what Trotsky labelled the ‘poetry’ of revolution, his adherence to the model of Marx and Engels is evident. Marx and Engels considered the form of a communist society to be unimaginable and certainly not the kind of administrative utopia projected by Proudhon and Saint-Simon and practised by Owen. Even after the revolution, Trotsky still envisaged the future culture as a distant and imprescriptible prospect: ‘If a line were extended from present art to the Socialist art of the future, one would say that we have hardly now passed through the stage of even preparing for its preparation.’21 For these reasons, Trotsky argued

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against the artistic claims of Proletcult (which was in any case no longer the force in 1923 that it had been until 1920). Although every ruling class creates its own culture, Trotsky noted, it did not simply follow that the proletariat must do likewise. Although the ‘transition to Socialism [. . .] on a world scale, will last [. . .] decades’, Trotsky asserted that even during this long period of transition – a key term in his description of the new period – the proletariat would not have ‘enough time’ to create a proletarian culture, and that in any case ‘the proletariat will be more and more dissolved into a Socialist community and will free itself from its class characteristics and thus cease to be a proletariat’, with the effect that a ‘new culture’ cannot be created ‘during the period of dictatorship’.22 Unlike Trotsky, who remained true to the strangely unpresentable vision of futurity which he drew from Marx and Engels, the Pauls were more interested in practical questions of education, were generally supportive of Proletcult, and cast around for the intellectual means to consolidate the workers’ society. Their treatment of the topic in Proletcult (Proletarian Culture) focuses much more on the issue of education than culture. In contrast to Trotsky, whose (later) account would emphasise the necessarily abstract nature of the culture of the future society, the Pauls dig in and defend its actualisation under Lunacharsky, Bogdanov and others. Their initial formulation reflects the key distinction between the pre- and post-revolutionary proletariat. Before the revolution, proletarian culture is said to be a ‘fighting culture’, preparing the way of revolution; post-revolution, the workers’ State can now to an increasing extent devote its attention to what we have termed the arts and graces of life. The social revolution will have released the creative forces slumbering in the proletariat; art and science will blossom abundantly and assume new forms.23

The Pauls clearly identify the change of gears from the revolutionary proletariat to the dictatorship of the proletariat, but do not even acknowledge the theoretical problem of Marxism of which Trotsky is keenly aware, even if he does not explicitly formulate it. That problem concerns the whole question of the transition from capitalist to communist society which, as well as being a practical issue of government and administration, also sits astride the question of revolutionary agency and subjectivity. As is well known, Hegel had made fairly clear claims about the relationship between the state, bourgeois society and the family and individual in The Philosophy

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of Right, and had given a map of the formation of Geist in The Phenomenology of Spirit that connected individual and social development in a formulation which made reason as absolute knowledge the foundation and goal of human historical existence. It is also well known that Marx and Engels formulated their philosophy in large part as a repudiation of Hegel’s totalising vision, as they interpreted it, and rejected the notion of a Hegelian ‘World Spirit’ in favour of attention to the multiplicity of human actors and circumstances, although this multiplicity would in fact congregate in any historical moment around two competing classes. The key feature of Marxism is that, while it firmly and, in the minds of the Bolsheviks and others, scientifically predicts the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society, it seeks to give only the vaguest indications about the process of transformation in post-revolutionary society, and indeed its principal formulation – that the state will take over ownership of all capital property and then wither away – creates no road map. What Trotsky seems to take from this seems to be much closer to the radical vision of liberty proposed by the Hegelian-Marxist tradition. Taken as a whole, the essays assembled in Literature and Revolution present a picture of the present in terms of the unavoidable imbrication of the immediate cultural past with the aspiration towards a yetunrealised future. In refusing to accept whatever now presents itself as the manifestation of this still-remote future, Trotsky remains true to the spirit of Socialism: Utopian or Scientific, yet also emblematises the gap which has been opened between the post-revolutionary aftermath and the still unpresentable future – a gap filled by waves of competing voices. Untroubled by the philosophical considerations which shape Trotsky’s approach, the Pauls were more content to look for practical solutions, and to draw on a variety of disciplines. The first chapters of Proletcult do not deal with the present and future, or even with Russia, but give an extensive outline of the Plebs League, and the establishment of the Central Labour College as an alternative to the model of working-class education which had been offered by Ruskin College, the Workers’ Education Association and other bodies. The simple deficiency of these earlier efforts at workers’ education in Britain is that they did not advocate class struggle and ‘were in no sense whatever a spontaneous production of the working class spirit’.24 The Adult School Movement and the National Adult School Union had been concerned only with spreading literacy, while the Cooperative movement had aimed only at technical education and reformist integration. The WEA is denounced as assimilationist –

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‘there is no political alchemy which can turn an industrial or political enemy into an educational friend’ – and Ruskin College as more geared to ‘imbibing the university atmosphere instead of guiding a revolutionary movement’. The Pauls describe how their own ‘small propagandist group’ was established by dissatisfied students of Ruskin, once that college had departed from its original ‘quasi-revolutionary roots’. 25 None of what the Pauls describe is ‘Proletcult’ as such, since they are dealing with the question of revolutionary consciousness in relation to the lack of Marxist education in Britain, and their main objective is to assert the importance of what they see as a properly proletarian education. In doing so they also make connections to traditions of progressive education which are outside the Marxist or Soviet model, making reference to the ideas and projects of Spanish anarchist and educational theorist Francisco Ferrer, Swiss educationalist Adolphe Ferrière and the Portuguese head of an experimental school in Belgium, A. Faria de Vasconcelos.26 Vasconcelos, for example, advocated a ‘practical pedagogy’ in co-educational rural boarding schools, with manual work part of the curriculum, general cultivation supplemented by special training based on individual tastes, nude gymnastics, excursions, camping, individual research and class presentation, collective research, moral education through the ‘critical sense of freedom’, and the reward of creativity.27 The new Soviet schools were formed under the broad direction of Lunacharsky and the People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkompros), which he directed. They did indeed reflect the ideas of European and American progressive educationalists such as John Dewey, August Lay, Maria Montessori and Ferrière, although Narkompros lacked both the political and logistical weight that would have been needed to roll out a consistent programme. The tension evident in Vasconcelos’ ‘New School’ between individualism and communalism emerged in Russia as a full-blown debate between the Petrograd educationalists, with Lunacharsky at their head, and the much more communalist Moscow group.28 The Pauls laboured both to grasp the complexity of early Soviet educational and cultural policy in a period of civil war, and to convey it to their imagined readers. The Times just one year later featured a denunciation of the school system and of the policies of Zlata Lilina of Narkompros, citing an émigré publication by Tatiana Varsher, a professor of ancient history.29 The unsigned Times article repeats Varsher’s accusation that the Soviet system has ‘destroyed’ the family, mothers can ‘no longer fulfil their natural function’, children are consigned to the street, children’s immorality is praised, and outside the model schools which were shown to foreign

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visitors, children were starved, beaten, without books and toys, their will to learn destroyed.30 Against the general background of denunciation of Soviet family and educational policy in organs such as The Times and The Morning Post, the Pauls had set themselves a complicated task: to explain Soviet education policy, which they conflated, either in error or for reasons of economy, with Proletcult; to claim a continuity between the work of the Plebs League and the Soviet system; to give some indication of the conflicts which had taken root in Soviet education and arts policies without exaggerating these differences (and creating an image of dysfunction); finally, to make their own idiosyncratic suggestions about the role which various forms of new psychology might play in proletarian education. A minimal indication of the conflicts around education policy and Proletcult are given in the one chapter exclusively dedicated to Russia, although these are not very fully presented. The Pauls proceed by outlining the conception of Lunacharsky which he had expressed in the articles translated in Plebs Magazine, in which the culture of the Russian proletariat had the supreme responsibility of founding what would ultimately become a universal culture. Lunacharsky took the stance that the proletariat must not renounce bourgeois culture. The Pauls prefer the view of Pavel Lebedev-Polyanskii who, they do not explain, was the head of Proletcult, which was structurally independent of the Commissariat for Education, and who denounced the ‘poison’ of bourgeois culture and argued for ‘a strictly working-class’ culture. They also endorse Alexander Bogdanov, leader of the Moscow Proletcult, who argued for the creation of a proletarian science, above all in the area of economics.31 Any reader who had gone to the Pauls’ book expecting a full account of the early Soviet cultural scene might have been disappointed that a relatively low proportion of the book is dedicated to Russia, and that the Pauls seem to present more in the way of judgement than of narrative or fact. Had the Pauls been poets, this text might have attained the status of an eccentric classic, such as Ezra Pound’s Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), a battered document of mind and times gone wrong, implicated with the creative work in such a way as to make the two indissociable. The Pauls were not Pound, but in their attempt to supply Marxism with the psychology they felt it lacked, their bibliographies and pattern of translation suggest a similar drive to overcome gaps both in public knowledge and in the agenda of the revolutionary leaders. The key chapter in Proletcult, then, turns out to be the that dealing with ‘The New Psychology’, in which the Pauls juxtapose Freud with early attempts to develop a mass psychology, and recommend the model of suggestion and autosuggestion as a means of

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developing the proletarian unconscious. Here the departure from Bolshevism and Marxism is notable. The Pauls make use of Arthur Tansley’s The New Psychology and Its Relation to Life (1920), an early and influential attempt to introduce Freud and Jung to a wider anglophone audience. Eden Paul had translated Albert Moll’s The Sexual Life of the Child (Das Sexualleben des Kindes (1908)) in 1912, and picked up the theme again in 1921 in a pamphlet of the same title written for the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, which was basically a short paraphrase of Moll’s work. Paul mentioned in that pamphlet that he had received a commission to translate Freud’s Traumdeutung, subsequently withdrawn, and the Pauls did publish a translation of A Young Girl’s Diary with Freud’s introduction, in 1921, as well as the translation of Fritz Wittels’ Sigmund Freud, His Personality, His Teaching, and His School in 1924.32 Among other things, then, the Pauls were committed Freudians, yet they are keen to de-emphasise the sexual aspect of the ‘new psychology’. Asserting that ‘the older science tended to exaggerate man’s rationality’, the Pauls explain that there are ‘three universal complexes’ shaping action – ‘the ego complex, the herd complex, and the sex complex’ – and distance themselves from the Freudians who find the latter overwhelmingly important, while they ‘are far more closely concerned with the other fundamental complexes’.33 The Pauls were not aware that Freud himself was also turning to the question of mass psychology, in Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921), and their points of reference therefore lie elsewhere. They refer approvingly to a short section of Tansley’s book which discusses the herd and defines the proletariat as ‘the most powerful and important of all existing partial herds’.34 Although Tansley purports to be presenting mainly the ideas of Freud, Jung and Janet, the term ‘herd’ appears hundreds of times in his book, not because of its place in psychoanalysis at that time but due to the new prominence given to the notion of the herd by Wilfred Trotter, in a 1908 essay and in Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916), and taken up by Gilbert Murray and others.35 Trotter’s rather speculative original essays were not intended as an account of war and are not psychoanalytic in nature, though his book contains a chapter examining the nature of collective enmity between Britain and Germany in social-psychological terms. Murray’s lecture suggests that both positive and negative claims can be made for the role of the herd instinct with reference to the war. Tansley, in turn, muses on human suggestibility in the context of the ‘herd’ and suggests that it is a key human quality:

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Suggestion is a non-rational process depending on the interrelationship of complexes and their affects, and it plays an immense part in the building up and modification of mental complexes. Its origin is not clearly understood, but its great importance in human affairs is largely connected with the influence of the herd on the mind of the gregarious individual. The herd is one of the most potent sources of suggestion to the individual mind, and it is by herd suggestion that many of the most important complexes which determine the opinions and conduct of the individual are fashioned. The imitativeness of man and his respect for authority depend on his suggestibility.36

Tansley’s case is thinly argued, but it gives the Pauls enough confidence to consider the role of education as a mass intervention designed to overrule the ‘ego instinct’ with the ‘herd instinct’, and claim that ‘Education acts largely in virtue of its power to turn these instincts, these complexes, these affects, to account’. ‘The herd complex’, they note, ‘was the basis of primitive communism’ and ‘has been the basis of the impulse towards communism [. . .] throughout history’, yet ‘for centuries the aim of bourgeois culture [. . .] was to emphasise the ego complex at the expense of the herd complex’.37 To bring the undeveloped science of mass psychology to bear on communism is already a bold gesture, but the Pauls go further. They assert that education, in the light of the new psychology, is much more about educating the unconscious than the conscious self, and that education should now be regarded as a form of suggestion, a connection which they acknowledge is novel, but which they believe will soon become ‘commonplace’.38 Their source on suggestion is the work of the psychoanalyst Charles Baudouin, presented in his (frequently reprinted) Suggestion and Autosuggestion (1920), which the Pauls themselves had translated and introduced. Baudouin glosses ‘suggestion’ as ‘the subconscious realisation of an idea’,39 and in Proletcult the Pauls assert that: Suggestion and autosuggestion are ideomotive [sic] force; the force whereby, through the intermediation of the subconscious, thought is realised in action. That is the meaning of Marxism as a revolutionary high-explosive; for the Marxist ideology arouses the latent autosuggestions of the proletarian status. [. . .] Education is suggestion. What counts in initiating suggestion is not the will but the imagination. [. . .] The function of the Proletcultist is to fire the imagination, until the imagination realises itself in action.40

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It seems remarkable that the Pauls, in this moment at least, present education not as the liberation of the reasoning individual but as a more or less mechanical means of harnessing both conscious and subconscious forces, yet this is just an aspect of their eclectic approach to ideas which are assembled in an almost collage-like manner, without any thorough attempt to pursue all of the workings which these models from different domains require, in themselves and in relation to the other. Really what the Pauls develop is a palette, and this suggests a parallel between their own intellectual agenda and the pattern of their translations. Where the Pauls translate a work which might seem less central or even antipathetic to their agenda, it is usually clear why they have selected it in terms of their own pattern of interests, and their desire to expand the palette of anglophone intellectual discourse. They found their aim of combining social thought and individual psychology reflected, but in anti-communist fashion, in Aurel Kolnai’s Psychoanalysis and Sociology (1921).41 Kolnai was only twenty when this book was published, a student in Vienna, and became better known much later for his ethical writings and his critique of Nazism in The War on the West (1938). What is notable about it for our purposes is that this book evidences the earliest attempts to map psychoanalysis on to mass politics. Kolnai’s principal influences seem to be Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1915) and Durkheim’s On the Division of Social Labour (1893), and his main claim is dependent on Paul Federn’s Zur Psychologie der Revolution: die vaterlose Gesellschaft (1919) which also makes use of the motif of the revolt of brothers against paternal authority.42 Kolnai makes extensive use of the highly speculative notion developed by Freud in Totem and Taboo of the excluded brothers in early society banding together to kill the father. Stating that ‘the mechanism of collective ideas exhibits striking analogy with the mechanism of dreams, mental disorders, and even some of the products of contemporary literature’,43 Kolnai argues that political symbolism is frequently Oedipal, and goes on to describe anarchism as ‘an extreme form of revolt against the father; the revolt of those who are not content to accept paternal authority in a modified, sublimated, non-despotic, democratic form [. . .]’. Anarchism is the model for the analysis of socialism and communism which follows. Anarchism does not ‘entail the proper freedom of the adult, but only the unrestrictedness of the child [. . .] of the foetus’. Rousseau’s return to nature is said to be anarchistic and nature is the symbol of the mother. Anarchism aims at the ‘abolition of repression’ but does

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not replace it with ‘self-critical judgement’. Instead, the ‘unrestricted self-indulgence’ of anarchism is ‘the faithful social projection of the uterus’. Anarchism’s ‘ideal is brotherhood in the primitive sense of the word, the confraternal uterine inversion’. Anarchism is governed by the ‘primitive wish’ to transform ‘the paternal and suprapaternal community’ into an ‘infrapaternal community’. The ‘primal absurdity’ of anarchism is ‘the impossibility of the actual union within the mother’.44 From this remarkable analysis Kolnai goes on to examine communism and Lenin’s State and Revolution, criticising communist ‘infantilism’ for its desire to ‘found a society with undeveloped organisation in conjunction with marvellously developed technique’ as no more than a belief in the omnipotence of thought, while in reality technical development can take place only along with advances in the division of labour, and hence of social differentiation.45 He draws on Federn, who ‘discerns in the development of the soviet system the birth of the fatherless society of the brethren, and perceives therein the evolutionary potentialities of society’, but claims instead that ‘we may interpret Bolshevism as a peculiar feudalist middle course between the direct regression of anarchism and the paranoid regression of Marxist socialism’, arguing that Bolshevism excludes capitalist ‘fathers [. . .] in order to have scope for its own neo-paternal caesarism’.46 Like Eliot, who made passing use of it in The Waste Land, Kolnai invokes Hesse’s ‘Die Brüder Karamasoff oder der Untergang Europas’ (1920), citing Hesse’s belief that the imminent overthrow of Europe is part of the Russian psyche and concurring with Hesse’s analysis of the regression to the Asiatic home as a regression to the primal mother. This allows Kolnai to conclude that the Bolshevik is a ‘transitional personality between the proletarian of central and western Europe and the type described by Hess[e]’.47 Kolnai’s final gesture here stretches his speculative psychoanalytic framework to breaking point, but this text seems remarkable now. After decades of exposure to the model of the anal-retentive authoritarian personality as the force prevailing against economic and libidinal liberation (Adorno, Marcuse, Deleuze and Guattari), it come as a surprise to encounter a politically contrasting appropriation of Freud from this Viennese circle, in the earliest years following the Russian Revolution. The communist Rajani Palme Dutt reviewed Kolnai’s book in his journal, Labour Monthly. The opening of Palme Dutt’s review gives an exact impression of the use which the Pauls’ translations served at this time:

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The appearance of a new translation from the busy pens of Eden and Cedar Paul will always win for the author they have selected an attention he might not have otherwise received from the small band of Labour students. They may lead us sometimes into strange paths; but they have a flair for the original and the arresting, and they are almost our only link with some of the movements of thought on the Continent.48

This assessment shows that, while the Pauls may have been historically eclipsed, to their contemporaries they represented an important conduit for non-anglophone thought, and the purpose of their choices was well understood by their readers. Their thinking, and the thinking of some of those they translate, may represent now little more than a history of lost or thwarted currents, yet the pattern of their translations and of their own writings opens on to a complex discursive world and, for literary scholars, an almost lost aspect of the modernist mind which is far from the more famous pronunciations of someone like Paul Valéry. Indeed, while Valéry’s famous essays on the spirit of Europe seem to look down on Europe with aloofness, the Pauls’ operating mode of intervention-throughtranslation is closer in character to the methods that would come to be adopted by Ezra Pound as translator-activist and conduit for otherwise remote ideas and histories. The Pauls were not the first or only writers to attempt to explain Proletcult to the anglophone public. The New Europe, perhaps the most thoroughly internationally minded of any journal of the period, continued to discuss the Russian Revolution with the aim of weakening the ideology of pan-Slavism in Central Europe, which conflicted with its own agenda of national self-determination. They tackled the subject of the new Russian culture in a series of articles on ‘Proletarian Culture’ by John Cournos, which were published alongside articles by Paul Dukes on ‘Bolševik Rule in Russia’, in late 1919. Paul Dukes was an agent of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, later MI6) operating principally in Petrograd.49 Dukes’ articles predate the fame of his knighthood in 1920 and his well-received account of Bolshevism in Red Dusk and the Morrow: Adventures and Investigations in Red Russia (1922). His editors found it necessary to explain that ‘no living Englishman can speak with Mr. Duke’s authority regarding the real condition of Petrograd under Bolševik rule’, and that Dukes had been operating in Russia until September of 1919, ‘disguised as a Russian and in perpetual danger of his life’.50

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Dukes, fluent in Russian following a period working as an English teacher in Latvia, was invited to work on the Anglo-Russian Commission which had been established in Petrograd in 1915 under Hugh Walpole and Harold Williams. Early in 1916 he resigned from the Mariinsky Theatre where he had been working towards a musical career as assistant to the conductor Alfred Coates. As an operative for SIS, Dukes reported to Lord Carson and John Buchan, and claims in his memoirs that he was first to alert the British to the likely impact of Lenin at a time when Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev were unknown. Although the Commission decamped from Petrograd in the wake of the Bolshevik coup, Dukes impressed on his superiors that he should go back, ‘and saw a gleam in the eye of the author of Greenmantle’.51 His amazing activities as a spy would come to light only later but The New Europe, well connected as ever, brought him forward to reinforce its anti-Bolshevik agenda. Dukes’ account of the vituperative rhetoric of Zinoviev, the President of the Petrograd Soviet and of the Third International at a meeting in July 1919, and of the crackdown on supposed counter-revolutionaries and foreigners by the Extraordinary Commission (CHEKA) under the direction of its deputy leader, Yakov Peters, display a high degree of authority in their detail and plausibility. The evident authority of Dukes’ articles is the context for Cournos’ account of Proletcult. Cournos had already contributed to the pages of The New Europe on the question of Anglo-Russian cultural relations in an essay of June 1918, ‘Cultural Propaganda in Its Russian Aspect’, which was a response to M. T. H. Sadler’s piece ‘The Meaning and Need of Cultural Propaganda’.52 In an argument which anticipates the formation of the British Council and the modern conception of soft power, Sadler outlined Germany’s success in exporting its cultural image, and warned that, while Britain had been led to see Germany in terms of Prussian barbarity, neutrals were far more positively inclined to the German exportation of its ‘Kultur’. Sadler urged a long-term development of British cultural propaganda designed ‘to lay before foreigners the texture of the Anglo-Saxon mind’.53 Cournos, connecting Sadler’s argument to his own propaganda work in the Anglo-Russian Commission, made the case that Britain had erred in overlooking the importance of culture for mutual understanding, especially in the Russian context where the Russian passion for culture contrasted with the directness of the Anglo-American character. There is something wrong, argues Cournos, that in Petrograd the plays not only of Shakespeare but of Wilde, Shaw and Galsworthy were widely performed but, at that

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time, he claims, neglected in London. Gordon Craig, notes Cournos, ‘exercises an inspiring influence on the whole modern European theatre, yet secures no adequate recognition at home’. He might have mentioned Craig’s collaboration with Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre on the famous production of Hamlet in 1911–12. In contrast to this neglect of British culture at home, Germany has exported its music, education, engineering, jurisprudence and science into Russia. Cournos amplifies the journal’s line that Germany had steered the revolution using its cultural power in Russia, and goes on to mock the ‘sentimental travellers’ such as Stephen Graham for their celebration of the Russian soul which had informed the revolution, and the ‘old regime bias’ of Graham and of Robert Wilton, whose recently published Russia’s Agony (1918) had blamed the Jews for the revolution.54 At this moment, in 1918, Cournos does not yet reckon with the notion that Russian culture might now change in its very nature, and he optimistically urges such initiatives as sending over Craig, a set of Epstein sculptures and ‘a library of British and American authors’.55 By 1919 it was evident that Russian culture had indeed changed in its nature, and Cournos’ account of Proletcult makes much clearer than anything the Pauls wrote that the new culture is intended no longer to serve as a ‘simple pastime or diversion’ for the bourgeoisie, but ‘is one of the best means for the organisation of life, the training of the new man’.56 Cournos’ account of the theoretical basis of Proletcult reveals several elements which the Pauls do not address, even though they make reference to his articles: Bogdanov’s rejection of the authority, even, of the party leaders, in favour of collective consciousness and his corresponding rejection of classical and bourgeois culture; and Proletcult’s emphasis on the scientific and conscious basis of proletarian art, which is compared to the machine. So, while the Pauls advocated the training of consciousness by an authority, on the model of Wells’ Samurai, Cournos quotes Bogdanov’s claim that ‘the spirit of authority, the spirit of individualism, the spirit of comradeship, are the three consecutive types of culture’ corresponding (although this is not made explicit) to feudal, bourgeois and communist society.57 While the Pauls had focussed really on the education of workers, Cournos more accurately emphasises Proletcult’s attention to the creation of the new artwork and its social function. The Pauls’ attempt to blend Bergsonian intuition with Marxist materialism is flatly contradicted by Cournos’ finding in Proletarskaya Kultura of the denunciation of Bergson and the anti-materialist Émile Boutroux as the symbols of the impotence of ‘twenty generations’ of bourgeois

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thought and an escape into ‘intuition and mysticism’. Instead of the evolutionary process which the Pauls find at the heart of the Bolshevik revolution in culture, Cournos more prosaically – but quoting directly from sources – finds ‘the subjection of all cultural and artistic creation to the philosophy of economics’ in a new era of artistic rationalism in which, according to Proletarskaya Kultura, ‘The sphere of invention [. . .] is being transferred to the factory’, and the ‘personal “I” assumes its proper proportion and its proper place’ in a world in which ‘the machine has become the living thing’.58 Cournos performs a major service for his readers in translating chunks of Futurist poetry, designed to reveal its main characteristics and the theoretical lessons which were drawn from it. It seems doubtful that this material had much impact on anglophone literary circles at the time, although the Pauls’ response to Cournos is evidence that it had become somewhat known, and the comparison which Cournos makes between the Futurists and the London Vorticists, themselves dependent on the Italian Futurists, might have led his readers to assume that they were already familiar with the Russian Futurist idiom. The Vorticists were opposed to the machine-worship of the Italian Futurists, but the Russian group most certainly was not, and Cournos’ examples are chosen to demonstrate this. Mentioning Mayakovsky in passing, Cournos offers snippets by various poets, including Aleksei Gastev, ‘the most perfect exponent of the Bolševik creed’ and the first poet to be published by the group, including his ‘masterpiece’, ‘We Grow Out of Iron’: Look – I stand among them: the machines, the hammers, the furnaces and forges among a hundred comrades. Above is the forged iron space. On the sides are girders and beams. They rise to a height of ten sazhenes. They bend right and left. They are joined by rafters into arches and, like the shoulders of a giant, they hold up the whole iron structure. They are impetuous, they are bold, they are strong. They demand yet more strength. I look upon them and straighten myself out. A new iron blood pours into my veins I have grown yet more. I also am growing iron shoulders and immeasurably strong hands. I have merged with the iron of the structure. [. . .]59

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Cournos finds here a one-sided version of Whitmanism, which by contrast, he argues, attempted to hold in balance the individual and the mass, and is in that way more democratic. Cournos is unequivocally hostile to the collectivist orientation of Proletcult, but his account of theatre does show some awareness that the movement may be the product of objective contradictions – as Marxists might say, although Cournos does not introduce such vocabulary or the discursive field from which it emerges. When it comes to theatre, Cournos notes, the Proletcult demand that art be based on what Proletarskaya Kultura calls ‘deeper experiences in the province of the workman’s feelings’ runs up against the difficulty that theatre itself is a specialised form of work. Proletcult admits the need, first to make use of ‘bourgeois specialists’ to keep theatre in production, and thence to create its own proletarian theatre specialists. Cournos contemptuously notes that these new specialists will constitute ‘a separate, superior, aristocratic, privileged and [. . .] parasitic class – that of the artist’. There is a related problem with regards to generating new content, where the ‘bourgeois’ plays continue to be produced for the moment, with Émile Verhaeren’s Les Aubes (1898) viewed as the perfect example of a revolutionary bourgeois play. Cournos offers British readers only the broadest sketch of the problems facing Soviet art – problems which were given extensive articulation six years later in the English translation of Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution (1926). The positions of Bogdanov and the other Proletcultists are given proper coverage in their own words, including a lengthy excerpt on the mechanics of collective creation by Platon Kerzhentsev, but Cournos at no point tries to suggest that this is an interesting experiment, and in relation to theatre he plainly has a limited overview, since he writes from outside the country.60 Cournos’ access to Proletcult writings gives him much greater insight into the ideological shifts in Russian theatre than the first lengthy account to emerge after the revolution by the American theatre critic Oliver M. Sayler. Sayler was present in Moscow and Petrograd for the six months following the October Revolution, but as a consequence of being there so early, and of having already decided what he was looking for, Sayler’s The Russian Theatre under the Revolution (1920; UK publication 1923) did not reflect any of the new developments. Sayler presents an image of continuity, not change, and, apart from the briefest reference to a clash of ideas involving Lunacharsky (as Commissar for Education responsible for the state theatres), Sayler’s narrative emphasises the longer-term trajectory of Russian theatre, which has ‘weathered the storms of the

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class struggle’ and maintained its leadership of the modern stage. His principal topic is the Art Theatre which he finds in fine working order, in contrast to the ‘utter disorder and confusion at the Theatre of the Soviet and Workmen’s Deputies’. Sadly, Sayler has nothing to report about the workers’ theatre, so, despite the intense interest of his accounts of productions at the Art Theatre, of the Cubist production of Wilde’s Salome at the Kamerny, and of Meyerhold’s production of Molière’s Don Juan at the Alexandrinsky, comment itself on the revolution and its arts is limited to the bland and unelaborated claim that, while ‘the proletarian hatred of all the fruitage of the autocracy threatened to engulf the theatre and the opera and the ballet’ , wiser counsels had prevailed, since ‘the leaders of the Bolsheviki have just as much respect as anyone else for these proud possessions of the Russian people’.61 D. S. Mirsky, who came into exile in London in 1921, became well known for his histories of Russian literature, culminating in the two-volume A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900 (1926–7) as well as for his later conversion to communism around 1927 and return to Russia in 1932, marked by the publication of Lenin (1931) and his The Intelligentsia of Great Britain (1935). He used the period of his first arrival in England to make contacts in the literary world and place articles on Russian literature, some of which dealt with the most recent developments. Mirsky used his connection with Maurice Baring, the novelist and intelligence officer, to secure a position writing for The London Mercury. In 1922 he became lecturer at the School of Slavonic Studies, then a department of King’s College London, on the invitation of Bernard Pares, and subsequently developed important connections with Jane Ellen Harrison and the Woolfs.62 Mirsky’s 1921 article for The London Mercury included a detailed account of the current literary scene in Russia and its origins before the war. The Symbolists are identified and situated, Michael Kuzmin is singled out, their relationship to the emergent Acmeist group led by Nikolay Gumilov and Sergey Gorodetsky, with its dependence on Gautier, is described. Figures from other movements are mentioned and briefly described – Joseph Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Marietta Shaginyan. Anna Akhmatova is nominated as the ‘Tenth Muse of Modern Russia’, while the Futurist Igor Severyanin is said to be ‘the first really popular Russian poet of the decade’. A second Futurist group including Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Vladimir Mayakovsky is briefly but accurately introduced – while Cournos lumped them in with the Italian Futurists, Mirsky notes that the connection could only be limited

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since none of them knew French, let alone Italian – and the Moscow Futurists around Sergei Bobrov, with their passion for Mallarmé and Picasso, get their own short introduction. War literature is said to be negligible, the patriotic poetry of ‘the Satanist Sologub’ – admired and translated by Cournos – are among the works dismissed as ‘less than worthless’, with only Akhmatova said to have ‘found in herself notes of sincerity’ and succeeded in ‘wringing compassion for the coming woes of her country’. Mirsky presents a political typology of contemporary Russian literature in four categories, with the ‘Unromantic Bolshevists’ receiving the most space, among whom Gorky is singled out as the most famous. The ‘most representative poet of our intelligentsia today’ is identified as Alexander Vertinsky, the singer who presented in stages and music halls, dressed as Pierrot, his work described by Mirsky as ‘the poetry of neurasthenia and will-less impotency’.63 That was in August 1921, but by January 1922 Mirsky had switched to open hostility to the Bolshevik regime and its writers, who are in any case tangential to Bolshevism, which is ‘an un-Russian and still more an un-intellectual movement’ (that is, not of the intelligentsia). Gorky is ‘not taken seriously except by foreigners’; Myakovsky produces ‘dull nonsense’ and the Futurists in general are just a ‘“reversion to type” of the primitive barbarian’; the Proletarian poets are mediocre and monotonous. Mirsky gives some space to the Scythians (Left Social Revolutionaries) Andrei Bely and Alexander Blok. Although he does not mention it, Blok’s The Twelve (1918) was the one major work of this period to be contemporaneously translated into English, in 1920. Mirsky claims that The Twelve is ‘much more obviously a hideous portrait of the Red Guards than a glorification of their unconscious mission’. Among the peasant poets, Sergei Yesenin (one of the very few poets to receive any attention in English64) is said to be the most interesting, although his work is still found to be ‘bombastic and extravagant’.65 Mirsky was not altogether partisan in his criticism: an article on the literature of the emigration finds little to commend except Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Face of War and Vasily Shulgin’s 1920, both only published in Sofia and in Russian.66 The latter, which Mirsky continued to advocate, is a novel of the civil war, which remains untranslated into English to this day. Here, of course, is the problem. While Mirsky’s articles are well informed, critically careful, detailed and mindful of his anglophone readership, in the nearcomplete absence of translations at that time of any of the writers he discusses, the literary-critical discourse alone could not really carry the debates and complexities of the literary field into public discourse in Britain. Mirsky had a wide array of materials at his fingertips, and

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was no doubt able further to share his knowledge at King’s and at the Anglo-Russian Literary Society which met there, as part of his duties as a lecturer. In general, though, it is evident that even the most informative reviews could not give substantial anglophone presence to the new Russian culture. Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution probably had the same difficulty a few years later: the analysis was clear and extensive enough but the literary materials were almost entirely unavailable in English (or indeed in French). The gap in British knowledge of the transformation in Russian culture came closest to being filled in 1924 with the publication of Huntly Carter’s The New Theatre and Cinema of Soviet Russia (later followed by The New Spirit in the Russian Theatre: 1917–1928 [1929]). Carter was an established and already highly internationalised theatre critic, and his work is a frequent point of reference for historians of theatre and cinema.67 In the preface to his 1924 volume, Carter noted the limitations of Sayler’s book and regretted that even commentators of the like of Brailsford, Farbman and Ransome had not managed to explain these important developments very well, if at all.68 Carter’s style reflects little of the Marxist theory which drove the Bolsheviks and is rather breathlessly admiring, but his knowledge of the people and practices is very substantial and, combined with the book’s illustrations, creates a solid picture of some of the new cultural institutions. The ‘Russian people are innately, intensely dramatic’, Carter tells us. In revolution, ‘Russia has appeared in dramatic form’; the streets of Moscow, for example, ‘have been running with molten human lava, in the form of demonstrations, parades, pageants, festivals’: ‘Here we have a people unfolding under the touch of political, patriotic and national influences. And under these influences the principles of art have come into full play. [. . .] Never before, perhaps, has citizenship reached a dramatic expression so vast and complete.’69 Even as he celebrates the demands on theatre of the workers and their government, Carter presents the risk that the new theatre, with its rejection of the immediate past and its recourse to the much older traditions of ancient Greece, Elizabethan comedy and commedia dell’arte, risks a new isolation as deep as that of tsarism.70 Carter’s expressed reservations go no deeper than this, but the positive consequence of his suspension of critical disbelief and apparent lack of interest in Marxist theory and Bolshevik polemics gives his study room to breathe on its own terms and on the terms of his many subjects. If Carter is a romantic, it is not because he casts a romantic gloss over everything he sees, but because he shares the romanticism inherent in all of the projects he examines.

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Just as Mirsky in very few pages had attempted to outline the currents of the new Soviet literature, Carter orders his book around left, centre and right, with Meyerhold and Proletcult at the head of the Left, Lunacharsky at the centre, and Stanislavsky with his ‘prewar ideas and his loyalty to old Conservative interests’, and already widely known throughout Europe, on the Right.71 Carter’s sympathetic approach yields some over-affirmative character descriptions of his three ‘representative personalities’, of the kind that are often found in the literature sympathetic to Bolshevism – so in Meyerhold’s ‘half-drawn eyelids and dreamy look one found a touch of mysticism’, while Lunacharsky has ‘restless but attractive eyes that one felt saw some good in the world even if they saw also a considerable amount of fatigue’, only one of the qualities said to be ‘just the things one looked for in a cultural minister’.72 The descriptions of the theatre are also somewhat romanticised but are detailed enough to convey a convincing impression. The account of Meyerhold properly registers his involvement with communism, and the sections on Proletcult theatre and of the many forms of more autonomous workers’ theatres, including street pageants, are invaluable documents. The coverage of Lunacharsky is equally valuable and novel. Lunacharsky was one of the very few Soviet writers to be translated in the early 1920s, but his volume of Three Plays (1923) seems to have made little impact. The plays themselves contain some obscurities, and one dates from before the Revolution, so it would have been difficult to read off very much about the state of Russian theatre from this slender and oblique evidence.73 Wyndham Lewis used Carter’s book as a prime exhibit in his account of the process of ‘infantilisation’ which was a key to the process of collective subjugation, as Lewis described it, in The Art of Being Ruled (1926). The disappearance of art is just one of the effects of this process, which is said to extend from the artistic amateurism of ‘millionaire society’ to the elimination of the boundary between actor and spectator in the Bolshevik drama. It may be that Carter’s text, which did not concentrate on the theory of the new consciousness, allowed Lewis to forcibly compress his accounts of millionaire society and its art and ethics with his impression of mass society under capitalism and such a version as could be gleaned by 1926 of Soviet society. Ever contemptuous of what he sees as the weakening of the decadent British ruling class – a topic he treated at great length in Apes of God (1930) – Lewis depicts millionaire society as ‘impatient of the slowness of revolution’ and having decided to replicate in their own coteries ‘a painting, writing, acting, cultural

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paradise [. . .] in which everyone is equal (that is, equally a “genius”) and everyone is free – at the expense, naturally, of the great majority, who have to wait for their revolutionary paradise’.74 Lewis makes a connection between the artistic egalitarianism of wealthy coteries and the Soviet theatre. By this time, ‘the magnificent spirit animating the Moscow theatre is a byword’, Lewis states, acknowledging the ‘intellectual deadness’ of all but the Russian and German theatre. Lewis seems to know that Carter’s book is at the apex of the reception of Russian theatre, but he appears not to have a copy, and relies on quoting a review of the book from Labour Monthly, from which he borrows a few quotations, notably the claim that Meyerhold’s aim is to find ‘the best means of conveying the spectator into the creative author in such a way that he experiences all that the creative author experiences’.75 Lewis argues that this attempt to ‘break down the barrier between the audience and the actor’ goes in the opposite direction to the ideas of Gordon Craig, which served to ‘make the actor more remote, masking him, robbing him of personality’. The results obtained by Meyerhold and company is the obverse: Improvisation replaces the written word, an amusing reversion to the ‘Commedia dell’Arte’. So we see the simultaneous disappearance of the author and of the actor, to all intents and purposes. The people go into the theatre as though into a large nursery, and improvise their own plays, dividing the rôles among themselves – or this is the tendency. The policy of such of the theatrical world as remains from the old regime is to ‘break down the barrier between the audience and the actor’, to express ‘masses not men’, not to ‘represent any particular person’, but a class-type, the trader, the peasant, the bad man, and the good man.76

Lewis continues to conflate the Soviet theatre and ‘bourgeois bohemia’ in an unwarranted way, and it is Carter’s book which makes the link for him. It can be seen that Lewis here is working his own vein of the question of the personality or impersonality of the artist.77 In contrast to Mallarmé, and unlike Eliot, who used the concept of impersonality to present an argument about the proper role of emotion in art, Lewis foregrounded the differentiation of artist and audience as the paradigm of individual and mass, and found in what he identified as the ‘infantilisation’ of capitalist and communist collectivism the threat of a regression of the ego itself. Lewis had already announced this theme in a two-part essay for The Calendar of Modern Letters, ‘The Dithyrambic Spectator’ (1925), which sought to

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give the theory an anthropological basis in extended commentaries on Elliot Smith’s The Evolution of the Dragon (1919) and Jane Ellen Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual (1914).78 Carter’s text does give some confirmation to Lewis’s notion of the nursery. The left and centre theatre of Russia, argues Carter, aim ‘to make of the theatre an open creative playground for everyone instead of a reserved enclosure for shopkeepers, gamblers and egoists’.79 Lewis gets no further than this, though, and the detail and grain of Carter’s account goes for nothing, leaving Lewis with the bones of his fairly singular anticommunist argument. By the time of Time and Western Man (1927), Lewis had to hand a more congenial anti-communist source of information on Soviet culture, the English translation of René Fülöp-Miller’s The Mind and Face of Bolshevism (1927). It emerged too late for Lewis to use for anything other than an epigraph, but his deployment of it in the very moment of its appearance marks the moment in which anticommunism seized the high ground in the interpretation of Soviet culture. Fülöp-Miller, an Austrian, had already published widely on Dostoevsky, but it is in 1927 that a wave of translations began to arrive, including Lenin and Ghandi (1927), Rasputin (1928), The Power and Secrets of the Jesuits (1930) and The Russian Theatre (1930). It is The Mind and Face of Bolshevism which is the centre of interest in all of this activity. A hefty volume, though of only 300 pages, it makes its impression by its weight and numerous photographs – a total of about 250 illustrations, a handful in colour – a ‘weighty tome’ if ever there was one, achieving physical as well as cultural authority. This was the first book to survey the whole of the Soviet cultural project, and however hostile to that project it was packed with information. Ten years on from 1917, it was now possible to shift focus from revolution to the new society that the revolution had aimed to create. One reviewer echoed and endorsed Fülöp-Miller’s own claim for the status of his work: the revolution ‘has been discussed to the point of tedium as a political institution’ with no results. Fülöp-Miller’s book for the first time describes the ‘cultural’ ideas of Bolshevism, in the sense of Kultur, the reviewer reminds his readers, the ‘cultural and spiritual aim’ of creating the new man, or what Fülöp-Miller calls ‘collective man’.80 Fülöp-Miller had visited Russia on several occasions, many of the photographs were his own, and he had benefitted from conversation with some high-ranking officials, such as Lunacharsky. The list of topics is comprehensive: the opening polemic against the ‘collective man’ is followed by chapters on Lenin, Bolshevism, architecture and sculpture,

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theatre, poetry, music, the revolution of everyday life, education, church, the rebirth of mysticism, prison and ethics. The illustrations include photographs of Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks, posters, paintings, constructivist designs, street parades, photographs from Gastev’s biomechanical lab, of teachers, peasants, workers, soldiers, gymnastic displays, writers’ circles and so on – a wealth of material some of which has perhaps been rarely reproduced since. The book is a remarkable resource, then, and, as well as quoting it once in Time and Western Man, Lewis made a rather forced use of it in ‘Paleface’ (1927), his essay on the romanticisation of race by his literary contemporaries, which compared D. H. Lawrence’s celebration of the ‘mindlessness’ of the Mexican with Fülöp-Miller’s attack on Soviet anti-individualism, and Sherwood Anderson’s idealisation of ‘black laughter’ with Fülöp-Miller’s description of the rebellion of laughter against Bolshevism.81 These are pointed but isolated uses, though, and it seems surprising that Lewis did not make more direct use of Fülöp-Miller, considering the role played by his opposition to revolution of all kind in these polemical essays of the 1920s. That Lewis did not automatically and intrinsically know far more about Soviet culture than he did, though, confirms that Fülöp-Miller’s book filled a huge gap in knowledge, which the passing information about culture found in the texts of many visitors, and even Carter’s exuberant and detailed account of the theatre, had not addressed. It seems a shame then that there is such a tension between FülöpMiller’s passion to document his objects and his passionate denunciation of every aspect of collective culture. Despite its usefulness as a source, the frequent polemic makes it a hard read. Huntly Carter was sympathetic to his object at the expense of making a clear assessment of the political contexts and purposes of theatre. He knows well enough that all is geared to the worker, but his exclusive emphasis on the liberation of imagination does not bring into focus the intended qualitative change in life – in Kultur – which is Fülöp-Miller’s fixed perspective. To judge Bolshevism politically is superficial and misleading, claims Fülöp-Miller: The problem of Bolshevism extends far beyond the narrow horizon of political sympathies or antipathies. Its acceptance or rejection is the rejection or acceptance of the whole of European culture. [. . .] The ordinary methods of objective criticism break down before the vastness of the subject [. . .] Bolshevism stands for a radical change of the whole of human life in all its fundamental aims and interests, in every one of its manifestations.82

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The dominant theme here is the binarism of Russian Soviet society as the other of Europe, a recurrent theme of the book, but the remark about documentation is interesting. If the vastness of Russia is evoked in other texts as unpresentable and unrepresentable – on lines suggested by the twentieth-century recuperation of Kantian aesthetics83 – Fülöp-Miller asserts that photography is an essential ally, which ‘preserves for all time the whole world of Bolshevism: the daily life of the period, its great festivals, its works of art, and its men and women’.84 The range of photographs in the book make this seem true, and we are reminded that such images would only have been available sporadically in Britain, and never in such quantity – though in subsequent decades they came to seem commonplace. The images are marvellous, but the relentless hammering of collectivism is wearing if at least clear: Now it is here, the ‘nameless beast’, and it has set up its kingdom: the impersonal mass is lord of Russia; it is the most important new phenomenon which Bolshevism has produced, a reality which noone can disregard. Whether, like some monstrous creature of fable, it rolls through the streets of the great cities, now growling happily, now roaring with rage, or whether it lies down comfortably on one of the wide squares to enjoy, like an animal, the sun, life, and its own exuberant strength – the many thousand isolated personalities of which it is composed disappear, and we no longer recognise the simple worker in his workaday blouse, the soldier, the typist, the student, or the navvy. A mighty and powerful organism has absorbed them all into itself, and a single rumbling voice, incomprehensible and terrifying as the roar of the elements, has swallowed up all their individual cries, their joyful or angry words.85

This passage conveys the tone, if not the entire content, of this book. As Fülöp-Miller remarked in his later volume on the Jesuits: ‘in the author’s opinion, subjective appraisement, enthusiastic affirmation and denial, awe-struck reverence, indulgent humour and malicious mockery, as the subject at the moment demands, are no less valid means of representation than the objectivity of impersonal relation.’86 It is easy to see why Fülöp-Miller’s methods should have been brought to bear on both Bolsheviks and Jesuits. This is not to say that he does not present any analysis of Bolshevism, and indeed he invokes Gustave Le Bon’s study of crowds, Psychologie des foules (1895), and Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), which, he says, finds in mass psychology ‘a retrogression to primitive psychological conditions’.87 Another element of FülöpMiller’s analysis is his criticism of the impersonality of the mass This content downloaded from 59.120.225.187 on Thu, 13 Aug 2020 18:27:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 5804_Ayers.indd 184

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man, which he sees as being a product of Russia’s history of serfdom and the religious renunciation of the will which that institution demanded. Collectivism is of course a doctrine of socialism, but it is Russian Bolshevism alone that can aspire to ‘a purely quantitative combination of individual mass-particles into the largest and most homogeneous conglomerate possible’.88 The Bolsheviks have seized on only the economic premise of Marx and ignored his higher ideals; Taylorism and the automation of industry have made of America the ‘Promised Land’ – Mayakovsky’s Chicago and Gastev’s Americanism are cited in evidence – and the result is a ‘machine cult’ and false Marxism.89 His account of the theatre and especially of the mass-performances under the drive of the slogan ‘theatricalise life’ would have given much material to Wyndham Lewis had he chosen to return in detail to the account of the abolition of the gap between actor/author and audience which he had set out before the publication of Fülöp-Miller’s book. Aldous Huxley was to make much more use of Fülöp-Miller when he came to write Brave New World.

Notes 1. Kevin Morgan, Bolshevism and the British Left: Part Two. The Webbs and Soviet Communism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006), pp. 155–61. 2. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: Jarrold, 1915); Rosa Luxemburg, Letters from Prison, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (Berlin: Young International, 1923); N. Buharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism: A Popular Explanation of the Program of the Communist Party of Russia, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (n.p.: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1922); A Young Girl’s Diary, pref. with a letter by Sigmund Freud, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921); Pierre Janet, Psychological Healing: A Historical and Clinical Study, 2 vols, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1925). 3. ‘J.F.H’, ‘Plebs Bookshelf’, The Plebs Magazine 10:1 (January 1918), 22–3. 4. Eden and Cedar Paul, ‘Vision and Re-Vision’, The Plebs Magazine 10:4 (May 1918), 80, 82. 5. A. V. Lunatcharsky [sic], ‘Problems of Education in Soviet Russia’, trans. ‘A.P.L.’ from Le Phare, ‘organ of the Swiss Communists’, The Plebs Magazine 12:1 (January 1920), 9–10; ‘Working-Class Culture’, trans. ‘E. Bernstein’, The Plebs Magazine 12:10 (October 1920), 157–62, and 12:11 (November 1920), 189–92.

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6. Étienne Antonelli, Bolshevist Russia: A Philosophical Survey (London: Stanley Paul, 1920), p. 44. No translation credit. 7. R. H. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent: Being an Account of the Author’s Early Life in Many Lands and of His Official Mission to Moscow in 1918 (London and New York: Putnam, 1932), pp. 257–8. 8. Lunatcharsky, ‘Problems of Education in Soviet Russia’, p. 9. 9. For a fine-grained reading of the Pauls’ Bergsonism, see Mark Antliff, ‘From Class War to Creative Revolution: Bergson’s Communist Legacy in Britain’, in Annales bergsoniennes. VII: Bergson, L’Allemagne, la guerre de 1914 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2014), pp. 235–58. 10. Eden and Cedar Paul, Communism, Labour Booklets no. 3 (London: Labour Publishing Company, 1921), pp. 15, 19. 11. Eden and Cedar Paul, Creative Revolution: A Study of Communist Ergatocracy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920), p. 16. 12. Ibid. p. 15. 13. Ibid. pp. 18–19. 14. Algot Ruhe and Nancy Margaret Paul, Henri Bergson: An Account of His Life and Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1914), pp. 228–9. Nancy Paul is not stated to be translator but presumably she is. 15. Paul and Paul, Creative Evolution, p. 192. 16. Ibid. pp. 196–8. 17. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (London: Jarrold, 1915). 18. Paul and Paul, Creative Revolution, pp. 155–6. 19. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1925), pp. 9–10. 20. Leon Trotsky, ‘Not by Politics Alone Does Man Thrive’, in Problems of Life, intro. N. Minsky, trans. Z. Vengerova (London: Methuen, 1924), p. 2. 21. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 12. 22. Ibid. pp. 18–45. 23. Eden and Cedar Paul, Proletcult (Proletarian Culture) (London: Parsons, 1921), p. 22. 24. Ibid. p. 39. 25. Ibid. pp. 42, 45, 47, 49, 54, 61. 26. Francisco Ferrer, The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School, trans. and intro. Joseph McCabe (London: Watts, 1913); Transformons l’école (Basel: Bureau international des écoles nouvelles, 1920); A. Faria de Vasconcelos, A New School in Belgium, intro. Adolphe Ferrière, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: Harrap, 1919). 27. Faria de Vasconcelos, A New School in Belgium, pp. 11–18. 28. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organisation of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky. October 1917–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 29–30.

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29. Varsher’s fiancé was executed by the CHEKA and she fled to exile in Latvia in 1921. For a translation of her later memoir, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 113–17. 30. ‘Children of the Soviet’, The Times, 2 October 1922, p. 19. The Times Digital Archive (accessed 21 July 2016). 31. Paul and Paul, Proletcult, pp. 90–8. For key background, see Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, pp. 89–109 on Proletcult and pp. 110–61 on the treatment of the arts in this period. For treatment of the question of higher education in this period, see Michael DavidFox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 37–48. 32. Albert Moll, The Sexual Life of the Child, trans. Eden Paul (London: George Allen, 1912); Eden Paul, ‘The Sexual Life of the Child’, No. 10 in a series of pamphlets for the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology (London: Society of Francis, 1921); Fritz Wittels, Sigmund Freud, His Personality, His Teaching, and His School, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: George Allen, 1924). 33. Paul and Paul, Proletcult, p. 127. 34. Ibid. p. 123, quoting A. G. Tansley, The New Psychology and Its Relation to Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920), p. 213. 35. See Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (London: Unwin, 1916), which incorporates ‘Herd Instinct and Its Bearing on the Psychology of Civilised Man’, Sociological Review (a1:3 July 1908), 227–48, and ‘Sociological Application of the Psychology of Herd Instinct’, Sociological Review (a2:1 January 1909), 36–54. See also Gilbert Murray, ‘Herd Instinct and the War’, 1915, reproduced in Faith, War, and Policy: Addresses and Essays on the European War (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), pp. 46–66. For some context, see Jonathan Atkin, A War of Individuals: Bloomsbury Attitudes to the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 212–14. 36. Tansley, The New Psychology and Its Relation to Life, pp. 87–8. 37. Paul and Paul, Proletcult, p. 128. 38. Ibid. pp. 127–8, 130–1. 39. Charles Baudouin, Suggestion and Autosuggestion: A Psychological and Pedagogical Study based upon the Investigations made by the New Nancy School, translated and introduced by Eden and Cedar Paul (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920), p. 26. 40. Paul and Paul, Proletcult, pp. 132–3. 41. Aurel Kolnai, Psychoanalysis and Sociology, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921), from Psychoanalyse und Soziologie. Zur Psychologie von Masse und Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1920).

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42. Paul Federn, Zur Psychologie der Revolution: Die vaterlose Gesellschaft. Nach Vorträgen in der Wiener Psychoanalystischen Vereinigung und im Monistenbund (Leipzig and Vienna: Anzengruber, 1919). Federn is briefly discussed in Michael Kane, Modern Men: Mapping Masculinity in English and German Literature, 1880–1930 (London and New York: Cassell, 1999), pp. 219–21, alongside Hans Blüher’s Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft (1915). For an extended discussion, see Fritz Lackinger, ‘Paul Federn’s Analyse der Österreichischen Revolution: Historisches zur Revolutionspsychologie’, Werkblatt: Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und Gesellschaftskritik 4/5:3/4 (1985), 35–49. 43. Kolnai, Psychoanalysis and Sociology, pp. 21–2. 44. Ibid. pp. 112–20. 45. Ibid. pp. 145–7. 46. Ibid. pp. 168–9. 47. Ibid. pp. 173–4. 48. ‘R. P. D.’, ‘Psycho-Analysing the Bolshevik’, Labour Monthly 1:4 (October 1921), reproduced at Marxists.org (accessed October 2017). 49. For a discussion of Dukes in context, see Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), pp. 175–8. 50. Paul Dukes, ‘Bolševik Rule in Russia’, Parts I and II, The New Europe 13:159 (30 October 1919), 50–5, and 13:160 (6 November 1919), 100–6. 51. Paul Dukes, The Story of ‘ST 25’: Adventure and Romance in the Secret Intelligence Service in Red Russia (London: Cassell, 1938), pp. 15, 23, 25. 52. John Cournos, ‘Cultural Propaganda in Its Russian Aspect’, The New Europe 7:89 (27 June 1918), 251–5. M. H. T. Sadler, ‘The Meaning and Need of Cultural Propaganda’, The New Europe 7:84 (23 May 1918), 121–5. 53. Sadler, ‘The Meaning and Need of Cultural Propaganda’, p. 121. 54. Robert Wilton, Russia’s Agony (London: Arnold, 1918), see, for example, pp. 55–61. Cournos (‘Cultural Propaganda’, p. 254) mentions Wilton but does not discuss his book. 55. Cournos, ‘Cultural Propaganda’, p. 255. 56. John Cournos, ‘Proletarian Culture: (I) The Theory’, The New Europe 13:159 (30 October 1919), 61–4, at p. 61. Cournos is translating directly from an article by Poliansky, Proletarskaya Kultura 5 (November 1918). 57. Ibid. p. 61. 58. Ibid. pp. 63, 64. 59. John Cournos, ‘Proletarian Culture: (II) Bolševik Poetry’, The New Europe 13:160 (6 November 1919), 110–16, at p. 114. 60. John Cournos, ‘Proletarian Culture: (III) The Bolševik Theatre’, The New Europe 13:161 (13 November 1919), 151–4, passim; ‘Proletarian Culture: (IV) “A Factory of Literature”’, The New Europe 13:162 (20 November 1917), 183–7, at p. 186.

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61. Oliver M. Sayler, The Russian Theatre under the Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1920), pp. vii, 20, 118. 62. See G. S. Smith, D.S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life, 1890–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 91–9. 63. Dmitri Mirski, ‘A Russian Letter: Recent Developments in Poetry. Poetry and Politics’, The London Mercury 4:22 (August 1921), 414–18. On Vertinsky, see, for example, Riku Toivola, ‘The Undercut Utopian Worlds of the Russian Pierrot’, in David Ayers et al. (eds), Utopia: The Avant-Garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 475–91. 64. Sergei Yesienin [sic], ‘Three Poems’, trans. Gerard Shelley, The Chapbook (A Monthly Miscellany) 31 (November 1922), 5–9. The poems are ‘From a Hooligan’s Confession’, ‘The Last Peasant Poet’ and ‘The Blue Steppe’. 65. Dmitri Mirski, ‘The Literature of Bolshevik Russia’, The London Mercury 5:27 (January 1922), 276–85. 66. Dmitri Mirski, ‘A Russian Letter: The Literature of the Emigration’, The London Mercury 6:32 (June 1922), 193–5. 67. There seems in general to be more interest in Carter’s comments on cinema than on theatre. Among recent studies, see Claire Warden, Migrating Modernist Performance: British Theatrical Travels through Russia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 79–80, 169–71; and Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 309–10. 68. Huntly Carter, The New Theatre and Cinema of Soviet Russia (London: Chapman & Dodd, 1924), pp. vi, viii–ix. 69. Carter, The New Theatre, pp. 3, 4. 70. Ibid. p. 23. 71. Ibid. p. 34. 72. Ibid. pp. 35, 41. 73. Three Plays of A.V. Lunacharski: Faust and the City; Vasilisa the Wise; The Magi, trans. and intro. L. A. Magnus and K. Walter with a pref. by the author (London: Routledge and New York: Dutton, 1923). A promised second volume never appeared. 74. Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926), p. 171. 75. Quoted in Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, pp. 174–5. This is a misquotation from Carter, The New Theatre, p. 52. The review is unidentified. 76. Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, pp. 175–6. 77. See David Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), passim, for a treatment of this topic. 78. Wyndham Lewis, ‘The Dithyrambic Spectator’, The Calendar of Modern Letters 1:2 (April 1925), 89–107; ‘The Dithyrambic Spectator: Part II’, The Calendar of Modern Letters 1:3 (May 1925), 194–213. Reproduced in Lewis, The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931).

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79. Carter, The New Theatre, p. 52. 80. Unsigned review, The Spectator 139:5168 (16 July 1927), 101–2. 81. See Wyndham Lewis, ‘Paleface’, The Enemy 2 (September 1927), 3–110, see pp. 52, 106–8. Lewis quotes at length from René FülöpMiller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia, trans. F. S. Flint and D. F. Tait (London and New York: Putnams, 1927), pp. 272–5. Republished in an expanded version as Paleface: The Philosophy of the ‘Melting-Pot’ (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), see pp. 182–3, 264–8. 82. Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, p. xiii. 83. See, for example, Jean-François Lyotard, L’Inhumain: causeries sur le temps (1988. Paris: Klinksieck, 2014), pp. 91–106, 117–25, and the same author’s Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime: Kant, Critique de la faculté de juger, 23–29 (1991. Paris: Klinksieck, 2015), passim. 84. Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, p. xiv. 85. Ibid. p. 1. 86. René Fülöp-Miller, The Power and Secret of the Jesuits, trans. F. S. Flint and D. F. Tait (London: Putnam, 1930), p. viii. 87. Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, p. 5. 88. Ibid. p. 12. 89. Ibid. pp. 12 (quoted), 14–25.

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Chapter 7

The Criterion, the English Trotsky and the Idea of Europe

The evolving politics of Eliot’s strategy as editor of The Criterion can be pegged to the growing discursive presence of communism more generally in the British public sphere, and more specifically to the growing public presence of Trotsky, as well as to the state of class relations in mid-1920s Britain, in the period around the General Strike. Eliot’s treatment of Trotsky needs to be seen in the context of Trotsky’s reception more broadly, notably in relation to his direct intervention in British politics with his book Where is Britain Going? (1926), which drew responses from Baldwin, MacDonald, Keynes and Russell, among others. Eliot’s editorial strategy in dealing with Bolshevism was less direct than any of these prominent commentators, but appears most clearly in his advancement of a principle of European culture as a bulwark against Russia and Bolshevism.1 While other writings by leading Bolsheviks such as Lenin and Bukharin were published in Britain, Trotsky is almost a case apart because of the volume of his writings and the extent of their dissemination in Britain and across the world. Trotsky became widely known outside Russia after the October Revolution, and his statements and activities were frequently reported in Britain, especially once he had assumed the role of Commissar of Foreign Affairs and begun to lead the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk in December 1917, and then again when he became Commissar for War and architect of victory in the civil war.2 Even before the discussions began at Brest-Litovsk, The Times reported an interview in which Trotsky assured the correspondent that Russia would not negotiate a separate peace, announced his doctrine that there should be peace without annexations, and set out his theory that ‘the whole European proletariat will insist

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within the next few weeks upon the conclusion of a general peace’, an ‘illusion’, the correspondent notes, which marks the shift from the Bolsheviks’ former lives in ‘a dreamland of idealism’ to the ‘problems of practical statesmanship’.3 The national newspapers were of course keen to understand the attitude of the new Russian government to the war, but socialist and communist workers were interested in the Bolsheviks for different reasons. The first publication in Britain under Trotsky’s name was a 30-page pamphlet called War or Revolution, published in 1918 and dated ‘May Day’ by the Socialist Labour Press (SLP) in Glasgow. The SLP was part of the militant left-wing scene in Glasgow which led to the place and period being dubbed ‘Red Clydeside’.4 The publication of socialist literature at this period in Glasgow constitutes a notable sub-history in its own right. Other items published by the SLP around this time include Militarism and Anti-Militarism (1917) by Karl Liebknecht. This had been first published in 1907 in Germany, where it was promptly banned, earning its author a prison sentence. Its republication in Scotland in 1917 reflected Liebknecht’s political agitation, as a founding member of the Spartacist League, against the war in Germany, where he was again held in prison. Other publications of the SLP included Lenin’s The Collapse of the Second International (1916), which criticised the action of the social democratic parties of the European nations in supporting a war based on nationalism and renouncing their internationalism. The context of these publications is the struggle of the Scottish Left against the war and against conscription. This struggle had seen the imprisonment of figures such as James Maxton of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1916 for making speeches against the Munitions Act, and of John McLean of the British Socialist Party for sedition, on the basis of his speeches against conscription in 1916. McLean was released from prison in 1917 following widespread agitation and was made Soviet Consul for Scotland following the Russian Revolution, a position which was treated as seditious by the British government.5 The ILP was not a revolutionary or Marxist party, and its opposition to the war tended to be pacifist in nature. By contrast, opposition to the war by Marxists such as McLean and the British Socialist Party was more political, condemning the war as the product of imperialist rivalry, a final stage of the illogical competition created by capitalism, and urging the working class to oppose it. This is the context of the publication of Trotsky’s War or Revolution, which is not a text dealing with current events in Russia, as might be expected, but a partial English translation of Der Krieg und die Internationale, published in Germany in 1914.

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The full text of Der Krieg und die Internationale appeared in English translation in the United States, published not by a political party but by an established publisher, Boni & Liveright, as The Bolsheviki and World Peace (1918). This mostly literary publishing house at that time published works by Wilde, Yeats, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Max Stirner, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Strindberg among others.6 Subsequent political publications included John Reed’s famous account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World (1919), and Max Eastman’s less well-known Since Lenin Died (1925). Boni & Liveright certainly had the intention of introducing their readers to the most advanced materials, as had been shown as early as 1914 when Albert and Charles Boni had published Des Imagistes: An Anthology, and the publication of works by Dreiser, Norris and Upton Sinclair added a socialist component to their offering. Nevertheless, Trotsky’s book is a unique item on the list, as the direct political statement of an eminent Russian revolutionary. Coming from a mainstream publisher, its circulation would have been very different from that of a political pamphlet such as War or Revolution. Its emergence in 1918, as the end of the war in Europe following US involvement began to come into view, also meant that the circumstances of its reception, and not least the status and significance of its author, were far different from those of its origin as a response to the collapse of socialist solidarity across Europe written for the consumption of the German working class.7 The text originated in the dissolution of the Second International in 1914, and Trotsky’s rhetoric is aimed over the heads of the socialist political leaders, who had endorsed their national war efforts and seemingly preferred nationalism to socialism, at a projected international audience which includes not only the workers of the world but the whole of humanity. The 1918 publication of the text in Englishlanguage versions served Trotsky’s purpose of inspiring a socialist and pacifist rising of the workers against their warmongering governments. This text is aimed at the future; it is intended to appeal not to what people are but to what the world must become; denouncing the politics of national identity and interest, Trotsky’s rhetoric aims to create a shift in the collective imaginary of all nations. In this vision, the world as revealed in its unity by imperialism supplies the basis for a revolution in the political imaginary which can now grasp the world, and not the nation state, as its object: The whole globe, the land and the sea, the surface as well as the interior, has become one economic workshop, the different parts of which are inseparably connected with one another.

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What the politics of imperialism has demonstrated more than anything else is that the old nation state [. . .] has outlived itself. The present War is at bottom a revolt of the forces of production against the political form of nation and state. All talk of the present bloody clash being a work of national defence is either hypocrisy or blindness. On the contrary, the real, objective significance of the War is the breakdown of the present national economic centres and the substitution of a world economy in its stead. The War of 1914 is the most colossal breakdown in history of an economic system destroyed by its own inherent contradictions.8

The vision of the globe as a vast workshop is striking; the analysis that the forces of production are in conflict with the relations of production is classical Marxism; the shift to seeing the relations of production in terms of the conflict of nation states rather than class conflict is the necessary adaptation of classical Marxism to the state of imperialist rivalry which had brought about the war. The following suggestion though is more specific to Trotsky. He continues: In these historical circumstances the working class, the proletariat, can have no interest in defending the outlived and antiquated national ‘fatherland’, which has become the main obstacle to economic development. The task of the proletariat is to create a far more powerful fatherland, with far greater power of resistance – the Republican United States of Europe, as the foundation of the United States of the World.9

Woodrow Wilson had dealings with Trotsky over the Bolshevik peace plans and over American intervention in Russia, and was well aware of Trotsky’s ideas and of his strategy for peace, with which in effect he was in dialogue. Trotsky’s text had only a general bearing on the revolution, which it predated, but its early and prophetic call for a United States of Europe was heeded by Wilson whose own Fourteen Points imitated Trotsky’s vocabulary. Trotsky later claimed that Charles Boni told him that Wilson had demanded the proofs and, on reading them, banned the book from publication.10 Be that as it may, it is often asserted that Wilson developed his politically quite different idea of the League of Nations as a ‘counter-manifesto’ to Trotsky’s proposals.11 Trotsky’s text, though, was written in quite different political circumstances, when the author was in exile in Switzerland, at a time when revolution in Europe appeared remote and the Russian Revolution almost impossible. What is remarkable about Trotsky’s

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vision of a United States of Europe is not just its apparent prescience but its mode of appeal to workers over the heads of their governments and of their union leaders by recourse to a rhetoric of the future, projective and ecstatic, a discourse of escape from the identity of the existing state of being and from the existing nation-state.12 Trotsky’s internationalism will continue to depend on this romantic rhetoric, even as his ability to implement concrete change grows – then wanes – with the progress of the revolution. The introduction to the New York edition of this text is by the journalist Lincoln Steffens, dated 4 January 1918.13 Steffens had covered the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and visited Russia in 1919, returning with the famous remark: ‘I’ve seen the future and it works.’14 His introduction is cast in a romantic light intended to establish Trotsky as the blazing heart of ‘red’ internationalism: The spirit that flames and casts it shadows on these pages is not only Trotzky’s. It is the spirit of the Bolsheviki; of the red left of the left wing of the revolutionary movement of new Russia. It flashed from Petrograd to Vladivostock [sic], in the first week of the revolt; it burned all along the Russian front before Trotzky appeared on the scene. It will smoulder long after he is gone. It is a hot Fact which has to be picked up and examined, this spirit. Whether we like it or we don’t, it is there; in Russia; it is elsewhere; it is everywhere today. It is the spirit of war; class war, but war. It is in this book. Nor is that all. The mind in this book – the point of view from which it starts, the views to which it points – Trotzky’s mind is the international mind. We have heard before of this new intelligence; we have read books, heard speeches, witnessed acts demonstrative of thoughts and feelings which are not national, but international; not patriotic, but loyal only to the lower-class-consciousness war aims of the workers of the world. The class warrior is as familiar a figure to us as the red spirit of the red left of revolution. But the voice which utters here the spirit and the mind, not only of the Russian, but of the world revolution is the voice of one having authority.15

Even though Trotsky produced his manuscript in a moment of defeat, four years later Steffens is able to cast Trotsky as the authoritative voice of the world revolution, as the voice, almost, of the world spirit itself, the ‘international mind’. Trotsky’s megaphone diplomacy at Brest-Litovsk, his claim to speak for the workers of the world, had its effect on Wilson. The appearance of Wilson’s own book, The State (1889), published in

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Russian translation in 1915, had already fomented Russian suspicions of Wilson and later fuelled Bolshevik scepticism about Wilson’s own brand of internationalism. Wilsonian anti-imperialism is often considered to have developed as a direct reformist alternative to the worldview of Lenin.16 Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ declaration of American war aims on 8 January 1918 was immediately transmitted to Russia, where it was received favourably, and forwarded to Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk where peace negotiations with the Central Powers had been under way since 22 December 1917. On the one hand, the Russians thought that America was the least imperialistic of the capitalist powers and that American workers were the most open to the internationalist message; on the other suspicions of Wilson grew and were finally confirmed by Wilson’s reluctant approval of American action in Russia in support of counterrevolutionary forces in 1918. The formation of the Comintern on 2 March 1919 cemented opposition to Wilson with a denunciation by Trotsky of the League of Nations, which Bolsheviks saw as a capitalist-imperialist force and a direct rival of the plan to spread Soviet government throughout the world: ‘toiling mankind was to become the bond-slaves of victorious world cliques who, under the firm-name of the League of Nations and aided by an “international” army and “international” navy, will plunder and strangle peoples.’17 Trotsky set out the Bolshevik position on national self-determination, and his own on the United States of Europe, in What is a Peace Program? (February 1918), a pamphlet published in English in Petrograd, which almost certainly achieved only limited circulation, but which is a marker, chronologically speaking, printed as it was just weeks before the Brest-Litovsk treaty was signed. The pamphlet recycled older writings, but Trotsky used the preface to defend Bolshevik internationalism against the claim of hypocrisy for making peace with ‘the monarchistic and capitalistic representatives of Germany, Austria and their allies’. Trotsky asserted that reaching an understanding with the Kaiser was as relevant to the ‘international proletariat’ as ‘the Mikado’ and asserted that ‘national differences of state form and of diplomatic usage are completely moved to the background by the uniformity of the imperialistic aims and the methods of the present world policies of the great powers’. The negotiations are taking place to ‘accelerate the rising of the working masses against the imperialistic cliques’. Russia, ‘in awaiting the imminent revolutionary flood in Europe’, may be forced to make peace with the Central Powers provisionally, but the coming ‘European Revolution’ will change everything: ‘Our

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whole policy is built on the calculation upon this revolution.’ The peace negotiations, says Trotsky, are taking place with the collapse of European governments as the ultimate goal. Trotsky adds into this statement of Bolshevik policy his own aim of creating a ‘United States of Europe’ and ultimately ‘a republican World Federation beyond a European one’.18 Trotsky’s notion of a United States of Europe never became an official Bolshevik goal and was in any case a slogan created as a response to the war which the cessation of hostilities probably rendered obsolete. Trotsky’s pamphlet, though, is also an interesting record of the internal intellectual conflict in Bolshevism around the concept of the nation, in which the tension between internationalist principle and the Bolshevik position as inheritors of the Russian Empire, in a situation which led to the creation of numerous if temporary newly independent nations in the wake of 1917 – Finland, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Karelia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and parts of Poland. Discussing the principle of ‘peoples’ right of self-determination’, Trotsky writes: National unity is a living hearth of culture, as the national language is its living organ, and these will still retain their meaning through indefinitely long historical periods. Social-Democracy will and must warrant to the national unity its freedom of development (or dissolution) in the interest of material and spiritual culture.19

Be that as it may, states Trotsky, the proletariat cannot allow the ‘national principle’ to get in the way of the inevitable and deeply progressive tendencies of the present industrial order towards an orderly organization throughout our continent, and further, all over the globe. Imperialism is the capitalistico-thievish expression of this tendency of modern industry to tear itself completely away from the stupidity of national narrowness [. . . T]he centralistic tendency of modern industry is fundamental and it must be guaranteed the amplest possibility of executing its real historical deliverance mission, to construct the united world industry, independent of national frames, State and tariff barriers [. . .]20

Trotsky concludes that ‘The United States of Europe – Without Monarchies, standing Armies and Secret Diplomacy appear as the most important feature of the proletarian peace-program.’21

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While Wilson’s vision of national self-determination was based on traditional notions of national governance, with peace encouraged by open trade agreements and reinforced by ‘a general association of nations [. . .] formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike’,22 the Bolshevik defence of national self-determination was aimed at internationalising the revolution. In terms of cultural debate, all questions about the Russianness or otherwise of the Russian Revolution – as manifested discursively in terms of the ‘Asiatic’ or of the ‘Russian Soul’ – would always already be subordinated by the Bolsheviks’ own rationalist view of the merely accidental nature of nationality, their dialectical position that it was globalising capital which was obliterating national difference and should be allowed to do so, and their corresponding adherence to the ideal of international revolution.23 Among the first actions of the Bolshevik government had been the appointment of Stalin as head of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities and the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of the People of Russia, which proclaimed the equality and sovereignty of peoples of Russia, their right to free self-determination, including statehood, the abolition of all national and religious privileges and restrictions, and the free development of national minorities and ethnographical groups in the former Russian Empire.24 As a Georgian, Stalin was regarded as an expert on the nationalities question, which he had addressed in Marxism and the National Question (1913), and in subsequent speeches and publications, which achieved wider anglophone circulation only in 1936 with the publication of Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, while just two other of Stalin’s works had previously been published in book form in London in 1928.25 While Stalin’s international profile developed more slowly, Trotsky’s fame led quickly to interest from more mainstream publishers in Britain. His perceived centrality resulted in a series of book publications in England including, perhaps as a symbolic apex, the invitation to write the entry on Lenin for the 1926 issue of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.26 In 1924 Methuen published Problems of Life and Towards Socialism or Capitalism? In 1925 George Harrap published Trotsky’s biography of Lenin, and George Allen & Unwin, a publisher with a Labour bent, published Literature and Revolution. They followed this in 1926 with the publication of Where is Britain Going?, an argument against the Fabians which adduced the evidence of Cromwell and the English Revolution to claim that England

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could soon face revolution. This intervention in British politics elicited widespread responses not least from Ramsay MacDonald (who later personally barred Trotsky’s application for asylum in Britain), Bertrand Russell and George Lansbury.27 In 1928 the same publisher produced The Real Situation in Russia, a key early account of Stalinist Russia and one of several texts translated by Trotsky’s key supporter in the United States, Max Eastman, made available for the US market but also issued in London. Subsequent important publications of the exiled Trotsky in the 1930s included My Life (1930) from Thornton Butterworth, The History of the Russian Revolution (1932) from Gollancz, and The Revolution Betrayed (with I Stake My Life) (1937) from Faber. Faber – as Faber & Gwyer – had earlier published Max Eastman’s Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth (1926). Trotsky’s importance most certainly cannot be presented in terms of a book publication history, although such a history opens interesting perspectives. Already by the 1930s, after Trotsky had left Russia, it was not these respectable publishers, left-leaning or otherwise, who provided his only outlet, but in particular the ILP, which issued Trotsky’s pamphlets and defended his ideas. This extensive and highly internationalised publication history – which can be surveyed in Louis Sinclair’s colossal Trotsky: A Bibliography (1989) – is an important factor in grasping the mechanism by which Trotsky’s influence was to extend long after his fall from power and continue to grow long after his death. We need only think of his appearance in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as Goldstein, the shadowy opponent of Big Brother. Trotsky’s spectral presence ultimately extended well beyond this, as he provided an alternative to the Soviet Union for socialists and communists during the Cold War, and fed debate within Marxism in decolonising countries about the advisability of moving directly to socialist government, bypassing the stage of creating a national, bourgeois parliament – the theory of Permanent Revolution, strongly advocated by Trotsky.28 The emergence of this ghostly Trotsky was in large part enabled by the extraordinary publication trail. In the 1920s Trotsky was more than a mere ghost as far as Britain was concerned. Explicit references to Trotsky in cultural writing of the period need to be given substance by reference to this body of published work. Early evidence of The Criterion’s interest in communist theory comes in ‘A Commentary’ of April 1924, in Eliot’s well-known claim about the nature of classicism:

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Classicism is in a sense reactionary, but it must be in a profounder sense revolutionary. A new classical age will be reached when the dogma, or ideology, of the critics is so modified by contact with creative writing, and when the creative writers are so permeated by the new dogma, that a state of equilibrium is reached.29

The italicisation is Eliot’s. Although the term ‘reactionary’ was well established by this time, the socialist or Marxist use of the term in opposition to ‘revolutionary’ is probably a post-war novelty. Eliot seems consciously to pick up on this vocabulary, although the context of his discussion is aesthetic, not social. His use of the term ‘ideology’ might be an allusion to Marxism as the very model of social and cultural struggle, although it is hard to establish the pattern of circulation of this term at that time. At this point Eliot is not proposing aesthetic classicism as a broader social programme intended as an alternative to Marxism. His use of only apparently Marxist terminology here should be taken as an indication of his ambition for classicism, and also as an indication of his sense, which seems to grow with successive phases of The Criterion, that classicism, like Bolshevism, must become organised. Classicism is to be seen as a third way, which belongs to both reaction and revolution, in this fashion laying claim to the radicalism, novelty and romanticism of socialism and communism. In 1924 Eliot does not present himself as being on any kind of anti-communist bandwagon. ‘A Commentary’ for July 1924 dedicates a page to a flyer which The Criterion has received from ‘The Society for Cultural Relations between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’. Eliot expresses unwillingness to support this organisation since, he asserts, it is probably sponsored by the Soviet government rather than by individuals, but takes a measured approach and does not make any overt political points beyond raising the question of government control. Indeed, the Society for Cultural Relations (SCR) had its origins in the ‘Hands off Russia’ campaign against British intervention in the civil war.30 Eliot treats the SCR as if it were anonymous, but the list of its members included George Bernard Shaw, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and even those critical of the Soviet regime, such as Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells. Much less well known is the name of the first President of the SCR, Denis Nowell Pritt, later a pro-Soviet Labour MP and now thought to be a Soviet agent tasked with creating support among British intellectuals.31 Olga Kameneva was director of the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign

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Countries (‘VOKS’ in Soviet parlance),32 which, according to Kameneva, had been formed independently of the foreign organisations such as the British SCR. In fact, Kameneva’s previous role had been as head of the Foreign Aid Commission which liaised with foreign charities working to mitigate the effects of the famine, with the intention of limiting and winding down their role. Kameneva’s group worked from later 1925 to 1928, and its interventions in Britain included a poster and book exhibition in London and Cambridge, and a further exhibition along the same lines travelling to other British towns.33 How much of this detailed background might in fact or in principle have been known to Eliot is not clear, but his lack of intellectual aggression at this point seems to indicate that at this stage neither fellow travellers nor the deliberate cultural intervention of the Soviet Union are key topics for him. The January 1925 ‘Commentary’ takes a closer interest in Soviet affairs. Eliot reviews Leon Trotsky’s Problems of Life which had been published by Methuen in 1924. This book was in fact a collection of essays published in Pravda when Trotsky had uncomfortably switched from war matters to the domestic agenda, although how much of this context was visible to Methuen’s readers is arguable. Methuen at this time was a general publisher, offering a range of titles of broad cultural interest (e.g. history and science) which included a limited literary list featuring Belloc, Chesterton, Conrad and A. A. Milne as well as some Blake, Shelley and Shakespeare. Problems of Life is in character with this list only by dint of its potential general interest. Trotsky’s perceived importance at this point was probably at its apex. Following the death of Lenin, Trotsky was imagined to be the leading Bolshevik by those outside Russia, even as his position within the Politburo had in fact begun to weaken with the formation of the Left Opposition around the January 1924 publication of Trotsky’s The New Course. Methuen’s publication of Problems of Life was evidently aimed at presenting communist thought to a general, educated readership. Although the general tenets of communist thought were certainly widely known, Trotsky’s book presented a set of arguments about the development of new social practices in some detail. The book’s arguments concerning the role of tradition, the awakening of the proletarian ‘personality’, and the role of ritual in a new society are interestingly consonant with the concerns of Eliot and indeed Leavis. With the end of the civil war, it was clear to all observers that the communist state was a reality, and that any plans outlined by Trotsky carried the authority not simply of the most prominent Bolshevik after Lenin, but also of someone whose organisational effec-

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tiveness was in no doubt. Eliot’s review of Problems of Life is printed opposite his review of a new edition of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Eliot sees continued relevance for Arnold’s ethical centredness on ‘the good life’, and juxtaposes Trotsky to Arnold: ‘Against Arnold and his party has arisen in the East a new prophet of culture.’ Eliot’s reaction to Trotsky’s book is mocking, although within two years he will have begun to conceive of communism as the principal political feature and threat of the modern world. Here, Eliot prefers to diminish the revolution: ‘I was prepared to find in Mr. Trotsky’s book an exposition of a culture repellent to my own disposition; but I hoped that it would be distinct and interesting.’ Instead, Eliot finds a ‘dreary picture of Montessori schools, playing fields, plasticene, club-houses, communal kitchens, crèches, abstinence from swearing and alcohol, a population warmly clad (or soon to be warmly clad), and with its mind filled (or in the process of being filled) with nineteenth-century superstitions about Nature and her forces’. Eliot quotes Trotsky, speaking, as he claims, in ‘the smuggest tones of a New Bourgeoisie’: ‘The cinema amuses, educates, strikes the imagination by images, and liberates you from the need of crossing the church door.’34 Trotsky does not mention Montessori schools, but it will be noted that Eliot seeks to disparage this form of new educational thinking, which had been widely discussed in England, while subtly and perhaps accurately connecting it to Trotsky’s idea in Problems of Life that the Russian worker is a child whose development of personality and of culture cannot be led by government but must be allowed to follow its own evolutionary, developmental course – not quite in the manner of Rousseau, whom he does not invoke, but who can certainly be construed as the ultimate target of Eliot in this moment. Plasticene is not mentioned by Trotsky, but the other things are, and Eliot’s strategy here is to diminish socialism, both domestic and foreign, by representing it, with not quite Wildean aloofness, as boring. Sidney Webb, the prominent Fabian and supporter of the Soviet Union, is mentioned at the conclusion of the review, more in order to signal disdain of one of the leading British Fabians, who had recently served in the shortlived government of Ramsay MacDonald, than to sound a warning about the socialist enemy within. Yet as his only direct quotation from Trotsky, on cinema as a substitute for the church shows, Eliot might also have been in the process of discovering in Trotsky’s book a significant threat and useful anti-model. Eliot’s disdainful approach also serves to conceal some of the important argumentative threads of Problems of Life, notably the centrality of the question of the family, women’s work and childcare.

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The reconstruction of life is one thing at the level of public life, where things can be rapidly and visibly changed, but it is another at the level of the family. Families may now even be strained by the fact that both husband and wife might have exciting new prospects in politics and work, but each returns to find life still the same at home. The Enlightenment, Trotsky argues, created the foundations for a rational reconstruction of life, but the horizon of its effects were set by its origins in, and commitment to, the world of bourgeois private property. Only the revolution in property creates the conditions for a fundamental transformation of life along rationalist lines: ‘It is only Socialism that has set itself the task of embracing reason and subjecting all the activities of man to it. [. . .] Only this will open up the possibility of a rational reconstruction of life.’35 This will have particular effects for women, but reconstruction of the family presents particular challenges: To institute the political equality of men and women in the Soviet state was one problem and the simplest. A much more difficult one was the next – that of instituting the industrial equality of men and women workers in the factories, the mills, and the trades unions, and of doing it in such a way that the men should not put the women to disadvantage. But to achieve the actual equality of man and woman within the family is an infinitely more arduous problem. All our domestic habits must be revolutionized before that can happen. And yet it is quite obvious that unless there is actual equality of husband and wife in the family, in a normal sense as well as in the conditions of life, we cannot speak seriously of their equality in social work or even in politics.36

Perhaps already people can start to experiment with communal living, Trotsky suggests. The power of custom is hard to break, but the revolution has created the material conditions which will break the economic dependency of the family structure by making women equal in the workplace, and much else will follow. That this English translation of Trotsky made visible some of the considerations around the socialist reconstruction of life as a feminist project based on gender equality and unconstrained intimate relationships is lost in Eliot’s review. In 1925 Trotsky entered British public political discourse in an unexpected way. Stanley Baldwin had assumed the premiership following the general election of October 1924 which yielded a Conservative landslide. This followed a period of minority Labour government following the general election of December 1923, which

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Baldwin had called quite unnecessarily. Industrial relations were increasingly confrontational. The year 1925 saw John Maynard Keynes forcefully defending his own liberalism, denouncing Bolshevism, asserting that ‘the Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie’, and repudiating Labour as the ‘Party of Catastrophe’ characterised by ‘malignity, jealousy, hatred of those who have wealth and power’.37 In the face of a revival of the Triple Alliance of miners, railwaymen and transport workers, and a resurgence in Communist Party activity, Baldwin used one of his most noted speeches in the House of Commons to argue for industrial peace and a new partnership in industry.38 His speech to the house of 6 March was preceded by one at Birmingham on the 5th and followed by a further speech at Leeds on the 12th, all three being published together as Peace and Goodwill in Industry (1925). Baldwin’s Commons speech asserted the need in an evolving economy for ‘a partnership of men who understand their own work’, practical industrialists and workers, ‘men who have been right through the mill’ who can gain ‘little help [. . .] from politicians and intellectuals’.39 In his Leeds speech, Baldwin refers, without naming it, to a book by Trotsky (evidently Problems of Life), which he says he has ‘been reading with much interest’, quoting it briefly in order to characterise the book’s argument that social reconstruction would require hard work, and concluding that ‘Trotsky is slowly and reluctantly discovering [. . .] the inevitability of gradualness. He is a man of action facing realities.’40 Trotsky became aware of this speech from reading The Times, and responded to Baldwin’s attempt to soften the class struggle – as well as to the attack on his own name – in Where is Britain Going?41 At stake in the notion of ‘gradualness’ was the question of the theory of history and especially the role of revolutionary violence. Trotsky derided the assertion that social transitions could be made gradually by adducing Baldwin’s support for the war with Germany – hardly a gradual approach, he argued, to the changing pattern of relations between the two rival capitalist powers – and by making reference to the history of British imperial violence, noting that the more successful the British ruling class had been at suppressing ‘revolutionary disturbances’ internally, the more successful they had been in their military and economic adventures abroad.42 Baldwin was not the sole target of Trotsky’s book, and further chapters attacked the Fabians and elements of the trades union leadership. The clear effect of the book was to intervene in British politics in defence of revolution at a period when industrial struggle was once again on the rise and, coming from a prominent publishing

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house, Where is Britain Going? received a wide response, including a robust swipe from Maynard Keynes, who derided the ‘turbid stream with a hectoring gurgle which is characteristic of modern revolutionary literature translated from the Russian’ and compared Trotsky’s approach to ‘the philo-fisticuffs of the Right’, more intent on means than ends.43 Keynes elsewhere characterised Bolshevism as an alliance of ‘Russian and Jewish natures’.44 Here, he attends to the concept of revolution itself, and denounces Trotsky’s assumption that ‘a plan exists, and that nothing remains except to put it into operation’ and criticises ‘the empty-headedness of Force at the present stage of human affairs’, noting that ‘we lack more than usual a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal’, while the ideas of all political parties, including the Marxists, are rooted in the past.45 The debate provoked by Trotsky’s intervention in British politics was not a theoretical exercise but a response to a sense of emergency which in 1926 would culminate in the General Strike, although this turned out not to be the sustained general confrontation which some trades unionists and communists had hoped for. It was in 1926, too, that Eliot began to modify the politically aloof stance of his journal and give it a broadly anti-communist mission. The first issue of Volume IV of The Criterion in 1926 appeared under the banner The New Criterion. In his leading piece, ‘The Idea of a Literary Review’, Eliot signalled the renewal of the political-cultural intent of his journal with a booklist outlining his preferred ‘tendency’. This list includes Georges Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence, Charles Maurras’ L’Avenir de l’intelligence, Julien Benda’s Belphégor, T. E. Hulme’s Speculations, Jacques Maritain’s Réflexions sur l’intelligence and Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership.46 A few issues later, the ‘Commentary’ states that Wyndham Lewis’s The Art of Being Ruled ‘might be added to those mentioned in the January New Criterion as significant of the tendency of contemporary thought’ and likens Lewis to Benda, Babbitt and Maritain. Against this often noted pantheon, ‘The Idea of a Literary Review’ identifies ‘that part of the present which is already dead’ in a list which includes H. G. Wells’ Christina Alberta’s Father (1925), George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan (1923) and Bertrand Russell’s What I Believe (1925).47 The internationalist and socialist idealism of Wells, the pacifistic moral neutrality of Shaw, and Russell’s brand of atheist humanism and celebration of ‘good’, form a clear foil of well-meaning idealism to the emphatic celebration of intelligence, rejection of belief in progress, and dry realpolitik, which constitute the dominant strands of Eliot’s preferred ‘tendency’.

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In the issues immediately following ‘The Idea of a Literary Review’, one contribution which stands out and appears to confirm the tendency towards conservative anti-communism are the two extracts from Henri Massis’ ‘Defence of the West’,48 which later appeared in book form in France as Défense de l’Occident (1927) and in England in the same year. In 1920 Massis had been the co-founder with Jacques Maritain of La Revue universelle. He was a Catholic and nationalist committed to what he saw as France’s historic Christian mission, and a fellow traveller if never actually a member of Action française. Massis advocates a ‘defence’ of the West against Bolshevism, Indian mysticism and German Romantic culture. Eliot at this stage, in a brief prefatory note, distances himself from Massis by noting that Massis’ is a ‘national’ view.49 This is a complex reservation, since it might imply, on the one hand, a support for the notion of the West but a criticism of the French hostility to German culture, or, on the other hand, a general reservation about the notion of the ‘West’ – that is, of a universalised Europe – which Eliot finds in Massis’ text to be a specifically French projection.50 Eliot’s remarks on Russia in these pages are very cautious, in contrast to Massis’ grand vision, restricting himself to a short comment on freedom of speech in Russia in the context of the prohibition of certain books. Another brief comment comes a year later, when, in a short section of his ‘Commentary’ titled ‘The Latest Muscovite Menace’, Eliot broadly compares the Russian Revolution to the crowd singing at a Cup Final or Test Match, and makes passing reference to Matthew Arnold. The comment is urbane, the tone far from newspaper hysteria, the topic perhaps an established one in a period in which spectator sport had grown as a leisure pursuit, and the overall effect far removed from the grinding theoretical machinery of someone like Massis which might be thought to stand behind it.51 Although comment on the Soviet Union on Eliot’s part is restricted during this initial phase of The New Criterion, interest in Russian matters both revolutionary and expatriate is given an editorial fillip by the addition of John Cournos52 as a frequent contributor to the ‘Foreign Reviews’ section. This regular section of the journal concentrated principally on foreign language literary periodicals, and Cournos, appearing at first as ‘J.C.’, was tasked with the Russian section. Cournos, family name ‘Korshoon’, had been born in Kiev to RussianJewish parents and had emigrated with them age ten to Philadelphia. In 1912 he went to London to pursue his literary career. The Russian Revolution generated a demand from the Foreign Office for educated Russian speakers, and after a period translating intercepted

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Russian government messages, Cournos joined the Anglo-Russian Commission to Petrograd, published London under the Bolsheviks: A Londoner’s Dream on Returning from Petrograd (1919) under the imprint of the Russian Liberation Committee, and later worked for the Ministry of Information. Cournos was more interested in his literary career which resulted in a number of novels including an autobiographical trilogy (The Mask (1919), The Wall (1921) Babel (1922)) and several translations from Russian (including three translations of Feodor Sologub, one with Richard Aldington, in his own selection of Short Stories out of Soviet Russia (1929); much later he translated Andrei Bely’s St Petersburg (1959)). Perhaps because he was so briefed, or more likely though his own inclination, Cournos’ detailed reviews of both expatriate and revolutionary journals are initially quite neutral in tone, and maintain a focus on literary matters, although they increasingly signal political scepticism as writers are taken directly under Party control in the mid-1930s. Cournos’ contributions continued until 1938 and paint a detailed picture of Russian literary culture to which English-speaking readers had only partial access from a handful of sources such as Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and D. S. Mirsky’s Contemporary Russian Literature. Their inclusion contributes to the balance of the journal, not least in the period of its re-emergence as The New Criterion when the swerve towards Action française is so pronounced. To readers in mid-1920s Britain, the Soviet Union could be seen either as the harbinger of a socialist future in Britain and throughout Europe, or as a culturally separate reality, Russian and remote. The Criterion ‘Commentary’ often claimed that politics were national in character, not international, for example in Eliot’s assertion that fascism had an Italian character and could not be applied in Britain, nor be fully understood by the British.53 However, Eliot increasingly came to advocate the notion of a European cultural programme which would exclude Russia and be defined against it. This emerges in ‘A Commentary’ for August 1927, in a discussion headed ‘The European Idea’. In this piece, Eliot claims that nationalism is now an outdated, nineteenth-century phenomenon, although, since the end of the war, the press has claimed that nationalism has grown with the emergence of yet more small nations. Eliot comments sardonically: ‘Instead of a few “oppressed minorities”, the oppressed minorities seem to be almost in a majority; instead of a few potential Sarajevos, we seem to have dozens.’ The use of the phrase ‘oppressed minorities’ probably reflects a contemporary usage of which Eliot intends to signal his suspicion, but also conjures memories of ‘brave little

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Belgium’, the phrase used by politicians and propagandists to appeal to the British sense of fair play during the Great War, following its invasion by Germany in 1914. Eliot goes on: But the Idea of Nationality is no longer the same idea that it was for Mrs. Browning or Swinburne; like most of Woodrow Wilson’s ideas, it was aged when he discovered it; it will not explain fascism any more than it will explain bolshevism. Not how Europe can be ‘freed’, but how Europe can be organized, is the question of the day.54

Against the romantic ideal of ‘freedom’ Eliot asserts the classical value of ‘organisation’ and the phrase ‘the question of the day’ can be taken to imply either that the ‘organisation’ of Europe has in general become a question – in the formation of the League which is concerned more with questions of regulation than emancipation – or that Eliot himself wishes to assert that Europe should indeed ‘organise’ in resistance to the Romantic and socialist drive to (an impossible) ‘freedom’. The paragraph which follows identifies the work of Paul Valéry, Oswald Spengler and Henri Massis as three different examples of the form which a convergence around the ‘European Idea’ has taken: One of the ideas which characterizes our age may be called The European Idea. It is remarkable first because of the variety of its appearance; it may take the form of a meditation on the decay of European civilization by Paul Valéry, or of a philosophy of history such as that of Oswald Spengler, or it may appear allied with an intense nationalism as in the work of Henri Massis. It is remarkable second in that it is primarily an appeal to reason rather than an emotional summons to international brotherhood. It has no obligation to the thought of Romain Rolland, to nineteenth-century socialism, or to the humanitarian sentiments out of which the League of Nations arose; and it has as yet no direct connection with the League and no influence upon it. It owes its origin to a new feeling of insecurity and danger; it goes to prove that the most important event of the War was the Russian Revolution. For the Russian revolution has made men conscious of the position of Western Europe as (in Valéry’s words) a small and isolated cape on the western side of the Asiatic Continent. And this awareness seems to give rise to a new European consciousness.55

In Eliot’s intellectual shorthand, the names of Spengler, Massis and Valéry give point to the central role which the Russian Revolution and the corresponding formation of the League of Nations has taken in his thought. In the manner of an astute propagandist, Eliot tries

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to imply that there is more coherence and potential for unity among these disparate voices than – on any reading – seems possible or likely. While Eliot’s reference to Henri Massis here is relatively clear in the context of Massis’ anti-communism and the appearance of his work in The Criterion, the mention of Valéry requires a little more exploration. In examining this configuration of Eliot and Valéry, we should not really expect that Eliot, by adding up as it were the authorships and documents he mentions, will produce a concept of massive substance, a programme for action that might go beyond his later project of uniting selected European literary journals. The European Idea is an imaginary formation and a primarily defensive one. It is as hollow and as emptily resonant as such large ideological markers often are. Eliot seems to be under no illusion that that such a thing exists.56 His formulation, hesitating between ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’, is presented as if it created the space for thought, for alliance and cooperation among grand positions which are nevertheless only distantly related in terms of their cultural pessimism. Eliot, though, does not even pretend to unite the voices he links, and the details of his programme reveal gaps and frayed edges which are the mark of their moment. When Eliot mentions him here in 1927, Valéry’s reputation is at a height from which it has in effect never subsided. Valéry famously gave up poetry in his early years for the study of mathematics, and only later resumed poetry at the age of 47 with the publication in 1917 of two works which were intensely well received, La Jeune Parque and the short poem ‘L’Aurore’. Within just a few years Valéry was accepted as the continuation of the French poetic tradition. The first study of his work by Albert Thibaudet appeared in 1923 and was followed by several others in 1926 and 1927. Valéry became the cultural representative of France at the League of Nations and was invited to speak in many European countries. Eliot refers to two famous essays by Valéry published in The Athenaeum in April and May of 1919. This was before Valéry had become unequivocally famous, and before the publication of these essays in French in the Nouvelle revue française in August of the same year. Headed ‘Letters from France’, the first had the English title ‘The Spiritual Crisis’, the second ‘The Intellectual Crisis’. The two pieces appeared together in France under the title ‘La Crise de l’esprit’, firmly changing the emphasis from the English ‘spiritual’ to the broader set of meanings of ‘esprit’, as spirit, ghost, mind, intellect, and even character, essence, meaning, genius. A ‘spiritual crisis’, in other words, seems like a very definite moral and personal condition, but a ‘crise d’esprit’ is more

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nebulous. Valéry produced these essays at the request of John Middleton Murry, with whom Valéry had started a correspondence after Murry warmly reviewed La Jeune Parque in the Times Literary Supplement (23 August 1917) and translated the articles himself for The Athenaeum. Murry was naturally very pleased with the essays and wanted a regular contribution ‘from our Paris Correspondent’, but Valéry felt unable to produce hastily and let the collaboration lapse.57 These essays reflect an ambivalence that is also found in Eliot. On the one hand, there is a sense of transience, of the lack of substance in every being, in every culture, and in every monument of culture. Against his scepticism is the desire to maintain as culture that very entity which knows its own finitude in just this way.58 The first part of the essay argues that civilisations know they are mortal, but that the war has stimulated a wide interest in all aspects of European cultural legacy. The ‘crisis’ of the title lies not, following the war, in ‘the lost illusion of a European culture and the demonstration of the impotence of knowledge to save anything’ but in ‘the free coexistence in all cultivated minds of the most heterogeneous ideas, of the most opposite principles of life and knowledge’. He goes on: That is the characteristic of a ‘modern’ epoch. I have no objection to generalizing the notion of ‘modern’ and to giving this name to a certain mode of existence, instead of making it a mere synonym of ‘contemporary’. [. . .] The Europe of 1914 had, perhaps, arrived at the limit of this modernism. Every brain of a certain rank was a market-place for all races of opinion; every thinker a Great Exhibition of thoughts. [. . .] The Hamlet of Europe now looks on millions of ghosts [. . .]59

While the first part of the essay acknowledges uncertainty, transitoriness and loss, the second, albeit from behind the screen of Valéry’s insistently abstract philosophy, sets out the principles of a programme for European resurgence. For Valéry, this is the condition of ‘modernism’ itself, and studies of anglophone literary modernism which look at the developing use of this term have commonly overlooked this prominent appearance of the term in English. It is from this essay that Eliot quotes in his ‘Commentary’ of August 1927, though without himself using the term ‘modernism’: The present moment poses this capital question: Is Europe to keep her pre-eminence in all provinces? Will Europe become what she is in reality, that is, a little promontory on the continent of Asia? [un petit

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cap du continent asiatique] Or will Europe remain what she seems to be, that is, the precious part of the terrestrial universe, the pearl of the sphere, the brain of this vast body?60

Eliot uses ‘cape’ where Murry’s translation uses ‘promontory’, implying he has also seen the French published version and therefore perhaps other prose works of Valéry.61 Eliot had published, and contributed an introduction to, the 1924 English translation of Le Serpent, where he praises Valéry’s ‘impulse towards classicism’ and combination of tradition and experiment, but makes no reference to politics.62 Valéry’s subsequent statements on Europe mutated into a type of European nationalism, which it is not, quite, in this first version. When Valéry spoke in Vienna on the topic of Europe in October 1926 he argued in now-modified terms that Europe had through a certain esprit achieved a degree of civilisation without precedent, and in the present situation, characterised by doubt, instability and political incoherence, it was necessary to bring this spirit to life. ‘Il s’agit pour quelqu’uns d’entre nous, pour ceux que j’appellerai les hommes de l’esprit, de communiquer et servir l’Europe, la conscience qu’il-y-a quelque chose à sauver, à prolonger, à porter à son plus haut point de puissance et de lucidité.’ The man of esprit is not the intellectual, a word which Valéry says is not clear in its meaning, but any man however humble who ‘vit pour l’esprit’. The terms of Valéry’s advocacy of ‘esprit’ evolved, as he tamed his nationalism, but without embracing internationalism, instead extending his nationalism tacitly to the whole of Europe, seen as superior to other continents.63 At the point at which Valéry introduces esprit, and at which Eliot picks it up, there is little certainty indeed as to what it might mean. This is revealed by examination of Valéry’s notebooks from the period. While the methodology of this study emphasises published documents and other public activities, it is revealing of the vague sense of esprit to introduce a few lines from the Cahiers of Paul Valéry which were published in facsimile edition a few years after his death, between 1957 and 1961. The occasional uses of esprit in these notebooks amplify the rigorous and pessimistic scepticism of Valéry in relation to the term esprit, manifest the highly polysemous nature of the term, and seem to confirm the strange hollowness of the conception of a European mind or spirit even in the discourses and minds of its advocates. The Cahiers are a series of notebooks in which Valéry kept detailed accounts of his thoughts usually in short paragraphs often with a subject heading. The quoted remarks come from the Notebook kept from April 1919 to June 1920. Since they

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do not translate comfortably, and to give a better view of the nuance of the thinking, they are not translated here. ce qu’on appelle esprit se réduit à (ou ne se réduit que par) des contradictions, des désaccords, des discontinuités Crise de l’esprit – Bêtise fondée sur responsabilité. Politique. Le désordre de l’esprit est créateur – mais il ne donne que l’embryon nouveau. La vie et non le viable. Il faut porter et enfanter, après cette fécondation. Où encore est-il l’orage sans lequel pas d’éclair. L’éclair ne dure rien. A sa lueur on voit, on sait qu’il y a cette contrée – mais ensuite il le faut explorer. Ce qu’il y a plus vil au monde c’est sans doute l’esprit. Pareil à le [sic] monde, il touche a tout il ne connait pas des dégouts. Les ordures l’intéressent. Il va partout. [. . .] O bonheur de l’esprit ! Trouvailles, lueurs, puissances sans origine, aux effets admirables – vous êtes rien puisque vous n’obéissez à la volonté. On met donc la volonté plus près de soi que l’on fait les accidents de l’esprit. Cette volonté est comme substantielle. Mais en somme, que veut-on ? S’étonner soi-même en la voulant et en la faisant.64

It is notable that Eliot prefers to stay with the notion of mind in his 1927 ‘Commentary’, and does not follow Valéry down the path of the troublingly ambivalent ‘spirit’. Eliot cites only Valéry’s earliest essay on Europe, and when he claims that the European idea has no connection with or influence on the League seems unaware of Valéry’s role and influence. It may be that Eliot would have been less comfortable with Valéry’s more formalised European nationalism of the mid1920s than he was with the looser and more suggestive terms of the earlier essay. Responding to Valéry’s Vienna appearance of October 1926 – which he had refused to attend – Stefan Zweig, a committed internationalist who disapproved of Valéry’s European nationalism, wrote contemptuously in a letter to Romain Rolland: ‘It is a contagious disease, this new mania for travelling across Europe as spiritual missionaries – Thomas Mann and Paul Valéry are competing with movie stars.’65 Eliot seems not to have met Valéry, who gave a lecture in London in October 1927 called ‘Is there a Crisis of Intelligence?’, chaired by Edmond Gosse.66 Eliot did not manage to meet him but by November had become aware of the new level of Valéry’s exposure and wrote to Lady Rothermere that, now that Valéry has become so

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celebrated by others, he (Eliot) would be a ‘laughing stock’ if he were to belatedly join in with the general acclaim.67 Eliot would subsequently advocate Maurras as his preferred alternative, noting in his 1928 review of ‘The Literature of Fascism’ that ‘most of the concepts which might have attracted me to fascism I seem already to have found, in a more digestible form, in the work of Charles Maurras’, whose ideas ‘have a closer applicability to England than those of fascism’ on such topics as the monarchy.68 Yet even as he backed the Action française, Eliot allowed space for other voices in The Criterion, for example publishing McDiarmid’s ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’ in 1932.69 These years lie beyond the scope of this study, but it is interesting to note that Eliot later revisited Trotsky in the ‘Commentary’ of January 1933, in which he reviewed Literature and Revolution alongside V. F. Calverton’s The Liberation of American Literature. Calverton was the pen name of George Goetz, regarded as the first American Marxist literary critic. As Eliot notes, Calverton was already known for his works Sex Expression and Literature (1926) and The Bankruptcy of Marriage (1928).70 The Liberation of American Literature is generally discussed alongside Granville Hicks’ The Great Tradition (1933) as the earliest major Marxist accounts of American literature.71 In this six-page article, Eliot adopts a subtle strategy rather than launching a direct attack. Calverton’s adoption of Marxism is set in social and economic context, perhaps in sly tribute to Marxist materialism. Reflecting Wyndham Lewis’s view of the literary public sphere as a now closed circuit, Eliot points out that the literary profession is ‘overcrowded and underpaid’, and ‘embarrassed by such a number of ill-trained people doing such a number of unnecessary jobs and writing so many unnecessary books and unnecessary reviews of unnecessary books’. This undignified profession will welcome the opportunity ‘to take part in the creation of a new art and new standards of literary criticism, to be provided with a whole stock of ideas and words’ in order to receive a ‘new lease of life’. Seeking to taint the political commitment of the Marxist critic of the 1930s with careerism, Eliot concludes: ‘There are obvious inducements, besides that – never wholly absent – of simple conversion, to entice the man of letters into political and social theory which he then employs to revive his sinking fires and rehabilitate his profession.’72 Trotsky cannot be dealt with in the same way as a minor figure such as Calverton. Eliot combats Trotsky by agreeing with him. The approach seems in one optic to be strategic – as if by acknowledging points of agreement Eliot can avoid the appearance

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of giving a merely reactionary response – but it is also consonant with the intellectual politics of The Criterion, which considers political positions to be subordinate to the intellect. Eliot acknowledges that he knows little of the writers Trotsky discusses, although he might have referred the reader to the already substantial series of reviews of Russian periodicals by John Cournos which had covered some of that ground. In admitting that Trotsky is ‘certainly a man of first-rate intelligence’ who ‘utters a good deal of sound sense’, Eliot allows that Trotsky is a fit interlocutor. The basis on which Eliot admits him is not expressed in his slightly mocking initial claim that Trotsky’s book has ‘become a text-book for revolutionary litterateurs’, but in the almost opposing claim that ‘as an antidote to the false art of revolution his treatise is admirable’. In this way, Eliot can claim Trotsky as an enemy of Bolshevism. Of course, the works of Trotsky from the mid-1920s already contained evidence of his political problems, and as his criticism of Stalin became more explicit in the 1930s anti-communists felt able to pay more attention to him. In 1933 Eliot commissioned A. L. Rowse, the young historian and parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party, to review Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1932–3).73 Later editorials continue to discuss communism.74 In 1937 Faber published The Revolution Betrayed (1937).75 It is likely that Eliot was involved in its publication. Eliot’s desire to claim Trotsky as an ally of anti-communism would have been very strong by that time, when it had become fashionable for writers to support the Soviet Union.

Notes 1. Commentary on The Criterion which supplies further context for some of this discussion appears in David Ayers, English Literature of the 1920s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) and David Ayers, ‘Literary Criticism and Cultural Politics’, in Laura Marcus and Pete Nicholls (eds), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 379– 95. On The Criterion more generally, see Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 2. For an account of the civil war based on extensive knowledge of Russian source materials, see Jonathan D. Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World (London: Hurst, 2015). Smele’s account is notable for rejecting the attempt of Bolshevik and Soviet historiography to date the civil war from after 1917, in order to present the October Revolution itself as essentially peaceful and

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3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

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unopposed (see pp. 30–36). On Trotsky’s reputation and the role of his ‘train’, see pp. 130–2. Unnamed correspondent, ‘An Interview with Trotsky’, The Times 41654 (6 December 1917), 8; and ‘Trotsky’s Idea of Peace’, The Times 41655 (7 December 1917), 8. See, for example, Ian McLean, The Legend of Red Clydeside (Edinburgh: Donald, 1983). Michael Byers, ‘John McLean (1879–1923)’ (2002) http://gdl.cdlr. strath.ac.uk/redclyde/redclypeobyemle.htm at 10 July 2007. The Selected Addresses and Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson (1918) is the most overtly political offering from Boni Liveright at this date. Publications in the following decade included works by Eliot, Faulkner, Freud, H.D. and Pound. Anita Loos’ best-selling Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) was reprinted several times, and stalwarts of the house included Eugene O’Neill. The text of War or Revolution is divided into five sections: (1) The Basis of War; (2) Socialist Opportunism; (3) The Decline of the Revolutionary Spirit; (4) Working Class Imperialism; (5) The Revolutionary Epoch. The first chapter corresponds to the ‘Author’s Preface’ of The Bolsheviki and World Peace while the remaining four share the titles of the last four chapters of that book. Chapters I to VII of The Bolsheviki and World Peace do not appear in War or Revolution. Chapters I to VI correspond to Chapters 1 to 7 of Der Krieg und die Internationale (Chapter V combines Chapters 5 and 6 of the German). This only slightly complicated picture gives a hint of the nature of the Trotsky bibliography, with works adapted according to situation, and often with no clear indication of origin, editorial oversight or translator. Leon Trotsky, War or Revolution: Bolshevist Socialism versus Capitalist Imperialism (Glasgow: Socialist Labour Party, 1918), pp. 3–4. Ibid. p. 6. David Walters writes: ‘President Wilson had, however, already read the booklet by calling for the proof sheets from the publishers. Some of Trotsky’s phraseology (which would sound fine and liberal) he used in his own peace program: No reparations, self-determination of nations, United States of Europe, etc. Trotsky heard of this from Charles Boni himself, in 1931, when the publisher visited Trotsky in exile at Principo’, citing Alfred Rosmer, ‘Trotsky in Paris During World War 1: Recollections of a Comrade and Co-worker’, The New International 16:5 (September–October 1950), 263–78, citing 270, where Rosmer writes that Wilson ‘commented on the book, recommended it, made it a success’. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1914/war/warintl.pdf (accessed April 2017). See also Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921 (1954. London: Verso, 2003), pp. 178–9. See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 23, 66.

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12. The concept of the United States of Europe had first been promoted by Victor Hugo after 1848, and it seems likely that Trotsky would have known of earlier debate around this term. See Angelo Metzidakis, ‘Victor Hugo and the Idea of a United States of Europe’, NineteenthCentury French Studies 23:1–2 (Fall–Winter 1994–95), 72–84. 13. As a sidelight on literary modernism, Lincoln Steffens is known for his appearance in Ezra Pound’s Canto XIX, as ‘Steff’, giving advice to Carranza during the Mexican Revolution, and again in Canto LXXXIV. In both places, he is quoted as saying ‘you can [. . .] do nothing with revolutionaries until they are at the end of their tether.’ In the 1930s Pound believed that Steffens had become a supporter of Social Credit doctrines. 14. An early but still useful source on Steffens and Russia is Dimitri S. von Mohrenschildt, ‘Lincoln Steffens and the Russian Bolshevik Revolution’, The Russian Review 5:1 (Autumn 1945), 31–41. 15. Lincoln Steffens, ‘Introduction’ in The Bolsheviki and World Peace, pp. 7–8. 16. See, for example, N. Gordon Levin Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution (1968. London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 6. For a contrasting view which emphasises the cooperative relationship between American financiers and the Bolsheviks, see Anthony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (Sandton: Valiant, 1975). Sutton finds a high level of common ground between the internationalist and statist agenda of financiers such as Andrew Carnegie and Leon Trotsky. This type of argument seems to be important within American Aryanism. Sutton draws on Jennings C. Wise, Woodrow Wilson: Disciple of Revolution (New York: Paisley Press, 1938). 17. Quoted Alexander S. Khodnev, ‘The Legacies of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations in Russia’, World Affairs 158 (1995), 18–25, reference on 22, from V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 40, p. 154. 18. L. Trotzky, What is a Peace Program? (Petrograd, February 1918), pp. 1–4. 19. Ibid. p. 15. 20. Ibid. p. 16. 21. Ibid. p. 19. Bold type in the original. 22. Quotation from President Wilson’s Address to Congress, 8 January 1918. 23. Trotsky’s own internationalism and indifference to his own Jewish background – an origin that was often exploited by his enemies – was never more apparent than in his vehement resistance to the formation of a separate Jewish socialist caucus at the 1903 Socialist Congress in Brussels, one of the very few occasions when he referred to himself as a Jew, according to his biographer. See Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, pp. 73–5.

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24. On Soviet nationalities policy, see, especially, Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001). 25. Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1936) (the book had previously been published in English in Petrograd and Moscow in 1935); Joseph Stalin, The October Revolution: A Collection of Articles and Speeches (London: Martin Lawrence, [1928]); Joseph Stalin, Leninism, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928). 26. See The Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information. Thirteenth Edition. Being Volumes One to Twenty-eight of the Latest Standard Edition with the Three New Volumes covering Recent Years and the Index Volume. Volume 29; The Three New Volumes II Fabre to Oyama (London and New York: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1926), pp. 697–701. The entry is initialled ‘L. T.’ Trotsky does not appear in the list of contributors but is acknowledged in J. L. Garvin’s editor’s preface. Garvin writes, following a list of other governmental contributors including, first and foremost, Masaryk: ‘Commissary Trotsky himself has been persuaded to write the biography of Lenin, whose career, whatever else may be thought, has been one of the astonishing features of modern history’ (xi). The politics and other dynamics of encyclopedia construction might make a research area in their own right. In this case, the 1926 supplement to the 1922 edition in part reflects the rapid changes in national and international politics of the period. 27. The responses are gathered in Leon Trotsky on Britain, intro. George Novack, no editorial credits (New York: Monad, 1973), pp. 211–45. 28. The theory of permanent revolution was that a bourgeois democratic revolution in a country with an underdeveloped proletariat could be pushed into socialist revolution by an alliance of peasants and workers, led by the latter, even though such a revolution would not seem to satisfy Marx’s argument that a socialist revolution could take place only in a developed economy which had already developed bourgeois democratic government. In Trotsky’s words, ‘The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.’ See Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (New York: Pathfinder, 1969), p. 278. The concept of ‘permanent revolution’ is sometimes misconstrued in popular discourse. The phrase might have been known to anglophone readers from the edition in English from Moscow of Trotsky’s formulation of the idea in writings of 1905 and 1915 as A Review and Some Perspectives, trans. J. Fineberg (Moscow: Communist International, 1921). 29. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Commentary’, The Criterion 3:7 (April 1924), 232. 30. See John C. Q. Roberts, Speak Clearly into the Chandelier: Cultural Politics between Britain and Russia, 1973–2000: A Memoir (London, Routledge, 2000), p. 53.

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31. See Darren G. Lilleker, Against the Cold War: The History and Political Traditions of Pro-Sovietism in the British Labour Party, 1945–89 (London: Tauris, 2004), p. 32. 32. Kameneva was Trotsky’s sister and the wife of Lev Kamenev. 33. See O. D. Kameneva, ‘Cultural Rapprochement: The U.S.S.R. Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries’, Pacific Affairs 1:5 (October 1928), 6–8. 34. ‘A Commentary’, in The Criterion 3:10 (January 1925), 162–3, quotes ‘Vodka, Church and Cinema’, in Leon Trotsky, Problems of Life, intro. N. Minsky, trans. Z. Vengerova (London: Methuen, 1924), p. 43. Zinaida Vengerova wrote on Russian literature for various Western periodicals and later married the poet Nikolay Minsky, her collaborator on this volume. See G. S. Smith, D. S. Mirsky: A Russian–English Life, 1890–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 85–6. 35. Trotsky, Problems of Life, p. 31. 36. Ibid. p. 48. 37. The quotations are from John Maynard Keynes, ‘Am I a Liberal? (1925)’, in Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 324, 327; for Keynes’ account of Bolshevism, see ‘A Short View of Russia (1925)’ in the same volume, pp. 297–311. 38. See Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), pp. 296–300. 39. Peace and Goodwill in Industry: Three Speeches by the Rt. Hon. Stanley Baldwin, M.P., Prime Minister. March 1925 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1925), pp. 17–18. 40. Ibid. pp. 71–3. 41. For an account of this text and its origins, see Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, pp. 182–8. 42. Leon Trotsky, Where is Britain Going?, intro. H. N. Brailsford (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1926), pp. 22–3. 43. John Maynard Keynes, ‘Trotsky on England’ (March 1926), in Essays in Biography (London: Macmillan, 1933), pp. 84–91, quoted pp. 84, 86. 44. John Maynard Keynes, ‘A Short View of Russia (1925)’, in Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 297–311, quoted p. 310. 45. Keynes, ‘Trotsky on England’, pp. 90–1. 46. Eliot’s role as a mediator of these authors requires fuller commentary which space here does not allow. 47. The New Criterion 4:1 (January 1926), 5–6 and 4:3 (June 1926), 418–19. 48. The New Criterion, 4:2 (April 1926), 224–43 and 4:3 (June 1926), 476–93. 49. The New Criterion, 4:2 (April 1926), 222. 50. For Eliot’s private views on Massis at this time, see, for example, his letter to his mother of 13 June 1926, in which he identifies Massis as ‘one of the royalist and neo-catholic group as are in fact most of my friends in Paris’, criticises the anti-religious attitude of socialists in the wake of the Russian Revolution, and identifies the danger of foreign

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51. 52.

53.

54. 55. 56.

57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

62. 63.

64.

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agitators in France, ‘sometimes Russian and often Jew’. See The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 3, Kindle location 4946. The New Criterion 4:2 (April 1926), 222–3; 5:3 (June 1927), 285–6. On Cournos, see David Ayers, ‘John Cournos and the Politics of Russian Literature in The Criterion’, Modernism/Modernity 18:2 (April 2011), 355–69. On the national character of politics, see, for example, Eliot’s remarks on the first publication of the British fascist journal The British Lion, in ‘A Commentary’, The Criterion 7:2 (February 1928), 97–9; and ‘The Literature of Fascism’, The Criterion 8:31 (December 1928), where Eliot claimed that ‘The Russian Revolution, seen from a distance, appears far more Russian than revolutionary; possibly the fascist revolution is more Italian than fascist’ (p. 281). Eliot, ‘A Commentary’, The Criterion 6:2 (August 1927), p. 97. Ibid. pp. 97–8. A. David Moody, Tracing T. S. Eliot’s Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 96. See also John Xiros Cooper, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Die Einheit der europäischen Kultur and the Idea of European Union’, in Paul Douglass (ed.), T. S. Eliot, Dante and the Idea of Europe (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), pp. 145–58. For the sake of brevity, I am using Murry’s translation and not going into questions of vocabulary which are in fact substantial, or of text, since the second part was abbreviated at Murry’s request – see Michel Jarrety, Paul Valéry (Paris: Fayard, 2008), pp. 411, 435–6. Jarrety, Paul Valéry, p. 436. Paul Valéry, ‘Letters from France: The Spiritual Crisis’, The Athenaeum 4641 (11 April 1919), 182–4, at pp. 183, 184. And see Paul Valéry, Oeuvres I, ed. and annot. Jean Hytier (Paris: Pléiade, 1957), pp. 988– 1000 and, for publication history, pp. 1768–9. Paul Valéry, ‘Letters from France: The Intellectual Crisis’, The Athenaeum 4644 (2 May 1919), 279–80, at p. 279. Eliot hoped to publish an edition of Valéry’s prose works. See letter to Lady Rothermere of 18 January 1926, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 3, Kindle location 1299. Paul Valéry, Le Serpent, trans. Mark Wardle, intro. T. S. Eliot (London: Criterion, 1924), p. 11. Quotations from Jarrety, Paul Valéry, p. 654. Valéry’s lecture at Zürich University on 15 November 1922 was published as ‘Note (ou “L’européen”)’ (1922), in Œuvres I, pp. 1000–1014, and his lecture at L’Université des annales of 16 November 1932 as ‘La Politique de l’esprit: notre souverain bien’, in Œuvres I, pp. 1014–40; ‘Propos sur l’intelligence’ was published in La Revue de France for 15 June 1925, 617–36, in Œuvres I, pp. 1040–57. Paul Valéry, Cahiers, vol. 7 (1918–21), ed. Robert Laffont and Valentino Bombani (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1957), pp. 496, 509, 543, 511.

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65. Quoted Jarrety, Paul Valéry, p. 655. My translation. 66. Jarrety, Paul Valéry, p. 691. Eliot had been invited to contribute to a collection of essays on Valéry on the occasion of his election to the Académie française. See letter of 3 December 1926 to M. A. A. M. Stols, in Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (eds), The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Volume 3: 192–7 (Faber & Faber, 2012), Kindle location 8321. Eliot was interested in publishing an edition of Valéry’s prose. Although Eliot was scheduled to dine with Valéry during his packed October visit, he appears to have had no more than a fleeting introduction. See letter to Marguerite Caetani of 24 October 1927 in Volume 3, Kindle location 18854. Eliot had earlier been impressed by a lecture of Valéry on Baudelaire and they had a short correspondence: see Valerie Eliot and Hugh Hawton (eds), The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Volume 2: 1923–1925 (Faber & Faber, 2009), pp. 264–8. 67. Letter to Lady Rothermere of 12 November 1927, Letters. Volume 3. Kindle location 20052. 68. Eliot, ‘The Literature of Fascism’, p.288. See also Eliot, ‘The Action Française, M. Maurras and Mr. Ward’, The Monthly Criterion 7:3 (March 1928), 196–7. 69. In The Criterion 11:45 (July 1932), 593–8. This willingness to provide a platform to important voices to which he himself might dissent is reflected as well in the policies of the Criterion Miscellany. See Eleni Loukopoulou, ‘James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence in T. S. Eliot’s Criterion Miscellany Series’, in Matthew J. Kochis and Heather L. Lusty (eds), Modernists at Odds: Reconsidering Joyce and Lawrence (Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2015), pp. 131–60. 70. Eliot might also have mentioned Calverton’s The Newer Spirit: A Sociological Criticism of Literature (1925), which was an early attempt at materialist literary criticism, and The New Ground of Criticism (1930), which sought to combine Marxism and anthropology. Calverton had also edited the first Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929). 71. See David R. Shumway, Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 264–9. 72. ‘A Commentary’, The Criterion 12:47 (January 1933), 244. 73. The Criterion 12:48 (April 1933), 371–89. 74. See The Criterion 13:51 (January 1934), 270–8, and 14:56 (April 1935), 431–6. 75. I have not been able to ascertain what role Eliot played in the publication of The Revolution Betrayed.

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Chapter 8

Fiction and Story of the Russian Revolution

Long before Aldous Huxley presented his remarkable synthesis of the development of the Soviet state, his extrapolations from scientific developments, his reading of social theory and his observations of the industrialising United States, in Brave New World, the Russian Revolution had provided a topic for fiction and had also, in the memoirs and first-hand accounts it generated, produced a vocabulary for presenting that world which combined vast landscapes, adventurous journeys, spying and disguise, and a host of other tropes which would continue to echo in the adventure and spy fiction of later decades. Ian Fleming’s James Bond is often considered to have been based on the so-called ‘Ace-of-Spies’, Sidney Reilly, drawn from anecdotes passed to Fleming by his friend and Reilly’s collaborator in Russia, Robert Bruce Lockhart.1 Bruce Lockhart’s famous and best-selling Memoirs of a British Agent (1932) – so-titled even though Lockhart was basically a diplomat, not a secret agent – appeared at the very end of the period under consideration here, but Paul Dukes’ Red Dusk and the Morrow (1922), the account of the activities of the former chief of British Intelligence in Russia, presented one of the most remarkable spy stories of modern time. Many works of fiction which deal directly or indirectly with the revolution are of slight literary interest, although their contribution to the accretional collective imaginary is significant, and some works of fiction have only the thinnest basis in the country and its events or history, and rely on the broadest evocation of the revolutionary world. Yet even these are symptomatic of the extent to which revolutionary Russia quickly inhabited the imaginary as a place of threat with regard to its state machinery, its people and its impenetrable spaces. This is evident in Edgar Jepson’s fairly generic adventure novel A Prince in Petrograd (1921), in which

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the protagonist goes to Petrograd in order to free his son-in-law from prison. His potential contacts turn out all to be dead, in prison or living in fear of arrest; he is hungry and alone, and the environment almost entirely hostile: ‘I took the commonsense view of my situation, that I was in an enemy country [. . .] I regarded as my natural prey any and every agent, or supporter, of the infernal government.’2 The protagonist accidentally gets the chance to abduct Lenin, whom he is able to hold hostage in order to gain the release of his son-inlaw. There are even a couple of pages of conversation about politics between Lenin and his captor, in which Lenin admits that ‘not one in a hundred of my people is a true Bolshevik’ but that even if he had known how it would turn out he would still do the same again. ‘I willed the revolution,’ states Lenin in one moment: a moment later he asserts: ‘I’m only an incident. [. . .] It is the natural movement of the proletariat, slow but inevitable – and relentless.’3 The fairminded protagonist ensures that Lenin is freed – and not killed – once his son-in-law’s release has been secured. Such a novel, which translates complex and often brutal realities into the standardised fare of genre fiction, does not call for further explication, but what is notable is how soon after 1917 it is possible to use the simplest shorthand to evoke Russia as an already-understood environment. Reilly and Lockhart planned to assassinate Lenin, but Jepson’s protagonist lets him go without reflection, so that even if Bolsheviks are to be treated as enemies their chief is not to be treated by his own standards of justice. The perfunctory political conversation – which even goes so far as to reflect the philosophical-historically conflicting claims of the great leader and the inevitability of historical progress – gives an indication that, as early as 1921, the author broadly expects his readership to have a general understanding, at least, of Lenin and Bolshevik rule. The fiction and memoirs published in the 1920s, and especially in the first part of that decade, are copious and varied, with the firsthand accounts by far more convincing and important than most of the fiction, the greater part of which was produced by authors who had no knowledge or experience of Russia – a lack that mattered less to the extent that they were extrapolating the lessons of the revolution rather than trying to convey its reality. One of the few literary authors to take the lesson of the revolution to heart early on was Douglas Goldring, who was mainly interested in the corrective offered by revolutionary politics to the artistic radicalism of Bloomsbury. His play The Fight for Freedom (1919) was published as the first volume of the series ‘Plays for a People’s Theatre’ (the second of

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which was D. H. Lawrence’s Touch and Go). It is hard to imagine which people might have decided to put on this strange drawingroom drama in which the female protagonist is shocked out of her comfortable Bolshevism when she is sexually assaulted by her former lover, a returned soldier, and is forced to accept this loss of her freedom and dignity as a consequence of the war and its brutalising effect on men. As peculiar as is the role played by Bolshevism in the actual play, Goldring’s preface is pretty clear about where he considers its politics to lie. The Bolsheviks, Sinn Féin and the Spartacus League are only the leading examples of the surging proletarian movement, the ‘seeds of life and love’ are springing up once again, although the situation in England is ‘darker than any other’, and too many take up socialism as an alternative to jazz or art, and with ‘the same essential frivolity’.4 Goldring hit his target more squarely perhaps in his novel The Black Curtain (1920), in which the Bloomsbury art world, represented by the Wyndham Lewis-like Hawkins Moss, confronts the political world of the revolutionary agitator Ivan Smirnoff, ‘the only one who could help him to find a ray of light in the present darkness’. Members of the Vorticist-like ‘Kosmos’ group, ‘instead of living up to their pretensions by talking anarchy and revolution’, are ‘distressingly meek’, their ‘war pictures’ indistinguishable from ‘their pre-war products’. He rejects their ‘silly attempts to ignore the world’s tragedy, their futile shrinking from a rebellion of the mind [. . .], their desire at all costs to keep in with their patrons’. When the Russian Revolution arrives, the protagonist resolves to ‘fight in the rank and file of the revolutionary army’, although in the end he feels that his country is lagging historically and that socialism will only come to England incrementally.5 Katherine Mansfield balked at Goldring’s Bolshevik, ‘with the blue eyes of a child and the short black beard of a fanatic, crushing strength, crushing sweetness out of his violin, talking of the earth as “my mother’s breast”, crying the stranger “friend”, appearing and disappearing in the Russian way we have learned to accept’, concluding that the protagonist – and by extension the author – must be of unusual superficiality to be so overwhelmingly impressed by this heavily romanticised figure.6 The romanticised Bolshevik – whether as moody Slav or devil incarnate – became a stock figure, drawing on the generally hostile press representations, on Dostoevsky, and on the recent tradition of Russian political émigrés in British fiction, as well as on conventional romantic notions.7 As an adjunct to their passionate campaigning against the Bolsheviks, Harold Williams and Ariadna TyrkovaWilliams evidently felt the need to add fiction to their armoury.

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New Zealand-born Williams and his wife Ariadna Tyrkova, a prominent member of the liberal Constitutional Democrat (Kadet) Party, had become outspoken critics of the Bolsheviks. Williams was famous for his linguistic skills and had a close knowledge of Russian politics and regions, the latter reflected in his published work on the nationalities question.8 The story which precedes the Williams’ novel is of greater interest than the novel itself. The relative thinness of the fiction is due not simply to a lack of experience in this medium, and perhaps not even straightforwardly to the Williams’ evident motives for writing the novel, but owes something too to that deeper question of the possibility of presentation or representation of the revolution, let alone of the necessary processing and distance needed for art which was only really achieved in the anglophone context by Brave New World. Williams had been St Petersburg correspondent for the Manchester Guardian at the time of the 1905 Revolution and had been fairly continuously present in Russia until 1912. He returned in 1914 to act as wartime correspondent of the Daily Chronicle. Apart from his reports from the front, Williams set his encyclopaedic knowledge of Russia and individual Russians at the disposition of the British Ambassador, George Buchanan, and in 1915 joined the AngloRussian Bureau, established to place favourable articles about Britain in the Russian press, under the directorship of the novelist Hugh Walpole.9 Williams was never a paid agent, but began without success to warn the British government that a political storm was brewing long before the February Revolution. When the Bolsheviks took power in October, Williams continued to keep both the Chronicle and the British government informed and, in particular, attempted to deflect the optimism evident from Lockhart’s mission that the Bolsheviks could be brought around to continued support for the war. Tyrkova had been ‘very intimate’ with Krupskaya in her school days. She had met Lenin in 1904 in Geneva, when she herself was an émigré, and had seen a ‘sadistic smile’ when he threatened that she, as a Liberal, would one day be strung up from a lamppost. She later noted that ‘it would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between Lenin and his wife. She had a great capacity for love and sympathy; his mind knew neither shame nor mercy’. Williams shared her visceral dislike of the Bolsheviks and, according to Tyrkova, never even went to hear Lenin speak.10 Some of Williams’ telegrams to the Chronicle give a sense not just of the despair he felt as the project of the Provisional Government was overwhelmed by the Bolsheviks, but convey a very specific trope, that the Bolshevik

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coup and surrounding events embodied a collapse of narratability as such – not from the point of view of a bewildered outsider but in the mind even of a seasoned expert. In September, following the arrest of Kornilov in the wake of the failed putsch against the Kerensky government which bears his name, Williams wrote: ‘Events in Russia are elusive, unreal, intangible. Dream life and real life coalesce. Things are not what they seem. There are moments when one is tempted to believe in the unreality of all phenomena.’ In December, following the October coup and the start of the extraordinary peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, Williams wrote: We have lengthy reports now of the proceedings in Brest. I must admit, however, that to decipher the real sense of these documents of the new diplomacy is beyond my power [. . .] It is a matter for studies in intricate psychology, for investigations in obscure labyrinths of a turbulent subconsciousness. Read Dostoevsky, read the Possessed, read Bakunin and Eugène Sue, the history of the French Revolution and the tortuous politics of Byzantium, and listen to the gossip of the Indian bazaars, and you may get an idea of the unutterable confusion with which we have to do every day of our crowded lives.11

Williams’ language suggests that events in Russia are unrepresentable and, while it is sure that the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk were among the most unusual in history, this is not the position of the diplomat, say, who regards the rules as being unaccountably broken, nor is it the bemusement of the outsider, nor even the simple frustration of a progressive liberal who had set his hopes for Russia on the triumph of parliamentary democracy. Rather, this is a genuine evaluation by an expert witness of the revolution as a complex and Babelian narrative, with its roots deep in the collective psyche, but with its events determined by an almost sublime multiplicity of actors and motives, whose situations ranged from the high (Byzantine politics) to the low (the Indian bazaar), as Williams draws on some of the best-known tropes of his time – not least the frustration of British administrators in dealing with their Indian subjects, and of course the French Revolution with its own extraordinary proliferation of events and personalities. It is notable even that Williams, with his philological preparation in Russian and its dialects, represents the polyphony of voices not as a Russian sublimity at all, but as Indian, as if he himself stood outside the multiple and simultaneous field of the market of discourses with no means properly to penetrate its sublime complexity.

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These moments of aesthetic distancing may remind the modern reader of a return to the sublimity of the unpresentable as outlined by Jean-François Lyotard, or they may recall the motives of Alain Badiou in his creation of a metaphysics of the event designed to obviate entirely the Marxist and Bolshevik notion of historical change as driven by a collective subject of history.12 Yet in Williams’ context such philosophical considerations are only fleetingly visible, as the direct motive of challenging the Bolshevik regime by supporting the White armies and arguing for Allied intervention became dominant.13 The Williams set off towards the south in early 1918 to join Denikin’s army. On the way, Williams met Lockhart, on his way to Petrograd. Williams had met Lockhart before, but now found him ‘elusive, slippery, full of childish enthusiasms’ and unwilling to heed Williams’ warning that Trotsky ‘is one of the most evil men I have ever met’. Williams was dismayed to discover that Lockhart’s mission of arriving at an agreement with the Bolsheviks, as it seemed, was so diametrically opposed to his own, concluded that ‘Lockhart’s arrival clearly showed that the War Cabinet did not understand what the Bolsheviks were’, and decided to return to England to make his case there.14 In England, where he began to contribute to The New Europe, Williams concluded that ‘complete chaos reigned in British public opinion with regards to Russia. [. . .] Even the ablest minds were confused by the contradictory reports of eye-witnesses.’ While The New Europe was focused on Austria-Hungary, and was not alone, Williams felt, in giving too much credence to Lockhart’s reports, he was consoled by the support for intervention given by the major press organs – The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Morning Post and The Observer.15 British intervention began, in smallish numbers, in Murmansk and Archangel, while Lockhart continued to negotiate with the Bolsheviks. Williams made a noted contribution to the anti-Bolshevik cause in his September 1918 essay, ‘The Spirit of the Russian Revolution’, which amplified his thoughts on the psychology of the revolution and described its blend of violence and emotional arousal as an extension of the war: The Russian Revolution, one of the consequences of the world-war, is as disturbing as the results of the war itself, and at first sight even more disconcerting. It has an emotional quality distinct from, and yet akin to, that of the war. It brings out with a crashing violence the undertones of the war, undertones that, vaguely heard, awakened obscure hopes and indefinite fears. Playing on that volume of emotion aroused by the war, it has repeatedly changed the incidence

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of hope and fear, broadened and narrowed perspective, or created a confusion of thought that may or may not be a preliminary to broader vision. The War and the Revolution cannot be thought of apart. They are two aspects of the same struggle, which to so many is as much a mental as a physical struggle.16

Blaming the revolution on the weakness of the old regime, including the Provisional Government, Williams refused to credit the Bolsheviks as agents and architects of the revolution, and warned the non-Bolshevik British Left against support for the ‘handmaid of evil reaction’.17 The Provisional Government had asserted democratic liberties, granted independence to Poland and restored the Finnish constitution, but in doing so had appeared passive to a people who yearned to be governed. The revolution was originally a military mutiny and only later a socialist revolution, and the Bolsheviks were well placed to exploit it because of their ‘reckless, unscrupulous and destructive’ mentality.18 Williams amplifies his model of the revolution as a release of ‘elemental forces from age-long control’ which ‘could not in a short space of time be interpreted in rational forms’. In this context ‘none of them really led, none of them could lead’, the process of change extended ‘far out into the unknown future’ and ‘all they could do was hastily to devise temporary schemes for the guidance of the extraordinary complex of newly-awakened irrational forces’, while the leaders themselves ‘were strongly conditioned by the moods and impulses of the crowds’.19 Although Williams, in his detailed and knowledgeable account of the fall of the Provisional Government and ascendance of the Bolsheviks, can precisely identify the policies by which the Bolsheviks appealed to soldiers (peace), peasants (land) and workers (freedom from the bourgeoisie), it is striking that he continues to attribute the revolution to the impulse of irrationality and the unconscious, in evoking the ‘complex’ of ‘moods and impulses’ which go beyond the stated goals of rational actors, although in contrast to his reference to the Indian bazaar he does here acknowledge the florescence of rational political discourse on all sides in ‘perpetual talk and inquiry, the perpetual conflict of ideas, often crude, always picturesque’, and admits the spirit of real if anti-Western renewal brought about by the revolution in ‘a stirring up of an immense fallow land of reserves of human capacity’. In this moment, sweeping across the Eurasian continent, the revolution represents a revolt against the ‘modern Western civilization’ which had thought to impose its innovations everywhere, and ‘the way in which China and India will enter into the new world-civilisation,

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whose type we are now struggling to discern in war, will be largely determined by what is happening and what will happen in Russia’.20 The mixture of models which Williams furnishes – the emergence of suppressed irrational impulses, the unleashing of human potentialities, the changing course of ‘ancient civilisations that had no part in the up-building of modern Europe’ – is symptomatic of a sense that the revolution, more than the war, has brought a breakdown in Western narrative certainties, although the lines of the fracture, multiple though they be, are relatively clearly identified if not given thorough theoretical treatment: unconscious desires, the realisation of human potential, and the incomplete reach of Western hegemony. In spite of his critique of the notion of revolutionary agency, the diabolic figure of Lenin continues to provide a focus for Williams’ account. For his actions, too, both as an early contributor to the pro-intervention Russian Liberation Committee in London, which organised meetings, lobbied politicians and published a series of pamphlets,21 and then as a correspondent joining General Holman’s British Mission at Ekaterinodar in the spring of 1919, while Tyrkova stayed behind at first to complete her own anti-Bolshevik tract, From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk (1919). Following the final rout of Wrangel in November 1920 Williams, now joined by Tyrkova, left from Novorossiysk and returned to England via a lengthy stay in France, during which time they jointly produced their novel, Hosts of Darkness (1921). That the novel was not an artistic or critical success is not only a reflection of the authors’ exhaustion and disappointment at the failure of the White armies, nor even of their lack of experience in this genre, but also the objective difficulties of making narrative sense of such complex events. One reviewer of the novel stated bluntly that ‘the authors were more concerned to express their view than to compose a good novel’. The plot, in which a British officer returns to Moscow in 1917 to find all changed in the home of his host family, has some promise, notes the reviewer, especially in the love affair between the protagonist and a princess who aims to assassinate the Bolshevik leaders, but the whole founders on the authors’ compulsion to present their readers with ‘the real views of Russian patriots and be introduced to all the worst types on the other side’.22 More kindly, another reviewer asserted that the sheer range of individuals presented, albeit at the cost of the narrative, resulted in ‘harmony rather than confusion’ in its presentation of ‘one great Russian oversoul retaining through all its anguish and frenzy its childlike piety and idealism’.23 This fairly generous claim to find artistic unity in

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the work might have disappointed the Williams in its recourse to received notions of the Russian ‘soul’ and ‘Holy Russia’, which they themselves avoided, but it does not hide the conflict between the plot demands of the romantic adventure and the more dizzying demands of realism and the evidently more than Tolstoyan scope of the revolution. The role of narrative in presenting the revolution was of course a key theme of revolutionary artistic theory. Trotsky wrestled with it in Literature and Revolution, noting that ‘all through history, mind limps after reality’, and of course the demands of realism subsequently became the central focus of the Soviet Writers Congress of 1934, which gave far more space to denouncing Joyce’s presumption that the whole could be presented through the particulars of the daily life of his insignificant protagonist than it did to explaining what socialist realism might actually look like.24 Such theoretical considerations were unavailable to the Williams, of course, although their novel is as propagandistic as anything that a cultural commissar might have wished for. The revolutionary Petrovich resembles Lenin, and is portrayed with all the venom that the Williams felt for their enemy: Some dark and sinister force wrought in this short, unprepossessing man, who had little by little become a prophet to the world bearing strange revelations. [. . .] The many existed for him only as the instruments of his will. [. . .] For Petrovich men were simply figures in complicated sociological computations. His own wife was for him such a figure. [. . .] His way of thinking and the structure of his mind were not Russian. The vague, dreamy impulsiveness, the swiftly changing succession of desires and plans and moods, were strange to Petrovich. [. . .] His brain was geometrical, exact, dry and merciless. [. . .] The truth was given finally, once for all. [. . .M] an is simply a product of economic conditions. [. . .] There must be a revolution, all that has been accumulated by the ages must be destroyed. [. . .] Without knowing it he was a Cubist in his view of life. Living men with flesh and blood were for him simply combinations of lines and figures.25

The reference here to Cubism, which casts little light either on the revolution or on the essentially pre-revolutionary Cubist movement, is just the confirmation that, despite – or because of – their close involvement with the revolution, the Williams were not able convincingly to represent the psychology or ideas which shaped its events, let alone give them anything like persuasive artistic form.

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William Gerhardie, by contrast, launched an effective career as a novelist with Futility (1922) and The Polyglots (1925), both of which drew on his participation in the Allied intervention. Gerhardie was a British subject because his paternal grandfather was born in London, but was born and brought up in St Petersburg.26 As a member of the British military, he was deployed to the British Embassy in Petrograd where he worked for General Sir Alexander Knox, and was present through the February and October Revolutions, not leaving until March 1918 as part of the last group from the embassy to depart. Yet Gerhardie does not dedicate much space in his writings to the events of 1917, and this seems to be largely for aesthetic reasons. While he may have assumed that these events had been sufficiently narrated elsewhere, it is also clear that, when he did turn to writing during his return to Russia as part of the British Mission which was established in Vladivostok – again under Knox – from July 1918 to April 1920, alongside mainly American and Japanese allies, he had formulated principles of narrative which eschewed both historical and personal plot. If Gerhardie experienced much combat, he did not narrate it, and it is evident that he thought and felt in some ways differently from the generals with whom he passed the time, although his fictional habit of presenting characters via their tics and catch-phrases and avoiding detailed psychological development still somewhat resembles the bluff attitude of the British officer class. The approach in Futility, though, certainly represents a developed aesthetic approach, and not only in the external approach of its satirical language, which draws on Dickens and anticipates Waugh and Wyndham Lewis. The approach to narrative, in a story centred on waiting, is the most notable feature of this novel, and all the more remarkable that it was the experience of the Allied intervention which gave Gerhardie his approach and stimulated his desire to write.27 I have dealt in Futility, and again in The Polyglots, with the business of interfering, on an international scale, in other people’s affairs, the sample I dealt with being known to history as the Allied Intervention in Russia of 1918–1920. [. . .] I used the background of this theatre of war to throw into relief the theme of my novel, Futility. I was chiefly concerned to achieve a culmination of certain artistic effects, and the characters of my novels were composite creatures, for the most part combinations of several real people I had known [. . .] The genuine writer avoids psychological invention like poison. Nor is he concerned with living characters as such. They impinge on his consciousness [. . .]28

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There are three strands here: the use of the Allied Intervention; the unspecified ‘artistic effects’; the rejection of ‘psychology’. Gerhardie is clear that he considers he has treated the Intervention only as ‘background’, and he later set out a very clear rationale for his view of the history of great events: When I look back on the two years I spent on the staff of the Military Mission in Siberia, what fills me with wonder is not what was done – some people were killed and maimed, a few towns changed hands – but the dead matter of history. I feel already that the future is looking back with historical wonder on this little phase, when, owing to arguments no doubt very plausible at the time, a number of very variegatedly foreign troops massed themselves in a small sea-port on the Far Eastern fringe of Siberia: and while they were sending on stores and discussing what they ought or ought not to do, individual lives were gradually shaping themselves.29

Gerhardie makes a comparison with the time Goethe must have spent waiting for military campaigns to play out during his time as a war commissioner, and to Cervantes’ years in the hands of Algerian slavers – all dead time in which what is of interest are not the grand narrative events but the individual life to which those events were merely a background. Gerhardie falls back in a general way on some of the tenets of aestheticism, valuing art above life. There is more at stake, though, as the rejection of grand narrative is combined with a theoretical antipathy to life-as-story. Gerhardie produced a study of Chekhov in 1923, and there are repeated references to Chekhov throughout these novels, not least in the use of the ‘three sisters’ in Futility. While the thematisation of waiting explicitly makes reference to military experience – at least to that of Gerhardie himself – the main literary influence is certainly Chekhov, and in particular Three Sisters (1901). Gerhardie draws on Chekhov to amplify his own theme of futile waiting, and pushes into dryly detached satire the more humane depiction of a family waiting for a return to Moscow which will never come, the consequent compromised marriage choices and affairs, and the desperation of thwarted dreams and desires. Futility makes explicit the connection with Three Sisters when the narrator and the unattained object of his desire reminisce about a performance of Chekhov’s play which they attended in Petersburg, a city to which they will now probably never return. The dialogue concludes with a metafictional reflection:

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‘How long ago it seems,’ she said at last. ‘To think how long ago! . . . and we are still the same. Nothing has changed . . . nothing. Then it was the climax, and we held our breath expecting that now . . . now something must happen. Nothing happened. Then our whole life stood on edge, and the edge was sharp. We felt that the crisis could not last. We waited for an explosion. But it never came. [. . .] And nothing happens. Nothing ever happens. Nothing happens . . . .’ ‘When I was very young,’ I said, ‘I thought that life must have a plot, like a novel. But life is most unlike a novel; more ludicrous than a novel. Perhaps it is a good thing that it is. I don’t want to be a novel. I don’t want to be a story or a plot. I want to live my life as a life, not as a story.’30

This thread of existential comedy, which finds philosophical echoes in Wyndham Lewis and Beckett, is frequently repeated in Futility and The Polyglots, sometimes in simple comedy, as when the protagonist and his companion, a White general, in the first moment of the Intervention, order soup in a restaurant and are kept waiting by a succession of different waiters making a series of excuses: ‘Well, you see you can’t have soup nowadays . . . unless you choose to wait –’.31 It is present in the plot of the whole novel, which concerns the (partly autobiographical) protagonist’s relationship with a family he gets to know in Petersburg before the revolution, and meets again in Vladivostok when he accompanies the Allied Mission and finds the family in exile there. At the centre of the family is Nikolai Vasilievich, accompanied by his wife, daughters (the ‘three sisters’), mistress, the mistress’s husband, the wife’s lover, and a number of hangers-on, all of whom are trying to shape lives which are put on hold either by marital dissatisfaction or by the failure to perform of Nikolai Vasilievich’s gold mines in Siberia. These mines will never really pay off, and the revolution sees them pass from the hands of the Bolsheviks to the Czechs and the Whites, and then to the Social Revolutionaries, in succession, while Nikolai Vasilievich sees in every set of actors in the motley group of interventionists a possible force to restore his mines and thereby the fortunes of his family and the hangers-on. He is kept waiting. In its initial outline, if not much beyond that, the plot reflects both Chekhov and the Ibsen of Hedda Gabler. The first half of the novel mainly avoids the political background and concentrates on the family and its relationships, with the narrator making his first ‘intervention’ as he describes it, as he sketches out a plan by which all the problems of the family could be solved by marrying them off in various combinations. The family and its outliers are furious when they learn of the plan, but the

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narrator, Andrei Andreiech, believes he was acting like an international peace conference: I would have to do it all tactfully, slowly, discreetly. But really, was it not a worthy mission? To arbitrate; to settle things. I felt as President Wilson must have felt years later when he was laying down the principles of a future League of Nations . . .32

The theme of the futility of intervention is clearly announced before the Allied Intervention takes place. The notion that war and intervention are upheld by senseless narratives is repeated throughout the novel. Yet the mode of satirical detachment includes, too, a passionate attachment which it cannot mask. One running theme is the emptiness of love even when it seems most present, an idea set out most clearly in a quotation from Chekhov in The Polyglots, love is a ‘remnant of something degenerating’, or a ‘particle’ of an immense future, but ‘in the present it is unsatisfying’.33 This notion of the emptiness of present time inhabits the frequent condemnation of the Intervention as ‘farce’ or ‘absurdity’, but this satirical objectification amounts to a form of emotional distancing from the author’s own evident anger about the war and the Intervention. One of his characters lashes out furiously at the war rhetoric which claims that blood must be shed for the sake of future generations, ‘Fools shedding blood for the sake of future fools, who will do as much!’34 The war aims of Kolchak, the White leader in Siberia, are given short shrift: Kolchak’s ‘interpretation of democracy was that of denying the people the choice of government until by such time as by some vague, mysterious, but anyhow protracted, system of education he hoped their choice would fall upon his own administration.’35 The anger is not political. Gerhardie’s point is clear, that war is futile, and it is the meaningless deaths, only occasionally mentioned, which give moral force to the otherwise satirical-seeming trope of futility. The morning unveiled a gruesome picture. The snow that had fallen in the night, and was still falling, now covered the ground and its dead bodies some inches deep. The square, the streets, the yards, the rails, and sundry ditches betrayed them lying in horrid postures, dead or dying. Those that were not dead, when discovered were finished with the bayonet by the ‘loyal’ troops, amid unspeakable yells. Then they lay still and stiff in horrible attitudes. Men and women would stoop over them, gaze and wonder. Perhaps there is nothing that brings home so clearly the conviction of the temporary nature of

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human things as the sight of a dead body. What a moment since had been a human being with a life and purpose of his own was now an object, like a stone or a stick.

This is followed by a massacre of prisoners, whose boots and other valuable are taken before they are machine-gunned: One man three hours afterwards was still breathing heavily. He lay on the steps, bleeding, and covered by other bleeding bodies. Another man in the pile was but slightly hit. He lay alone in the pile of dead, with a curious mob and sight-seeing soldiery walking about him, shamming death. After three hours he rose and walked away, but was caught and shot.36

This is the only such direct passage in the novel, and is made more striking by the contrast with the otherwise comic events. The Kolchakites are ‘loyal’ to what meaningful enterprise? Gerhardie implicitly asks. The purposelessness of the now-dead bodies provides the link to the novel’s general sense of the futility of actions. Gerhardie later expressed admiration for General Knox, who spoke Russian fluently, and served as Knox’s assistant. Gerhardie left as much work as he could to subordinates and concentrated on writing, treating the war with a ‘levity’ and, in The Polyglots, reminding readers who might be critical of his detachment, that the Treaty of Versailles, in preparation as he worked in Vladivostock, was a ‘monument of foolish greed’ and that ‘to regard a government run by Churchills and Birkenheads seriously is not to know how to be serious’.37 It was only after Kolchak was handed over to the Bolsheviks and the whole Allied Mission seemed ‘finished’ that Gerhardie felt able to let rip ‘out of turn’ to Knox and denounce the futility of the Intervention.38 It is this suppressed anger which informs Futility and its satellite, The Polyglots, but which gives those works literary point and purpose beyond the propagandistic efforts of the unskilled Williams. This is not to say that the literariness of the literary becomes suddenly unproblematic, as if Gerhardie had discovered some kind of aesthetic solution in which the conflicts of war and revolution could be made to disappear. The glancing references to Versailles and to the League of Nations serve to bracket the principal institutional elements of the peace process, but the question of what it might mean for nationalities to abandon bloodshed is loudly announced by the theme of the international intervention in an event, the revolution, which is already multinational in character, both within the borders

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of the Russian Empire and within the borders of Russia itself. Perhaps strangely, Gerhardie makes little of his own cosmopolitan multinationalism. The ‘polyglot’ of the novel and autobiography is of course Gerhardie himself, fluent first in Russian, then in French from his governess, also in the ‘Reval’ German of a permanent house guest, and in English only from his parents (with whom evidently he had the least interaction and became proficient only later). While writers who acquire languages can be prone to display them – and Gerhardie wrote well on Chekhov – the natural polyglot may be more likely to take such linguistic skills for granted, and Gerhardie does not make much of, or is perhaps chary of, his own status as a ‘transnational’ subject. ‘Polyglots’ do not exist in any case in isolation, and the use of the plural in the title of the novel does not point to any glamorous cosmopolitan world but to a heightened and internationalised environment of comedic dysfunction, which reflects Gerhardie’s view of Chekhov’s rejection of the event-driven plot and focus on ‘life in the aggregate’ as ‘an ensemble of solitary souls’.39 The social world is the miniaturised comic image of the political world. Gerhardie many times presents the notion of the revolution and intervention as a Babelian farce which cannot be reduced to simple narrative. The Polyglots presents Sir Hugo as a version of Knox and satirical synthesis of the procedural obsessions of the British officer caste, a lover of ‘staff work’ and keeper of endless files recording minor matters, who has commissioned the protagonist to obtain an order of fur hats which proves elusive.40 In a scene which, to the British reader, anticipates the accurate but labyrinthine and befuddling explanations given by the civil servant to the minister in the television series Yes, Minister (1980–84), Sir Hugo asks his subordinate for an ‘intelligible account of the present situation’, but struggles to grasp what he is hearing and eventually falls back on the question of the procurement of the fur hats. The account which the protagonist offers in response to Hugo’s question details some of the various nationalities, nations and other actors involved in the revolution and intervention, and emphasises the narrative complexity of the situation: ‘It is quite simple. [. . .] You see, sir, it’s like this. Irkutsk is now once again in the hands of the Whites who are being drive by the Reds towards Irkutsk. The Reds at Irkutsk, you will recollect, had taken it over by a coup de main from the Social-Revolutionaries after these had captured the town from the Kolchakites and later defeated Semënov. Now the Kappel Whites, I think, will join in with Semënov, but being hard pressed by the main Red forces [. . .]

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‘Of course, sir, I have said nothing of the Poles, the Letts, Latvians and Lithuanians, the Czechs, Yanks, Japs, Rumanians, French, Italian, Serbians, Slovenes, the Jugoslavians, the German, Austrian, Hungarian and Magyar war-prisoners, the Chinese, the Canadians and ourselves, and many other different nationalities, whose presence rather tends to complicate the situation in view of the several politics they follow.’

Sir Hugo considers asking for clarification about the ‘relation between the so-called nationalities such as the Letts, Latvians, Lithuanians, and so forth, and the so-called countries as Lettland, Latvia, Lithuania, Esthonia, Livonia, Esthland, Kurland, Livland, and so forth, and whether or not, in fact, they are not all, or if not all, largely the same people’. He lets this ‘drift’ and instead focuses on the Czechs, which the protagonist evidently holds to be the most pronounced example of shifting aims and allegiances, switching alliance from the ‘old-régimist’ Whites to the Social Revolutionaries, then allying with less reactionary Whites but earning the enmity of other Whites, as their former allies the Social Revolutionaries became ‘as red as their advancing foes, the Bolsheviks’.41 The Czecho-Slovak Legion made an appearance, too, in Futility, making a particularly damaging intervention in the question of the gold mines. We have already examined what role the Legion played in the politics of the creation of the new Czecho-Slovakian state, and touched on the manner in which the unit altered its stance according to changing circumstances on the ground and the image the national leaders intended to create, in the end being represented for Wilson’s consumption as a victim group which needed to be rescued, providing a motive for the tentative and passive American role in the intervention in Vladivostock. Gerhardie is relatively true to the shifts in posture of the legion, and indeed misses a trick, since he could have pointed out that in an initial phase they remained at least notionally on the side of the Bolsheviks as successors of the Provisional Government, but the Legion serves Gerhardie here as the very emblem of the tangle of national participants and their motives which rendered the Intervention futile. Gerhardie’s judgement on the Allied Intervention is reflected in his occasional remarks about Versailles and the League, as a distrust of the notion that the plurality of national interests can be subordinated to supranational goals. He is entirely cynical about the notion of international collaboration and points out that the ‘medley of nationalities made all the Russian national cause seem like a band of disgruntled adventurers’, with the ironic effect of casting the

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‘international Bolsheviks’ as defenders ‘of the citadels of their own country against a host of foreign invaders’ and as the authentic bearers of the Russian nationalism which the diverse White and international groups claimed to be defending.42 One character in Futility denounces the diplomat he has met, as ‘a marvellous linguist’, who ‘sat before me, maintaining a most distressing silence in twenty-eight foreign languages’.43 This trope casts the ultimate polyglot not as the cosmopolitan master of the domains which he can regulate but as the heart of the diplomatic discursive darkness. The references to Conrad and especially to Heart of Darkness are in fact quite discernible, as in the account of the fresh-faced interventionist who ‘will undertake brief excursions along the coast and fire now and then, somewhat promiscuously, at groups of villagers, whom in his simplicity he believes to be Bolsheviks’.44 The modern reader is put in mind of more recent strategies of intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere. Gerhardie does not have any answers and his aesthetic solution may be no more than a retreat, but the challenge to political and national grand narrative which his work marks – while it may suggest no practical end – occupies a particular place in the literature of the period as an early example both of the anti-war novel and of the satire which became such dominant strains of the decade. Yet other literary contributions from the Anglo-Russian Bureau came from the pen of Hugh Walpole, the already established and well-connected novelist who took up a position in Petrograd as correspondent for the Daily Mail in September of 1915, earned a George Cross for single-handedly rescuing a wounded soldier when briefly serving in the Russian campaign in Galicia as part of a medical unit, was appointed to lead the Anglo-Russian Bureau, and left just before the Bolsheviks seized power.45 Walpole was a surprising choice for leadership of the bureau as his knowledge of Russian was poor and the whole initiative for the propaganda project had been that of Arthur Ransome, another established literary figure who was passed over. Walpole produced two novels based on his Russian experience, The Dark Forest (1916) and The Secret City (1919). The former draws on his wartime experience and the latter recycles some of the surviving characters from that novel in a plot leading up to the February Revolution. Walpole became a popular novelist, and The Secret City was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, but these novels are now among the more faded of Walpole’s productions. Rebecca West needled Walpole in an article about Stephen Graham for The Daily News, where she made a passing reference to Walpole as a Russian ‘Idiot-Manufacturer’.46 Graham had done

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much to generate the British interest in Russia in the decade before the revolution in a series of works which included fiction, history and travelogue, but had become a byword for the promotion of the romantic myth of ‘Holy Russia’ among the British intelligentsia, and Walpole was stung by the comparison.47 The comparison to Graham flatters Walpole, as Graham had travelled much more widely in Russia, was widely read in Russian literature, and fluent in the language. Walpole struggled to acquire Russian, and the anglophone characters in The Secret City are all in part modelled on Walpole’s own limitations as an outsider. ‘Of Russia and the Russians I know nothing’, declares his narrator in his opening gambit, ‘but of the effect upon myself and my ideas of life that Russia and the Russians have made during these last three years I know something.’48 Another English character has acquired his ‘sentimental’ knowledge of Russia from an extended study of Russian language and literature, as well as ‘the books that emphasised the more sentimental side of the Russian character’, and believes he has grasped the Russian character after only two days ‘in the country’. A third has been brought up for fifteen years in Russia but, a bluff Oxford sportsman, has never read a Russian book and has ‘forgotten all his Russian’.49 While not directly based on Williams, Gerhardie, Cournos or even Stephen Graham (whose ‘sentimental’ books are alluded to), Walpole’s point is that even those arriving in Petrograd with a better linguistic preparation than he had himself are inevitably outsiders. As the narrator asserts in the opening paragraph: [. . .] this business of seeing Russian psychology through English eyes has no excuse except that it is English. That is its only interest, its only atmosphere, its only motive, and if you are going to tell me that any aspect of Russia psychological, mystical, practical or commercial seen through an English medium is either Russia as she really is or Russia as Russians see her, I say to you, without hesitation, that you don’t know of what you are talking.50

This is an unpromising premise, no doubt in part an attempt by Walpole to legitimise his own efforts, but this claim of an absolute Russian difference and impenetrability has become by this time dated. Williams and Gerhardie both advance the notion that the events of the revolution and intervention are unpresentable and elude narration, but neither pretends that Russia itself or the Russian soul can never be mediated in English. Walpole’s notion seems dated after 1917 since, despite the widespread demonisation of the Bolsheviks,

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it had become clear that Russia was governed by rational actors who could and must be grasped rationally, not least because their political goals, in one form or another, were already international in character, and the ready-made analogy with the French Revolution – the height of rational political action – became the norm, while the models of ‘Holy Russia’ and Russian ‘Asiaticism’, although they do recur after 1917, do so in a secondary mode. Commentators did draw on Dostoevsky in casting around for an explanation of the Russian revolutionary spirit, and Walpole, too, references Dostoevsky in his depiction of Petersburg and of the troubled (if rather stylised) spirits of his Russian characters.51 The Secret City reaches its climax in Easter of 1917, and it is here that Walpole – or at least his narrator – offers a thinly imagined account of the Bolshevik spirit in terms of the model of Russian difference from the West (for which he is indebted not least to Under Western Eyes). In the wake of the famous Order Number One issued by the Petrograd Soviet, which challenged military authority and set the scene for the withdrawal of Russia from the war, the narrator writes: Pretty quick, isn’t it, to change from Utopia to threatenings of the worst sort of Communism? But the great point for us in all this [. . .] was that it was during these weeks that the real gulf between Russia and the Western world showed itself! Yes, for more than three years we had been pretending that a week’s sentiment and a hurriedly proclaimed Idealism could bridge a separation which centuries of magic and blood and bones had gone to build. For three years we tricked ourselves (I am not sure that the Russians were ever really deceived) . . . but we liked the Ballet, we liked Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky (we translated their inborn mysticism into the weakest kind of sentimentality), we liked the theory of inexhaustible numbers, we liked the picture of their pounding, steam-roller like to Berlin . . . we tricked ourselves, and in the space of a night our trick was exposed.52

British socialists are singled out in particular for their rush to support the revolution. Russian extremists may claim that they are fighting ‘for the democracies of the world’ but ‘they never even begin to understand the other democracies’. Russia ‘remains finally alone’. For a moment she had been drawn into the ‘Western whirlpool’, but ‘she has slipped back again behind her veil of mist and shadow [. . .], she remains alone, apart, mysterious’.53 While Walpole does not find much to say here about the nature of the revolution or its consequences, this passage does reflect the sentiment of a British public which had been encouraged to think of Russia as an able

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ally, its illiberalism given a high-cultural gloss. It is hard to dissociate the narrator from the author, as Walpole lends his character so much of his own history. So when the narrator witnesses a worker’s procession and writes of ‘those strange, pale, Eastern faces, passive, apathetic, ignorant, childish, unreasoning, stretched in a vast cloud under the grey overhanging canopy of the sky’, and envisions ‘A hundred million of these children – ignorant, greedy, pathetic, helpless, revengeful – let loose upon the world’, it is hard not hear the voice of authorial opinion.54 This voice is indeed offset by the more idealist views of one of the Russians who describes the day the bullets were flying on the first day of the February Revolution, and the spiritual unity of the people in the face of danger: ‘it was curious that we should all march along as though there were no danger and the peace of the world had come’.55 When one of the English characters denounces the revolution as, in effect, a surrender to Germany who will roll in and restore the monarchy, the narrator is soothed by the defence offered by a Russian, who asserts ‘I believe in the Christ-life, the Christ-soul’ and argues that the invading Germans will eventually be penetrated by the Russian idea of peace and be ‘born into a new world’: ‘Germany will triumph [. . .] but our Idea will not die.’ The narrator hears this as ‘a voice speaking to me across a great gulf of waters’ – the Western/Russian difference again – but an ‘honest’ one.56 In that moment the narrator takes solace in the idea of the Russian soul, and the deeper spiritual meaning of ‘Holy Russia’. It should be said that the protagonist of the novel is cast, as the title indicates, as Petrograd itself. The narrator alludes explicitly to this in discussing Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman (1833) which deals with the great flood of 1824, and suggests a Petersburg as an artificial city on the brink of obliteration by natural forces: ‘This poem only emphasised for me the suspicion I had originally had, that the great river and the marshy swamp around it despised contemptuously the buildings that man had raised beside and upon it.’57 Many passages in the novel present the mood of the city itself, often with a sense of foreboding, always with a sense of the depth of its difference. There is, in a way, nothing but difference, but the reified differences of Walpole’s Russia sit outside and above their proposed object, mapped on from a set of routinised judgements. The ‘idiot’ of West’s damning phrase for Graham was the idiotic Englishman abroad. She is referring to the central character of The Dark Forest, another English outsider in Russia who has swiftly brushed up on Russian and Russian literature, hastily falls in love with a Russian girl, and ends up romantically killed (in the Galician engagement

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which Walpole himself survived and which gives the novel its titular forest location). It comes to seem that this string of Englishmen – John Durward, narrator of both novels; John Trenchard, the naive protagonist of The Dark Forest; and the contrasting Henry Bohun and Jerry Lawrence of The Secret City – are all of them variants of the English idiot, and that this is what Walpole acknowledges when he declares that his novel ‘has no excuse except that it is English’. From this perspective – in a way resembling Conradian impressionism – the native component might be seen as the mere outside to the exploration of a certain restricted bandwidth of Englishness. Be that as it may, Walpole’s fiction does little justice to the talented people he worked with at the bureau, just as it has little explanatory power – and indeed little narrative content – regarding the events of the revolution, although the popular success of these works at the time testifies to a gap in some sections of the public imaginary of modern Russia which called out to be filled. Readers who turned to Walpole expecting to find a portrayal of revolutionary diabolism would have been disappointed. Quite different in nature and temperament were the novels of W. L. Blennerhassett, The Dreamer (1922), a romance dealing with the 1905 Revolution, and more notably The Red Shadow (1922), dealing with the aftermath of October 1917. Captain William Lewis Blennerhassett was an intelligence officer attached to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and subsequently to the Political Intelligence Department (PID) which was in operation between 1918 and 1920. Following distinguished service in the war Blennerhassett worked as an agent in Berne in 1918, then in 1919 joined the British Command at Murmansk, and was awarded the DSO for combat and intelligence work. In 1920 he became Acting Vice Consul at Kovno, Lithuania for a year, before returning to his business as a stockbroker. Blennerhassett was a noted linguist, spoke German and Russian, and was an appointed interpreter for the League of Nations.58 Blennerhassett was well enough placed to write novels based in Russia once he had left government service, but he was not an eyewitness to the events he describes, although the novels give the appearance of detailed knowledge, and he uses The Red Shadow to give fictional form to the favoured conspiracy theory that the Jews were behind the revolution. The plot concerns a Menshevik, Roman, who is drawn into a Bolshevik plot to assassinate the Minister of the Interior, Piotr Stolypin, at the Opera in Kiev in 1910. The assassination of Stolypin was real, but the meeting which the hapless protagonist attends is Blennerhassett’s invention. It could not have taken place in Russia in 1910 when

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both Lenin and Trotsky were in exile, and the real history of the assassination remains opaque. The meeting is attended by orthodox Jews, and when Roman arrives, accompanied by his mentor Bronstein (who turns out to be Trotsky’s brother), there is an argument in progress between an ‘aged Chassîdim’ and a younger, ‘non-sectarian Jew’, who are debating in Yiddish whether or not the revolution should preserve or abolish marriage. The elder argues that Jewish and Gentile blood should not mix, to preserve the purity of the race, while the younger argues that, Jews being a superior race, it would be to the advantage of humanity to allow the blood to be mixed in order to improve the general stock. Of the many arguments taking place among Russian Social Democrats at this time it seems safe to assume that this was not one. The argument is in any case brushed aside by the next speaker, Nikolai Cheidze (the Georgian Social Democrat who was a key figure in the Petrograd Soviet), who arrives like a breath of racial fresh air and, to the protagonist’s relief, speaks Russian. Cheidze proclaims the importance of Lenin, who is said to be in exile in Siberia – one of the many inventions and inaccuracies in this seemingly historical fiction – but the surprise arrival at the meeting is Trotsky himself, ‘much more typically semitic than his younger brother’, who steps into the room ‘in short, rapid strides, swinging his arms as he did so’, his words of greeting ‘abrupt and raspingly pronounced in Yiddish to the Chassîdim and the non-sectarian Jews present, in Russian to the other members of the audience’. The meeting closes when the police arrive and everyone flees, leaving behind the hapless protagonist to face arrest and imprisonment.59 Blennerhassett, despite his experience, succeeded in producing only bad historical fiction with added anti-Semitic spice, and his penportraits of the revolutionary leaders are reductive imitations of the many eyewitness accounts. The plot of The Red Shadow, concerning the disillusion with Bolshevism of a moderate young socialist, was never that promising, and this begs the question why Blennerhassett did not make more use of his own experience. It also highlights the phenomenon of amateur writers who decided to have a shot at writing popular fiction. Another one-time vice-consul to Lithuania who had the same idea was Ernest John Harrison, who had worked as a journalist and remains known in judo circles for his path-breaking writings on that sport. Harrison’s major contribution to writing could be considered his histories of Lithuania. The first of these was Lithuania Past and Present (1922), a substantial study intended to establish that Lithuanians have their own history and are a nonSlavonic people. Harrison’s clarification of the question of national

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identity is the long version, really, of the fragmentary and implicitly thwarted attempt by the speaker in The Waste Land to clarify the same topic. Harrison was vice-consul from summer of 1919 to winter of 1921, mainly at Kaunas and for only a short time at Vilnius, since it was occupied by Poland, a development which Harrison wholeheartedly condemns and is part of his reason for writing this book.60 The British, he notes, have an ‘abysmal ignorance’ of Lithuania even though ‘for months there have been repeated press references, long and short, to the Polish–Lithuanian dispute and the futile efforts of the League of Nations to settle it at Brussels and Geneva’.61 Indeed, Lithuania was a frequent topic of press discussion in the years from 1918, alongside the other Baltic states and the question of the Eastern border of Poland. In 1919 The Times reported frequently on German machinations in the Baltic states, intended to undermine newly independent Poland, and argued for Lithuanian independence, to avoid a Bolshevik annexation, proudly reporting the arrival of a British military mission at the end of 1919 to train the Lithuanian army.62 The presence of Harrison and Blennerhassett in Lithuania was evidently part of this strategy. With Germany out of the picture, The Times noted in September 1921 that ‘the dispute between Poland and Lithuania has dragged on from month to month without any apparent hope of solution, despite all the efforts and exhortations of the League’.63 Harrison’s study is a labour of love which was a major contribution to Lithuanian history but also served as a response to events, and should be seen in the context of the explosion of discourse around nationalities in the years after 1917. It is more than a coincidence that the book shares its year of publication with The Waste Land. Harrison followed this up with other studies of the country, including the more compact and factual Lithuania 1928 (1928), but his attempts at fiction use his knowledge to a different and less effective end. The first of his two novels is The Red Camarilla: A Stirring Romance of Present-Day Russia (1923).64 It is dedicated to Captain Francis McCullagh, author of With the Cossacks: Being the Story of an Irishman Who Rode with the Cossacks throughout the RussoJapanese War (1906). Harrison had evidently served with McCullagh, but the novel scarcely reflects any of this history or any of Harrison’s own experience, and is a fanciful adventure yarn. The protagonist, Francis Sullivan, modelled on the personality, if not the actual feats, of McCullagh, is sent to Petersburg to investigate a possible Russian–German–Japanese alliance. The treaty is opposed by the Mensheviks, who take Sullivan into their confidence. There is a

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new secret weapon the design for which the Russians are about to buy from an American inventor, a form of artillery so powerful that whoever possesses it will be irresistible. This would mean big trouble for the Allies, and the Mensheviks, too, oppose this and plot to assassinate the American inventor. Sullivan has been sent as special correspondent of the Argus to investigate this alliance but he has been set up by his editor who is in collusion with the Japanese.65 And so it goes on. Rasprava (1924) is in a similar vein. ‘Rasprava’, which means justice or punishment, is used as a code word in an illegal transaction of fire extinguishers from Helsinki to Petrograd in order to avoid duty.66 The novel is set in Petrograd, Helsinki and New York and, in common with other generic models, involves a gauche young British man who is caught in a plot by his employers in Petersburg and used unknowingly to run advanced machine guns from Helsinki to Russia to support the Whites. Typically for the genre (and for the subgenre of the Russian Revolution thriller), he is in love with his young female language teacher, who turns out to be a Cheka agent and sells him out. The plot involves a submarine which is used to abduct a Cheka leader to New York by the sinister Whites, who torture him in an electric chair. Unusually, it is the Whites who are the villains from the point of view of the novel, as they are the ones who manipulate and endanger the naive protagonist. The central trope of the protagonist lured into gun-running appeared, differently configured, in Wyndham Lewis’s novel of the run-up to the Spanish Civil War, The Revenge for Love (1937). The figure of the naive protagonist serves the function of creating an ironic identification for the reader, who also lacks knowledge of the alien environment but suspects, more than the protagonist, that shenanigans are afoot. There are innumerable examples of naive protagonists, but if Waverley (1814) comes to mind that is because the political use of this narrative structure can subtly induct the reader into historical and political knowledge and create a feeling of the existence of the generally naive, romantic and well-meaning subject – usually a young man – as a paradigm for the modern subject, positioned by the clear-minded manoeuvring or the conspiratorial manipulation of the politically empowered. This may be the case in Waverley, though by contrast in The Revenge for Love the narrative is the vehicle for anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, but in Harrison’s fiction the device serves no discernible political function, with its submarines and secret weapons. Rather, it supplies little more than a conventionalised atmosphere, and Harrison’s novels remain potboilers, while his real contribution was to the discourse of nationalities in the context of Russian Revolution.

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The son of Stanley Baldwin, Oliver Baldwin, writing as ‘Martin Hussingtree’, decided to try his hand at fiction, and the result, Konyetz (1924), is a combination of the anti-Bolshevik novel and the invasion-scare genre.67 Following service in the war, Baldwin had agreed to act as an independent military advisor with the Armenian army, following an accidental meeting with Alexander Khatisian, prime minister of the short-lived Armenian Republic of 1919–20.68 The new republic first allowed the Bolsheviks into the state to defend Armenia against the Turks. The entry into Armenia was friendly, but in any case Baldwin was arrested and imprisoned. When a fightback started against the Russians, Baldwin joined it, and helped prepare telegraph messages to the world in Russian, French and English, to call for support. None came, and the motif of perfidious Albion is central to the narrative of Konyetz. Baldwin attempted to return home via Turkey and was this time imprisoned by the Turks for five months at Kars. As it happened, Stanley Baldwin at that time signed the Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement with Krasin, and took the opportunity to ask Krasin to free his son – too late, as Oliver was now held by the Turks. The British rapprochement with the Bolsheviks while they committed atrocities in Armenia – Baldwin describes a massacre of prisoners – is a theme of the novel, rendered as an imaginary history.69 Baldwin had acquired a personal and cultural attachment to Armenia, and was part of the Armenian delegation at the Lausanne conference – ‘the final betrayal of Armenia’.70 This is the context of Konyetz, about which Baldwin mentions in his autobiography only that it did not sell well. The narrative is an alternative history in which, following the First World War, Bolshevik Russia begins a conquest of Europe and the Orient, beginning with the establishment of a Soviet government in Germany. Britain is governed by Labour, who concentrate on land redistribution and social reforms. The British people are weary of war and given to pacifism. The novel lavishes ironic comment on British pacifism and Britain’s refusal to support its closest allies, France and Belgium, as countries fall to the Soviets in the West and the East. As the narrative reaches its climax, German and French bombs and gas fall on London, panic sets in, and Nelson’s Column is split in two by a bomb. What makes the narrative so curious is the central figure, a Russian mystic called Ogóne, resident in England, who warns against British passivity in the face of Bolshevik advances. Ogóne himself has been a prisoner in Russia and is again imprisoned in England for making a speech calling for volunteers to travel to France and fight a war which their government will not. As drought, famine and plague

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spread, the more histrionic passages of the novel are cast in his voice, summoning references to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and drawing on imagery from both Christianity and Islam, in a reflection of Baldwin’s own expressed absolute ecumenism.71 Since there actually is an apocalypse, the tone and vocabulary are not limited to Ogóne, but recur thickly in the main narrative voice. Konyetz (конец) is ‘end’, Ogóne (огонъ) is ‘fire’, so the mystical stance of the protagonist is embedded in the narrative itself, not presented ironically. Sarcasm about the failure of the League of Nations in the novel is easy to understand, as Baldwin believed that the League had betrayed Armenia.72 The ironising about the vacillating British Government is also easy to understand, with its socialist pacifism, upper-class complacency, and concentration on domestic issues and wishful thinking that the war would just disappear – resembling the circumstances and mind set which had produced the end of the intervention and the trade agreement with the Bolsheviks. What is harder to grasp is the motivation of the anti-Semitic discourse. As Bolshevism triumphs: All the Jews in Germany danced the Jerusalem jig in the Unter den Linden, put their fingers to their noses and winked. The Hebrew was ruling. His day had come. And clutching his greasy coat-tails, he clambered to the seats of Justice, Interior, Foreign Affairs, Treasury, Agriculture, War – everywhere! The Mark of the Beast was everywhere.73

Konyetz is a fascinating curiosity, but a marginal one, and there is no need to work out every nuance of Baldwin’s racial politics. Though Baldwin later became a Labour MP, his novel reflects a clear view – that the British Government and the League of Nations had proved inadequate bulwarks against Bolshevism, and it is only necessary to substitute France or Belgium for Armenia to imagine where that might lead. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden: or, The British Agent (1928) could be considered the strongest literary and cultural thread to emerge directly from the Russian Revolution. In its anti-romantic stance towards the agent and towards Russia it has long been seen as a corrective to the clichés both of spy fiction and of the representation of Russia. A source of so much that came later from the likes of Ian Fleming and Graham Green, Ashenden was genre-founding. For that reason, though, it very much looked forward out of the decade we have been considering. It had been in any case Paul Dukes’ remarkable and best-selling Red Dusk and the Morrow (1922) that had first seized the public imagination. The conclusion to this study

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therefore takes a left turn at this point, and begins to weave back in some of the theoretical questions which motivated it in a light and loose reading around Huxley’s Brave New World, arguably the most substantial synthesis of developments since 1917, which breaks with the whole tradition of the thriller, the romance and the literary novel of ideas.

Notes 1. On Lockhart and Reilly, see, for example, Michael Hughes, Inside the Enigma: British Officials in Russia 1900–1939 (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon, 1997), pp. 127–34; Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), pp. 134–8, 178–84. 2. Edgar Jepson, A Prince in Petrograd (London: Odhams, 1921), p. 9. On this novel, see also Keith Neilson, ‘Tsars and Commissars: W. Somerset Maugham, Ashenden and Images of Russia in British Adventure Fiction’, Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire 27:3 (December 1992), 475–500, on Jepson, pp. 494–5. 3. Jepson, A Prince in Petrograd, p. 235. 4. Douglas Goldring, The Fight for Freedom (Plays for a People’s Theatre, No. 1. London: Daniel, 1919), pp. 5–7. 5. Douglas Goldring, The Black Curtain (London: Chapman Hall, 1920), pp. 153, 155–6, 160, 176. 6. Katherine Mansfield, ‘Butterflies’, Athenaeum 4696 930 (April 1920), 511. 7. For a detailed survey of Russians in British fiction, see John Slatter, ‘Bears in the Lion’s Den: The Figure of the Russian Revolutionary Emigrant in English Fiction, 1880–1914’, The Slavonic and East European Review 77:1 (January 1999), 30–55. See also, more generally, Anthony Cross (ed.), A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture (Cambridge: Open Book, 2013), and Anthony G. Cross, The Russian Theme in English Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to 1980. An Introductory Survey and a Bibliography (Oxford: Meeuws, 1985). 8. See Harold Williams, ‘The Nationalities of Russia’, in Paul Milyoukov et al., Russian Realities and Problems, ed. J. D. Duff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), pp. 123–52, and Harold Williams, Russia of the Russians (London: Pitman, 1914). 9. See Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, Cheerful Giver: The Life of Harold Williams, pref. Sir Samuel Hoare (London: Davies, 1935), pp. 164–5, 168. For a detailed account of the bureau, see Charlotte Alston, Russia’s Greatest Enemy? Harold Williams and the Russian Revolutions (London and New York: Tauris, 2007), pp. 99–121.

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10. Tyrkova-Williams, Cheerful Giver, pp. 188–90. 11. Quoted Ibid. pp. 193, 198. 12. See Jean-François Lyotard, L’Inhumain: Causeries sur le temps (Paris: Klincksieck, 2014), pp. 117–25; Alain Badiou, L’Etre et l’événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), pp. 429–44, and Alain Badiou, l’Hypothèse communiste (Paris: Lignes, 2009), pp. 181–205. 13. See Alston, Russia’s Greatest Enemy?, p. 155, for evidence of Williams’ total support for Denikin and his objectives. 14. Tyrkova-Williams, Cheerful Giver, pp. 204–5. 15. Ibid. pp. 212, 216. 16. Harold Williams, The Spirit of the Russian Revolution (London: Russian Liberation Committee, 1919), p. 1. Previously published in Round Table for September 1919, with the addition of an introduction. 17. Ibid. ii. 18. Ibid. pp. 9, 12. 19. Ibid. p. 6. 20. Ibid. pp. 25, 27. 21. See Tyrkova-Williams, Cheerful Giver, p. 224, and Charlotte Alston, Russia’s Greatest Enemy, pp. 150–2. 22. Orlo Williams, ‘Hosts of Darkness’, The Times Literary Supplement 1039 (15 December 1921), 843. 23. Unsigned review, The Times 42839 (2 December 1921), 13. 24. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1925), p. 19. 25. Ariadna and Harold Williams, Hosts of Darkness (London: Constable, 1921), pp. 140, 149–50. 26. William Gerhardie, Memoirs of a Polyglot: The Autobiography of William Gerhardie, 1931, pref. Michael Holroyd (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), p. 47. 27. Gerhardie attributed his decision to become a writer to a conversation with Francis McCullagh on the Pacific crossing to join the mission. See Memoirs of a Polyglot, p. 161. 28. Memoirs of a Polyglot, p. 164. 29. Ibid. p. 62. 30. William Gerhardi[e], Futility: A Novel on Russian Themes (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1922), pp. 220–1. 31. Ibid. pp. 112–13. 32. Ibid. p. 68. 33. William Gerhardie, The Polyglots, 1925, pref. Michael Holroyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 232. 34. Gerhardie, Futility, p. 100. 35. Ibid. p. 162. 36. Ibid. pp. 179–81. 37. Gerhardie, The Polyglots, p. 45. 38. Gerhardie, Memoirs of a Polyglot, p. 177.

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39. William Gerhardie, Anton Chehov: A Critical Study, pref. Michael Holroyd (1923. London: MacDonald, 1974), pp. 83, 85, 137. 40. Gerhardie, The Polyglots, p. 45. 41. Ibid. pp. 76–8. 42. Gerhardie, Memoirs of a Polyglot, p. 169. 43. Gerhardie, Futility, p. 212. 44. Ibid. p. 213. 45. On this period of Walpole’s life, see Rupert Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1952), pp. 123–64. 46. Quoted in Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole, p. 172. 47. For a fine biography of Graham, see Michael Hughes, Beyond Holy Russia: The Life and Times of Stephen Graham (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2014). 48. Hugh Walpole, The Secret City: A Novel in Three Parts (London: Macmillan, 1919), p. 3. 49. Ibid. pp. 8, 10. 50. Ibid. p. 3. 51. For more detail on the use of Dostoevsky, see Anthony Cross, ‘The Secret City: Hugh Walpole, Russia, and His Novel about Petrograd (1919)’, Journal of European Studies 35:3 (September 2005), 315–37. 52. Walpole, The Secret City, p. 361. 53. Ibid. p. 362. 54. Ibid. pp. 331–2. 55. Ibid. p. 266. 56. Ibid. p. 386. 57. Ibid. p. 41. 58. These facts are taken from the research of Paul Biddle MBE, posting as ‘leibregiment’, on the Great War Forum, http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/ (last accessed 5 January 1917). The research is mainly taken from regimental histories and newspaper sources, and also makes use of passing reference to Blennerhassett in scholarly sources, including Michael Occleshaw, Armour against Fate: British Military Intelligence in the First World War (London: Columbus, 1989) and Michael Dockrill, ‘The Foreign Office Political Intelligence Department and Germany in 1918’, in Michael Dockrill and David French (eds), Strategy and Intelligence: British Policy During the First World War (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon, 1996), pp. 160–183, reference p. 170. 59. W. L. Blennerhassett, The Red Shadow (London: Duckworth 1922), pp. 57–64. 60. E. J. Harrison, Lithuania Past and Present (London: Fisher Unwin, 1922), p. 18. 61. Harrison, Lithuania Past and Present, p. 15. 62. See, for example, unnamed correspondents, ‘Control in the Baltic: Britain or Germany’, The Times 42263 (21 November 1919), 10, and ‘British Advisers in the Baltic States’, The Times 42278 (9 December 1919), 13.

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63. Unnamed contributor, ‘The League of Nations’, The Times 42818 (6 September 1921), 9. 64. See also Neilson, ‘Tsars and Commissars’, pp. 495–6. 65. E. J. Harrison, The Red Camarilla: A Stirring Romance of Present-Day Russia (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1923). See p. 57 on the secret weapon. 66. E. J. Harrison, Rasprava (London: Bles, [1924]), p. 96. 67. For a discussion of this novel in its generic context, see Michael Hughes and Harry Wood, ‘Crimson Nightmares: Tales of Invasion and Fears of Revolution in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, Contemporary British History 28:3 (July 2014), 294–317, on Konyetz, see pp. 307–8. Hughes and Wood are reluctant to classify this as an anti-Bolshevik novel. The article discusses other relevant examples of the genre: Horace Bleackley, Anymoon (London: John Lane, 1919); J. D. Beresford, Revolution: A Novel (London: Collins, 1921) and Hugh Addison, The Battle for London (London: Jenkins, 1924). 68. Oliver Baldwin, The Questing Beast (London: Grayson & Grayson, 1932), p. 87. 69. Ibid. pp. 89–118. 70. Ibid. quotation p. 169, account of the conference pp. 170–80. 71. Ibid. p. 128. 72. ‘Martin Hussingtree’, Konyetz (London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1924]), p. 305; Baldwin, The Questing Beast, p. 97. 73. ‘Hussingtree’, Konyetz, p. 80.

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Coda

Brave New World

When Aldous Huxley tackled the topic of communism in a review of René Fülöp-Miller’s The Mind and Face of Bolshevism for Vanity Fair, in a piece titled ‘The Cold-Blooded Romantics’, he scathingly remarked that the aim of the Communist Revolution in Russia was to deprive the individual of every right, every vestige of personal liberty (including the liberty of thought and the right to possess a soul), and to transform him into a component cell of the great ‘Collective Man’ – that single mechanical monster who, in the Bolshevik millennium, is to take the place of the unregimented hordes of ‘soul-encumbered’ individuals who now inhabit the earth.1

He went on: To the Bolshevik idealist, Utopia is indistinguishable from one of Mr. Henry Ford’s factories. It is not enough, in their eyes, that men should spend only eight hours a day under the workshop discipline. Life outside the factory must be exactly like life inside. Leisure must be as highly organized as toil.2

A similar love of the machine has shaped the new art and literature of the West, where ‘Cubism’ is ‘deeply symptomatic of the revolt against the soul and the individual’, and artists and writers have followed the Bolshevik attack on ‘sentimentality’ and declared that art ‘is a question of pure form’.3 Huxley’s attention to Fülöp-Miller tends to confirm the influence of The Mind and Face of Bolshevism after 1927 in turning attention away from the fact of revolution as such on to the nature of the new society, and in particular on its convergence with developments in

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American capitalism. The focus on the revolution itself is reflected in much of the writing we have examined in this study. The conduct and immediate outcomes of the Russian Revolution had placed the act of revolution itself dramatically in the foreground, while the implications of the Bolshevik attempt to remodel the human – albeit by way of such seemingly banal interventions in the everyday as Trotsky’s denunciation of swearing – was not commonly set in the context of the wider question of the human future, in the context not only of capitalism and class society, but also in terms of any working out of the implications of intensifying industrialisation and communications which had already, as Trotsky had noted, turned the entire world into a workshop. Huxley’s slightly earlier essay ‘Revolutions’, collected in Do What You Will (1929), is remarkable in part for the lack of direct reference to the Russian Revolution as such. In this essay, Huxley argues that the proletariat is disappearing, increasingly part of the bourgeoisie, and makes reference to the situation he had found in his visit to the United States in 1926: [Marx] did not foresee the possibility of that Proletariat ceasing to exist. For him it was to be for ever and inevitably victimized and exploited – that is, until revolution had founded the communist State. The facts have proved him wrong. The Proletariat as he knew it had ceased – or, if that is too sweeping a statement, is ceasing – to exist in America and, to a less extent, industrialized Europe. The higher the degree of industrial development and material civilization [. . .] In the most fully industrialized countries the Proletariat is no longer abject; it is prosperous, its way of life approximates to that of the bourgeoisie. No longer the victim, it is actually, in some places, becoming the victimizer.4

If the proletariat is comfortable, its sense of justice diminishes. The capitalist is happy to have a prosperous proletariat around him. The provision of leisure ensures that the minds of the proletariat are kept busy. Huxley concludes: Given this transformation of the Proletariat into a branch of the bourgeoisie [. . .], the doctrines of socialism lose most of their charm and the communist revolution becomes rather pointless. Those who inhabit paradise do not dream of yet remoter heavens (though it seems to me more than likely that they yearn rather wistfully for hell).

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Huxley therefore posits a gradual transformation of capitalist society which will involve income standardisation, a universal participation in consumerism, and concludes that ‘A century should see the more or less complete realization, in the industrial West, of Mr. Shaw’s dream of equal incomes for all.’5 The Russian Revolution is the sine qua non of Brave New World. In terms of literary influence there is, of course, a pretty straight line from the Russian Revolution to Brave New World via Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, written in 1920–1 and first published in English in New York (but not in London) in 1924.6 Really so much is borrowed from We that Huxley’s novel can be thought of, in a way literally, as the Hollywoodisation of We – literally, as Huxley brings his experience of California to Zamyatin’s highly mediated use of experiences in Russia and England (where he had served as an engineer). The list of borrowings might run long, but includes such elements as the existence of a World State; the communalisation of sexuality; the dissemination of a false, standardised consciousness; the organisation of mass production; the subjection of the arts to social goals and their technological reconstruction; the projection of a synthetic future dependent on existing capitalist and socialist realities and objectives (Russia and England for Zamyatin, to which Huxley adds the United States and perhaps India); and the recourse to poetry as the emblem of thwarted human possibilities (Pushkin in Zamyatin, Shakespeare in Huxley). Influence studies alone then remind us to situate Huxley as a product of the Russian Revolution. What is most interesting about the way that Brave New World is shaped by the revolution, though, is the extent of its abstraction from events, something that few anglophone writers had managed to achieve, and none to such great effect. Huxley was commonly accused of fragmentariness in the construction of his works. Of Point Counter Point (1928) it was remarked by the one reviewer that ‘the persons always come second to the ideas’ and Huxley’s Philip Quarles, talking about his own fictional aims in Point Counter Point, states that ‘the essence of the new way of looking at things is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen . . . there’s the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees professionally a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is look with all those eyes at once.’7 This perspectivism is redolent of Nietzsche, whom Huxley occasionally quoted, as in his remark during his visit to the United States that ‘the thing which is happening in America is a revaluation of all values’.8 Brave New World departs from the model of seeing

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the ‘revolution’ as the proximate cause which must immediately lead to the new society, renounces detailed narrative about how the new society has been arrived at, and focuses on what that society might be like. Huxley has a strong narrative line in the novel, thanks mainly to his use of Zamyatin’s We, but his novel’s coherence as story and, more to the point, the apparent coherence of its world, does not disguise that it does not and cannot posit the process by which the world it depicts might actually come into being. It is this abstraction from the question of revolution which allows Brave New World to reflect so vividly, and with such artistic and popular success, on the changing nature of the world in which the Russian Revolution had taken place. In Brave New World, the names of Lenin and Trotsky are found but not that of Stalin, implying that Huxley’s knowledge of the Soviet state was anything but current. He briefly addressed this absence in Brave New World Revisited, where he comments that ‘Brave New World was written before the rise of Hitler to supreme power in Germany and when the Russian tyrant had not yet got into his stride’.9 This is fair, in the sense that Stalin’s show trials and the terror postdated Huxley’s novel, but we might equally note that Stalin’s rise to power was no secret at this point, and its nature had begun to be exposed by Trotsky, whose book The Real Situation in Russia had been published in 1929 by George Allen & Unwin in Max Eastman’s translation. Huxley, of course, having superseded Zamyatin’s then less-known dystopian fiction, needed also to defend his own work against Orwell’s 1984, which resituated the Stalin–Trotsky conflict as the endless oppositional game of Big Brother and the ghostly Goldstein. We might also wonder what Huxley really made, in the years preceding the composition of Brave New World, of Mussolini, about whom he remarked in a 1923 letter to Julian: It seems to me that the chances of finding an active charlatan who is also a philosopher and a man of science – and to lead a modern state one must be these too – are almost infinitely small. Mussolini, I suppose, comes as near as anyone to fulfilling the conditions. A little more pure reason and he would be a philosopher king.10

The question of fascism seems important not just for the question of the corporate state but also for the issue of political violence and the suppression of dissent, the latter topic prominent in Brave New World when the riot police are revealed to be ready to hand and well

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drilled when it is necessary to suppress the admittedly hollow dissent of the soma riot caused by John the Savage. T. S. Eliot, Huxley’s rival for pre-eminence in English letters in the 1920s, responded slowly but eventually quite definitely in the wake of 1917. Eliot’s highlighting of the two dominants of the period – the Russian Revolution and the question of supranational government – reveals by way of contrast how remote these two issues are in Huxley’s work. Eliot grasps the questions of governance and politics as a single question of geopolitics and sees the Russian Revolution as an emergency for established European identities. These are topics of the age, very clearly, so it is that much more remarkable that Huxley, imitating the model given in Zamyatin’s We, simply presents the World State as an accomplished reality and – perhaps coldly and cleverly – invites his readers to respond without any of the call-to-arms which characterises Eliot’s intervention. Eliot defends a geopolitics which is so much under threat as to seem unsalvageable, and the defence of culture rings hollow when it comes from someone whose doubts about the prospect or shape of a purposeful contemporary culture are so evident; by contrast, Huxley offers no defence, and while many have considered that the Savage and Shakespeare are Huxley’s totems of the thwarted residue of the human, I, at least, am among those readers who consider that they are offered up as futile alternatives, that the Controller wins not only the battle but the argument. At the close of ‘Revolutions’, though, Huxley shows that he has taken on board the abundance of commentary highlighting the violence of the Russian Revolution and the psychology of its perpetrators: The time will come when the whole population and not merely a few exceptionally intelligent individuals will consciously realise the fundamental unlivableness of life under the present regime. And what then? [. . .] The revolution that will break out will not be communistic – there will be no need for such a revolution, as I have already shown, and besides nobody will believe in the betterment of humanity or in anything else whatever. It will be a nihilist revolution. Hate, universal hate, and an aimless and therefore complete and thorough smashing up of everything. And the levelling up of incomes, by accelerating the spread of universal mechanization [. . .] will merely accelerate the coming of this great orgy of universal nihilism. The richer, the more materially civilized we become, the more speedily it will arrive. All that we can hope is that it will not come in our lifetime.11

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Notes 1. Usually cited as Vanity Fair 30 (March 1929), 64, 104; the essay is reproduced as part of ‘The New Romanticism’ in Music at Night and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), pp. 211–220, quoted pp. 213–14. On the influence of Mind and Face on Brave New World, see James Sexton, ‘Brave New World and the Rationalization of Industry’ English Studies in Canada 12 (1986): 424–36, and reprinted in Jerome Meckier (ed.), Critical Essays on Aldous Huxley (New York: Hall, 1996), pp. 88–102. 2. Huxley, ‘The New Romanticism’, p. 214. 3. ‘Ibid. p. 216. 4. Aldous Huxley, ‘Revolutions’, in Do What You Will: Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), pp. 220, 216. 5. Ibid. pp. 221–3. 6. Yevegeny Ivanovich Zamyatin, We, trans. and intro. Gregory Zilboor (New York: Dutton, 1924). The novel was perhaps not published in London until 1970, as We, trans. Bernard Gilbert Guerney, intro. and bibliographical note by Michael Glenny (London: Cape, 1970). 7. Quoted Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2003), pp. 214, 215. 8. Quoted Murray, Aldous Huxley, p. 184. 9. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), p. 12. 10. Grover Smith (ed.), Letters of Aldous Huxley (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989), p. 222. 11. Huxley, ‘Revolutions’, pp. 225–6.

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Morgan, Kevin, Bolshevism and the British Left: Part Two. The Webbs and Soviet Communism. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006. Murray, Gilbert, Faith, War, and Policy: Addresses and Essays on the European War. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1917. Murray, Nicholas, Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual. London: Little, Brown, 2002. Neilson, Keith, ‘Tsars and Commissars: W. Somerset Maugham, Ashenden and Images of Russia in British Adventure Fiction’, Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire 27:3 (December 1992), 475–500. Neumann, Ivor B., Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations. London: Routledge, 1996. Nicholson, Steve, British Theatre and the Red Peril: The Portrayal of Communism, 1917–1945. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999. Occleshaw, Michael, Armour against Fate: British Military Intelligence in the First World War. London: Columbus, 1989. Occleshaw, Michael, Dances in Deep Shadows: Britain’s Clandestine War in Russia, 1917–20. London: Constable, 2006. Orzoff, Andrea, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914–1948. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia, Soviet Russia: As I Saw It. London: The Workers’ Dreadnought, 1921. Paul, Eden and Cedar, Communism, Labour Booklets no. 3. London: Labour Publishing Company, 1921. Paul, Eden and Cedar, Creative Revolution: A Study of Communist Ergatocracy. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920. Paul, Eden and Cedar, Proletcult (Proletarian Culture). London: Parsons, 1921. Paul, Eden, The Sexual Life of the Child, No. 10 in a series of pamphlets for the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. London: Society of Francis, 1921. Philips Price, M., My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921. Pipes, Richard, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923. Revised edition with a new preface. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pitcher, Harvey, Witnesses of the Russian Revolution. London: John Murray, 1994. Ransome, Arthur, Six Weeks in Russia. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1919. Ransome, Arthur, The Truth about Russia. London: Workers’ Socialist Federation, 1919. Reed, John, Ten Days that Shook the World. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919.

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Smele, Jonathan D. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World. London: Hurst, 2015. Smith, Adrian, The New Statesman: Portrait of a Political Weekly, 1913–1931. London: Cass, 1996. Smith, David C., H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal. A Biography. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986. Smith, G. S., D. S. Mirsky: A Russian–English Life, 1890–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Snowden, Mrs. Philip, Through Bolshevik Russia. London: Cassell, 1920. Soubigou, Alain, Thomas Masaryk, intro. Václav Havel. Paris: Fayard, 2002. Stalin, Joseph, Leninism, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928. Stalin, Joseph, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1936. Stalin, Joseph, The October Revolution: A Collection of Articles and Speeches. London: Martin Lawrence, [1928]. Stepniak, Sergius (Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky), The Russian Peasantry: Their Agrarian Condition, Social Life and Religion. London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1888 and London: Routledge, 1905. Stepniak, Sergius (Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky), The Russian Storm-Cloud; or, Russia in Her Relations to Neighbouring Countries. London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1886. Stepniak, Sergius (Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky), Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life. Preface by Petr Lavrovich Lavroff. London: Smith, Elder, 1883. Stern, Ludmila, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–1940: From Red Square to the Left Bank. London: Routledge, 2007. Strong, Anna Louise, The First Time in History: Two Tears of Russia’s New Life. Preface by L. Trotsky. London: The Labour Publishing Company, 1924. Sutton, Anthony, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Sandton: Valiant, 1975. Tansley, A. G. The New Psychology and Its Relation to Life. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920. Taylor, Gary, Orage and The New Age. Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University Press, 2000. Tooze, Adam, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order. London: Allen Lane, 2014. Townshend, Jules, J. A. Hobson. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990. Trotsky, Leon, Between Red and White: A Study of Some Fundamental Questions of Revolution, with Particular Reference to Georgia. London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1922.

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Trotsky, Leon, The Bolsheviki and World Peace, intro. Lincoln Steffens. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1918. Trotsky, Leon, The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1919; and Glasgow: Socialist Labour Party, 1919. Trotsky, Leon, entry on Lenin in The Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information. Thirteenth Edition. Being Volumes One to Twenty-eight of the Latest Standard Edition with the Three New Volumes covering Recent Years and the Index Volume. Volume 29; The Three New Volumes II Fabre-Oyama, pp. 697–701. London and New York: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1926. Trotsky, Leon, Leon Trotsky on Britain, intro. George Novack, no translation credit. New York: Monad, 1973. Trotsky, Leon, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1925. Trotsky, Leon, My Life: The Rise and Fall of a Dictator. London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930. Trotsky, Leon, Problems of Life, intro. N. Minsky, trans. Z. Vengerova. London: Methuen, 1924. Trotsky, Leon, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects. New York: Pathfinder, 1969. Trotsky, Leon, A Review and Some Perspectives, trans. J. Finberg. Moscow: Communist International, 1921. Trotsky, Leon, The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky: The Balkan Wars, 1912–1913, ed. George Weissman and Duncan Williams. New York: Monad, 1980. Trotsky, Leon, War or Revolution: Bolshevist Socialism versus Capitalist Imperialism. Glasgow: Socialist Labour Party, 1918. Trotsky, Leon, Where is Britain Going?, intro. H. N. Brailsford. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1926. Trotter, Wilfred, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. London: Unwin, 1916. Trotzky [sic], Leon, Lenin. London: Harrap, 1925. Trotzky [sic], Leon, What is a Peace Program? Bureau of Revolutionary Propaganda attached to the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Workmen’s and Peasant’s Government of the Russian Republic: Petrograd, February 1918. Tyrkova-Williams, Ariadna, Cheerful Giver: The Life of Harold Williams. Preface by Sir Samuel Hoare. London: Davies, 1935. Tyrkova-Williams, Ariadna, From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk: The First Year of the Russian Revolution. London: Macmillan, 1919. Valéry, Paul, Cahiers, vol. 7 (1918–21), ed. Robert Laffont and Valentino Bombani. Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1957. Valéry, Paul, Oeuvres I, ed. and annot. Jean Hytier. Paris: Pléiade, 1957.

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Valéry, Paul, Le Serpent, trans. Mark Wardle, intro. T. S. Eliot. London: Criterion, 1924. Vining, Major L. E., Held by the Bolsheviks: The Diary of a British Officer in Russia, 1919–1920. London: Saint Catherine [1924]. Vinogradoff, Paul, Russia: The Psychology of a Nation. London: Oxford University Press, 1914. Vogeler, Martha S., Austin Harrison and the English Review. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. Walkowitz, Rebecca L., Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Walpole, Hugh, The Dark Forest. 1916. London: Macmillan, 1923. Walpole, Hugh, The Secret City: A Novel in Three Parts. London: Macmillan, 1919. Warden, Claire, Migrating Modernist Performance: British Theatrical Travels Through Russia. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Wells, H. G., Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866). 2 volumes. London and Southampton: Gollancz & Cresset, 1934. Wells, H. G., Russia in the Shadows. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1920. Wells, H. G., with Viscount Grey, Lionel Curtis, William Archer, H. Wickham Stead, A. E. Zimmern, J. A. Spender, Viscount Bryce and Gilbert Murray, The Idea of a League of Nations. Boston, MA: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1919. Wes, Marinus Antony, Michael Rostovtzeff, Historian in Exile: Russian Roots in an American Context. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1990. West, Julius, The Russian Revolution and British Democracy. London: Fabian Society, 1917. White, Stephen, Britain and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Study in the Politics of Diplomacy, 1920–1924. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979. Williams, Ariadna and Harold, Hosts of Darkness. London: Constable, 1921. Williams, Harold, ‘The Nationalities of Russia’, in Paul Milyoukov, Peter Struve, A. Lappo-Danilevsky, Roman Dmowski and Harold Williams, Russian Realities and Problems, ed. J. D. Duff, pp. 123–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917. Williams, Harold, Russia of the Russians. London: Pitman, 1914. Williams, Harold, The Spirit of the Russian Revolution. London: Russian Liberation Committee, 1919. Wilson, Duncan, Leonard Woolf: A Political Biography. London: Hogarth, 1978. Wilson, Peter, The International Theory of Leonard Woolf: A Study in Twentieth Century Idealism. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

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Wilson, Woodrow, The Selected Addresses and Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1918. Wilton, Robert, The Last Days of the Romanovs: from 15th March 1917. London: Thornton Butterworth, 1920. Wilton, Robert, Russia’s Agony. London: Arnold, 1918. Wise, Jennings C. Woodrow Wilson: Disciple of Revolution. New York: Paisley Press, 1938. Wittels, Fritz, Sigmund Freud, His Personality, His Teaching, and His School, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. London: George Allen, 1924. Woolf, Leonard, International Government. London: Allen & Unwin, 1916.

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Index

Action française, 206–7 Adorno, Theodor, 171 Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer), 87–8, 162–3 Adult School Movement, 165 Akhmatova, Anna, 177–8 Aldington, Richard, 207 Alexandrinsky Theatre, 177 Allied intervention, 63–4, 86, 118, 226, 230, 231–7 ‘Allied note’ (Entente Reply to Wilson’s Peace Proposals), 48, 50, 53 alterity, 71–2 anarchism, 18, 21, 44, 170–1 Anderson, Benedict, 38, 40 Imagined Communities, 38, 40 Anderson, Sherwood, 183 Andreyev, Leonid, 13, 98 Anglo-Irish Treaty, 142 Anglo-Russian Bureau, 62, 97, 105, 173, 207, 224, 237 Anglo-Russian Commission see Anglo-Russian Bureau Anglo-Russian Literary Society, 179 Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement, 93, 106, 245 Anglo-Soviet Trade Delegation, 131 anti-Semitism, 81, 100–4, 120, 122–3, 205, 241–2, 246

Antonelli, Étienne, Bolshevik Russia, 158 Armenian Republic, 245–6 Arnold, Matthew, 202, 206 Culture and Anarchy, 202 Arnot, R. Page, 112 arts policy, 39–41, 58, 75–7, 80, 86, 88–9, 107, 115–16, 135–6, 140–1, 163, 167, 172–85, 201–2, 253 Artsybashev, Mikhail, 13 ‘Asiatic’ Russia, 14, 15, 24, 72, 89, 90, 109, 112, 113–14, 171, 198, 208, 239 Asquith, Herbert, 41, 130 Assembly of the League of Nations, 143 The Athenaeum, 209–11 autosuggestion, 156, 167–8 Babbitt, Irving, Democracy and Leadership, 205 Badiou, Alain, 225 Bakunin, Mikhail, 225 Baldwin, Oliver, 245–6 Konyetz, 245–6 Baldwin, Stanley, 191, 203–4, 245 Peace and Goodwill in Industry, 204 Baring, Maurice, 105, 177 Baudouin, Charles, 156 Suggestion and Autosuggestion, 169

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Beamish, Henry Hamilton, 102 The Jews Who’s Who, 102 Beckett, Samuel, 232 Bellamy, Edward, 159 Bely, Andrei, 178 St. Petersburg, 207 Benda, Julien, Belphégor, 205 Beneš, Edward, 38 Bennett, Arnold, 130 Bergson, Henri, 85, 159–61, 174 Creative Evolution, 161 Berlin-Baghdad Axis, 41, 47–8 Berlin-Baghdad railway, 41–2, 47, 57, 83 Black and Tans, 142, 149 Blennerhassett, William Lewis, 241–3 The Dreamer, 241 The Red Shadow, 241–2 Blok, Alexander, The Twelve, 178 Bloomsbury, 222–3 Bobrov, Sergei, 178 Bogdanov, Alexander, 167, 174, 176 Bolsheviks, 3, 20, 21–3, 24, 25, 26, 27, 39, 43, 58, 60, 63, 70, 81, 85–90, 107–12, 182–5, 191–9, 236–7 in fiction, 221–3 Boni, Albert, 193 Boni, Charles, 193, 194 Brailsford, Henry Noel, 33, 69–90, 124, 142, 179 Across the Blockade, 77–82 After the Peace, 77, 82–4 A League of Nations, 33, 74–7 Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future, 74 The Russian Workers’ Republic, 84–90 Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle, 70 The War of Steel and Gold, 73

Brest-Litovsk, Treaty, 23–4, 54, 59, 61, 62, 94, 95, 104, 118, 191, 196, 225 British Command at Murmansk, 241 British Council, 173 British Embassy in Petrograd, 115, 230 British Military Mission, 228, 230–7 British Socialist Party, 192 British Society for Cultural Relations (SCR), 106, 200–1 British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, 168 Britons Press, 102 Buchan, John, 173 Buchanan, Meriel, 98–9 Buchanan, Sir George, 98, 224 Bukharin, Nikolai, 95, 103, 162 ABC of Communism (with Yevgeni Preobrazhensky), 157 Cadets (Constitutional Democrats), 63, 98, 224 Caird, Edward, 70 The Calendar of Modern Letters, 181 Calverton, V. F. (George Goetz), The Liberation of American Literature, 213 Carson, Edward (Lord Carson), 173 Carter, Huntly, 179–82, 183 The New Theatre and Cinema of Soviet Russia, 179–82 ‘Central Europe’, 41, 57 Central Labour College, 165 Cervantes, Miguel de, 231 Chaplin, Charlie, 149 Cheka (the ‘Extraordinary Commission’), 88, 120, 136, 173 fictionalised, 244 Chekhov, Anton, 13, 231–4 Three Sisters, 231

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Index Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 44 Chesterton, G. K., The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 22 Churchill, Winston, 113, 130, 132–3, 153 Civil War, Russian see Allied Intervention Coates, Alfred, 173 co-education, 89, 135, 166 Cole, G. D. H., 112 Collins, Michael, 142 The Communist, 112 Communist Party of Great Britain, 93, 134, 204 Congress of the Peoples of the East (Baku), 109, 113 Congress of Vienna, 30 Conrad, Joseph, 241 Heart of Darkness, 237 The Secret Agent, 99 Under Western Eyes, 18 Constituent Assembly, 95 Cooperative movement, 165 cosmopolitanism, 29–30, 40, 46–7, 70–2, 103, 234–5 Cournos, John, 13, 56, 97–100, 172–8, 206–7, 214, 238 London Under the Bolsheviks, 97–100, 207 Craig, Edward Gordon, 174, 181 creative will, 79 The Criterion (and The New Criterion), 191, 199–202, 205–9, 213–14 Cromwell, Oliver, 123, 198 Cubism, 150, 177, 229 Czech National Council, 39, 48, 53 Czecho-Slovak Legion, 38, 40, 43, 236 Czechoslovakian nationalism, 40, 46, 53, 83 The Daily Chronicle, 224 The Daily Herald, 107 The Daily Mail, 11, 19, 237 The Daily News, 94, 157, 237

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The Daily Telegraph, 226 de Vasconcelos, A. Faria, 166 Decree on Land, 22 Decree on Peace, 22 de-imperialisation, 3–5, 25–6, 28, 31, 72–3, 112 Deleuze, Gilles, Mille Plateaux (with Félix Guattari), 78 Denikin, Anton Ivanovich, 58, 113, 226 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 70 Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, 1 Dewey, John, 166 Diaghilev, Sergei, 11 Dickens, Charles, 230 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 25 ‘Dioneo’ see Shklovsky, Isaak Vladmirovich Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 1, 13, 44, 64, 182, 223, 225, 239 Brothers Karamazov, 44 The Possessed, 225 Dukes, Paul, 172–3 Red Dusk and the Morrow, 172, 221, 246 Durkheim, Émile, On the Division of Social Labour, 170 Dutt, Rajani Palme, 171–2 Dzerzhinsky, 136 Eastman, Max, 199, 254 Leon Trotsky, 199 Since Lenin Died, 193 education, 25, 75–6, 78, 80–1, 87–9, 107, 135, 140–1, 156–8, 163–70, 174, 183, 202 The Egoist, 148 Ehrenburg, Ilya, The Face of War, 178 Eliot, T. S., 1–2, 27, 49, 53, 78, 84, 181, 191, 199–202, 205–14, 255 on ‘oppressed minorities’, 49, 84, 207 The Waste Land, 1–2, 53, 171, 243

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Ellis, Havelock, 12–13 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ‘Letters’, 95 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 198 Engels, Friedrich, 163–5 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 159, 165 English Revolution, 111, 198 Epstein, Jacob, 174 ergatocracy, 158–60 ethnography, 41, 54–5, 83 Europe, 49–51, 71–2, 78, 82–4, 172, 194–7, 207–13, 228 Expertise Commission, 115 Faber & Gwyer, 199 Fabian Society, 16, 22, 25–6, 96, 109, 116, 202, 204 family policy, 135, 139, 166–7, 202–3 Farbman, Michael, 11, 21, 84, 94, 104–6, 179 Russia and the Struggle for Peace, 104–6 February Revolution, 14–18, 59, 62, 94–5, 97, 108 Federn, Paul, Zur Psychologie der Revolution, 170 Fell, Marian, 13 feminism, 15, 88, 134–5, 140, 146–8, 150–2, 202–3 Ferrière, Adolphe, 166 Fetterlein, Ernst, 131 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 45–6 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 47 Figgis, Darrell, 142 Fleming, Ian, 221, 246 Ford, Henry, 251 Foreign Aid Commission, 201 Foreign Office, 94 Forster, E. M., 13, 200 Foucault, Michel, 3 Four Courts, 142–3 Fourteen Points, 24, 48, 53, 194–6 Frankfurt School, 162–3

French Revolution, 59, 95, 225 Freud, Sigmund, 157, 160–1, 167–8 The Interpretation of Dreams, 168 Mass Psychology and EgoAnalysis, 168, 184 Totem and Taboo, 170 A Young Girl’s Diary, 168 Fülöp-Miller, René, 182–5 Lenin and Ghandi, 182 The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, 182–5, 251 The Power and Secrets of the Jesuits, 182, 184 Rasputin, 182 The Russian Theatre, 182 Futurism, 59, 150, 175, 177–8 Gallagher, William, 132 Garnett, Constance, 44 Garshin, Vsevolod, 13 Garstin, Dennis, 105 Gastev, Aleksei, 175–6, 183, 185 Gautier, Théophile, 177 General Election, 203 General Strike, 205 geopolitics, 2–3, 12, 79, 255 George Allen & Unwin, 198, 254 George Harrap (publisher), 198 Gerhardie, William, 231–7 Futility, 100, 117, 230–4, 236–7 The Polyglots, 230, 232–6, 238 Godwin, William, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 70 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 231 Gogarty, Oliver St. John, 142 Goldman, Emma, 117 Goldring, Douglas, 222–3 The Black Curtain, 223 The Fight for Freedom, 222–3 Gollancz (publisher), 199 Gorky, Maxim, 13, 104, 108, 115, 178 Gorodetsky, Sergey, 177

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Index Gosse, Edmond, 212 Gould, Gerald, The Coming Revolution in Britain, 110 Government Code and Cypher School, 131 Graham, Stephen, 105, 174, 237–8, 240 Greek war of independence, 28–30 Green, Graham, 246 Grey, Sir Edward, 55–6 Griffith, Arthur, 142 Guattari, Félix, Mille Plateaux (with Gilles Deleuze), 78 Gumilov, Nikolay, 177 Habermas, Jürgen, 4 Haden-Guest, Leslie, The Struggle for Power in Europe, 107 Harrison, Ernest John, 242–4 Lithuania 1928, 243 Lithuania Past and Present, 242–3 Rasprava, 244 The Red Camarilla, 243–4 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 13, 177 Ancient Art and Ritual, 182 Russia and the Russian Verb, 13 Haushofer, Karl, 3 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 45–7, 70 The Phenomenology of Spirit, 165 The Philosophy of Right, 164–5 Heidegger, Martin, ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, 71 Henderson, Arthur, 27 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 47, 49 Hesse, Hermann, 1, 171 The Hidden Hand: or, Jewry Ueber Alles, 102 Hitler, Adolf, as ‘Littler’, 149 Hobson, John A., 25, 31–3 The Crisis of Liberalism, 31 Imperialism: A Study, 31

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Towards International Government, 31–3 Holman, Herbert, 228 ‘Holy Russia’ (or ‘Russian Soul’), 11, 13, 14, 15, 24, 44, 64, 104–6, 109, 174, 198, 229, 238–40 Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Theodor Adorno), 87–8, 162–3 Howells, William Dean, 159 Hulme, T. E., Speculations, 205 Hume, David, 39, 45–6 Hungary, Soviet Republic of, 78–9, 110 Hus, Jan, 40 ‘Hussingtree, Martin’ see Baldwin, Oliver Huxley, Aldous, 185, 221, 251–5 Brave New World, 185, 221, 224, 247, 253–5 Brave New World Revisited, 254 Do What You Will, 252–3 Point Counter Point, 253 Huxley, Julian, 254 Ibsen, Henrik, Hedda Gabler, 232 Independent Labour Party, 27, 192 India, Home Rule, 17, 18, 72, 121 International Socialist Bureau, 26 internationalism, 27, 46–7, 49–50, 69, 191–9 Ipiatev House, 122 Ireland, Home Rule, 17, 18, 131 Ireland, War of Independence, 143, 145–6 Irish Nationalist Party, 146 Irish Public Record Office, 143 Irish Republican Army, 142 Islam, 145, 152 Izmir see Smyrna Jameson, Storm, 56 Janet, Pierre, Psychological Healing, 157

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Jepson, Edgar, A Prince in Petrograd, 221–2 journalism, 71–3 Joyce, James, Ulysses, 142, 229 July Days, 20–1 Jung, Carl, 168 Kamenev, Lev Borisovich, 131, 133–4, 136 Kameneva, Olga, 200–1 Kamerny Theatre, 177 Kant, Immanuel, 29–30, 45, 47, 50, 70 Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?, 70 On Perpetual Peace, 50 Károly, Mihály, 79 Kautsky, Karl, 158 Kemal, Mustapha, 152 Kerensky, Alexander, 20–1, 225 Kerzhentsev, Platon, 176 Keynes, John Maynard, 25, 191, 204–5 The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 191 Khatisian, Alexander, 245 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 177 King’s College, London, 41, 177, 179 Kissinger, Henry, 3 Knox, Alexander, 230, 234–6 Kolchak, Alexander, 56, 113, 233, 235 Kolnai, Aurel, 170–2 Psychoanalysis and Sociology, 170–1 The War on the West, 170 Kornilov, Lavr, 21, 58, 95, 225 Korolenko, Vladimir, 13 Krasin, Leonid Borisovich, 131, 245 Kropotkin, Peter, 44 Kruchenykh, Aleksei, 177 Krupskaya, Nadezhda, 224 Kun, Béla, 78, 136

Kuprin, Aleksandr, 13 Kuzmin, Michael, 177 La Revue universelle, 206 Labour Government, 15 Labour Monthly, 171–2, 181 Labour Party, 14, 27, 117, 204 Labour Party and Trades Union Delegation, 106–8, 112–13, 121 Labour Publishing Company, 159 language acquisition, 71–2, 234–5 Lansbury, George, 107, 199 What I Saw in Russia, 107 Lausanne Conference, 144, 245 Lawrence, D. H., 183 Lay, August, 166 Le Bon, Gustav, Psycholgie des foules, 184 League of Nations, 24, 27, 50–1, 57, 73–7, 81–3, 194, 208–9, 212, 234, 236, 246 Leavis, F. R., 201 Lebedev-Polyanskii, Pavel, 167 Leeper, Rex (‘Rurik’), 58, 59–61 Left Opposition, 201 Lenin, Vladimir, 21–2, 27, 58–9, 60, 62, 63, 93, 94, 95–7, 106, 107–10, 114, 116, 130, 132, 136–7, 159–60, 162, 173, 182–3, 191, 196, 198, 201, 224, 242, 254 The Collapse of the Second International, 192 fictionalised, 221, 229 ‘First Sketch of the Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 111–12 State and Revolution, 88, 160, 171 Levinas, Emmanuel, 71–2 Lewis, Wyndham, 27, 180–3, 213, 223, 230, 232 Apes of God, 180

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Index The Art of Being Ruled, 180, 205 The Revenge for Love, 244 Time and Western Man, 182–3 Liberal Party, 31 Liebknecht, Karl, Militarism and Anti-Militarism, 191 Lilina, Zlata, 166 Lister-Kaye, Adeline, 13 Lithuania, 1–2, 53, 236, 241, 242–3 Litvinov, Maxim, 133–4 Lloyd George, David, 106, 123, 138 Lockhart, Robert Bruce, 94, 133, 158, 221–2, 225 Memoirs of a British Agent, 221 Lockhart Plot, 94 London Conference of the Allied Socialists, 27 The London Mercury, 177 Low, David, 138 Lukács, Georg, 80 Lunacharksy, Anatoly, 107, 156–8, 166–7, 176, 180, 182 Three Plays, 180 Luxemburg, Rosa, 156 Letters from Prison, 157 Lyotard, Jean-François, 226 MacDonald, Ramsay, 15, 26, 191, 199, 202 Mackinder, Halford, 2–3 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 181 The Manchester Guardian, 11, 94, 104, 225 Mandelstam, Joseph, 177 Mann, Thomas, 212 Mann, Tom, 113 Russia in the Shadows, 113 Mansfield, Katherine, 223 Marconi House, 97 Mariinsky Theatre, 173 Maritain, Jacques, 206

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Marsden, Victor, Jews in Russia, 102 Marx, Karl, 41, 59, 163–5 Marxism, 3, 44, 46, 47, 64, 70, 79, 113, 157–65, 176, 200 Masaryk, Tomás Garrigue, 38–58, 64 on English and American culture as ideals, 52 and Ireland, 42, 51 on Magyar culture, 52 The Making of a State, 49 The New Europe: The Slav Standpoint, 42–3 ‘Pan-Germanism and the Eastern Question’, 57 ‘The Problem of Small Nations in the European Crisis’, 41–2 reading of English and French literature, 39–40 on Russia and Ukraine, 51–2 on Russian reception of German philosophy, 45–6 speaks at Kings, 41–2 The Spirit of Russia, 41, 43–6 studies in Marxism, 43 Massis, Henri, 208–9 Défense de l’Occident, 206 Maugham, Somerset, Ashenden, 246 Maurras, Charles, 213 L’Avenir de l’intelligence, 205 Maxton, James, 192 Mayakovksy, Vladimir, 175, 177, 185 McCullagh, Francis, 117–24, 243 The Bolshevik Persecution of Christianity, 118–19 A Prisoner of the Reds, 117–22 With the Cossacks, 243 McDiarmid, Hugh, ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’, 213 McLean, John, 192 Mensheviks, fictionalised, 241–4 Methuen, 198, 201

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Mexican revolution, 161, 195 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 177, 180–1 MI5, 132 Michels, Robert, Political Parties, 156, 158, 162 MIi(c) [SIS, later MI6], 94, 117, 172–3, 241 Miliukov, Pavel, 61, 63, 98 Miners’ Federation, 110 Mirsky, D. S., 177–9, 180 Contemporary Russian Literature, 207 A History of Russian Literature, 177 The Intelligentsia of Great Britain, 177 Lenin, 177 modernism, 40, 70–1, 145, 147–50, 172, 201–11 Moll, Albert, The Sexual Life of the Child, 168 Montessori, Maria, 166, 202 More, Thomas, 122 The Morning Post, 11, 57, 102, 132, 134, 167, 226 Morris, William, 159 Moscow Art Theatre, 174, 177 Murray, Gilbert, 168 Murry, John Middleton, 210–11 Mussolini, Benito, 142, 254 Mussorgsky, Modest, 11–12 Boris Godunov, 11–12 Khovanshchina, 11–12, 105 Narkompros (People’s Commissariat for Education), 166 National Adult School Union, 165 National Council of Civil Liberties, 104 national self-determination, 196–8 National Union of Railwaymen, 110 nationalism, 48–55, 71–2, 75–7, 83–4, 89, 207–8

The New Age, 15, 16–19, 20, 56 The New Europe, 42, 54–63, 172–6 New Left, 162 The New Russia, 97 The New Statesman, 12, 13, 15–16, 20, 21–2, 23, 24, 25, 26–7, 31, 56, 58, 94 Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, 95 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 85, 253 No-Conscription Fellowship, 108 Nouvelle revue française, 209 O’Connor, Rory, 142–3 The Observer, 226 October Revolution, 21–2, 51, 56, 94, 97, 99, 157, 191 Onou, Alexander, 59–60 opera, 11–12, 89, 105, 158, 177, 241 Orage, Alfred, R., 15, 16–19 Orwell, George, Nineteen EightyFour, 199, 254 Ottoman Empire, 28–30, 53, 73–5 Oxford Union, 130 Oxford University, 56, 60, 105, 157 Paderewski, Jan, 39 Pan-Germanism, 42, 47–8 Pankhurst, Sylvia, 117, 132, 133 Pan-Slavism, 39, 172 Pares, Bernard, 56, 61, 117, 177 Paul, Cedar, 156; see also Paul, Eden and Cedar Paul, Charles Kegan, 156 Paul, Eden and Cedar, 43, 85, 156–72, 174–5 Communism, 159–60 Creative Revolution, 158, 160–2 Proletcult, 158 Paulsen, Friedrich, 70 Permanent revolution, theory of, 199

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Index Petrograd Soviet, 21, 61, 95, 113, 173 Philips Price, Morgan, 61, 94 plasticene, 202 Plebs League, 156–7, 165–7 Plebs Magazine, 157–8, 167 Poland, 39, 48, 53, 61, 80–3, 87, 227, 243 Pound, Ezra, 172 Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 167 Pravda, 201 Preobrazhensky, Yevgeni, ABC of Communism (with Nikolai Bukharin), 156 Pritt, Denis Nowell, 200 Proletarskaya Kultura, 174–6 Proletcult, 156–8, 163–9, 172–6, 180 The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, 102 Provisional Government, 20–2, 38, 61, 100, 224, 227, 236 Pushkin, Alexander, 240 Pynchon, Thomas, Gravity’s Rainbow, 77–8 Radek, Karl, 94, 97 Randall, Alfred E., 10, 18 Ransome, Arthur, 94–7, 157, 179 Six Weeks in Russia, 95–7 The Truth about Russia, 95 Rasputin, Grigori, 16 Rathenau, Walter, 157 ‘Red Clydeside’, 192 Reed, John, 134 Ten Days that Shook the World, 117, 193 Reilly, Sidney, 221–2 Remizov, Aleksey, 13 Representation of the People Act (1918), 15 reterritorialisation, 24, 51, 53, 78, 80, 82, 84–5 Revolution of 1905, 21, 60, 158, 224, 241

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Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 12 Le Coq D’Or, 12 Rolland, Romain, 157, 208, 212 Romanova, Tatiana Nikolaevna, 122 Romanov family, execution of, 122–3 Rostovsteff, Mikhail Ivanovich, Proletarian Culture, 97 Rothermere, Lady (Mary Lilian Share), 212–13 Rothstein, Andrew, 134 Rowse, A. L., 214 Royal Irish Fusiliers, 117 Ruhe, Algot, 161 ‘Rurik’ see Leeper, Rex Ruskin College, 157, 165–6 Russell, Bertrand, 20, 69–70, 107–12, 114, 138, 191, 199, 200 The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, 107–12 What I Believe, 205 Russell, George William (Æ), 142 Russell-Cooke, Sydney, 131 Russia Liberation Committee, 93, 97, 207, 228 Sadler, M. T. H., 173 Saroléa, Charles, 43 Impressions of Soviet Russia, 43 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 72 Sayler, Oliver, The Russian Theatre Under the Revolution, 176, 179 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 45, 47 Schnitzler, Arthur, 157 School for Slavonic Studies, 38, 41, 177 Scott, Walter, Waverley, 244 Second International, 26, 193 ‘Secret treaties’, 22–3

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Semyonov, Grigory Mikhaylovich, 235 Seton-Watson, Hugh, 38 Nations and States, 38 Seton-Watson, Robert William, 38, 40, 54–5, 61 Severyanin, Igor, 177 Shaginyan, Marietta, 177 Sharp, Clifford, 16, 94 Shaw, George Bernard, 20, 96, 200 St. Joan, 205 Shelpina, Yevgenia, 94 Sheridan, Clare, 44, 112, 130–53 In Many Places, 142–4 Russian Portraits, 132–42 Stella Defiant, 135 The Thirteenth, 146 A Turkish Kaleidoscope, 152–3 Shklovsky, Isaak Vladimirovich (‘Dioneo’), 14 In far North-East Siberia, 14, 98 Russia Under the Bolsheviks, 98 Short Stories out of Soviet Russia, 207 Shulgin, Vasily, 1920, 178 Siberia, 14, 52, 56, 98, 105–6, 117–19, 232–3 Sienkiewicz, Henryk, 39 Simmel, Georg, 70 Sinclair, Louis, Trotsky: A Bibliography, 199 Sinn Féin, 111, 137, 142 fictionalised, 223 Smith, Elliot, The Evolution of the Dragon, 182 Smyrna, Great Fire, 144 Snowden, Ethel (‘Mrs. Philip Snowden’), 96, 107–8, 110 Through Bolshevik Russia, 107–8, 133 Socialist Labour Press, 192

Socialist Revolutionaries (or Social Revolutionaries), 21, 44, 95, 178, 232, 235–6 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 99 Sologub, Fyodor, 13, 178, 207 Solovyov, Vladimir, 44 Sorel, Georges, Réflexions sur la violence, 205 Soskice, David (David Vladimirovich Soskis), 21 Soviet Writers Congress, 229 Spartacist League, 192 fictionalised, 223 Spectator, 56 Spengler, Oswald, 79, 150, 208 Stalin, Josef, 24, 103, 198 Marxism and the National Question, 198 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 174 Steed, Wickham, 42, 56–7 Steffens, Lincoln, 87, 195 Stepniak, Sergius (Sergey StepnyakKravchinsky), 18 Stolypin, Piotr, 241 Strachey, Lytton, 26 Strong, Anna Louise, 117 Struve, Peter, 56 Stumpf, Carl, 70 Sue, Eugène, 225 The Sunday Express, 113 Sverdlov, Yakov, 122 Tansley, Arthur, The New Psychology and Its Relation to Life, 168–9 Taylorism, 185 theatre, 80, 96, 136, 158, 173, 174, 176–7, 179–83, 185, 222–3, 231–3 Theatre of the Soviet and Workmen’s Deputies, 177 theory of history, 45–6 Third International (Comintern), 173, 196

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Index Thornton Butterworth, 199 The Times, 11, 16–17, 19, 25, 28, 42, 62, 100–1, 110, 132, 166–7, 191, 204, 226, 243 The Times Literary Supplement, 112, 210 Tolstoy, Leo, 239 Trades Union International, 113 transnationalism, 2, 40, 46, 70, 142, 235 Treaty of London, 18–19 Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 49 Treaty of Vienna, 28 Triple Alliance, 110 Trotsky, Leon, 18–19, 21–3, 25, 27, 62, 74, 87, 93, 94, 95, 97, 102, 112, 120–1, 123, 130, 132, 135–40, 162–5, 173, 191–9, 201–5 The Bolsheviki and World Peace, 193–5 The History of the Russian Revolution, 199, 214 The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk, 23 Der Krieg und die Internationale, 192–3 Lenin, 116–17, 198 Literature and Revolution, 141, 163–5, 176, 179, 198, 207, 213–14, 229 My Life, 199 The New Course, 201 Problems of Life, 163, 198, 201–4 The Real Situation in Russia, 199, 254 The Revolution Betrayed, 199, 214 Towards Socialism or Capitalism?, 198 War or Revolution, 192–3 What is a Peace Program?, 196–7

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Where is Britain Going?, 22, 25, 79, 109–10, 130, 191, 198, 204–5, 213–14, 225, 242, 253 Trotter, Wilfred, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, 168 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 177 Tyrkova-Williams, Ariadna, 223–5, 228–9 From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk, 228 Hosts of Darkness (with Harold Williams), 228–9 United Information Bureau (OBI), 106 Valéry, Paul, 172, 208–13 Cahiers, 211–12 La Jeune Parque, 209 ‘Letters from France’, 209–11 Le Serpent, 211 Varsher, Tatiana, 166 Vattimo, Gianni, on pensiero debole, 79 Verhaeren, Émile, Les Aubes, 176 Versailles, Peace Conference, 24 Versailles, Treaty, 77–8, 80, 82, 84, 234, 236 Vining, L. E., 117, 119 Held by the Bolsheviks, 117 Vinogradoff, Paul, 56, 60–2, 63, 105 VOKS (Russian All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries), 96, 106, 200–1 Vorticism, 175, 223 Walpole, Hugh, 97, 105, 173, 224, 237–41 The Dark Forest, 237, 240–1 The Secret City, 237–41 Waugh, Evelyn, 230 Webb, Beatrice, 156 Webb, Sidney, 20, 96, 156, 202

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Wells, H. G., 20, 33, 69–70, 113–17, 121–2, 124, 130, 132, 136–7, 159, 162, 174, 200 as ‘F. C. Mells’, 148 Christina Alberta’s Father, 205 In the Fourth Year: Anticipations of a World Peace, 33 Joan and Peter, 137 A Modern Utopia, 158, 162 Russia in the Shadows, 113–17 The War of the Worlds, 100 West, Julius, 13, 20, 21–2 The Russian Revolution and British Democracy, 157 West, Rebecca, 237, 240 Williams, Harold, 56, 62–4, 105, 173, 223–9 Hosts of Darkness (with Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams), 228–9 The Spirit of the Russian Revolution, 97, 226 Wilson, Woodrow, 10, 11, 18, 24, 48, 53, 82, 194–6, 198, 208 The State, 195–6 Wilton, Robert, 94, 100–2 The Last Days of the Romanovs, 122 Russia’s Agony, 101–2, 174

Woolf, Leonard, 24–5, 27–33 ‘An International Authority and the Prevention of War’, 24–5, 27–31, 177, 200 Woolf, Virginia, 26, 140–1, 177, 200 A Room of One’s Own, 140 To The Lighthouse, 147 Workers’ Educational Association, 157, 165–6 Workers’ Socialist Federation, 93 World Literature publishing house, 104 Wrangel, Pyotr Nikolayevich, 113 Wycliffe, John, 40 Yeats, William Butler, 142 Yes, Minister, 235 Yesenin, Sergei, 178 Yurovsky, Yakov, 122–3 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, We, 253–5 Zetkin, Clara, 136, 156 Zimmerwald Conference, 27 Zinoviev, Grigory, 136, 173 Zuzenko, Alexsandr, 132–3 Zweig, Stefan, 157, 212

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